The General Explains

Why does the U.S., which already has 1,000,000 men overseas, need an army of 7,500,000 men, plus 650,000 officers? The tall, lean man who knows more about the U.S. Army than anybody else answered that question last week. General George Catlett Marshall said:

"Germany and Japan have determined the size of the U.S. Army. We are in to win; and not to compromise. There must be no tie game.

"It took six months of intense study of our resources and the entire world military situation to arrive at the figure 7,500,000 as the size the Army should reach next year. I do not say that we can whip the Axis with an army of 7,500,000. The 1944 estimate, which will be able to carry a more intelligent factor for battle casualties, will not be ready until next August."

Global War. "We are hooked up by air transport all over the world. Except for the comparatively small stretch of water between Australia and India, American communications encircle the earth. It is difficult even for people in the War Department to see the picture as a whole.

"Every day some new island in the Pacific pops up like a volcanic explosion and the Navy says we must have troops there. Then they take another island and say we must have troops there. They are right. In every case it is vital to the security of our communications and to the progress of our advance.

"We are building major bases around the world. New ones now at Casablanca, at Oran, and soon, I hope, at Bizerte. Right now we are preparing to establish air and naval facilities at Dakar. We have a tremendous installation in the Persian Gulf. We have built bases along the shores of the Red Sea area, initially to support the British Middle Eastern operations and now for our own air force in that theater. We have run a double track across equatorial Africa. We have established, with the cooperation of Brazil, air facilities in the bulge of Brazil. We have lookouts strung clear across the Himalayan passes."

No Grocery Stores. "On each Pacific island, in the Aleutians, Greenland, Africa, everywhere, each unit of troops must take along its engineers, its quartermaster detachment, its medical, sanitary and communications units. There are no public water supplies in the Pacific, few roads or railroads in Africa. Bridges, automobiles, service stations, grocery stores and similar facilities are few and far between.

"As we come to grips with Germany and Japan, the problem of maintaining our overseas forces involves the replacement of battle casualties and losses by sickness. Eisenhower had 2,000 in a few days. That was a remarkably small number, but the wounded must be moved out and, the replacements moved in. As the battle in Africa progresses, this part of the job will get tougher and tougher. We must not cut our air program."

Toughest: Shipping. "Our estimate of 7,500,000 is tied more closely to shipping than to any other factor. This much we have decided: it would be far better to have more trained men than we could ship than to have empty bottoms for which there were no trained troops to support commanders whose forces might be wiped out for the lack of them. If we had not considered the shipping problem, we should have been tried for incompetence.

"To take every advantage of shipping space, every advantage of materiel, we developed all possible shortcuts. We went to double bunks in cantonments. The expeditionary forces that are now in North Africa lived in pup tents for months prior to their departure for that campaign, to toughen the men and to make their cantonments available for new divisions.

"Now we have a dual problem. We must maintain our already huge establishment. Secondly, we must further expand it. The process of expansion itself immobilizes a million men: the men in training, the trainers, the service and medical troops and other overhead, the officer-candidate schools and various specialist schools. As we get toward the end of our expansion program, we will be able to plow back this overhead into replacements for the fighting forces.

"Above all, while we could quickly cut down pur program, it would be utterly impossible to improvise troops on short notice. A year or more is required to build fighting divisions."

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