Interim Report

ARMY & NAVY

Franklin Roosevelt said last week: "If the U. S. is to have any defense, it must have total defense." The U. S. people agreed with both hands. And last week they wanted to know how much has been done about U. S. Defense, how much remained to be done. After a week of reports, official statements, military arithmetic, they were bound to conclude that the U. S., materially and mentally, was still far from "total defense."

Work Done seemed to add up to mighty small potatoes. Of $5,400,000,000 which Congress had voted for Defense since May, a piddling fraction had actually been spent. An enormous job of planning had to be done first. In charge of the planning were Industrialists William S. Knudsen, Edward Stettinius Jr., some 200 high-powered colleagues on the President's National Defense Advisory Commission. Getting these talented bigwigs down to coordinated work was in itself a big, time-taking job. Up to last fortnight, most commission spark plugs always had time for an easy hour's chat with visitors; many paced uneasily from office to office, fretting for something to do. But last week the doldrums were over. The commission was moving rapidly out of the planning stage into action.

The commission announced that Mr. Knudsen had painstakingly passed on $1,000,000,000 of equipment contracts. Aircraft Coordinator George Jackson Mead placed $100,000,000 of plane orders, got tape-wound Army & Navy bureaus to simplify their contradictory, wasteful systems of testing and buying planes and engines. Commissioner Stettinius cheerily reviewed his studies of raw materials which the U. S. would need and might not have in wartime, said: "The situation . . . is more hopeful than we anticipated six weeks ago. . . ." For an example of heartening speed, he told of hearing about a stock of tungsten and antimony "near Indo-China." The supply was bought, loaded on a U. S. ship, on the way to the U. S. within 48 hours.

For an example of disheartening delay, Mr. Stettinius wrathfully cited an incident which also exemplified the new mutual attitude of U. S. Government and Business. One of the commission's prime concerns is aluminum, which aircraft makers will need in stupendous quantities. At the urgent behest of Messrs. Stettinius & Knudsen, the House last week was asked to appropriate $25,000,000 for a new TVA dam, wherewith to supply the Aluminum Co. of America with critically needed power. Up popped Republican anti-TVA Congressman McLean of New Jersey, Republican Congressman Dirksen of Illinois, blocked the appropriation. They were unmoved by assurances that one of the bill's sponsors was the commission's Utilities Consultant Gano Dunn, whose engineering firm had once helped G. O. P. Candidate Wendell Willkie fight TVA.

Work Undone. Up to last week nobody had succeeded in charting the full scope of total U. S. Defense. But the President, with his third emergency estimate in two months, upped the prospective Defense bill for fiscal 1941 to $10,000,000,000--more than even he has needed in any previous year for the whole U. S. Government. Telling Congress what he proposed to do with the $4,848,171,957 which he requested last week, he laid down these vast objectives:

"1) To . . . build up the Navy to meet any possible combination of hostile naval forces.*

"2) To complete the total equipment for a land force of approximately 1,200,000 men. . . .

"3) To procure reserve stocks of tanks, guns, artillery, ammunition, etc., for another 800,000 men or a total of 2,000,000 men, if a mobilization of such a force should become necessary.

"4) To provide for manufacturing facilities, public and private, necessary to produce critical items of equipment required for a land force of 2,000,000 men and to produce the ordnance items required for the aircraft program of the Army and Navy--guns, bombs, armor, bomb sights and ammunition.

"5) Procurement of 15,000 additional planes for the Army and 4,000 for the Navy, complete with necessary spare engines, armaments and the most modern equipment."

The President and his Chief of Staff, General George Catlett Marshall, also asked Congress to provide the men to use the new Army's equipment. Only way to get enough men is conscription. Testifying for the pending Burke-Wadsworth Universal Training Bill (TIME, July 1), General Marshall and Lieut. Colonel Harry L. Twaddle drew up a conscription schedule: 300,000 to 400,000 draftees to be called Oct. 1, another 300,000 or 400,000 next April (or next January, if necessary). By October 1941, the rate can be stepped up to 600,000 at a time. The Army wanted an 18-month training period, would settle for a year, called the 8 months proposed in the bill so much twaddle.

General Marshall wanted something else: immediate mobilization of the National Guard's 230,000 men, 15,000 officers. He undoubtedly had in mind the Latin-American police duty for which he has been told to prepare the Regular Army. But his immediate reason was less ominous. He wanted to give the guardsmen intensive training, then use them to absorb and train the conscripts, rather than dilute the Regular Army with raw men. Last week the President set out to get George Marshall part of what he wanted. Announced at the White House was a plan to call out four National Guard divisions, totaling about 50,000 men in twelve States all over the nation, seven anti-aircraft regiments--when & if Congress agrees to shift the Guard from State to Federal control.

How Soon is Soon? Congress last week passed a bill which envisions a U.S. Navy of 35 battleships, 20 aircraft carriers, 15,000 airplanes, 88 cruisers, 378 destroyers, 180 submarines. Of the warships, 137 were under construction; 200 were hardly on paper. In service (as of last June 1) were only 1,786 airplanes (including 1,367 combat planes). Given $10,000,000,000, good luck, hard work, and an enormous increase of shipbuilding and aircraft facilities, the Navy hopes to have all its new vessels by 1946 or 1947.

General Marshall last week said that the Army by next October will have in hand enough equipment to train (but not to put on the battlefield) at least 300,000 conscripts. A Defense Commission spokesman announced that the 15,000 Army planes, 4,000 Navy planes which Mr. Roosevelt had just asked for should be turned out by July 1942.

No wishful optimist is Theodore Paul Wright. Mr. Wright, Curtiss-Wright Corp.'s vice president of engineering, last week was at work for Mr. Knudsen. In Aviation's July issue, Expert Wright appraised the aircraft industry, concluded that the U. S. may be able to better the Germans' rate of increase in their air force (from 4,300 planes in 1936 to a reported 31,000 last May). Wrote Mr. Wright (before he joined the Defense Commission): "It is estimated that an airplane production rate of approximately 2,000 a month, or 24,000 a year, can be achieved in 2 1/2 years, or by January 1943* . . . 3,000 planes a month, or 36,000 a year . . . by the spring of 1944; and a rate of just over 4,000 planes a month, or 50,000 a year . . . by July 1945."

* For a review of these possible combinations see p. 19.

*Present production (military and commercial): 500 per month. Present capacity with a little more push: 850.

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