In military and nautical situations food, potables, bedding, clothes, ammunition, and other supplies are all-important, because you often won't be able to get more for months. For the same reason, they are usually purchased in large quantities. The person in charge of acquiring, storing, and distributing these supplies is called the quartermaster (sometimes supply sergeant or purser). These individuals are thus entrusted with large amounts of money and valuable goods, and some find the potential for personal gain irresistible. They may sell supplies on the black market and report them destroyed, or get kickbacks for directing contracts to particular (and often substandard) sellers, or maybe just buy cheap goods with an expensive budget and pocket the difference. May be a Military Moonshiner, and if not can always put you in touch with one, for a price.
They are usually an obstacle or antagonist, causing the heroes to have to do without essential goods, or worse have the essential goods fail at a critical moment. Heroic or protagonist-allied examples will often balance this by being The Scrounger for the unit, and often the Friend in the Black Market as well. This will very often happen in Military Fiction, to the point where many characters will automatically assume that anyone they meet filling this role is doing one or more of these things, and open discussions on that basis.
This is sometimes Truth in Television, although much less so in modern professional militaries than has often been the case historically.
Compare Arms Dealer, who may be a customer, or may be the quartermaster directly.
Compare Honest John's Dealership. Several possibilities:
- The quartermaster acts like or deals with one of them.
- The protagonists will have to deal with one of them to get what they need.
Compare The Scrounger, which may overlap.
Examples
open/close all folders
Comic Books
- Punisher: The Platoon: Donald is as corrupt as they come, which Frank takes advantage of by setting up a trade: Donald provides Frank's men with M-14s (rather than the craptastic M-16s) in exchange for AKs taken from dead Vietnamese soldiers (which he then supplies to the Soldiers at the Rear), and all it takes is a significant look from Frank to ensure that no heroin goes to Frank's base. He also sells spare batteries to the locals and replaces them with the dead ones which are re-issued to the American soldiers, which nearly gets Frank's platoon killed in an ambush. He finally goes too far in screwing over other people, and is last seen waking up with a grenade on his pillow.
Fan Works
- In Code Geass: The Prepared Rebellion, these are quite common among the Britannian Military in Area 11, thanks to Clovis' lax administration. Lelouch uses them to get supplies for the Black Knights, and sometimes arranges for them to be found out by Euphemia.
- Hard Enough: Giovanni is revealed to have served as one during the Great Offscreen War that informs the fic's storyline. His position allowed him to gather resources he would later on use to turn Team Rocket into the Indigo region's primary criminal gang, and to leverage favors from various parties including Brock's mentor, Lt. Surge.
Film
- Once the main characters of the 9th Company arrive in Afghanistan, Chugun is given a PKM with a bent barrel. When the private starts to protest, the quartermaster belittles him for questioning the "great honour of using the gun previously operated by the late Comrade Samylin, hero of the Red Army". The factory new gun Chugun should be given is presumably sold to the black market.
- Elwood, the Villain Protagonist of Buffalo Soldiers, is selling whatever he can from the military base he's a quartermaster of, always filling forms for way more than is actually used up. Things escalate when he goes from cleaning supplies and alike to a truckload of firearms that officially went missing in a freak accident. That's without mentioning the fact that he's also running a local heroin market, which is why the accident happened in the first place. In the end, he gets away with everything, and it's implied that he will start the whole gig in a new base.
- Downplayed in The Count of Monte Cristo (2024): The ship's quartermaster Caderousse isn't shown to be particularly corrupt, but he does participate in framing Dantès as a Bonapartist. He takes to drink out of guilt, but redeems himself by leading an attack on Danglars' ship in the end.
- The quartermaster in Glory keeps claiming that he's out of shoes for the all-black 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, thinking it's funny to leave them either barefoot or getting infections from very worn shoes. Colonel Shaw eventually loses his patience and has the entrance to the store blocked, trapping the quartermaster inside with him while he wrecks the store until the quartermaster is cowed into giving him the shoes.
- In Kelly's Heroes, "Crapgame" is an opportunistic supply sergeant who will do anything for money and illegally provides the equipment needed for the raid on the bank storing the Nazi Gold — which includes handful of halftrucks, among other things.
- Played with in Lord of War. Yuri's uncle is an honest general who is only roped into arms trading by family connections. It is Yuri who convinces him to fill out the paperwork, claiming that he's 30 thousand rifles short and selling out many other pieces of materiel from the stockpile under his command. Once he is killed, it's implied that his replacement had far fewer scruples and went along with Yuri's demands. In fact, the main reason why Yuri is overjoyed about the fall of the USSR is not about politics, but the Soviet arsenal being all for grabs — while maintained by thoroughly corrupt quartermasters.
Jokes
- A Wehrmacht sniper on the Eastern front looks through his scope to see a Soviet officer, but by the time he looks away to check what their rank is in his manual and the corresponding bounty on them is, they've gone. Finally he decides to shoot first and check later, kills the first one he sees, and looks up his manual.
Quartermaster: 500 Deutschmark fine for contributing to raise enemy morale.
Literature
- Bernard Cornwell's novel Battle Flag, set in The American Civil War, introduces Captain Billy Blythe, who holds this position for a regiment of Northern States cavalry raised by public conscription. Galloway's Horse receives a massive cash donation from an Abolitionist preacher to buy its horses. Blythe, who in peacetime had been a horse dealer, is entrusted to buy mounts. but the horses when they arrive are a herd of elderly, mangy, knackered and blown remnants. Blythe defensively says the war has made it hard to get good horses. The suspicion grows that he has pocketed most of the money — but it cannot be proven. Blythe then goes on to be a notorious looter and rapist, who says to the hero, when there are no witnesses, that the only sane thing to do in a war is to get rich out of it. The hero vows to deal with him, but Blythe has powerful protectors.
- The BattleTech Expanded Universe novel Malicious Intent has Caradoc Trevena seek out the person in his new command who's got a reputation for being a corrupt quartermaster. This is because his command is considered low priority on the supply chain and is therefore badly underequipped. He uses the quartermaster's connections to get vital equipment and upgrades to turn his command into an effective fighting unit.
- Milo Minderbinder from Catch-22 isn't corrupt so much as completely amoral. Officially, he's a mess officer for an Air Force base in WW2; unofficially, he uses Air Force resources to expand his operation, shipping commodities across the Mediterranean. He calls it "the Syndicate," and insists "everyone has a share." Near the end of the novel, he cements his amorality by contracting the Nazis to bomb the base in order to destroy a backlog of Egyptian cotton he couldn't sell.
- Ciaphas Cain:
- In the short story "The Smallest Detail," Ferik Jurgen and a local investigator catch a quartermaster who's selling food and weapons on the black market and fudging the records to hide this. Jurgen spots it immediately when he reads the inventory (the records were too perfect), but he's just there for a supply run and didn't think it was worth reporting until the quartermaster panicked and sent thugs after him.
- Subverted with Jenit Sulla, a quartermaster who was promoted to Lieutenant after most of her regiment was eaten by Tyranids. Cain doesn't like her, not because she's corrupt (on the contrary, her experience makes her one of the most logistically-minded officers in the 597th) but because she's a Leeroy Jenkins who wholeheartedly believes in Cain's heroic reputation and is eager to follow in his footsteps (as do her soldiers, accounting for their higher-than normal successes and combat losses). Amberly doesn't like her either, but that's because Jenit has a bad case of Purple Prose and her memoirs feature heavily in Amberley's accounts (for all that Cain disparages her enthusiasm, Jenit ends up becoming the first woman to reach the rank of Lady General in the history of the Imperium).
- In Codex Alera, during Tavi's period as a Subtribune Logistica in the First Aleran Legion, he is assigned to find why the legionnaires are complaining about reduced rations. He discovers that someone has forged slightly undersized measuring cups for the Legion's flour and that the excess flour has been sold on the black market. He traces it back to the Legion's Tribune Logistica, and the discovery spooks said Tribune into stopping his corrupt activities without anyone getting punished (and damaging the morale of the freshly minted Legion).
- In the Detective Joe Sandilands novel Ragtime in Simla, an offscreen quartermaster is selling British military rifles to a Pathan tribe via the book's villain.
- Discworld:
- Nobby Nobbs was a supply sergeant for several armies, a number of whom lost due to his having sold all their gear. He uses this experience to his advantage in Men at Arms to get into the Ankh-Morpork armory, claiming to be an inspector and accusing the man in charge of everything he used to do.
- In Monstrous Regiment, 'Threeparts' Scallops is a subversion. When the squad sees the shoddy, second-hand gear he has for them, they accuse him of having put aside the best goods so he can sell them off. Then he shows them his back room, full of worse gear — the war is going so badly for Borogravia that the best they can use to equip new units is mangled stuff other soldiers have died in.
- In The Edge Chronicles, multiple quartermasters have turned traitor.
- In the Horatio Hornblower novel Hornblower and the Atropos, Captain Hornblower discovers that some of the salt beef the Victualling Yards sent to his ship (the Atropos) is inedible. The superintendent of the Victualling Yards asks that the barrels of bad beef be returned to him, apparently so he can palm them off on some other unfortunate ship's crew. Hornblower considers the possibility that he has some kind of financial interest in doing so, and punishes him by having the word "Condemned" branded on the barrels to warn any other ship they might be given to.
- The protagonist of the McAuslan series is introduced to his new unit's quartermaster as the 'biggest rogue in the army'.
- In Phule's Company, Captain Jester asks his new supply sergeant Chocolate Harry point blank at their first meeting what company gear he's been selling on the Black Market. Harry indignantly denies the accusation until Jester threatens to lock down his inventory and bring in an outside auditor to check everything over. After he owns up, Jester then explains that he doesn't want to lower the boom, just to have some oversight about what gets sold. He also has a shopping list of what he wants from the black marketeers in return.
- In the Prince Roger series, offscreen corrupt quartermasters left the unit with plasma cannons that failed explosively in humid conditions, causing numerous casualties, and "upgraded" powered armor whose critical components also failed (if not explosively) shortly after exposure to Marduk's climate. Prince Roger swears that heads will literally roll over the matter when he gets home.
- In Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Cao Cao creates one. He is fully aware that he doesn't have enough food to take Yuan Shu via a siege, or the strength to assault his walls, so he orders the quartermaster to serve half-rations. When the soldiers complain and threaten to desert, Cao Cao has his generals announce that the quartermaster had been holding back vital supplies for himself and has him executed. After a feast, the men are strong and enthused enough to break through and force Yuan Shu to flee. Cao Cao does provide for the innocent quartermaster's family after this.
- In Sharpe's Fortress, Sharpe's nemesis Sergeant Hakeswill wangles a supply sergeant's slot, and colludes with his captain to sell off prodigious amounts of goods. Sharpe himself averts this trope, remaining honest during his own stints as a quartermaster. Few believe it, though; see Real Life, below.
Live-Action TV
- In the M*A*S*H episode "The Incubator", Hawkeye and Trapper John run into one of these, who is hoarding several of the incubators that they need, but refuses to release one (or even use it himself because three incubators are better than two and it might break down).
- In "Good-Bye Radar Part 2", Klinger gets a quartermaster to sell him an electrical generator because the camp's main generator is broken and the backup one is missing. Just before they complete the deal the Colonel of the unit which is supposed to get the generator shows up in person because several of their requests for generators have "mysteriously disappeared." The colonel even mentions that they're making do with a backup generator they stole from a M*A*S*H unit. Klinger promptly steals it right back, which finally convinces Radar that the 4077th is fine without him.
Music
- The chanty "The Topman and the Afterguard" has this verse:
Then I'll pray for the purser who gives us to eat,
Spew-burgoo, rank butter and musty horse meat,
With weevily old biscuit, while he gets the gain,
May the devil double triple damn him, says the afterguard, amen!
Radio
- The Navy Lark has Chief Petty Officer Pertwee, a man who has sold out of Navy Stores everything from blankets to battleships. Not only that, but the Pertwee Clan has been selling Naval stores ever since the Battle of Trafalgar — it's a tradition.
Tabletop Games
- Troubleshooters in Paranoia often have to deal with the Alpha Complex version of this trope when attempting to get supplies for their latest Friend Computer-assigned mission.
Video Games
- Inverted in Deus Ex with Sam Carter, who encourages JC to use non-lethal tactics and is one of the few members of UNATCO who isn't corrupt, sadistic, and/or part of the conspiracy. He even refuses to defect with JC in the last mission in UNATCO, insisting that the place is still ultimately good. He is eventually forced out at the end of the game, though.
- Inverted in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. One of the main reasons for the fall of Castle Vitharn in the Shivering Isles DLC was because the keep's quartermaster was such a miser that he refused to give any of his equipment to Vitharn's defenders, even while it was under siege, out of fear that they might be damaged or lost during the battle. Somewhat justified, since this is the realm of madness and everyone in the Isles has some form of neurosis; his just happened to be extreme perfectionism.
- Escape from Tarkov has a few of these acting as the player's traders. Peacekeeper is a Polish UN representative who agrees to sell you NATO weapons in exchange for doing field work for him. Prapor is a Russian GRU quartermaster who is affiliated with the BEAR PMC group and sells Russian Army gear.
- In EVE Online, player corporations (read: Guilds) need players with logistics skills to move supplies where they're needed. This is vitally important but very boring grunt work that not many players want to do when they could be blowing up other players instead. So those that volunteer often are not background-checked properly before they're put into a position to siphon off massive amounts of goods that were supposed to be headed to a war effort.
- Fallout:
- Sgt Daniel Contreras from Fallout: New Vegas is the New California Republic's quartermaster at their Camp McCarran outpost who exploits his position for personal gain smuggling guns and chems to clients in the Mojave Wasteland. If you complete his unmarked quest for him, he'll give you full access to his inventory and also gives you This Machine, one of the best rifles in the game. You can also rat him out to the base's officials (much sooner because you just have to hack his computer, while Contreras's questline has a minimum level to start) and still get This Machine.
- Fallout 4 has Proctor Teagan of the Brotherhood of Steel, who has a repeating quest for the player where he sends you to get food from the local wastelanders, preferring that you use force (though you can choose alternate options).
- The player assigned to the role of Quartermaster on Space Station 13 can usually be counted on to blow the entire station's budget on useless crap like crates full of monkeys. Things get even worse if the quartermaster is a traitor.
Web Animation
- In Red vs. Blue, the Reds repeatedly put layabout Grif in charge of their ammo, a task he never performs. Eventually, they expand Simmons' duties to "bringing extra ammo for when Grif forgets". However, when Grif and Simmons are sent to a new base (where Grif is in charge), he actually sells all their ammo to the Blues.
Western Animation
- Rodney inverts this in Archer. In contrast to the highly unprofessional staff at ISIS, he is very by-the-book, and doesn't allow the team to take out weapons all willy-nilly as it was before he showed up. He does accept a handjob from Cheryl in exchange for a secret phone number, however. At his worst, he is more of an Obstructive Bureaucrat than anything else. Becomes a straight version of this in season 6 when ISIS gets shut down; he steals all the weapons from the armory and sets himself up as a very successful Arms Dealer.
Real Life
- Pursers in the era of Wooden Ships and Iron Men were notorious for this sort of behaviour, in part because they were paid poorly and semi-officially expected to do so. The officers and shipowners considered common sailors little better than animals, and didn't much care what their rations looked like (for the most part; officers like Horatio Hornblower did exist, but were rarer in life than fiction). The 1905 mutiny on the Russian battleship Potemkin ostensibly started over the quality of rations — the sailors were served borscht made out of rotten, maggot-infested meat. Not only did the purser insist that everything was okay, but the ship's surgeon was in it, too, ordering to simply clean the meat and cook it again. Things escalated in zero time.
- Nationalist China's army had to deal with plenty of these during the Second Sino-Japanese War. While China didn't have a robust arms industry like the other three Allied powers, they did receive foreign aid and produce enough weapons to fill entire warehouses (quality of some of those guns is another subject). Their soldiers were also well-equipped, especially the troops of the central government and the Guangxi Clique. But due to rampant corruption, most NRA soldiers were poorly supplied, even the basics such as bandages, rations and spare ammunition. This was due to many, many quartermasters selling off equipment to the black market or other warlords, who would hoard them for their troops and often do a poor job of distributing said equipment. Nothing effective was done to solve or even curtail this problem, which lead to quartermasters happily selling several warehouses' worth of supplies to the Chinese Communists in the Chinese Civil War, while the central government's troops starved, watched their equipment break down, or ran out of ammo. In fact, the severe shortage of materiel was one of the main reasons why the initial Japanese offensive was so successful — once the "German" divisions of the NRA were lost in the Battle of Shanghai, there was nobody left with enough guns and ammo to meaningfully slow down the IJA advance.
- This was a notorious problem on both sides of the Eastern Front during World War II. German quartermasters were keeping parts of the food and other supplies that could be sold via the black market to the civilian population, never sending them to the front. Soviet quartermasters were hoarding food that managed to reach front simply to get by, and as the tide of war was changing, to sell it via the black market to their own troops in exchange for war trophies.
- Early into the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, Soviet quartermasters saw nothing wrong with selling any man-portable materiel to the locals, thinking the war will be over in less than few months and thus wanting to make hay while the sun shines. Later into the war, quartermasters of the "allied" Afghan Army saw nothing wrong with selling their own guns to the mujahideen forces (and not for ideological reasons, but for a quick buck), then filling papers to get replacements from the Soviets for equipment "lost in action".