THE FIRST SIX MONTHS

In a few minutes the referee would take the center of the ring to announce the fight. The champion was not too apprehensive. He had got himself into fairly good condition and the challenger had only half his weight and half his reach. The champion stood in his corner, still talking to his seconds, and he didn't know what struck him. The challenger had hit him over the head with a water bottle. As he got up, dazed, and swung around, the challenger with all his might hit him squarely in the midriff with a heavy wooden stool. Staggered and hurt, the champion, instead of carrying the fight to his opponent, as he had planned, found the fight under way before he was ready, found himself being pushed around the ring.

Such was the beginning of the fight, on Dec. 7. Now the end of the sixth round is at hand -- this Sunday, June 7, is six-months to the day after Pearl Harbor. How well and how badly has the fight gone for the champion since its surprise beginning?

On the day of Pearl Harbor, Britain had already been fighting the Axis for over 33 months, Russia had been fighting for more than five, China continuously for 59. At the end of six months a major victory for U.S. arms is still to be recorded and more defeats are all too likely. But U.S. strength had changed the nature of the conflict.

The U.S. is already the senior partner among its allies in the battle -- to a degree which it never attained in World War I.

A United Nations High Command has been established with its headquarters significantly in Washington. China and Russia have yet to profit much from U.S. help.

But Britain's new air offensive has been made possible by the steady flow of replacements from the U.S. British strength in Africa has been increased by the same kind of aid. And in the Far East the U.S. has actually taken over from Britain the greatest burden of the battle.

Yet the immediate military position of the United Nations is far weaker today than it was before Pearl Harbor.

Rounds Lost

Before Pearl Harbor the United Nations commanded the seven seas. The British strategy had been to blockade Europe until Hitler ran out of oil. Six months later the United Nations have largely lost control of the Mediterranean, the eastern part of the Indian Ocean, a good part of the Pacific (the part where rubber came from). They have even had to permit the enemy to roam the Atlantic coastal waters of the continental U.S. They face the grim possibility that the Near East may fall to the Germans and India to the Japs--a juncture which would end any blockade for good.

Meanwhile oil, though still a problem for Hitler, has also become a problem for the United Nations. Australia must now get its oil from the U.S. (7,500 miles).

The British have to get oil from Venezuela or around the Cape of Good Hope (11,000 miles). In 17 States of the U.S., whose entire civilian economy had been oil-motivated for 30 years, oil is rationed. That alone suffices to tell Americans that the winning of the war has not begun, and that its losing has gone on apace.

At the end of the first six months of war the U.S. has learned three ugly facts: 1) That even its continental borders are not safe from attack. Henry Stimson warned the U.S. last week that West Coast air raids are "inevitable"; its East Coast, not immune from the same kind of attack, is already strewn with the wreckage of its own coastwise tankers. A Japanese attack on Alaska is well within the bounds of realistic possibility.

2) That the British, as an ally, can be a liability as well as an asset. In the Far East, in Hong Kong, in Malaya, in Burma, aboard the Prince of Wales and Repulse, the unexpected weakness of their forces and incompetence of their commanders almost made Americans forget the great lesson of 1940: that Englishmen are brave. (The Prince of Wales and Repulse served one useful purpose: the battleship admirals in U.S. Navy councils were at last discredited.) 3) That defense can not win the war.

This lesson permeates the Army, from General Marshall down. It has been less epidemic among British military men, who only recently were explaining to U.S. officers why there could be no second front in Europe this summer--a thesis on which they appear to have been overruled.

Work Begins

At the end of the first six months, no front for attack was open to the U.S.--yet. So perforce the U.S. still confined itself, for the time being, to the role assigned it before Pearl Harbor--"Democracy's Arsenal." But the six months had wrought one enormous difference: the Arsenal was now performing prodigies.

The spring of 1942 may some day be looked back on as the real turning point of the war. That was when the U.S. first began to demonstrate that it could really make munitions.

"The war abroad can only be won on the American industrial front," said Alfred P. Sloan. But when he said it--Dec. 4--arms were still a sideshow in U.S. industry's tent. A month later the whole emphasis changed: The President announced his 1942 production goals: 60,000 planes, 45,000 tanks, 8,000,000 tons of shipping. From that moment, lack of orders ceased to be a reason why U.S. industry could not convert to war.

After 20 months of fiddling around with NDAC, OPM, SPAB, etc., the President at last gave one man--Don Nelson--full authority over production.

Those 20 months had not been wholly wasted. War became the No. 1 U.S. industry in 1941; it was superimposed upon civilian industry, which it at first stimulated rather than curtailed. Thus the Federal Reserve Board index of production rose 27 points to 166 in the twelve months preceding Pearl Harbor. In the six months since, it has risen only nine points more.

But this increase is 100% war production. So is a much bigger increase which is concealed by falling civilian output.

The Conversion

Detroit was the dramatic symbol of the conversion. Before the assembly lines stopped, SPAB was genuinely worried about whether the U.S. would make the arms it needed in time. Labor, too, worried whether war would ever employ as many men as it laid off. But by last week Detroit war industries were employing 530,000 men--32,000 more than at the peak of 1941's auto boom. And tanks, guns and other arms came off the line so fast that they made a storage problem all the way to the docks.

Even the shipbuilders, current bottleneck No. 1, have performed enough technological prodigies to bring the launching rate to two a day. Thus the War Production Board is no longer much concerned with production, has turned it mostly over to Army and Navy. But it traded that 20 headache for a much worse one: raw materials. About the time the assembly lines began to hum, the U.S. war economy stopped expanding. Its raw materials were running out.

WPB admitted the bad news last month: no more construction of new war plants. There was simply not enough steel, copper, nickel, chemicals, etc., to feed any more. In Leon Henderson's figure of speech: "We may have to eat our seed corn because of the needs of the moment." Even shipyards could not get enough steel plate. The No. 1 submarine builder, Electric Boat Co., despite highest priorities, sometimes had as little as two days' supply of materials on hand.

The U.S. economy was at last approaching the highly critical phase of full war production, in which scarcity was the rule rather than the exception. Every piece of scrap metal, every kilowatt hour, every ton of fuel oil, every freight car and passenger bus would have to be used carefully, even if used for war. The priorities system, which had broken down long since, was gradually being replaced by over-all allocation. Consumer rationing had begun with sugar and gasoline -- but had only begun. Never in history had the average U.S. citizen been forced into such personal with his Government.

Going Total

Six months of war have done more to change the face and heart of Washington than eight years of the New Deal. The population has grown by some 70,000; emergency ticket booths have overrun Union Station and emergency office buildings have overrun the Mall; new bureaus have overrun the suburbs and old ones have overrun Philadelphia and Manhattan.

Everybody has taken to working later, drinking harder, walking faster. In six months a reformist bureaucracy has set out to become -- for the duration -- a totalitarian Government.

Every bureau has given its work a war angle. Some were more successful than others. Thurman Arnold, for example, found Nazis at the bottom of every antitrust proceeding; he made some of his victims (notably Standard Oil) look like veritable nests of spies -- to careless readers. WPA made little effort to survive, and did not. Some of the Government's biggest figures, especially Cabinet members, lost weight fast. The biggest: Jesse Jones lost his temper in public (to Eugene Meyer), his popularity in Congress (over synthetic rubber) and even some of his fiscal power (to BEW). Jesse's eclipse --perhaps temporary -- reflected the discovery that banking is no training for warmaking.

Meanwhile, amid the democratic confusion, the men of the total Government emerged, power in hand. After six months, the real Cabinet of the U.S. War Government -- aside from the President's alter ego Harry Hopkins -- consists of Don Nelson, Leon Henderson, Henry Wallace & Milo Perkins, Paul McNutt.

> Henderson's OPA already has 7,300 employes, but will need about 90,000 more. Before war's end, OPA is likely to be the most unpopular of agencies, a sort of kitchen Gestapo.

> Wallace & Perkins' Board of Economic Warfare took months to jockey Jesse Jones and the State Department out of position. By then BEW's most important role--control of imports and exports--was completely circumscribed by the shipping shortage. If it decides, for example, that Brazil deserves U.S. coal, it must line up as a petitioner to Admiral Land, standing in line behind the Army & Navy.

Yet BEW's powers mean that in six months U.S. foreign relations have graduated from striped pants, and that U.S. goods, markets and capital can now be employed realistically as weapons of war.

> McNutt's Manpower Administration, newcomer to the War Cabinet, is potentially the biggest bureau of all. When things get bad enough, it will in effect give every citizen a number and tell him where to work.

Most significant fact about Washington's growing totalitarianism is that it shows the direct effect of the first six months of war on the U.S. people. They no longer begrudge the Government power; they merely resent Government's inefficiency. They resent contradictory estimates of the gasoline and rubber supply, but they accept rationing with good grace.

They gave their pots & pans willingly to the aluminum drive, but resent the fact that the scrap has not yet found its way to smelters. They get maddest, not at the total Government, but at the palladium of democracy and inefficiency, Congress.

To their Congressmen they write: "You won't kill a Jap with your yap." The people want to be smartly and strongly led.

The Fighting & The Fighters The U.S. Army & Navy went to war, too. And the only really bad account that it gave of itself was in the first 24 hours of war.

In those few hours Pearl Harbor was disastrously surprised. Except for the individual heroism of soldiers and sailors, that day was an unqualified disgrace.

Same day, Japanese invaders destroyed on the ground a large part of the small air force in the Philippines--planes which should have been better dispersed.

The remainder of the Philippine campaign was not only gallantly fought--a moral victory as creditable as any defeat can be--but, more important as a test of U.S. arms, it was competently fought.

Of Guam's early loss, the U.S. still knows virtually nothing. But Midway and Wake, like the Philippines, put up a fight whose military competence was as great as its story of bravery.

Java was a catastrophe in which U.S.

forces played only a minor part. The Battle of the Java Sea was led and lost by a Dutchman. The subsequent loss of the Langley, sent by the Navy with planes to defend Batavia, was a creditable long-shot bet that failed to come in.

The other major U.S. actions (so far as known) have all been naval or air encounters in the Far East, and all substantially successful. One group of these: task-force operations, the brilliant raids led by Vice Admiral Halsey on the Marshall and Gilbert Islands, on Wake and Marcus. Others were miscellaneous actions such as that in which Lieut, (now Lieut. Commander) O'Hare shot down five Jap bombers when a U.S. task force was itself under attack.

Among the Navy's most important achievements were attacks on Jap convoys. One night a handful of U.S. destroyers shot up a whole fleet of transports. In the dingdong battle of the Coral Sea, two Japanese aircraft carriers and 18 other vessels were the victims. Meanwhile, with no to do, U.S. submarines have kept up a running campaign against the Jap supply lines.

The final show piece of the six months' action was Jimmy Doolittle's raid on Tokyo, an action of limited military importance but a brilliant tactical success.

None of these victories was as important in the war as in the headlines. But they all proved that Americans can fight.

Battles Without Blood

Trouble was, the U.S. was not yet able to engage the enemy. He was too far away.

Before Pearl Harbor, only regular Army troops were allowed by law outside the Hemisphere, except U.S. territory. Suddenly Army & Navy were called upon to extend themselves on a dozen or more world fronts, all of enormous importance.

Within three weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Army sent 600,000 troops to battle stations, many of them across both oceans.

But merely to maintain a single division in Australia requires enough shipping to move nearly 200,000 tons every month.

Thus the battle of transportation took on No. 1 importance. Some idea of its size is indicated by the accompanying map, on which each star shows a place where U.S. soldiers, sailors or technicians are now stationed (many other places are still secret).

U.S. ships have docked at Suez and Murmansk, at Sidney and at Reykjavik. Convoys have steamed through, without a loss, to Ireland and Australia.

So far as the means at hand permit, the battle of transportation has apparently been a U.S. success. It has not been a success off the Atlantic Coast, because the means -- proper escorts for convoys -- are still lacking. It has not been so successful anywhere as it might be, because of a basic shortage of ships.

At the end of the first six months, this emergency has given birth to a great, new strategy: the possibility of substituting the air for the sea as the chief supply route. It is still only an idea. Even if it proves practical, it is not likely to reach important dimensions for a year or longer.

But the Ferrying Command has already established regular routes for cargo planes across every continent save Europe. The fleets of planes to fly these routes have still to be built. Luckily the bombers Ford is building at Willow Run are readily convertible to cargo ships.

Education by Mars

Internally both Army & Navy have been improved by fairly drastic reorganizations since Pearl Harbor.

The Army, for the first time, has given an adequate voice to its own air-minded officers. Half the members of the new General Staff are airmen. In the three new sections which replaced the specialized haunts of hidebound brasshattery, General Arnold (Air) has equal say with Generals McNair (Ground Force) and Somervell (Supply). The Navy, whose top command was shared by two admirals, now has only one.

This man, Admiral King, is also an airman, as is his chief of operations, Rear Admiral Home. The Navy also undertook to tear down the walls between its many jealous bureaus (Ordnance, Supplies, Medicine, etc.) by putting all procurement under one man, Admiral Robinson. Symptomatically, in the naval building program, aircraft carriers, submarines, cruisers and destroyers have a new prominence. So has speed in all ships.

But one mental adjustment has not been made--Army and Navy are in general still unable to work well together.

They have achieved a formal unity of command in specific theaters--MacArthur in Australia, Admiral Nimitz in the Pacific, General Andrews in the Panama Canal area, etc. Yet in the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Army bombed the Jap Fleet for three days without knowing, till Army pilots found the Navy in action, that the Navy was coming in too. Last fortnight came evidence that the Navy is keeping secrets from its Army superiors even in the vital Canal Zone (TIME, June 1). The minds of generals and admirals, although much improved by six months' education in real war, had still much to learn about mutual cooperation.

Battles Unfought

At the end of six months of war the U.S. has:

>Not taken a single inch of enemy territory.

>Not yet beaten the enemy in a single major battle on land.

>Not yet opened an offensive campaign.

The war, in short, has still to be fought, as far as the U.S. is concerned. The campaigns to date have all been won by the enemy. More serious still, allies China and Russia are today in acute danger.

These are the solemn facts. It is also a fact that the U.S. has done an amazingly vast and rapid job of preparation for the battles still to come. Until they are fought, the war can be neither lost nor won.

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