The Military Rests

The testimony of all the Joint Chiefs of Staff was now in--and the effect of it was four minds speaking as one.

To a man, they opposed MacArthur's plan to extend the Korean war, but they conceded that the time might come when the U.S. would have to try it. They expressed personal admiration for MacArthur, yet they backed up President Truman entirely in firing him. They agreed that the handling of the firing was bungled (Admiral Sherman had wanted to send George Marshall to Tokyo "to straighten the matter out"). They hoped that the Korean war might be ended by their present, limited-war strategy--but no one of them could say how it would be done. Except for small details and shadings, the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force chiefs stood stoutly together.

Anybody who had expected otherwise, who had looked for one of the Joint Chiefs to stray from the reservation, overlooked the character of the military mind and the nature of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Even if some of them have been personally inclined to endorse MacArthur's program (and there was no testimony that any would buy more than perhaps a segment of it, if any, at this stage of the game), the climate of unification and loyalty to" the Commander in Chief was enough to keep the front united. Their answers had a conference-room sameness.

Devastating Shoestring. The Air Forces' General Hoyt Vandenberg used his time chiefly to lobby for more airplanes. In his enthusiasm, he scooted in & out of a series of contradictions without so much as a furrow on his handsome, unlined face.

Instead of arguing--as had Marshall, Bradley and Collins--that bombing across the Yalu might bring World War III, Vandenberg was against it, for the moment at least, for his own reason: the job, he said, might chew up the Air Force and leave the U.S. "naked for several years to come" to Russian attack.

He testified that the U.S. now has only "a 'shoestring Air Force," but within a few minutes he was saying that the Air Force is today's "sole deterrent to war," able to "devastate the industrial potential of any great nation on the globe."

Does present air power give the U.S. a defense against Soviet atomic attack? "Today, yes sir," said Vandenberg, "but not tomorrow. As the power of the Russian air force increases and their stockpile of atomic weapons increases, the job of the U.S. Air Force becomes roughly doubled." He was not satisfied with "the present 30% guns, 70% butter" defense program, but he favored full mobilization only if "war was inevitable"--and he did not think that was the case, although he was pessimistic. He threw a scare into the Senators by declaring that the Russian MIG-15 (powered, like the Navy's Panther and other fighter craft, with a redesigned Rolls-Royce Nene engine) is "superior to any jet engine that we have today" in "speed and climb and operations at altitude."

A Ready Navy. Admiral Sherman, who testified after Vandenberg, was asked pointedly if he had "a shoestring Navy." "Definitely not," said he. Is U.S. air power what deters Russia? No, said Sherman, "The deterrent is the realization that with our technical and industrial potential, the forces that we have, our ability to expand them, that there is a realization on the other side that if a general war comes, they will be defeated."

Sherman concurred in the firing of MacArthur ("We must have a commander in whom we can confide and on whom we can rely"). But he displayed some liking for MacArthur's proposed naval blockade of Red China--provided it was a U.N. affair.

On MacArthur's suggestion that the U.S. help the Chinese Nationalists go into action without itself fighting alongside them, Sherman was tart: "I don't know how to conduct an amphibious operation in which the troops fight and the ships don't." To MacArthur's emphasis on Asia, he replied, "... I believe that if we lose Western Europe ... we would have an increasingly difficult time in holding our own. Whereas if we lost all of the Asiatic mainland, we could still survive and build up and possibly get it back again."

There ended the military's case, after 19 days, 885,000 words.

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