An Army Without Arms
I
MR. LOUIS JOHNSON, in the July Atlantic, set forth some of the circumstances which make the Army unable, at present, to take up its task of Hemisphere Defense. As to the future, he makes clear that we must expect nothing in the way of prompt results. In all this his warning is by far the most candid word yet forthcoming from the Administration.
Yet this candor stops short of certain essential points. The exact shortages of arms and equipment are not disclosed — nor are we told of the appallingly long time it will take to fill those shortages under the accepted schedules of deliveries. This partial veiling of an unpleasant situation reflects the mental attitude of the American public at the present time: we listen to the vague hints we are prepared to hear, but our minds close tight against the disagreeable précisions of facts and figures which call for prompt and decisive action. Even more perfectly it reflects the attitude of the present Adminisiration.
This habit of mind and action, as applied to England and France, now goes by the name of ‘Chamberlainism’ — in some ways a serious misnomer. It is still an American affliction in an even more serious degree. If the other democracies did not awaken to realities until the time of Munich, we did not come to life until nine months after the outbreak of the war. Even then, after the collapse of France, we did not awaken to the realities of our own case. The slogan of ‘not sending our boys to Europe’ had served only to close our eyes to the neglect of our defenses at home. The new slogan of ‘Hemisphere Defense’ has raised a still more dangerous illusion — by turning away from Europe we have sought no solution of our own problem but merely a verbal device for not facing it.
The 75,000 available men in our Regular Army can provide no ‘Hemisphere’ garrisons. The National Guard will not be armed and equipped for more than a year. Our Navy cannot prevent Hitler from gaining a foothold in the Western Hemisphere: that foothold is already strong and secure, and the number of ‘militarized’ Germans in South America is far greater than any force we could now send. On the other hand, our recent guarantee to Uruguay makes a binding commitment from this time forward — and the sweeping declarations in support of Hemisphere Defense are backed by both parties and by all sections of opinion.
They are backed by nothing else. In the present state of our armaments we are no better prepared to defend the western world than to intervene in Europe. As a military solution, Hemisphere Defense is today a fraud and a sham. Following exactly in the steps of England and France, we have given public and formal commitments which expose us to an open conflict at any time — and which we are in no way prepared to support. Inept, slow preparation is merely an invitation to pick a fight with us before we are really armed. Inept, slow preparation is our military policy today.
II
Mr. Johnson’s brief allusion to the disappearance of our munitions industries came to most readers as a complete surprise. ' A generation ago we had a large munitions industry; today we have practically none.’ In reality, the same causes led to the rapid dwindling away of most of the war industries during the post-war years. The ending of the war left huge stocks on hand, and little possibility of new orders. With luck, a wartime industry could turn to some different field: the firm continued, the buildings remained, but the tools and machinery were scrapped for new equipment designed for wholly different products. This process proceeded faster than any idea of disarmament or universal peace — and after a decade or so the Nye Committee set out on what was in effect a dinosaur hunt.
The coming of the Roosevelt administration resuscitated only the shipbuilding industries. For the President, the Navy was the fair-haired child in the most jealously exclusive sense of the word: the Army was left to one side as if it had been a personal creation of Mr. Hoover. The huge blanket appropriations at the time of the NRA authorized the President to expend large sums on the mechanization of the Army and the modernizing of equipment, but public opinion was centred on very different matters in 1933. The Army itself was afflicted with a curious form of sleeping sickness throughout this period, and the steady increases in military appropriations were absorbed chiefly by the Air Corps. The advent of Hitler produced among us no more of a protective reaction than in France or England — but our Army was by then even worse off. In its provision of new types of arms and equipment it was more backward than any of the forces of the Great Powers — far behind Czechoslovakia’s.
At the end of 1937 it was realized in the War Department not only that the Army was flimsily provided with modern weapons, but that the industries of the country were without the tools and machines (to say nothing of the special skills and experience) necessary for producing them in any quantity if an emergency arose. This fact was laid before the President, and the proposal was made to lay out a modest sum for the preparations necessary to equip industries for these special and noncommercial lines of manufacture, so as to make them ready for orders when the time came. It was proposed also to follow this up with a certain number of orders, so that the Army would have a small reserve of arms and special equipment on hand. The sums involved were modest — in comparison to the handouts then lavished in every direction from the bottomless well of current deficits. But nothing happened. Apparently the proposals were not transmitted to the Congressional Committees, and the War Department had not confided them to the public.
After Munich, there were slight indications of a return to consciousness — enough at least to send up a trial balloon to sound out public opinion on a program of ‘ military recovery.’ There was a lively response in the press — and the whole episode was reviewed by Arthur Krock in the New York Times (October 30, 1938). Far from being interventionist, this tentative effort was squarely on the line of home defense and sought to point out the practical lessons of Munich. Mr. Bernard Baruch, just after his return from Europe, gave a brief interview after talking with the President: ‘We ought not to find ourselves in the position of England. ... I believe America is unprepared. We have not sufficient arms and equipment to put an army of 400,000 men into the field.’ He explained also that we should be ready to ‘break up all the bottlenecks of industry’ which stood in the way of producing war matériel. In a press conference the following day (October 14) the President responded with the opinion that the national defenses were in need of modernizing.
The German and Italian press broke out into a storm of abuse concerning the ‘American hate campaign,’‘Jewish spite,’ and ‘American and British warmongers.’ ‘Why is England arming?’ — and so forth. These views were promptly echoed in the United States. Father Coughlin entered into the fray; numbers of clergymen smelled sinister influences at work; and the New Republic raised its voice of alarm. But the Congressional elections were under way, and both Congress and the general public were more interested in the President’s attempted purges than in the warning offered by Baruch. The President let the matter drop.
The special tools and equipment needed to prepare industries for large-scale orders were thus not provided. When a first substantial ordnance program was begun, in the spring of 1939, it was found that three years would be required to complete it: the first 25 per cent of deliveries were due only in September 1940. The swallowing of Bohemia, the long approach to war, the rapid overrunning of Poland by an army with modern equipment — all this could not bring the Administration to tackle the known problem of adequate industrial preparations. When the President last May made his first appeal for a billion-dollar appropriation, he was reacting to the sudden bad news from France, but the urgent shortages of arms he reported had been formally reported to him at the end of 1937. In calling upon Congress for haste, he knew that the orders already under way could not be finished before June 1942 — from the Army and Navy Journal of May 4 the German Military Attaché had no doubt gathered the same information. Now, as in 1937, we are unable to arm and equip with modern weapons an army of 400,000 men. The gauges and dies and special tools and machines which might have been made ready at a modest cost during 1938 had still to be made and assembled in 1940 before the present vast projects could be got under way. The bottlenecks of industry discerned in 1938 were still untouched, and in approaching them the guiding idea seems to have been to sweep aside willfully every lesson of our industrial mobilization of 1918.
The huge scale of the President’s proposals, the piling up of one blanket appropriation upon another, have served merely to mask the fact that additional industries equipped to manufacture many of the things most needed simply do not exist. They would exist if the beginning had been made in 1938.
III
To meet the chaos already prevailing in Washington, one thing necessary is legislation making possible the coördination and use of all industries needed for the present task. Another is a general registration of the man power of the country — for industrial as well as military purposes and for the endless range of things between these two. The volunteer local Registration Boards of 1917 showed how promptly the task can be got under way; and as a practical necessity all categories of man power in each district should be registered (initially) on a single list. It is not necessary that all categories should be registered at one time: at the present time, toolmakers and skilled machinists are much more urgently needed than 1,000,000 infantry recruits. The Chief of Ordnance has recently noted: ‘The authoritative opinion of the War Department is that the procurement of this matériel should take precedence over desired increases in personnel.’
For skilled trades such as these, it would be wholly fantastic to accept men in designated categories on the basis of their personal declaration: hundreds of thousands would come forth as toolmakers or as ‘skilled workmen’ in other highly paid trades. Some sort of outside control is needed to determine real qualifications; and as it happens an almost complete census of this sort is already at hand in the monthly reports turned in by employers under the Social Security Act. New legislation could provide for adding to these reports the particular categories to be designated by the Advisory Council or other proper authority, and for ordering duplicate copies to be sent directly to the Registration Board of the proper district.
Enrollment in these particular categories would not establish exemption from military or other service — nor would it mean putting labor into uniform in any sense. Registration would mean no more than the necessary statistical preparation for any subsequent measure for national service. It would show the number of those available in the different categories, who they were, and where.
Military man power, and the wade range of those with minor but muchneeded qualifications who for one reason or another may be outside the records of the Social Security Act, would be recorded by direct registration. Their various qualifications could be determined by whatever practical tests might be devised. But there is no clear line between military and industrial services: the army will need carpenters, plumbers, machinists, stenographers, and engineers no less than the industries on the home front. No category should offer a way of avoiding military service: there must be a common obligation to serve wherever the service of any individual may be most needed.
Or the other hand, spare us from any ex post facto classification of these qualifications. The ground crews of the Air Corps do not need eight months of infantry training in order to fit them for their work, and there is no sense in putting through this mill other men who will be instantly needed for special tasks. In all these respects, 1917 was a model of how not to do it. In 1940 the doughboy will have much more to learn, and the labor of training should not be wasted on those called upon for other than combat duties. A proper concept of the work of registration will save an incredible amount of wasted effort.
The mistake was made in 1917 of not registering industrial qualifications at the outset, partly because the British attempt at this had been a failure. General Crowder records the disastrous confusion that followed, until the error was corrected late in the war. ‘It is perhaps unfortunate,’ he concludes, ‘that the Selective Service Law as originally enacted did not provide for the classification of labor upon industrial grounds as broad as labor itself. Yet the haste in which the Act was prepared and the lack of precedent available at the time precluded the enactment of a more perfect measure.’ To learn from experience means not lo make the same mistake twice.
IV
One result of the failure to act in time is that the National Guard is now left without its quotas of modern arms and equipment. On paper its provision of new weapons kept pace with the changing tables of organization of the Regular Army, but the weapons themselves did not appear. The process of ‘modernization’ continued, but it continued chiefly on paper as an expression of abstract aspirations. The horse, in due time, was officially set aside as the main reliance for traction, but the motorized equipment necessary to fit out a division on modern lines was for the most part not provided. As far as training could be carried out with old matériel (and with a few samples of the new, such as antiaircraft guns), the National Guard has carried out its work year after year. But in the main it was condemned to working as best it could with what was left over from 1918 — and to hoping for something better.
The Plattsburg manœuvres of 1939 made public in a conspicuous fashion the shortages that the personnel of the National Guard had been painfully aware of for some years past. The lively and well-informed press reaction which followed suggested that responsible quarters, in the Army and outside, were appealing in earnest to public opinion to prod Congress and the Administration into taking some real action. But the outbreak of the war left this a mere ninedays wonder. The press turned to other things; and public opinion, as ever, turned readily away from a troublesome practical question. The War Department had no arms to offer, and the Administration still took no steps to organize industrial production.
As a result, in the summer of 1940 the President finds himself forced to ask Congress for authority to call into active service a National Guard which he has neglected consistently and systematically since the beginning of his administration. It has received only pitiful driblets toward filling the shortages revealed in the exposé which followed the Plattsburg manœuvres: practically speaking, the Guard is as badly equipped in 1940 as it was a year ago.
In that masterpiece of casuistry, the Fireside Chat on national defense of May 26, the President offered the following vision: ‘And by the end of this year every existing unit of the present Regular Army will be equipped with its complete requirements of modern weapons. Existing units of the National Guard will also be largely equipped with similar items.’
‘Largely’ in this case means much less than the quota of the Regular Army — and by the schedules now in force the last of this very incomplete provision will not be delivered until September 1941. In regard to the Regular Army, General Marshall, some days before the President spoke, had given more precise statements in the present tense. The force of 75,000 Regulars which could now be put into the field, he noted, ‘would lack almost entirely at the present moment the 37 mm. anti-aircraft guns.’ Of the 1423 guns-to-be of the defense program, the number now on hand is 15. Of the 1432 modernized 75’s on the program, 141 guns are now on hand — a little less than half the quota for the 75,000 men. These modernized 75’s with the wide traverse, it may be noted, are essential for effective direct fire against numbers of fast-moving tanks. ‘These,’ General Marshall noted, ‘are being delivered at the rate of 24 per month.’ (Not one has yet reached the National Guard.) Of the standard 37 mm. anti-tank guns, the Regular force had, at the end of May, ‘a fair complement.’ (The National Guard has none.)
Last of all, the phrase ‘complete requirements of modern weapons’ means not the number really needed, but the requirements laid down by tables of organization drawn up (necessarily) before the German offensive into France. What will the ‘complete requirements’ be when the lessons of that overwhelming surprise are clearly known? At the time the President spoke, not a single American tank division existed even on paper. In reality, in that rather distant time when all the orders now under way are delivered, will our troops have a better provision of modern arms and equipment than that which has left the infantry of France strewn out across the fields of Champagne and Picardy?
Most disturbing of all is that slippery future tense: ‘the National Guard will also be largely equipped with similar items.’ Since the end of 1937 the President has known that the War Department could not provide these items, and that they had not been covered by current appropriations. He knew that the arsenals could not provide them, and that the few private industries equipped for such work could not complete their orders until late in 1941. At the time he spoke not a single Guard Division had one of the weapons most needed by infantry to defend itself against airplanes and tanks.
Yet five days later the President called upon Congress for ‘authority to call into active service such portion of the National Guard as may be deemed necessary to maintain our position of neutrality and to safeguard the national defense.’ With no anti-tank guns? With no 37 mm. anti-aircraft guns? With two light tanks per division? With no field artillery of the most modern type? With this miscellaneous total of shortages, deficiencies, and antique equipment, are we asking the Guard to safeguard the national defense?
Where the Guard now stands, as regards the ‘similar items,’ is made clear in a letter from Major General Haskell: ‘I do know that industrial production is not on a basis that will give us the necessary equipment for an army of the size that is evidently necessary in the near future. I am exceedingly worried about the equipment for our army. You have stated the case very clearly, but I wonder how many people in the United States appreciate the condition that we are in. If we cannot have equipment before 1942 we might almost as well not have it at all, in my opinion, because I think that before that time the test for America will come. I can tell you that in my command, the New York National Guard, of about 26,000 men . . . we have not received a single anti-tank weapon of any kind, not a single .50 calibre machine gun, not a single 81 mm. mortar, and not a single 60 mm. mortar — and we don’t know when we are going to get them. Meanwhile, our infantry has been reorganized and set up in groups to handle these particular weapons.
’I think you make it clear, and I certainly agree, that the passing of huge appropriations will not defend the United States, unless industry can produce very much needed weapons. We now have two tanks in the State of New York and 18 anti-aircraft guns. We have no 37 mm. anti-aircraft guns for our present anti-aircraft regiment, nor have we any .50 calibre machine guns for our infantry. As you well know, all this takes a great length of time, and as new equipment becomes slowly available it will be unable to meet the requirements of the rapidly expanding Regular Army. There is no telling when the National Guard will be equipped.
‘I am heartily in accord with any steps that can be taken looking toward the mobilization and proper use of skilled labor and semi-skilled labor for producing, at the earliest possible moment, equipment required with which to fight.’
Are the ordinary citizens of the country in accord with this view? The National Guard units in other states are no better equipped than in New York. Both political parties, all our political leaders, all sections of opinion, have come forth in support of the policy of Hemisphere Defense. It is a large order at best — and after the categorical promise our Government has given Uruguay, an ‘incident’ requiring the calling out of the Guard may occur, from this time forward, without the slightest warning.
They will have to go forth half-armed. With the present schedule of rearmament, with the appalling rate of production accepted by the Administration, they will stand without modern weapons and equipment for a year or two.
Today, in an overwhelming emergency, the President is taking for the first time the steps pointed out to him as necessary preparatory measures well over two years ago. The astonishing record of neglect in the past is now being plastered over and obscured by the pyramiding of huge appropriations which cannot now be spent — by proclaiming vast additional programs for war matériel which (as things stand) cannot be manufactured— by taking cover behind distinguished names in industry instead of tackling the actual task with necessary legislation and with a rational, nationwide mechanism for mobilizing industry and labor. Above all, instead of grappling with the critical needs of an immediate situation we are taking refuge in vast and nebulous preparations for 1942, and in naval projects for a still more distant future. Whatever his Latin American policy may be, Hitler will not stand waiting until 1942.
General Drum summed up the essential point on May 15: ‘America must produce armaments at a more rapid rate.’
The consistent record of the President and of both parties in Congress, the adroit hocus-pocus of the Fireside Chat on national defense, the eagerness of Congressmen and Senators to avoid responsibility, the readiness of the public at large to accept pleasant falsehoods and illusions rather than face unpleasant facts — all this makes an outstanding example of the political habits which have brought France and Britain to their present grip with realities. These habits have no particular relation to Democracy. Hitler, had he chosen, could have taken refuge in similar illusions. Stalin and Mussolini, the original totalitarians, have actually done so: they have built up ‘vast’ armies that cannot fight. The habits are not weaknesses of a political institution, but faults of character — Roosevelt’s character, the character all of us have gradually fallen into. What happened at Philadelphia showed that even now it is possible to snap out of it: that Democracy need not mean merely standing aside and laying the blame on ‘politicians.’ Apart from the particular responsibility of the President, Democrats and Republicans alike have been to blame. But a country in earnest can overcome the paralysis of Congress. With a proper direction, the abilities and resources of this country can produce results long before 1942. All our future depends upon a complete break with the complacency we have indulged in hitherto.