Paying Sea Service Officers, 1833

Regardless of how patriotic they may be, the men in the ranks, and even their officers, appreciate a little pay from time to time.

In January of 1833 Congress approved a new pay scale for the naval services, modestly increasing officer salaries.

The officer rank structure of the sea services took a long time to be established, not firmly settling into the familiar scale until after the Civil War, in contrast to the army, which had essentially the modern ladder from second lieutenant (O-1) through major general (0-8) by the early nineteenth century.

  The rank structure was: 

“Master commandant” became “commander” in 1838, while “passed midshipman” became “ensign” in 1862.  In addition, captains were paid a small bonus for every decade or so of their time in grade, and a little extra as well when they were serving as a commodore, commanding a squadron.  Midshipmen, who served aboard ship, performing as quasi-officers and having some of the privileges of officer rank, received $228 a year plus one ration a day.                   

According to the CPI, the purchasing power of a dollar of 1833 is today about $26, but on the basis of comparative unskilled labor wages is more like $250

Nobles in the Interwar German Army

The German Imperial Army had relied heavily on the old nobility for its officers.  Although the huge size of the Imperial Army necessitated granting men of middle class origins commissions, their promotional opportunities were limited, and it was rare for someone not a member of the nobility to secure a senior command assignment, and of those who made it, most usually ended up being ennobled by their Kaiser.  When World War I broke out in 1914, only one commoner could be counted among the nearly 150 officers who commanded divisions, corps, armies, and similar higher organizations, and even he was shortly ennobled.  The situation was only a little better for the commoners on the regimental level; in nearly 62 percent of Prussian regiments, half or more of the officers were nobles, and in 16 regiments, mostly of the guard or the cavalry, all the officers were.  So important was the belief that nobles made the best officers that when, around 1912, when about a third of all officers were nobles, a proposal was put forward to increase the active strength of the army by a couple of corps, it was turned down on the grounds that there weren’t enough nobles around to provide proper leadership for the new units.

The collapse of the German Empire in 1918 and the creation of the Weimar Republic, named after the city where the new constitution was drawn up, led to some liberalizing of the officer corps.  The army – the Reichsheer – was reduced by the Treaty of Versailles to 100,000 men, and only about a fifth of the 4,000 officers remaining were members of the nobility. 

Nevertheless, in 1926 a parliamentary inquiry found that despite the fact that there were only about 800 nobles in the officer corps, they still dominated the army,   

• Of 42 generals, 25 were nobles (60 percent).
  
  
• Of 105 colonels (not counted in branch figures), 45 were nobles (42 percent).
  
  
• Of 595 cavalry officers, 265 were nobles (44.5 percent)
  
  
• Of 1,512 infantry officers, 265 were nobles (17.5 percent)
  
  
• Of 589 artillery officers, 61 were nobles (10.4 percent)
  
  
• Of 724 officers (who could be of any branch) assigned to the Defense Ministry or held other types of assignments, 162 were nobles (22.4 percent)

The balance of the 4,000 officers in the army, most were technical specialists, such as engineers and signalmen, and about 400 were medical and veterinary personnel, few of whom were nobles.

Oddly, although the Nazi regime is not usually thought of as a democratic force, with the advent of Hitler, the proportion of nobles in the army fell, and not merely because there weren’t enough nobles to go around (there hadn’t been in 1914 either), but even in the higher ranks.  By October of 1935, the proportion of nobles in the highest ranks of the army (above divisions), had fallen to about 52 percent, by the onset of World War II, in September of 1939, to about 42 percent, and so forth, until by end of the war, in May of 1945, nobles held only about 20 percent of senior posts, still over-represented, but much less so.