ARMED FORCES: Ammunition Shortage

In 38 years of soldiering, James Alward Van Fleet has served his country well in France, Germany, Greece and Korea. But what may prove to be one of General Van Fleet’s greatest services was performed on Capitol Hill two weeks ago: he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that throughout his 22 months as commander of the Eighth Army in Korea he and his U.N. troops had been plagued by “a serious shortage of ammunition” (TIME, March 16). Charges of an ammunition shortage had been made before and brushed off before. Van Fleet’s reputation was too solid to brush off.

Last week, at the demand of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Pentagon’s bosses, civilian and Army, paraded to Capitol Hill to give their answer to Van Fleet’s charge. Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson, in the immemorial manner of civilian service chiefs, did his best to back up his uniformed Washington subordinates; he read a brief statement declaring that the ammunition situation in Korea was improving. Army Chief of Staff General J. Lawton (“Lightnin’ Joe”) Collins implied that Van Fleet, like most combat commanders, had an insatiable appetite for ammunition. The fact is, said Collins, that in 1952 the Eighth Army fired an average of 62,616 rounds of mortar and artillery ammunition a day—nearly ten times the enemy’s average daily rate of fire. But such Pentagon efforts to persuade the Senators to look at the silver lining collapsed when Virginia’s Harry Byrd put a question to Army Secretary Robert Ten Broeck Stevens.

Byrd: You do not deny there is an ammunition shortage? And can you speak for Mr. Wilson: he does not deny there is an ammunition shortage?

Stevens: Correct.

“Unsatisfactory.” The Army had a second line of defense: perhaps the disagreement between Collins and Van Fleet could be explained by different definitions of “shortage.” As the hearing went on, however, it became clear that the Army had a shortage of ammunition by anybody’s definition. Van Fleet specified that the Eighth Army had not always had enough ammunition on the firing line. At times, he said, there was not enough to support counterbattery fire or to cope with Chinese “human sea” attacks. All the Pentagon witnesses conceded that in the past reserve stocks in Korea had fallen dangerously low. Under questioning by Harry Byrd, General Collins finally admitted that, so far as ammunition supplies were concerned, the lull following the July 1951 armistice talks in Korea had come as a desperately needed respite.

Pentagon spokesmen made much of the fact that the Korean shortage was no longer critical. Today, said Defense Secretary Wilson, the Eighth Army has “the ammunition necessary for operations on the present scale.” To some of the Senators, Wilson’s statement sounded like another way of saying that the Eighth Army did not have ammunition enough for operations on a bigger scale.

If that was true in Korea, which has top priority in ammunition, what was the situation in Europe? Or in the strategic reserve stocks at home? Said Joe Collins: “The ammunition reserve stockage for our worldwide needs has been unsatisfactory and still is.” He added that the supply was “gradually improving.”

“Endangered.” The U.S. ammunition shortage was almost three years old, yet no Pentagon heads had rolled because of it. Army men were inclined to put the blame on the U.S. public. Ordnance Colonel John Medaris reminded the Senators that the nation’s ammunition industry was “almost completely shut down” after World War II, and observed that the post-Korea step-up in ammunition production “has had to be achieved on top of a civilian economy operating at an alltime high level.”

Army brass admitted, however, that Congress had met almost every Army demand for funds for ammunition. Neither Collins nor Joint Chieftain Omar Bradley had ever told Congress about the shortage and asked for enough money to end it. The fact is that the money needed for ammunition was hardly more than peanuts compared to the total defense budget. The shortage was caused not by lack of money but by poor planning.

Last week, after all the testimony was in, the members of the Armed Services Committee unanimously agreed that General Van Fleet’s charges had been borne out. The committee’s most disturbing conclusion: “The shortages of ammunition substantially restricted the action of our troops [in Korea] and endangered our defense lines.”

Maine’s Senator Margaret Chase Smith was named to head a five-man subcommittee which will try to pinpoint “the officials and conditions responsible” for the shortage. Mrs. Smith promptly announced that the subcommittee would investigate ammunition supplies in Europe as well as Korea. Said she: “We have no intention of getting caught out in left field when the next batter may swing from the other side of the plate.”