By the late 1930s, the technical foundations of palletized handling were already in place. Forklift trucks existed. Pallets had been designed and tested. Trade publications documented their promise. Yet palletization remained marginal in both industry and government. Abundant labor, limited capital investment, and institutional resistance slowed adoption. This was especially true within the military.
World War II changed those conditions decisively.
As the United States mobilized for war, the scale and urgency of military supply exposed the limits of manual handling. Quartermaster depots relied heavily on hand trucks, hand stacking, and low-density storage. Even major facilities had few powered machines. What had been acceptable inefficiency in peacetime quickly became a strategic constraint.
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A System Not Built for Wartime Scale
When the U.S. entered the war in 1941, an estimated 25,000 forklift trucks were in use nationwide. Within military depots, powered handling equipment was scarce and unevenly distributed. Storage heights were low. Throughput was slow. Labor requirements were high.
The Office of the Quartermaster General (OQMG) recognized early that existing methods would not scale. Labor shortages were inevitable, and supply orders would need to be filled faster and in far greater volume. To address this, the Depot Operations Branch of OQMG studied material handling practices already in use in leading industrial facilities.
Those investigations revealed a consistent conclusion: forklift trucks working in tandem with pallets represented the most efficient system available for handling packaged and strapped goods. Controlled testing, including trials at the Fort Wayne Quartermaster Depot in July 1941, confirmed these findings.
Forklift Shortages and Institutional Friction
Recognizing the solution did not mean it could be implemented quickly. Forklifts were initially classified as nonessential equipment by the War Production Board. Steel and manufacturing capacity were prioritized for weapons and vehicles. When funding for forklifts was released in late 1941, manufacturers were unable to meet demand.
Equipment shortages persisted into 1943. Forklifts were frequently misallocated, sent where they were urgently needed rather than where they were best suited. Heavy-duty trucks arrived at light-service depots, while smaller units were delivered to facilities handling heavy loads. Only as production increased and reallocation systems improved did deployment stabilize.
By the end of the war, approximately 2,500 forklifts were in use at Quartermaster depots, and roughly 75,000 were operating across the Army and Navy — three times the number in use nationally at the start of the conflict.
Sourcing Pallets at Wartime Scale
Pallet supply posed its own challenges. Before the war, pallets were manufactured locally in small quantities, often by firms that did not specialize in pallet production. Prices were high. Designs varied widely. When the military suddenly required hundreds of thousands of pallets, suppliers struggled to respond.
Early centralized procurement resulted in long transportation distances and delivery delays. As a temporary remedy, depots were authorized to purchase pallets locally. At the same time, the military adopted a pallet management practice still underused today: delivering pallets directly to nearby suppliers so products could be palletized at origin, reducing empty pallet transport and handling costs.
Quartermaster depots also began manufacturing pallets internally. Early production was manual and slow, but by 1944 depots such as Atlanta applied box-making automation principles to pallet construction. Productivity rose from roughly 100 pallets per shift to as many as 500.
Resistance, Box Pallets, and Practical Breakthroughs
Despite measurable gains, resistance persisted. Some depots argued that pallets consumed excessive storage cube. Others cited product damage or poor early pallet quality. As a result, pallet use was initially limited to uniform subsistence items.
Irregular or bulky goods posed a separate challenge. These were often stacked manually onto dunnage or racks until the introduction of box pallets. With vertical frames and diagonal supports, box pallets reduced crush damage, improved cube utilization, and enabled multi-level stacking. In at least one warehouse, conversion to box pallets freed up 35 percent of storage capacity .
By the later stages of the war, pallet handling had become standard practice at most Quartermaster depots, with some approaching full palletization of inventory.
GOPO Plants and Productivity Inside the Fence
Pallets also played a critical role inside Government-Owned, Privately Operated (GOPO) plants funded by the Defense Plant Corporation. These modern facilities were professionally managed, free from entrenched labor practices, and designed to support mechanized handling.
In many cases, pallets delivered their greatest value not in outbound logistics but in improving internal production flow. Palletization increased throughput by reducing handling time and congestion inside plants — a factor that proved decisive in munitions and equipment manufacturing.
These GOPO plants foreshadowed the postwar commercial adoption of palletized handling across industry.
Standardization Under Pressure
The Quartermaster Corps also confronted a familiar problem: too many pallet sizes. Testing during 1942 showed that the 32″ × 40″ pallet was best suited for subsistence handling with the 2,000-pound forklifts most widely deployed at depots. While administrators acknowledged its limitations, it was deemed optimal for roughly 85 percent of supplies.
Late in the spring of 1942, depots were prohibited from purchasing non-approved pallet sizes without authorization. Although controversial, OQMG argued that standardization optimized the system as a whole rather than individual products — an early expression of supply-chain thinking.
By 1944, acceptable pallet footprints had narrowed to a small set, enabling pallet pooling and inter-depot compatibility.
Cahners, Four-Way Entry, and the Pacific Theater
One of the most celebrated pallet innovations of the war was the four-way entry pallet, most commonly associated with Norman Cahners of the Hingham Naval Ordnance Depot. Designed to improve handling speed in congested environments, the block-leg four-way pallet enabled faster vessel turnaround and greater flexibility.
Cahners also oversaw early palletized cargo experiments in the Pacific, including the SS Paul Revere trial in 1943. While the method faced resistance from longshoremen, who viewed palletization as a threat to employment, the experiments demonstrated clear gains in speed and labor efficiency.
Palletization proved particularly effective in the Pacific, where newly constructed facilities and amphibious operations favored unitized handling. Palletized “sled” loads accelerated beach landings and eliminated dangerous manual bucket brigades.
From War Tool to Commercial Foundation
As the war ended, palletization was just reaching scale. Productivity gains were substantial. Tons handled per person doubled between 1943 and 1945. Vehicle turnaround improved. Warehouse expansion was constrained despite massive growth in freight volumes.
The postwar consequences were lasting. Surplus pallets entered civilian markets. Servicemen returned to industry with firsthand experience in palletized handling. In Australia, abandoned U.S. equipment became the foundation of the Commonwealth Handling Equipment Pool — later CHEP. In the United States, pallet rental experiments and pooling initiatives soon followed.
World War II did not invent the pallet. But it removed every barrier that had delayed its adoption. In doing so, it transformed palletization from a local efficiency into a global logistics standard.
Further Reading
Origins of the Pallet Before World War II
Postwar Expansion and Pallet Standardization (forthcoming)
References:
Pallets: A North American Perspective (2023)
Pallets and Progress: A Collected History of Pallets and Palletized Handling 1922 – 1945 (2025)
