Billions for Defense

Where the Sabine River divides Louisiana from Texas, 68,000 Regulars of the U. S. Army maneuvered last week. Their war game, unrolled under a hot sun, on russet roads of sand and clay, in air sweet with the odor of pine trees, was the biggest the U. S. Army had ever had.

The Army got a good look at Louisiana: moss, bats, and dark, stagnant pools in forests of oak and pine; Negroes, staring wall-eyed from weather-grey shacks; from shacks no better, poor whites whose grand pappies saw the Confederates run the Yanks off this same land; a new oil find, 30 miles south of prosperous Alexandria; cotton, corn, potatoes, rice where cane grew until Louisiana sugar prices went to pot. Yellow signs reading: TROOPS, KEEP OUT hung on fence posts and trees. These signs marked farms whose owners had refused the Army permission to cross their land. One officer, seeking such permission before the troops arrived, had the tallest yarn of the maneuvers. Turned down by a backwoods slattern, he inquired: "Madam, don't you know that Louisiana is at war with Texas? And don't you want Louisiana to win the war?" Said the lady of the house: "I sure do. Give me that paper to sign!"

Mostly the natives liked what they saw of the Army in Alexandria, Dry Prong Natchitoches, along the dusty roads and at Camp Beauregard (where at night the clustered, lighted tents were like an incandescent half-orange). Military police had little to do. As many soldiers went to drugstores for malted milks as to honky-tonks for beer.

They were just games, but they had the look, sound, smell of motorized war. They even had casualties: at week's end, twelve dead, about 200 injured. Engines aground and aloft belched more noise and fumes than did the guns (which fired blanks). There were agile, armored scout cars (with four guns, two-way radio). Excellent medium and light tanks (but no such heavy tanks as the Germans' mighty 80-tonners) rumbled up against 3 7 mm. anti-tank guns (which can pierce 2-inch armor at 1,500 yards) and smokepots (devised to blind tank crews in grey, saccharine fog). Some of the tanks had names. Defense forces using smokepots and modernized French 75-mm. field guns captured Gypsy Rose Lee, Diamond Lil, Galloping Ghost, Suicide Kid in one skirmish. Along with a completely mechanized cavalry brigade, there was still horse cavalry. But even the horses were modernized. There were trucks to haul them on long marches; some carried portable radio transmitters which the riders operated on horseback in the field.

But measured against the reality of World War II, last week's game was more unreal than most such playing at soldiers. There was absurdly little Air Corps participation, practically no realistic anti-aircraft practice, no practice whatsoever with and against parachute troops-which the U. S. Army has not officially recognized. What useful training and new techniques the Army did pick up cost the taxpayers about $2,400,000. They probably got more for their money than the Army did. For last week's game provided an excellent index of what the U. S. Army has, what it needs.

The U. S. could see (and was told by Chief of Staff George Catlett Marshall) that its Army could muster enough initial combat equipment for about 75,000 men.

This estimate blinked some glaring deficiencies, made no allowance for replacement of battle losses. But it was more than the U. S. people had ever before been willing to let their Army have in peace. And the Army, with additional equipment already ordered, was only $279,000,000 short of what George Marshall thought he would need (at the start of war) for a force of 750,000 Regulars, National Guardsmen and conscripts (plus 250,000 more conscripts in reserve).

Last week, Adolf Hitler corrected George Marshall's estimates. Military arithmetic, which a month ago was too much for the U. S. to add up without getting taxpayers' cramp, suddenly became kindergarten stuff. Along with the arithmetic went the military thinking which produced such piffling ciphers as $279,000,000. Overnight, the pleasant doings in Louisiana became old-fashioned non sense. Against Europe's total war, the U. S. Army looked like a few nice boys with BB guns.

How Much Is Enough? In the past seven years, the U. S. had spent $3,700,000,000 on its Navy, $3,400,000,000 on its Army. Why, then rose the cry of fear and anger last week was the U. S. not armed? Ofcourse the money has been well spent, said Commander in Chief Roosevelt, instantly on the defensive. A further answer: by no means all the money was spent for rearmament. Huge are the "housekeeping" (maintenance) expenses for even a skeletal Army, a growing Navy.

Example: of $2,212,343,670 allotted for the Navy in three fiscal years (1939-41), only $621,728,841 was for new ships; of $700,000,000 which the War Department originally asked for the Army next fiscal year, only $53,000,000 was for new equipment.

But the angry, frightened people, the press, Congress were beyond accepting such answers. Savage, often uninformed and unjust critics screamed at generals and admirals. Massachusetts' well-informed young Senator Lodge set the Senate by the ears with a resolution providing what many a temperate critic has long demanded, what many another within the services has secretly advocated: a full, impartial investigation of U. S. defense needs, method, purpose. Congressmen sensitive to clamor from home had up a batch of admirals (Robinson, Furlong, Van Keuren), gave the wallowing sea dogs hell. So hot was the attack that Minnesota's Melvin Maas was at last moved to say: "When peace times are here we jump all over you and accuse you of just wanting . . . a lot of nice battleships to ride around in, but . . when we are scared and the Navy is scared we are going to whip you up because you haven't done the things we haven't let you do."

Congress since 1934 has let the Navy: 1) build up from relative decrepitude to a strong fleet of 301 combat ships, inferior in tonnage only to Great Britain's; 2) get to work on 62 more, plan 63 others; 3) acquire 1,780 of 3,000 projected planes. The chronically neglected Army got started later in 1937. Up to last week it had at hand or on order : >-- 227,000 of its 280,000 authorized men.

AND 792 light and medium tanks (until last week the Army wanted only 136 more for its wartime force. The Germans use 300-400 tanks in a single division). AND 744 anti-tank guns (total wanted: 1,556).

AND 741 modernized French 75-mm. field guns; 698 more to be renovated from War I stocks; 6,000,000 rounds of 75-mm.

ammunition (the French used 50,000 rounds per day in the early weeks of World War I.) AND 2,000 anti-aircraft guns. This seemingly impressive total includes 1,100 which in fact are 50-calibre machine guns, useful mainly against low-flying strafers; 500 good but recently outmoded three-inchers ; 70 newer, longer-range go-mm. guns which the Army recently adopted as the best to be had. Wanted: 300 (enough, by British calculation, to defend 300 square miles, about the area of New York City).

AND 2,806 planes mostly outmoded as planes always are.

These figures looked better than did some of the scarehead arithmetic which Congress batted around last week (most popular scandal: that the Army had only four anti-aircraft guns). How appallingly short of effective preparedness they fell, Franklin Roosevelt soon showed.

The President listened to Congress, to the people. The drumfire from Europe reached crescendo. He left the White House for an evening afloat on the Potomac. He played with his stamps, "did some think ing." He called in the civilians and officers who assist him in running the Navy and Army: Secretaries Edison (due to go soon) and Woodring (long overdue to go); Assistant Secretary of War Johnson (whose brash, abrasive voice crying in the wilderness for men & arms last year was too loud for his own, the Army's and the country's comfort); Chief of Naval Operations Harold R. Stark, Chief of Staff

Marshall. Then the Commander in Chief went before Congress. He asked:

1) That to $1,748,796,572 of pending Army-Navy appropriations, Congress immediately add $1,182,000,000 ($896,000,000 in direct appropriations, $286.000,000 for orders to be placed now, paid for later) ; 2) that the U. S. step up its annual aircraft production to 50,000 planes, its standing force of Army-Navy planes to 50,000.

Huge though these items seemed, the public learned in driblets that there was much more to come. First fact to seep out was that the President's big proposals did not mean much in themselves. Actually to make the purchases which he referred to last week would cost at least $3,000,000,000 ; to round out the Army and Navy to his new scale would cost uncalculated billions more. Even his $1,182,000,000 was bound to mean 1) new taxes, or 2) lifting the present debt limit of $45,000,000,000. Yet Congress last week boggled only at a detail: whether to give Mr.

Roosevelt his $200,000,000 for new air craft and munitions production without strings, or tell him just how to spend the money.

How Much Time? The people likewise seemed to acquiesce in what Mr. Roose velt has proposed. Yet they were certainly not yet aware of what it all meant. Even the officials around the President were in credibly confused. (The War Department for years has studied the sources, short ages, availability of essential materials, yet no two sets of figures agreed.) Presidential advisers hardly knew whether to take the 50,000 plane figure literally ("That just helps abroad. My God. we don't know whether it will be 10,000, 50,000 or 100,000"). Said Chief of Staff Marshall this week: "We are thinking of adding 10,000 planes."

Whatever the final totals, however the huge expenditure is financed, the U. S. economy is in for a keelhauling. Guns, soldiers, wheeled weapons, ships are only the frontal factors of Defense; behind them must be armies in overalls, turning out the sinews of war. Given time. U. S. industry can produce all that Mr. Roosevelt has begun to ask for. But how much time is there? A terrible urgency moved the President last week. For him, speed was the essence. And without drastic stimulation (subsidies), supervision, coordination, sacrifice of commercial customers, industry just cannot supply the required speed.

Of things to come, there were many signs. Congress had up a bill authorizing the P U. S. capacity at better than 12.000 war planes; War Department estimates recently have run from 17.000 to 30,000. Reason for these discrepancies is that such arbitrary round numbers are in themselves meaningless. Aircraft makers can talk intelligently about capacity only when they know just how many bombers, pursuits, etc. are wanted. Only certain figure last week was 200 Boeing Flying Fortresses ($400.000 apiece), upping to 370 the total of heavy bombers on order. Already due for delivery by July 1, 1941, were 170.

There were other bottlenecks (engines, powder, machine tools without which aircraft, motors, guns cannot be made). One of the tightest is pilot training. Last week such notable citizens as Publishers Frank Knox, Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times') and Lewis W. Douglas (onetime U. S. Budget Director, now president of Mutual Life Insurance Co.) proposed to set up nine new schools, train 10,000 military pilots. But the tightest bottleneck of all was right under Franklin Roosevelt's nose: the traditional rigidity of the military services.

Army and Navy officers are precisionists, schooled to put perfection before speed and quantity. "There is no substitute for time," the Air Corps' able Chief Henry ("Hap") Arnold often says, typifying the military view that anything good takes a long time to make. Thus "Hap" Arnold is horrified by the idea of trying to double an aircraft factory's production within less than a year. Understanding that perfection has to take a back seat when speed is essential, the Navy last week recommended that changes in ships already under construction be prohibited except by order of the President. And, knowing his friends in uniform, the President looked around for industrialists to run his new industrial armies.

Defense of What? Last week the Senate Naval Affairs Committee undertook to examine U. S. defense, arrive, at a defense policy. Chairman Walsh & colleagues deduced from World War II that air power is still secondary to sea power ("Without . . . sea power Britain today would probably be another Poland"). And even if German air power finally conquers, said the committee, the conclusion by no means follows that a European air force reaching over the Atlantic could knock out an adequate U. S. Navy. Recommendation: that the U. S. continue to build up its Navy, build a strong but still "secondary" air force, prepare to fight only to defend the

U. S. mainland, the Western Hemisphere, their sea approaches.

Said President Roosevelt last week:

"The clear fact is that the American people must recast their thinking about national protection. . . . Our defense as it was yesterday, or even as it is today, does not provide security against potential developments and dangers of the future.'' What smoldered beneath his words was the warning that the U. S. is arming, and will have to arm with all its might & main, because the world that is closing in on it is no longer safe for democracy.

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