ARMY & NAVY: Arms Before Men

ARMY & NAVY

At the mercy of mosquitoes and chiggers, 66,523 sweating men scattered from Mississippi to Arizona and Wyoming last week, wore themselves out doing nothing of interest to most civilians. They were playing a war game—repelling an “enemy invasion” from the South—and civilians do not care about wars unless the killing is for keeps.

But if civilians had no reason to care what that army was doing they had good reason to care what that army was: something new under the U. S. sun, something that is costing civilians a pretty penny for reasons and for things that most civilians know nothing about.

This year the U. S. Third Army (there are four “armies” divided geographically) whose turn it was to play the annual U. S. war games, was a mobile army, prepared to fight in the open rather than in the stagnant trenches of 1914-18. Its reconnaissance cars (mechanized cavalry) spurted 75 and 100 miles ahead, keeping tabs with headquarters by two-way radio. Its horsed cavalry rode to battle and sent its mounts back while it did its fighting. Motorized field artillery (still largely the World War French 75s, improved to give faster fire and greater range) rolled into place behind motorized infantrymen, who made long marches by truck. New mortars arched shells into supposed enemy lines with an accuracy never approached in 1918. “Silhouette” machine-gun units went into battle firing from low-slung trucks. Some of the army’s 283 light tanks tried out against new anti-tank guns which can supposedly stop any tank within range.

This fiscal year, the U. S. Army is costing $492,896,735, a record peacetime high. Since the U. S. is determined not to fight abroad and does not expect to have to fight at home, the public may well ask whether its half billion dollars is serving any purpose except to keep up with the Joneses of Europe and Asia. Where, how, and for what does the U. S. Army expect to fight?

The army’s answer is that it has no particular expectations but that it is realistic. In 150 years of U. S. history the U. S. has repeatedly told the army that there was no job for it except a little domestic police work, but 25 consecutive years have never gone by without the army’s being called on to undertake a campaign, against British, Mexicans, Spanish, Germans, red Indians, or white Southerners. And of the five principal wars the army has been called upon to fight, only one (the Civil War) was fought wholly on U. S. soil.

Today the U. S. Army has no idea where it will have to fight next, but its job is to be ready whatever the spot. Purely on the laws of political probability the army’s present guesses rate future wars in the following order of likelihood: 1) civil uprisings on the U. S. mainland— some sort of trouble in the social order; 2) war in South America in case fascist economic penetration rubs the U. S. past endurance; 3) war in Europe or Asia for any reason; 4) least likely of all, invasion of the U. S. mainland.

Chief of Staff Malin Craig says often that the U. S. Army neither desires nor willingly thinks of war abroad. It hopes most of all that it will not be sent to fight in Asia, 5,000 miles from its mainland base. But the No. 2 man on the General Staff is brilliant, taciturn Brigadier General George C. Marshall whose professional job is precisely to plan for war anywhere — to keep up-to-date a succession of “Tan papers” (for Cuba), “Brown papers” (for Germany), etc.

Surprising to most U. S. citizens would be the contents of the General Staff “White Paper”—a thorough plan for suppressing civil disorder in the U. S. In it every large city is divided into possible battle zones. Paved highway intersections throughout the U. S. are marked down for airplane runways. That U. S. officers mull their “White Paper” a great deal of the time and talk about it none of the time, is due of course to the fact that no U. S. citizen would like to think about it any of the time.

A Million Men. The army calls the day it goes to war M (for Mobilization Day). For the first time in peace, the U. S. Army could today throw into the field two corps (about 1,000,000 men) within 48 hours, could supply an enlarged Initial Protective Force of some 400,000 men for about two months at fighting strength. Backbone and main line of this initial force would be the much maligned, until recently neglected National Guard.

In the field with them would be as many of 12,500 Regular Army officers, 163,800 Regular Army enlisted men and 75,000 enlisted reserves as could be spared from the enormous task of training an additional 730,000 volunteers and conscripts. Whereas, in the World War it took a good 14 months to put 1,000,000 men in fighting trim, the army today could do a better job with the same number in about eight months.

Until four years ago, however, the U. S. Army was under the illusion that in case of war it could mobilize, equip and continue to supply anywhere from 2,000,000 to 10,000,000 soldiers. Under Malin Craig, the General Staff has reduced this astronomical assumption to the more practicable basis of a round million. This is taken to be all the men the U. S. could train and equip in time to be of use in a day when wars arise suddenly and are likeliest to be won by the country able to strike fastest and hardest.

Man in a Million. If the million were called tomorrow, top man on their Regular Army faculty would be an officer rated by his fellows as a soldier in a million, a rare Chief of Staff who sees the army whole. When he retires next year at the mandatory age of 64, the army will remember General Malin Craig for his revision of mobilization plans, his encouragement of a new, critical approach by military men to military affairs, his success in riding the appropriations wave on Capitol Hill.

Having found Congress and the U. S. people in mood to spend, General Craig now figures after three years of record spending that the army has about half the material it needs as a minimum for M Day action. He calculates that the U. S. must spend at least $142,000,000 more to put its army on a “sensible” preparatory footing. Last spring, with the potent help of a White House message, he persuaded Congress to meet the principal deficiency —in anti-aircraft equipment. In Malin Craig’s last year the army is spending or allotting $23,000,000 for 230 modern, mobile anti-aircraft guns, with supplementary searchlights, target detectors, etc. etc. Another $30,000,000, he says, will give the U. S. enough anti-aircraft equipment for immediate requirements. Likewise, deficiencies in tanks, anti-tank guns, modern artillery, bombs and other ordnance were partly filled by the last Congress and should be pretty well remedied within three years.

Contrary to the popular conception of a pitifully attenuated army, Malin Craig thinks his 163,800 enlisted men are just 16,200 less than enough. His prime concern is not over numbers but over equipment and organization. Major items in this new army’s makeup:

¶ Infantry has 57,286 enlisted men, 3,568 officers in 36 skeleton regiments, two tank regiments. Blue-eyed, able Chief of Infantry George A. Lynch admits that the U. S. Infantry’s organization is outmoded by foreign armies, tells his officers to think hard and fast. Meanwhile, the Infantry’s equipment is excellent in type, deficient in quantity.

¶ The Air Corps, alone of fighting branches, is being brought to fighting strength with 1,250 modern planes on hand, 1,050 on order, 2,320 in sight by the end of fiscal 1940.* Emphasis in new construction was recently shifted from heavy bombers to light bombers and attack planes, in order to catch up with foreign developments.

¶ Cavalry has only 9,919 men, 895 officers in 12 horsed regiments, two mechanized regiments. Its new chief is lively Major General John K. Herr, a grey horseman, onetime top-flight polo player, who hates to smell gasoline, does what he can to brake the trend toward mechanization at the cost of horsed units.

¶ Field artillery has 21,996 men, 1,627 officers in 28 regiments. Its best equipment is second to none in quality but short in quantity. Bulk of its best weapons are French field guns left over from the World War, modernized with new carriages and firing mechanisms.

Self-criticism is a near-fetish in the new army. “. . . We are training under tactical regulations and with materiél that are almost wholly obsolete,” Major General Lynch wrote in the current Infantry Journal. “There should be no hesitancy in moving at once to a radical revision. . . .” Beneath the static military crust, new tactics, weapons, strategies are in the making. At the Air Corps’ experimental Wright Field are such men as Major Carl F. Greene, whose wing designs largely made possible the modern monoplane, whose new pressure cabin is carrying military and commercial aviation into the substratosphere; Capt. Carl J. Crane, whose radio-controlled plane has completed 160 landings without a hand on the controls; Major Edwin R. Page, in whose laboratories engines with 3,000 h.p. in a single unit soon will be on test; Major George W. Goddard, whose color cameras capable of making pictures at 15,000 ft. altitude and 200 m.p.h. are revolutionizing air reconnaissance. In the army arsenal at Springfield, Mass., is Consulting Engineer John C. Garand, whose semiautomatic, 30-round-per-minute shoulder rifle will, by its increased firepower, vastly affect infantry practice (and increase the hazards of the U. S. and all armies). On paper in the War Department, and partially worked out in the field, is a new infantry division, halved from the present strength of 22,000 into a more compact, harder-hitting unit combining infantry, ground reconnaissance in one command.

“That Boy.” Most of these changes enormously complicate the army’s No. 1 problem in wartime: how to insure adequate supplies for easily assembled and quickly trained fighting forces. That task belongs not to General Craig but to a balding, agile gentleman whom older army officers call “that boy” in tones varying from awe to horror. Louis Arthur Johnson, 47, is the boy.

Typical of Louis A. Johnson is the fact that when he was mustered out of the army in 1919, (he was a captain, 80th Infantry Division, A.E.F.), he had the nerve to write a letter to the then Chief of Staff, detailing what was wrong with the army and what to do about it. Fresh out of the University of Virginia (where he was champion wrestler and orator) he hung out his law shingle at Clarksburg, W. Va., in 1912. By 1917, he was Democratic floor leader of the State’s House of Delegates, and was thinking of running for Governor. Back from the War, he went into partnership with seasoned Philip P. Steptoe of Clarksburg, soon was earning $40,000 a year or better in corporate practice. As the money rolled in, he began to put on weight, lose his hair but not his vim, ease up on poker and take to golf. He could afford to play politics without running for office. By picking his candidates after the primaries, he steered clear of West Virginia’s bitter Democratic feuds, thus stands well with such enemies as Senators Matthew M. Neely and anti-New Deal Rush Holt.

Having entrenched himself with the “King Makers” of the American Legion he became National Commander in 1932-33. That turned out to be his great piece of fortune. For in 1933 Franklin Roosevelt’s Economy Act decreed a cut in veterans’ benefits, and temperate Louis Johnson saved the President from insult when he appeared at the Legion convention in Chicago. In 1936, still alive to the main chance, Louis Johnson organized the Veterans’ Division of the Democratic National Committee, got his reward within the twelvemonth.

War & Politics. The then Acting Secretary of War was amiable, politically adroit Harry Woodring, ex-Governor of Kansas and ex-State Commander of the Legion. He was in the War Department partly because he was an Original Roosevelt Man in 1932, partly because the Legion had by then taken unofficial title to the job of Assistant Secretaryship. If the White House did not rate Mr. Woodring a first-class administrator, the army in 1933 was in the doldrums anyway, was no great administrative problem. Even when Harry Woodring became involved in a messy procurement scandal with Army Goods Dealer Joseph Silverman Jr., the White House allowed him to weather it. Not until Secretary of War George H. Dern died in 1936 did Harry Woodring become a problem. Franklin Roosevelt met that problem the easy way: he successively saved Harry Woodring’s face and pleased his friend, Mrs. Harry Woodring, by upping the Assistant first to Acting, then to full Secretary of War.

Into the vacant Assistant Secretaryship in June 1937 stepped Legionnaire Johnson. In the newspapers began to appear paragraphs like the following: “. . . It seems . . . that the new Assistant Secretary of War . . . is going to be promoted to Secretary. . . . Another ex-Commander [of the Legion] Paul V. McNutt, will soon be ex-High Commissioner of the Philippines. . . . The other ex-Commander and present War Secretary, Harry Woodring, would not be stepping downward if he stepped into Mr. McNutt’s Philippine boots, even if they’re pinching the incumbent.”

On excellent talking terms at the White House, Louis Johnson had a neat if ambiguous understanding with Franklin Roosevelt. From the day that he took over his pleasant office in the State, War & Navy Building next door to No. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the Department’s No. 2 Man has virtually been No. 1 because he was promised that he would be very shortly. When army officers stationed in Washington say “The Secretary” they usually mean not Secretary of War Woodring but Assistant Secretary Johnson.

In keeping with his prime tenet—that the General Staff should not find him a pliant Secretary—Louis Johnson takes an impish delight in upsetting army dogma and army officers. Though it is distinctly outside his province as Assistant Secretary, he once decided that too many enlisted men were serving as dog-robbers (officers’ servants). A series of telegrams and cables querying every army post confirmed this conclusion, resulted in a marked reduction in the number on dog-duty. At present Mr. Johnson (himself a Lieutenant Colonel of Reserves) is concerned with the army’s overgrown list of colonels and generals. The field artillery, for example, has 95 colonels, needs no more than 50. Some system of selective promotion to replace the present seniority method (and incidentally to weed out 7,200 World War holdovers) soon will be presented to Congress, will please even the West Pointers who dislike Louis Johnson.

Rearguard Guards. Procurement for the peacetime armies and mobilization of industry to supply the war-time armies are the prime duties of the Assistant Secretary of War. While playing Secretary, Assistant Secretary Johnson has not neglected these duties. In fact, he has done a rapid, bang-up job. When he talks about the next war, Louis Johnson emphasizes: “The civilians will be fighting, too.” Every U. S. citizen will be mobilized in some fashion. Heart of the War Department’s plans for civilians is its Industrial Mobilization Plan, to throw U. S. industry into war-time gear with a minimum of muddling, profiteering and confusion. Core of I. M. P. is a file of 10,000 cards in Washington’s stuccoed Munitions Building.

On each card is indexed by name, locality, product and capacity a manufacturer who has agreed to turn out a stipulated quantity of army matériel. So far the Department has found no way to get around the cost-plus contract of World War ill-fame. But the 400 different contract forms in use then have been reduced to five, in the hope that simple phrasing and fore-analysis of actual plant costs may hold profiteering to a minimum.

I. M. P. was on the books and on the way to completion before Louis Johnson took office. His contributions have been: 1) a notably successful effort to “sell” it to big industrialists; and 2) a supplementary Educational Orders Program, approved by the last Congress, whereby the U. S. will supply expensive dies and tools to pivotal manufacturers to test their facilities and train them in military production. This week Mr. Johnson submitted to President Roosevelt a list of the first items to be manufactured under this program. No. 1 on the list: the infantry’s semi-automatic rifle, given preference because during the World War the army could not get enough Springfield rifles at home, had to turn to European suppliers. Important in industrial as well as military mobilization is a Selective Draft Act prepared for passage on M Day. Key provision so far as U. S. industry and labor are affected is a section authorizing draft boards to “exempt” any designated civilian from military service. In practice, this would mean not exemption but civilian service wherever the War Department thinks the citizen should be, would prevent a shortage of skilled labor and executive personnel in vital industries and areas. The Social Security Board’s list of some 40,000,000 U. S. citizens, identified by age, residence, occupation will be very useful for this purpose.

With his mobilization machine in good order, Louis Johnson this week flew toward Alaska. He is to look over the route of a proposed 2,338-mile highway from Seattle to Fairbanks, inquire whether the project has sufficient military value to justify expenditure of U. S. money on a road through Canada. By law, this is no direct concern of the Assistant Secretary of War. But Franklin Roosevelt is interested, and Louis Johnson is glad to accommodate his friend at the White House.

*Official figures. As in all armies the U. S. Air Corps minimizes its strength, undoubtedly has and will have several hundred more planes available.