The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE dust is still flying from the tilt between Donald M. Nelson, head of the War Production Board, and Lieutenant General Brehon B. Somervell, head of the Army Services of Supply. It is no personal quarrel. The conflict was forced upon these two war giants by a flaw in our war organization. That flaw is the absence of a head.

The recognition is now general in the Capital — and, indeed, in the country at large — that our war organization is a sprawling body without a directing intelligence. Mr. Roosevelt? Of course, he is at the top, but he is President as well as Commanderin-Chief, and simply cannot supply the administrative authority. In point of fact, he has never pretended to provide it. Long before the war was forced upon America, Mr. Roosevelt — who, as the appointment of Mr. Nelson showed, is capable of delegating responsibility — allowed Harry Hopkins to ask General Charles G. Marshall, our chief of staff, whether he would be interested in an overall command. It was only a suggestion, and General Marshall turned it aside. If the suggestion had been favorably received, General Marshall today would be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which represent the Navy, Air, and Army.

And, in course of time, Marshall as our generalissimo would have been generalissimo of the AngloAmerican forces as well. For, when Churchill was in Washington, he intimated that General Marshall would be acceptable to the British, and the hint has been renewed by the British.

The lack of a generalissimo means that neither the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington (representing Britain and America) nor the Joint Chiefs of Staff can hammer out a global plan of campaign. Neither President Roosevelt nor the proxy of Mr. Churchill, Marshal Sir John Dill, can or will take the responsibility. They are leaving grand strategy to the professionals, but the professionals each represent different services in different countries. Therefore, there is a vacuum at the top. Our war organization has no “cutting edge,” as Captain Oliver Lyttelton calls it.

Let us first look at our own situation apart from that of the United Nations. Navy, Army, and Air operate in more or less watertight compartments, loosely connected, for purposes of consultation only, in the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. Examples of the lack of a unified command have been noted plentifully in the newspaper s— from Pearl Harbor to Alaska. We paid dearly for this deficiency when war broke out. What is less excusable is the continued absence of a unified command, even in fighting the U-boats off our coastline. What the Navy — every man in it, from gob to Admiral — has chiefly on his mind is the licking of the Japanese Navy. It sometimes seems as if to our Navy the Japanese Navy is divorced from Japan herself, let alone Nazi Germany. The operations in the Solomons, without doubt, are intended to lure the Japanese Navy into combat, and we are justified in feeling proud of what our boys have accomplished. Those operations, incidentally, have nothing to do with the “ Orange plan" of a step-bystep conquest of Japan which has been the Navy’s Bible for years for precisely the present contingency. But there is not a shred of evidence that the Orange plan has been accepted by the United Nations as part of the grand strategy for winning this war. Even our own Army has not had a chance to pass upon it.

The Army is pursuing its major objective. Its aim is to raise and equip a mass army and put up extensive home defenses without delay.

This plan was never accepted by those who stressed the mechanized mobility of a professional army. Nor did it appeal to those who saw as our major contribution the job of equipping the United Nations with a breadbasket and an arsenal. But neither of these plans could make headway amid the hubbub of the “nation in arms.” Now, however, they are coming to the fore. The main reason lies in the acceleration in the tempo of recruiting, as well as the crisis in the war with Hitler. General Hershey, head of the Army’s Selective Service system, has declared that it will be necessary to draft men “at a rate which would have been considered superhuman a year ago.” He includes men hitherto considered vital to the industrial machine, married men without children, and married men with children if their wives are employed. To be sure, he later said that all single men would come first, even if that meant a pooling of quotas among the draft boards. A little more political courage, moreover, is observable in favor of drafting the late teens. There is some restiveness about the Army’s precipitate policy. It is argued that ten million and over in the army would mean neglected farms, factories deprived of essential workers, children left to fend for themselves, and a civilian population composed of women, children, the aged, and the subnormal. But the raising and equipping of a mass army (coupled with an elaborate defense system for America) is the Army goal.

How does this Army aim fit into any scheme of grand strategy?

It certainly does not square with our present strategical needs. Hitler, whom the President has designated as our Number 1 enemy, is making his great bid for a take-off against Britain and the American continent. Surely the first object of our war policy should be to stop him in Russia and Egypt. To this end we must depend upon our armed services, yet we find them preoccupied with their own concerns. Their minds, it would seem, should be elsewhere. Our means of communication must, of course, be the fibers of our strategy, and the Navy’s primary job, therefore, should be both to lick the U-boats and to convoy supplies. As for the Army, the need for a switch in emphasis of policy must be equally obvious. There must be a slowdown in the equipping of our Army, and consequently in the recruiting of it, and in the equipping of our home defenses; all the equipment we can spare should be rushed to the fighting fronts.

Wanted: World-size strategy

How does this affect Nelson and Somervell? In this way. Nelson’s trouble stems basically from the fact that he has never had any strategic supply plan to work upon. He has to work on a list of requirements obtained separately from the armed services. These are not related to each other. They are not handed down by the Chiefs of Staff, Joint or Combined. They are not even “screened" by an overall requirements committee. Yet supply must be the servant of strategy. It had been assumed that Mr. Nelson would sit with the Combined Chiefs of Staff, but he has never yet attended one of their meetings. Perhaps he feels that, since overall strategy is conspicuous by its absence, he is better employed elsewhere.

Yet there will never be any logic in the supply situation till Mr. Nelson (as I have insisted here before) sits in with the strategists, and till the strategists have been topped by a military mind that could work out an overruling single plan.

Of course, much of the trouble is due to Mr. Nelson’s own disabilities. No mandate has been so definitive and so sweeping as the mandate that the President gave to Mr. Nelson on January 16. He was made tsar of war industry. Actually, instead of fulfilling his responsibilities, Mr. Nelson started to shed them. He allowed the procurement branches of the armed services to continue to function without even bothering to assume any operating leadership. The result, in view of the pressing nature of the armed services’ demands, could have been foreseen. The Navy, always jealous of its prerogatives, blandly ignored Mr. Nelson, and continued to make contracts out of the funds appropriated by Congress. The Army, through General Somervell, did Mr. Nelson the honor of consultation, but argued him into backing its own supply program. And all the armed services combined together in the Army and Navy Munitions Board to deluge our war industry with priorities to fill their urgent and claimant needs. Priorities, indeed, have rained upon war industry so lavishly that there is now a fantastic inflation of the symbols. Republic Steel, for instance, won’t take any more orders which have less than an AA111 rating.

Thus Mr. Nelson found his authority in gradual process of diminution. The result upon his own organization — an organization which in the lower brackets contains the best brains in the country — has been pitiful. Morale has been low. The worst dilemma of all was the impossibility of keeping our Allied demands and the armed services’ demands in balance.

This, to repeat, was a problem which owed its origin to the absence of overall strategy. But Mr. Nelson might have mitigated it. He could have said to the President: “Here are your two directives of policy, but they are mutually incompatible. First, that we put our Allies in a 50-50 classification with ourselves for supplies from our arsenal. Second, that we equip our Army without delay. One or the other must give way, since we have not the equipment resources in this country to supply both on their time schedule.” There is no evidence that he made any such representation. The result is that for months back there has been a tug-of-war for supplies between the Allies and the Army, with the Allies — at this crucial moment in Hitler’s sweep — on the losing side. Of our war production, only 12 per cent has got to our Allies.

In particular items this (relative) starving of our Allies might be illustrated in the case of steel. When Mr. Lyttelton was here, it was arranged that Britain should get 600,000 tons a month. This amount has been whittled down till it is now 400,000 tons. Or take an end production like a gearshift in an armored vehicle. South Africa, by some miracle, managed to make 700 six-ton armored vehicles, but could not equip them with the gearshift mechanism. This required a small quantity of alloy steel — an amount sufficient for 15 American tanks. Accordingly the Army calmly interposed an objection, and now this steel is in a tank, probably doing duty somewhere in an American training camp. It might have been — and ought to have been — in Egypt in the South African vehicles helping to repel Rommel.

THE MOOD OF THE CAPITAL

The mood of the Capital emphasizes that the present shake-up in the War Production Board must be thorough. In Congress the investigating committees demand it. Representative John H. Tolan, head of the House investigating committee on war production, says: “We can’t hold our present military positions abroad, and we certainly can’t take the offensive, without changes in our production program. We need a military strategy for a world-size war, a production plan to meet these military requirements, but first we need a basic change in our thinking about production.”There is a political uneasiness, moreover, about the authority that General Somervell has been grabbing from Mr. Nelson. Mr. Nelson, on the spot, is “getting tough,” but his toughness has not yet reached to the heart of his difficulty. He has restored a semblance of authority — not to say order — in his own organization. He has got the Army and Navy to accept a recheck on priorities. He is seeking to balance the output of war industries so that, say, the components of a shell all arrive at a loading plant on time. But he still has to make his authority felt as the overlord of supply and production.

Not so much has been said about the correlative need for a master strategic plan, though Representative Tolan mentions it. Yet that need must be apparent as a fundamental necessity. You can’t go on making supplies till you know where, how, and when they are to be used. Otherwise all the motion in Washington will get nowhere. But this problem will arise — probably in the renewed call that Mr. Roosevelt name a generalissimo.