Would a cook (MOS 060) in the infantry be assigned to an infantry "regiment" or only at infantry "division' level? I'm trying to find the unit of a veteran who participated in the Bismarck Archipelago, New Guinea and Southern Philippines (Liberation) campaigns in the Pacific Theater of Operations. From his discharge papers I know that his unit was awarded a Meritorious Unit Award and him the Philippine Liberation Medal.
Hard to answer definitively without access to all the Army Regulations of that era -- and even if we had access I'm not sure I would want to read enough to know for certain. Most of the documents we see are the discharge documents which are actually a distillation of facts from one period of service. I think they tend to skew how we think the Army categorized its manpower. Then we also tend to extend what we think we know about more recent Army procedures. When I interpret "division level" I have to think of the Division Headquarters and Headquarters Company which, for a cook, is little different from a cook for a Rifle Company -- just higher expectations (for which cooks can be hand picked). Below Division Headquarters a division is a collection of regiments, battalions and companies which each has a set of cooks for each of their companies and batteries. Unit supervision of 'food service' comes from officers that are tasked as Mess Officer in addition to their primary duty. The division level supervision for 'food service' might come from a Quartermaster officer on the division staff. From a cursory search it looks like 'food service' would fall under Quartermaster Corps -- subsistence. If so, QMC had responsibility for developing the guidance (maybe regulations?) for food service but I am not sure they trained all the cooks. I have read the letters of a cook in the Army Air Forces so I know there was centralized training for some cooks. There were also many cook's assistants -- usually PFC's but maybe higher -- that were trained on-the-job but I am not sure their MOS would change to cook but it might. In any case their Arm or Service stays the same as the unit they are assigned to -- a cook's assistant in a Signal battalion is Signal Corps. That is a rare list of campaigns for which we might find some candidate Infantry or Cavalry (foot cavalry) regiments but that will take some effort.
