Reserves in Command

Until 1940's emergency mobilization, the 104,000 members of the Officers Reserve Corps (within the age limits of their grades) had kept up their training by correspondence courses, summer training camps, occasional tours of active duty. When the Army began filling out its regular units with reservists, no professional officer could predict with certainty how well doctors, lawyers, policemen and clerks would function as commanders of field units. Last week General Staff officers at Washington surveyed the Organized Reserves' performance, found it good.

Up to last week, 14,000 reservists had been called to duty. Most of them were straightway dumped into regular Army outfits to replace professionals promoted to higher commands or assigned to special administrative work. Today every platoon commander of regulars is a Reserve lieutenant, and 70% of regular companies are commanded by Reserve captains. One reservist, Colonel Julius Ochs Adler, general manager of the New York Times, is in command of the Army's big reception centre at Fort Dix, N. J., and many another major and colonel has been dropped into an Army administrative job. Of the 14,000 already called, not more than 50 have had to be dropped for lack of stamina, indecision, other incompetence.

To reservists not already called up. active duty is just around the corner of 1940. Next January, 30,000 more will be called to the colors, and by June, when Chief of Staff George Catlett Marshall hopes to have 1,200,000 men in uniform, a total of 55,000 reservists will have hung up their civvies for a year to work in khaki and O. D.

The biggest shortage in the Organized Reserves was in specialists for work in such civilian arts as publicity, procurement, building, etc., but the lack did not worry the Army long. Officers in specialist assignments need little military lore. Newspaper and advertising men, contractors, engineers, businessmen who volunteered for service when mobilization began, found themselves in officers' uniforms as soon as the Army satisfied itself that they knew their civilian callings. (Most celebrated case: commissioning of Radioman Elliott Roosevelt as a captain in the Specialist Reserve.)

In service, many a Reserve officer may find himself soldiering under civilian bigwigs who have been long in the Organized Reserves. Examples: David Sarnoff, president of Radio Corp. of America and colonel in the Signal Corps; Camoufleur Homer Schiff Saint Gaudens, lieut. colonel in the Corps of Engineers; Cineman Cecil Blount De Mille, major in the Signal Corps; U. S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., captain of Cavalry; Brigadier General Cornelius Vanderbilt III.

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