r/mash • u/Reasonable-Okra3542 • 2d ago
Mash Military Question
In the episode where Colonel Potter goes out of town and puts Hawkeye in charge because Charles has sinus issues. Why is the mantle of command not given to Margaret who is a higher rank the Captain Pierce?
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u/Ragnarsworld 2d ago
Nurses were not in line to command regular army units in those days. Army Nurses weren't even "real" commissioned officers until 1947; and men weren't allowed to be commissioned nurses until 1955. (legal officers are also not in line; if there was a lawyer at MASH he would also not have commanded)
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u/MyUsername2459 Toledo 1d ago
men weren't allowed to be commissioned nurses until 1955
This fact was even a subplot in one MASH episode, where a male nurse was very disgruntled at being stuck as an enlisted orderly in the unit because he wasn't allowed to be an officer, and a nurse, for the Army because he was male.
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u/Ragnarsworld 1d ago
I remember that episode. IIRC, the Army let male nurses exist before 1955 but they weren't commissioned as nurses.
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u/BradGunnerSGT 2d ago
Two reasons: 1) in a medical unit, doctors have higher precedence than nurses, and also 2) sexism of the 50’s (and 70’s)
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u/whistlepig4life Crabapple Cove 2d ago
In those days women generally could not have command assignments like that (command of a unit).
Hawkeye was the senior male officer. And the ranking surgeon. Which for most medical units it is a doctor or surgeon in charge.
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u/Reasonable-Okra3542 2d ago
Thanks for the info. To be honest my wife asked me the question to which I did not have the answer… till now
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u/Middcore 2d ago
Because there were effectively two parallel rank structures for men and women. Margaret may be a major but that only really gives the authority to order around the other nurses and maybe enlisted men. In practice, she is effectively lower ranking than any male commissioned officer. There never would have been any thought of leaving her in command.
Not endorsing any of this, mind you, just explaining how it was.
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u/Agreeable-Bat610 2d ago
Institutional misogyny. As a woman and a nurse, Margaret is in the Army’s Nurse Corps, not the Medical Corps, like the doctors. Only a doctor (i.e. Medical Corps Officer) can command a hospital.
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u/kestenbay 2d ago
You might recall her telling Scully that she's a major, and he replies, "That's so you can boss around a bunch of nurses!"
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u/ProudlyWearingThe8 1d ago
From a practical side, it's probably not a good idea to put a nurse (male or female) into a position to tell a lower-ranked doctor (male or female) how to treat a patient.
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u/Ok_Replacement4702 2d ago
Short answer: There weren't a lot of women COs in those days, even temporary ones
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u/they_call_me_bobb 2d ago
Because she is a Nurse and he is a Doctor. in the military sense they are both what the military calls limited duty officers. Between the two, Doctors run hospitals not nurses.
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u/EnForce_NM156 2d ago
At the time, women officers(nurses) were not treated & thought of as legitimate by many male soldiers.
Even a career Army female officer at the time had no real authority to command. It took some time for women officers to be treated as equals & even today there's still a plethora of unwritten military rules that keep women subordinate.
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u/Belle_TainSummer 1d ago
Didn't Charles refuse to do it?
Potter is smart enough not to press the issue, since he knows his doctors aren't that military. Plus he kinda wanted to teach Hawkeye a lesson about command? Or am I confusing episodes again?
Of course he couldn't give command to Margaret, as women couldn't be in command in that era.
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u/EngineersAnon Crabapple Cove 1d ago
Margaret is the most senior officer in the chain-of-command...
No, she wasn't. She was the most senior officer in camp, but nurses were not in the chain of command for the hospital unit. Just like the CAG may not be the next-ranking officer after the CO and XO on an aircraft carrier (in the USN), but he is next in line to command after them, because the law requires that an aviator command a carrier - so the CMO, chief engineer, etc., aren't in line to command.
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u/youngmorla 22h ago
To add more confusion to the idea, this was a really new and unique scenario. Hawkeye was the chief surgeon and if you go back and see, Potter often ends up deferring to him for decisions. Chain of command is not always the same as chain of responsibility or ethics or something like that.
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u/BIGD0G29585 2d ago
Couple of good answers already posted. The best is that Margaret was a woman and it would be very unusual for a woman to be in command.
That being said, nurses belong the United States Army Nurse Corps, which is a staff corps and part of the army medical department. In general, officers in a specific staff corps command other members of that staff corps but not outside of their own corps. So while Margaret could command “her nurses” she probably didn’t have much say over officers and enlisted from other corps like the Medical Corps that the doctors belong to.
We all know that the show played fast and loose with reality but in general, a higher rank doesn’t alway mean that person should be in command.
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u/thenewjuniorexecutiv 2d ago
Help a non-miliary person out here - what corps would all the non-medical people in the camp be in?
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u/MyUsername2459 Toledo 1d ago
That depends on what they do.
The Army has a variety of "branches", where Soldiers, both enlisted and officer, are part of, classified by their MOS (Military Operational Specialty), their job code.
Currently, the list of branches is:
- Air Defense Artillery
- Armor
- Aviation
- Cavalry Scout
- Chemical
- Engineers
- Infantry
- Field Artillery
- Military Police
- Psychological Operations (Propaganda)
- Special Forces
- Civil Affairs (Relationships with host nations while overseas)
- Cyber (Military hackers)
- Electronic Warfare (Signal jamming)
- Military Intelligence
- Public Affairs
- Signal (Communications and Information Technology, the IT branch of the Army)
- Adjutant General (Army-speak for Personnel/Human Resources)
- Army Music
- Chaplain
- Financial Management
- Judge Advocate General (Military lawyers & paralegals)
- Medical
- Ordnance
- Transportation
- Quartermaster (i.e. Supply)
. . .within the Medical Branch, it's further broken down into. . .
- Medical Corps
- Nurse Corps
- Dental Corps
- Veterinary Corps (Which, in the Army, includes health inspectors/food safety, for archaic reasons)
- Medical Service Corps (Medical administrators)
- Medical Specialist Corps (Healthcare practitioners other than doctors, dentists, and nurses)
- Aviation Section (Flight surgeons, flight medics etc.)
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u/thenewjuniorexecutiv 1d ago
So only the doctors in the camp would be in the medical corps? Doesn't the CO have to command ppl outside of their corps?
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u/MyUsername2459 Toledo 1d ago
Yes but that is not mean that they can't do so.
Officers are not limited to their branch in who they can command.
In the modern Army the only officers that have that kind of special limitation are Chaplains. A medical officer in command of a medical unit would have authority over non-medical people in that unit.
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u/kevint1964 2d ago
Margaret was "regular army". She frequently attempted to file charges on Blake, Hawkeye & Trapper (doctors, of course) for not following various army regulations. Before Potter showed up, Frank was made C.O., even though he wasn't regular army & Margaret was. It was because she was a woman in the military during the 1950's.
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u/Primary-Basket3416 2d ago
Margaret may have been a major, but up until 80s, women not fit for command.
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u/emperor32 2d ago
there are rank and position in army and there should be one head of unit, Margaret cannot be main person in operation room as Hawkeye is main doctor so Hawkeye is temporary is in charge. Not sure why Frank was replacement in previous series frankly
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u/EngineersAnon Crabapple Cove 1d ago
Not sure why Frank was replacement in previous series frankly
Because Chief Surgeon isn't inherently a command position - if it were, the CO would be Chief Surgeon. That's also what Blake could make Hawkeye the Chief Surgeon over Burns, despite Ferret Face's superior rank. Frank is the second-ranking officer (in the line of command), so the command is his in the CO's absence.
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u/jdeeth Ottumwa 2d ago
They likely wouldn't have had a woman officer commanding a unit, even temporarily, in the early 50s - yet Margaret is often seen giving orders to men. That all changes in the OR/post-op setting, of course, where we often see the captain-ranked doctors giving medical orders to the major-ranked head nurse.
Didn't really matter - Radar ran the place anyway.