ARMY & NAVY: The Great Illusion

ARMY & NAVY

Of all the words sputtered last week on the subject of U. S. Defense, the most revealing did not come from Franklin Roosevelt (see p. 11). Nor did they come from editors or plain citizens, demanding effective Defense at any cost (see p. 12). Nor from the U. S. Senate, unanimously voting $3,297,000,000 for the Army & Navy. Nor from Chief of Staff George Catlett Marshall, saying that the Army with all its new money cannot be ready for a war before December 1941. Nor from Chief of Naval Operations Harold Raynsford Stark, confessing at last that the U. S. Navy, even when operating near its home shores, is helpless without enough aircraft to support and protect surface ships. (Admiral Stark told a House committee: “. . . Surface units cannot of their own resources cover, protect and defend the areas of vital interest without the assist ance of strategically located coastal or island shore-based aircraft.”) The most revealing thing about U. S. Defense was a little slip of the tongue by Major General Charles M. Wesson.

General Wesson’s job as Chief of Ordnance is to keep the Army supplied with the best & latest weapons. Before a Congressional committee, which published his testimony last week, he recited current Army shortages (TIME, May 27). The Congressmen were thoroughly alarmed by his testimony. But what might well have shocked them was his casual statement, in response to the Congressmen’s cries of alarm: the figures should be “emblazoned on the sides of the Flatiron Building. . . .”

As a colloquial synonym for magnitude, Manhattan’s 21-story Flatiron Building went out of style about the time the automobile began to replace the horse. In the U. S. Army, the horse up to last week was still holding its own. The Chief of Cavalry (which includes the Army’s only mechanized brigade) was still a horseman (Major General John K. Kerr), who gets the heaves when he has to think about gasoline engines. General Wesson’s offhand remark told more than he knew about the attitudes which underlie, enmesh, explain the Army and Navy.

The Navy’s top command, with a few exceptions, exemplifies the insulation, compartmented authority, punctilio which make up “the military mind.” One of the notable exceptions was onetime Chief of Naval Operations William Daniel Leahy, whom the President last week called in from Puerto Rico, reportedly to help coordinate the confused preliminaries to rearmament. The Army’s George Marshall is also exceptional—a brilliant, flexible iconoclast whose war on mental dry rot has done much to stimulate and modernize the service. But even he must placate work with and through traditionalists who outnumber him. Last week the Army-Navy commands’ shortage of officers like George Marshall was more serious than any lack of guns. Unless the human shortage is somehow corrected or compensated for, all the billions that Congress can appropriate will not prepare the U. S. for World War II or its aftermath.

France fired 15 Generals last week. Congress’ only cure for unpreparedness last week was money. President Roosevelt had asked for $1,182,000,000 in emergency cash and authorizations (plus previously pending estimates). The Senate in its responsive enthusiasm added $364,221,468, in the process grabbed off surprisingly little pork ($2,311,000 for the archaic, scattered string of forts which Congress forces the Army to maintain). Main items:

> $200,000,000 for the President to spend as he pleases (mainly on new plant capacity for airplanes, munitions, ships).

> $305,000,000 for airplanes.

> $348,228,998 for Army ordnance (antiaircraft guns, tanks, field artillery, powder, shells, etc.).

> $100,000,000 to step up naval construction (the Navy last fortnight estimated that, for $171,000,000 more than original costs, its construction program could be completed by 1944).

> $49,888,475 to speed construction of naval, air and marine bases (but nothing to fortify Guam, at Japan’s doorstep).

> $53,727,454 to boost the Army enlisted strength from 227,000 to 280,000.

To citizens accustomed to peacetime defense budgets, these sums read like full-dress Rearmament. Fact was that for the Army—which needed and got most of the emergency funds—it was only partial rearmament and on a 1938 scale. If the U. S. thought it could arm itself against these times at such small cost, or that its present military establishment could digest even such comparatively small sums, it still had another illusion to meet and overcome. Aircraft excepted, about all the Franklin Roosevelt’s initial estimates could do was provide what the Army thought it needed before Hitler’s mechanized hordes changed the modern definition of war. “I don’t think we ought to deceive ourselves that this program goes very far,” said the Army’s Colonel Harry K. Rutherford. Said the independent but authoritative Army & Navy Journal, “. . . the results will still leave us, a year and a half hence, far behind the fighting forces of the European nations. . . .”

The aircraft estimates looked big—until the Army’s Chief of Air Corps Henry Arnold came out with his estimate of what Franklin Roosevelt’s projected 50,000-planes force would cost: $3,500,000,000 to buy, $70,000 a year each to keep up. In spite of the President’s high plans, his Army and Navy last week were amazingly unresponsive about buying more aircraft. The Navy’s Chief of Aeronautics John H. Towers upped his final goal from 3,000 to 10,000, but said he wanted no additional combat planes at present; General Arnold in his emergency estimates requested cash for only 309 combat planes, 2,237 trainers, left the Air Corps’s projected total at 8,066 (by mid-1941). Greatly disgruntled, the Senate wrote in an authorization of $100,000,000 for naval planes, specifically instructed the Army to spend $103,000,000 on aircraft which it had not asked for, and under its present setup cannot use.

Commander in Chief Roosevelt meantime plunged ahead with his plans to up U. S. aircraft and engine capacity to 50,000 military planes a year. Two facts about this mighty project were known at week’s end: 1) Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau had hired able, motor-wise Dr. George Jackson Mead of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics to standardize military engine models, up production by bringing as many plants as possible into a field now limited largely to two companies (Pratt & Whitney, division of United Aircraft; Curtiss-Wright); 2) Mr. Morgenthau, Federal Lender Jesse Jones, Tommy Corcoran, et al., in the roles of industrial advisers, were finagling for control (see p. 44).

One reason why U. S. aircraft cannot be mass-produced is that airplanes and their engines are still largely hand-built, precision jobs. Last week an airplane designed for mass production with a minimum of handwork was flown in California. It was Timm Aircraft Corp.’s blue-&-gold plastic plane—with wings and fuselage pressure-molded from thin spruce plywood and liquid plastic (like the bakelite of radio panels), then baked in an oven. Test Pilot Vance Breese (who has designed and produced another plastic model) put Timm’s plane through its paces, convinced at least one Army observer (Colonel Joseph L. Stromme) that “this may mark the start of an era of mass production. . . .”