Army & Navy – Pudding

Franklin Roosevelt said that the manpower situation was something like a jigsaw puzzle.

It was more like a vast, sticky pudding which the Administration stirred and stirred, hoping that something in the way of a solution would come to the top. None did, though the stirring reached a new frenzy last week.

In cold (estimated) figures this was the situation:

To give the generals and the admirals the forces they demand. Selective Service must reach into the nation and draft 1,160,000 more men by July 1. Where is Selective Service going to get them?

Draft boards can scrape together 420,000 from 1-As; from 3-As (fathers), 250,000; from the new 18-year-olds, 250,000; total: 920,000. Somewhere draft boards must find another 240,000 fighting men.

This was the pudding which everybody stirred, fighting for the spoon.

Fathers?—No Thanks. Brigadier General Lewis B. Hershey, earnest but frequently bumbling director of the draft, nabbed some 160,000 fathers.

Congressmen, sensing they had a popular cause, howled. The pudding took on a faintly political stink. But Army & Navy men also raised objections to General Hershey’s father-draft. Their reasons were practical, military. General George Catlett Marshall and Admiral Ernest J. King made it clear that they wanted young men with young men’s stamina, who could charge a machine-gun nest without worrying about wives and children back home: i.e., unmarried men under 26.

Mr. Roosevelt made haste to redirect General Hershey’s hand.

Maybe they could get the men needed, said the President, by combing over deferments. Draft boards, ordered to review the deferments of men under 26, took the heat off fathers and turned toward young men with essential jobs.

No Steel?—Yes. Manpower Chief Paul McNutt, WPB Boss Don Nelson, industrialists and farmers howled.

They saw food production crippled, war plants disrupted. The steel industry, which declared that it lost 42,000 to the draft in two months, wondered how long it would be before its production began to sag. War manufacturers argued that young men specially trained in such new devices as radar were irreplaceable.

The Army could make fathers into good soldiers, argued McNutt and Nelson; there were some 700,000 fathers in the services already. Fathers ought not to enjoy any privileged status in this total war.

When the Army & Navy answered that they would settle for less production now in some materials in order to get more soldiers and sailors, the men charged with production said bitterly: “That’s what they say now. In 60 days they’ll be right back on our necks, yelling and raising hell about production, regardless of any agreements they make now.”

Middle of the Muddle. This was the haphazard state of affairs, the result of long mismanagement. McNutt was once ambitious to take on the job. Mr. Roosevelt never gave him the power. No one else, apparently, has ever had the power. The President has hung on to it, shifting its balance first one way, then the other.

No clear-cut policy has ever been laid down, so that war industries, repeatedly warned that they were going to have to let their young men go, nevertheless could not believe that such a thing would actually come to pass.

In the middle of this muddle sits General Hershey, another Indianian who began his education in one-room Hell’s Point School in the northeast corner of the state. He was studying for a Ph.D. at Indiana University (and McNutt was a young alumnus) when the bugles blew for World War I. National Guardsman Hershey went off with an artillery outfit, got to France just before the Armistice. He became a regular, was a soldier with a reputation as a good administrator when he was made boss of the draft in 1940.

By this week, General Hershey had plenty of reason to reflect that there was a poetic similarity between the name of his old school and the place where the indecision of the Commander in Chief now has him sitting.