Toward Unity

The United Nations at last had a High Command. It was not in London, where most U.S. citizens would have guessed it would be. It was in a cool white building put up for the United States Public Health Service in Washington, across Constitution Avenue from the Munitions and Navy Buildings. By this week the headquarters of the "Combined Chiefs of Staff had become the greatest complex of military secrets in the Allied world.

Dream. This united High Command fulfills a dream of General George Catlett Marshall, the U.S. Army's Chief of Staff. As a member of "Black Jack" Pershing's staff in World War I, General Marshall saw the lamentable results of the Allies' failure to cooperate. As a peacetime soldier without glory in his own country, he knew, as other military men knew, that effective joint military action depends on effective joint command.

The United Nations Command Post has done more than bring the Allied High Commands together: it has brought the services together. Army and Navy officers sit in the same room, fight out their problems across their desks. Gone is the oldtime system under which a captain asked his colonel to ask the Secretary of War to ask the Secretary of the Navy to detail a commander to confer with the captain.

Past armed sentries in the corridors walk all the uniforms of the English-speaking allies: gold-braided British and U.S. Navy men, R.A.F. men in slate blue. U.S. Army and Air Force men in their brown blouses and "pink" slacks. The British have the third floor, U.S. officers the second floor. On the first floor is the promise of even wider cooperation. There are quartered the Chinese, headed by Major General Chu Shih-ming; there also are the beginnings of representation for The Netherlands, Australia.

Brain of the C.P. is a vast octagonal room where the Chiefs of Staff and their top officers meet. Around a great table sit General Marshall, Field Marshal Sir John Dill. Admirals Ernest King and Sir Charles Little, Lieut. General "Hap" Arnold of the U.S. Army Air Forces, Air Marshal Arthur Travers Harris of the R.A.F., Chinese, Dutch and Australian representatives. There also sits pallid Harry Hopkins, all-powerful Chairman of the Munitions Assignment Board, who has an office in the building.

As fast as decisions are made, they are flashed out--to the White House, to No. 10 Downing Street, to every headquarters that they concern. Decisions must be made swiftly. But they must be deadly accurate, for no staff ever had such breadth of scope in the world's history.

Problems. Most immediate of the problems facing the United Nations this week is the war in the far Pacific. In Melbourne, General Douglas MacArthur was officially head of all United Nations forces. But Australians, demanding more voice in strategy decisions in Washington (and likely to get it), would also have ideas on how their home troops should be used. Lieut. General Joseph W. Stilwell, Chief of Staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, controlled U.S. forces in India, Burma and China, as well as the Fifth and Sixth Chinese armies in Burma. But most of China's forces were naturally under Generalissimo Chiang. These problems of command ceased to be problems with the High Command working smoothly. Along the Bataan peninsula and across the blue Manila harbor waters to the fortress of Corregidor, the Japanese were threatening a final all-out attack. Lieut. General Jonathan M. Wainwright's future was up to the High Command. And so was the future of the High Command.

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