MANPOWER,POLITICAL NOTES,PRODUCTION,THE CONGRESS: Fight or Work

MANPOWER

¶ The best fighting ages are from 18 to 26. The average age of the U.S. Army is now 27.

¶Selective Service is now about 100,000 men behind in its schedule of Army inductions. By latest estimate, to make up that deficit and to fill scheduled quotas, SS must draft 1,008,000 men by July 1.

To provide requisite youthful stamina, at least 250,000 of those men must be taken from the 1,185,000 aged 18-26 now deferred as key workers in war industry and agriculture.

¶An estimated 1,000,000 of the 3,623,000 men now classified 4-F are contributing nothing whatever to the war effort.

Last week Washington manpower officials began to put these facts together and try to make some sense out of them.

It was high time. Since Feb. 26, when President Roosevelt announced that the armed services would take almost every able-bodied U.S. male aged 18-26, Washington has been more topsy-turvy than ever. Representatives of industry after industry have streamed into town to wail that they could not possibly fulfill their war contracts if their young key workers were drafted. Officials of Army, Navy, War Manpower Commission, Selective Service, WPB, ODT, Petroleum Administration for War, et al, have been scrambling away at cross-purposes or behind each other’s backs, trying to get favored treatment for their industrial wards.

Last week the squabbling got organized, by formation under WMC of an inter-agency Committee on Manpower Claimants. First job of the CMC was to decide which industries rate deferments. By week’s end CMC had settled on five: aircraft, landing craft, rubber, rockets, radar. Competition was still fierce, since it is planned to defer a maximum of only 75,000 men. Once the industries are agreed on, the next job will be to list the most critical plants within each industry. Final selection of workers to be deferred will be left to plant bosses, local and State draft officials. The SS boss, Major General Lewis B. Hershey, insisted that the placing of an industry or plant on the critical list emphatically does not mean that every skilled young worker in it will be draft-exempt. The demand for fighting men will be met even at the cost of some loss in war production. For, as General Hershey wapsodized in his monthly Selective Service bulletin: “Warriors win wars with weapons; but weapons will not win wars without warriors to wield them.”

The other half of the pattern which began to emerge from the manpower muddle was a belated equivalent of War I’s “work or fight” order. First proposed last October by Connecticut’s Representative Clare Boothe Luce, the replacement of drafted war workers by noncontributing 4-Fs was now suddenly endorsed by General Hershey, Secretary of War Stimson, Under Secretary Robert Patterson and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bard. The Army & Navy would still like a National Service Act, which is politically impossible to get. They fall back on Congresswoman Luce’s bill. Some dopesters thought it unnecessary, thought a public listing of 4-F idlers and nonessential workers would do the trick. Others proposed to hold the threat of induction in Army “labor battalions” over those who failed to take essential jobs. Another plan would include 38-to-45-year-olds, as well as 4-Fs, in the program.

A House Military Affairs subcommittee promised to have some plan ready when Congress reconvenes April 12. Meantime, the Philadelphia area chief of the U.S. Employment Service last week forehandedly began taking an occupational census of the 4-Fs in his district.