War Office Selection Boards
[3] On a more local level, Assistant Adjutant-General Colonel Frederick Hubert Vinden observed that there was a very high failure rate at Officer Cadet Training Units (OCTUs): he visited each board in 1941, and pinpointed failings in the Command Interview Board as making poor selections of officer candidates and thus causing the failures.
[4] Psychiatrist Eric Wittkower of the RAMC had been conducting research on "problem" officers who had broken down or caused disruption, and concluded that these men lacked 'ability or qualities of personality adequate to withstand the stresses of their job.
[4] Wittkower had been passed a copy of the selection methods used by the Wehrmacht, and so Vinden and Wittkower met with psychiatrists Thomas Ferguson Rodger, A. T. M. Wilson and Ronald Hargreaves, and the head of Scottish Command, Sir Andrew Thorne, who had been military attaché in Berlin in the 1930s and seen the German methods being used.
Army psychiatry was dominated by psychiatrists from the Tavistock Clinic, and so many figures from that organisation were involved in officer selection from the earliest experiments.
[5] In summer 1941, Wittkower and Ferguson Rodger conducted experiments with the German officer selection tests at the Company Commander's School in Edinburgh headed by Alick Buchanan-Smith.
Historian Nafsika Thalassis has argued that this reflected the widespread view of the time that intelligence was a national problem that touched upon many areas of life.
[3] Concurrently with the Edinburgh experiment, John Bowlby conducted research with officer candidates at an OCTU in Southern Command, Wiltshire.
[3] A memorandum was drawn up in late 1941 to report the results of the psychological experiments to the War Office, and specifically to Adjutant-General Sir Ronald Adam, who was responsible for personnel issues in the Army.
The first WOSB was based in the Genetics Institute headed by Francis Albert Eley Crew in the King's Buildings of the University of Edinburgh.
In April 1942, the War Office expressed its satisfaction with the scheme and commanded that WOSBs should be created 'throughout Great Britain as fast as possible.
[3][9] Candidates were expected to demonstrate their ability to relate to others as a leader or in a more ambiguous position via Command Situations and Leaderless Group tests.
[9] Leaderless Group tests in particular were credited as changing 'the entire character of the WOSBs' because the innovation made the Boards centres for experimentation and learning.
Churchill actually appointed an Expert Committee to investigate the work of psychologists and psychiatrists in the services, with the particular intention that they focus upon uses (or misuses) of psychoanalysis.
[1] Psychologists Philip Vernon and John Parry (members of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology who worked with the Royal Navy) criticised the WOSBs scheme for technical deficiencies.
[14] In 1950, psychiatrist Ben Morris and Chief Psychologist to the War Office Bernard Ungerson, exchanged articles in the journal Occupational Psychology discussing the validity of WOSBs.
