Hard Pan

Last week a trim young woman accosted an Army recruiting officer in New Orleans, said she wanted to volunteer. "I'm sorry," said Captain A. P. Miceli, "but we don't enlist women. Did you mean you want to be an Army nurse?" "No!" said she, "and I don't want to be an infantrywoman and carry a rifle, either. I want to be a hostess on an Army bomber."

All over the U. S., thousands of militant citizens clamored for something to do for Defense. They besieged local recruiting stations, deluged the War and Navy Departments in Washington with letters. A great many wanted to be the equivalent of a hostess on an Army bomber. Few considered enlisting for the lowly job of buck private or gob. Some were too old; many had special talents which would be wasted in the ranks. But buck privates and gobs are what the Army & Navy want. The Army already has so many (117,000) reserve officers that it is issuing no more commissions (except in the Air Corps). Last week the Navy offered 5,000 young men (19 to 26) a month at sea, three months of shore training to develop reserve ensigns. But neither Army nor Navy was a big enough turbine to take the great head of national energy going over the spillway last week. The best the War Department could devise to channel the flood was a form letter, advising militant civilians to watch their newspapers.

Acutely aware of the U. S. people's yen to do something, somehow, if only somebody would tell them what, is Chief of Staff George C. Marshall. Lately he has been swamped by thousands of letters and phone calls from misguided patriots, each with a breathless suggestion (almost invariably old-hat to the War Department) of how to speed up or bolster Defense. General Marshall is a patient man, but he has a job to do; such letters could better go to the President's new Defense Commission. One thing he is dead set against is turning the Regular Army into a school for hordes of raw recruits. One reason: the Army must keep its few trained units intact for service in the troubled, troublesome Americas. Said clearheaded George Marshall (to the Veterans of Foreign Wars): ". . . We must not become involved by impatience or ignorance in an ill-considered, overnight expansion, which would . . . leave us in a dilemma of confused results, half-baked and fatally unbalanced. . . . We must get down to hard pan and carry out our preparations without vacillations or confusion."

Last week George Marshall got down to hard pan. To his office he summoned Brig.General Adna R. Chaffee, who commands the Army's only mechanized brigade; Brig. General Bruce Magruder and Lieut. Colonel Sereno E. Brett, who long have championed tanks in the infantry. Up to now, the mechanized brigade has been a stepchild of the cavalry; tanks have had a secondary place in infantry organization. Result: the U. S. Army has nothing remotely resembling Hitler's armored divisions, up to last week seemed to be moving with dreadful slowness toward getting anything like them.

No sloth, General Marshall at week's end shook Army traditionalists to the heels of their shiny boots. He announced that the Army is not only going to have more tanks and other armored vehicles, but is going to quit smothering them in the infantry and cavalry. His plan calls for a corps of two mechanized divisions, to be set up as a new and separate arm.

Vindicated at last were General Chaffee, who will command the new corps; Bruce Magruder, Colonel Brett, and Brigadier General Charles L. Scott, another tankster who will command one of the divisions.

About $150,000,000 of the $3,007,988,155 voted so far this year to the Army is for tanks, armored cars, similar equipment. The Army expects that the President will soon ask Congress for billions more--chiefly for tanks, guns, planes, and facilities to make them faster than is now possible. At best, ordnance production is appallingly slow; the Army will probably not get its new mechanized corps completely equipped until late 1941. Even so, the fact that such a corps at least was planned was heartening news to citizens who have been wondering hard whether their Army's high command had the wit to read Hitler's handwriting.

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