War Office Selection Boards

War Office Selection Boards, or WOSBs, were a scheme devised by British Army psychiatrists during World War II to select potential officers for the British Army. They replaced an earlier method, the Command Interview Board, and were the precursors to today's Army Officer Selection Boards. The WOSBs were also later adapted to civilian purposes such as selecting civil servants and firemen.

Following British defeats and German successes with Blitzkrieg in the early months of World War II, Members of Parliament and the British media expressed concerns with how the British Army was being led. There was a notable shortage of officers, with a shortfall of 25% meaning that the War Office was unable to properly staff units, and there was a high proportion of breakdowns. In addition, the Army was perceived as old-fashioned and inefficient, as well as tainted by social bias.

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. 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.' When Wittkower and Vinden met in a pub after Vinden's visit to the final OCTU on his tour, the result was a discussion about how to improve officer selection by utilising psychological methods. 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. The group made plans to experiment with and adapt these methods for use by the British Army. Army psychiatry was dominated by psychiatrists from the , and so many figures from that organisation were involved in officer selection from the earliest experiments.

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