Slowly Stirring

Most of the U.S. still wore the look of business-as-usual, but underneath, muscles were beginning to ripple.

The Pentagon began tapping the nation's pool of 2,500,000 National Guardsmen and military reserves.

The Army:

P:Summoned some of its organized Reserves to active duty on an individual rather than unit basis.

P:Sent out the first calls for National Guardsmen. Surprisingly, in view of the urgency of the situation, it called up none of the 27 Guard divisions. The first calls were confined to such non-divisional Guard outfits as signal, ordnance and supply units.

P:Alerted "several" combat and supporting Regular Army units from the six military areas of the U.S. mainland for movement "in the near future" to MacArthur's command.

The Navy:

P: Called up a part of the 39,000 men of its Organized Air Reserve, ordered them to stand by for specific assignments. With an occasional exception (see below), they would be scattered among Navy units already in operation.

P:Began calling up on an individual basis enlisted men with "left-arm" ratings', i.e., specialists in such technical fields as radar and engineering, in its Organized Reserve. P: Got ready to boost its Marine Corps fighting strength from 75,000 to 132,000 men--an increase of 60%.

The Air Force:

P: Called up no reserves last week, but would in a matter of days.

Just how many men altogether were called up was a Pentagon secret--or something of a secret to Americans at least. After three weeks of fishbowl mobilizing, the Defense Department was tightening up on security. It advised local newspapers to publish the figures for local calls, but asked the U.S. press to print no nationwide totals. Reason: there was no use "making things easy for the enemy by doing his bookkeeping for him."

Slowly, too, the sleeping giant that is the U.S. military production potential began to stir. Cadillac Motor Car agreed to produce new-type 28-ton tanks for the Army (see BUSINESS). Washington's paperwork for $16 billion in war orders was already done, and only the dispatch of official telegrams was necessary to place $900 million in "phantom orders" for machine tools.

Fourteen agencies were told by the White House to take a reef in federal public-works programs. Secretary of Agriculture Charles F. Brannan was busy looking for a way to spell "Brannan Plan" backwards. After two years of campaigning to give farmers permanent high incomes, he was under White House orders to work out a scheme for keeping food prices from going any higher.

In Washington hotels and in corridors of Government buildings were faces that looked familiar. Such World War II bigwheels as Donald Nelson, Charles (G.E.) Wilson and Henry Kaiser were back in town to sniff the air and find out what came next. Some offered to get back in harness as $1-a-year men but found that things hadn't gone that far--yet.

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