Three Men on a Shovel and the One Month Pregnancy

I was reading an article and I came across this:

When I was a teenager in Korea, the lesson was called Three Men on a Shovel. Koreans used to dig trenches using one guy steering the shovel with the handle and two other guys pulling with ropes tied to the shovel. How Americans would laugh! Dumb Koreans, takes three of them just to dig a hole! Then the Army did a test with three Americans with three shovels against the Koreans, and the Koreans kicked our asses.

From this article: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/barack-obama-opinions-062110#ixzz2AQECQC3I

I don't know if you have any idea how freaking revolutionary this would be. In the world of programming, we have a story which we tell over and over again, The One Month Pregnancy, it goes like this: "You can't make a pregnant woman give birth in one month by assigning 8 more women to the task." Here is, if it is true, a beautiful counter example of three people on the same task, with fewer resources, accomplishing more than the same three people working alone. An enormous blow to the individual-as-productivity-superhero cult.

However  this is the internet, which is not your friend. So I started trying to fact check. I found a russian video on the you tubes, showing how this works, with comments I can't read, but which I assume are mocking the activity.

 

I found an image of a 9 person shovel, with this caption:

"Actual experiment has demonstrated that nine or six or even three men using this kind of hand-digging shovel can do more work, more easily, than the same number of men vigorously using individual shovels."

I found that same image on another site with an exact opposite caption:

"... That this implement belongs to the class called labor-saving machines there can be no doubt. It takes five men to do one man's work, but entails no reduction in pay. In fact, the number of its crew can be extended to the limits of the shovel's ropes without risk of a strike among the laborers."

I found a 1911 article on "The Principles of Scientific Management" which is one of the most alarming and horrible documents I have ever read, about which I will write another day, but does talk a lot about shoveling.

I even found a wikipedia page for a Korean War era minesweeper ship, the USS Shoveler, ( which I can only assume was the secret hiding base for the Mystery Man of the same name )

Even snopes.com was no help. So I give up. I have no idea how true this is. I want it to be true. Anyone out there have better data?

 

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