NATIONAL DEFENSE: For Small Fires

Was the U.S. ready for Korea?

Obviously, the U.S. had been caught by surprise. Harry Truman had been weekending in Missouri. Lieut. Colonel W. H. Sterling Wright, acting head of the U.S. Korean Military Advisory Group, had been in Tokyo. General MacArthur’s chief air officer, Lieut. General George E. Stratemeyer, was somewhere on the West Coast, on his way back from service on an officers’ selection board in Washington. The chief of naval operations for the South Korean navy was in Pearl Harbor, picking up some PCs turned over by the U.S. Vice-Admiral Arthur D. Struble, boss of the U.S. Seventh (Asiatic) Fleet, was a long hop from his Manila headquarters: he had flown to Washington, B.C. to attend the marriage of his daughter.

A Matter of Hours. “Where was our Intelligence?” roared New Hampshire’s Senator Styles Bridges. Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, produced a secret report dated June 20 describing intense activity north of the 38th parallel. It warned that the Communists were “capable” of launching an attack at any time. But the same thing, he pointed out, was true of several other areas—Western Germany, Yugoslavia, Formosa or Indo-China. Nobody, said Hillenkoetter, could tell just when the attack itself might come, since such decisions can be made or unmade in a matter of hours.

Granting that surprise was inevitable, were U.S. plans and arms ready to meet such an attack? Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson had said expansively that if the Russians attacked at “four in the morning, the U.S. would be ready by five. Now, only “half a little country had attacked, and it was well past five.

Part of the answer was that the U.S. armed forces were designed for another kind of war: an all-out war in which a direct attack by Moscow was to be directly answered by atom-bomb-packed B-36s. The effectiveness of that kind of force had not been disproved by first week setbacks in Korea. But already Louis Johnson’s touted economy program was looking downright absurd. Last week, to meet the 1951 budget limitations dictated by Johnson, the Navy decommissioned the last of 14 large carrier air groups, reducing its total groups to nine.

Even at economy size, the U.S. armed forces were presumably capable of handling the Korean situation, though it would take time and lives. But what if the Kremlin’s masterminds chose to set other small fires around Communism’s vast periphery? Without involving themselves in declared war, they could blockade Berlin or Vienna, send Kurds into Turkey or Iran, launch Chinese Communist armies into Indo-China or Burma.

Help Needed. To contain such assaults, the Joint Chiefs of Staff told President Harry Truman last week, the present U.S. forces, thinly spread, were not enough. What they needed, and wanted badly, was an immediate transfusion from reserves—a limited mobilization of those who would volunteer. The Army needed reserve ordnance technicians and at least two more divisions. The Air Force asked for some 200,000 reserves, permission to take two B-29 groups out of moth balls, and a chance to bring its strength up to the 70 groups authorized by Congress. The Navy wanted to start reconditioning of laid-up escort carriers and antisubmarine destroyers, and to call up about 200,000 reservists to man them.

J.C.S. Chairman Omar Bradley was too much of a soldier, and too polite, to say it in public, but his clear implication was that Louis Johnson’s program of economy in a period of Communist expansion was clearly bankrupt. The muscles that had been cut along with the fat could not be restored overnight.-

Harry Truman accepted Bradley’s arguments, but insisted that he wanted to wait a few days, to measure the Russian reaction before making a call for volunteers. But there were already signs of change at the Pentagon. At the pleading of the Navy’s Admiral Forrest Sherman, Johnson last week changed his mind about relegating 366 freshly trained air reservists to inactive duty. And the Air Force, which Johnson had ordered to shut down four airfields in the Aleutians for economy’s sake, was allowed “to reconsider.”

* Sample timetables: 14 months to reconstitute a task force the size of famed Task Force 58; twelve months to bring up the Air Force from 48 to 60 groups; eight months to put two extra Army divisions in the field.