Your Army, Mr. Jones

Having dependents is no longer enough to get a man deferment from military service. Before a Senate subcommittee, Draft Director Major General Lewis B. Hershey testified that the pool of unmarried men eligible for the Army and Navy "was practically exhausted."

The time that he had long predicted had finally come. Among the able-bodied of the land, only indispensable workers in essential industries are now immune from the draft. Married men are already being inducted and many a draft board has already sent off fathers of children to the training camps.

If the country was to have a military force of eleven million by the end of 1943, this vast disruption of U.S. life seemed inevitable. Still untapped was the reservoir of draftable manpower from 38 to 45, but Selective Service estimates show that in this group the military pickings are thin and thinner. The dwindling number of single men among the older-age group (see chart) no longer meant anything to Selective Service. But the steady decline in physical fitness from 18 to 45 (which was well known) did. The weight of the draft must fall on the man under 30, married or not.

But Congress still huffed & puffed over the plan for an Army of 8,200,000, a Navy of 2,900,000. War Secretary Stimson went on the radio last week to take the Army's case to the people. His argument was the same that Senator Theodore Francis Green of Rhode Island had made two weeks ago (TIME, March 8). The big Army was made to carry out a specific strategic plan, which must be secret. The training of men must be continuous, if the blows to be struck are to be continuous. Said he:

"If you interrupt the steady flow of entrants to the [training] schools in March 1943, the effect of this break will be produced a year later and then, if it proves a mistake, cannot be corrected for another year. ... I hope and pray that it will not require tragic disaster to bring our people to a realization of the facts."

One fact that Henry Stimson hoped the people would learn: the civilians in the U.S. war effort were not pulling their share of the load on the farm or in the factory. His remedy, now also before Congress: a general service act which (as in Britain) would put every man and woman on call for service in the war economy.

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