Black & White

The Army duty officer at the Pentagon routed General Lightnin' Joe Collins out of bed at 5:30 one morning last week to read him the first pink secret dispatch about the Chinese counteroffensive. Collins rubbed his eyes and dialed General Omar Bradley, asleep in House No. 1 at Fort Myer, Va. All that day the Pentagon's brass-level was gloomy with misgivings. Next morning the whole thing exploded when Douglas MacArthur defined "the entirely new war."

The hard, shocking fact they faced was that the U.S. was out of combat-ready reserve strength. Only the 82nd Airborne Division was still left at home and at the ready. Behind them in the Army's production line was an assortment of National Guard (four divisions and spare parts) and marine outfits still in training, and the newly formed Regular 4th Division which would not be set until late spring. Equally as serious, U.S. industry had not been ordered into even a creeping mobilization. "We are moving," Mobilization Overseer Stuart Symington testified last week before the Senate Banking Committee, "from a light grey state of mobilization to dark grey."

Do Not Disturb. This sounded like murky talk to a nation whose arms crisis had been as clear as black & white since last June. Symington, testifying before a Senate committee the day after MacArthur's communique, said that "we ought to try and give present controls more chance and get a little clearer view of exactly what it is that the Defense Department wants before we, you might say, strait-jacket the economy." Essentially, the Administration had been more worried about keeping the $226 billion economy unruffled than about U.S. defenses. For example, instead of pressing the button on the much-talked-about "phantom orders"--which were supposed to put machine-tool factories to work on $750 million worth of war business almost overnight--Harry Truman's planners had been following the policy of gentling defense orders into the works so as not to disturb civilian production too much (see BUSINESS). Businessmen had asked to be told what to do and had gotten no satisfactory answers.

Partly the trouble was that the Pentagon (although it had been surveying the problem for more than a year) couldn't decide what it needed. The armed forces were burdened with an outsize crop of curbstone economists and amateur publicists who liked to talk about "what the economy will stand" and "what public opinion will approve," without knowing any of the answers. In doing so, they had been diverted from their prime function of telling the country what it needed to survive. Right after Korea, pound-foolish Louis Johnson had repentantly told the Joint Chiefs to shoot the works. Then George Marshall, taking over in September in the optimistic days of the Korean war, had ordered a careful re-sighting on all grand plans. The re-sighting held things up even more, but, the nation could only hope, made possible a more sensible program when the nation began to mobilize in earnest.

Manpower Dribble. The flow of men into the armed forces had been cut to a slow dribble. The 70,000 draft call for November had been followed by 40,000 for December and the same for January (in its peak month in 1942, the Army had drafted 450,000 men). The cutback, the Army explained, was caused by a shortage of trained instructors. It takes 14 weeks to give a soldier basic training; nowadays he must be taught, says the Army, about 25% more than soldiers of World War II, and trained to use not two weapons, as before, but eight.*

Harvard's President James Bryant Conant this week faced squarely the critical long-range problem of finding soldier material. He urged two-year service for "every young man" when he reaches 18 or graduates from high school. "I say 'every young man' advisedly," he wrote in Look. "The able-bodied are to serve in the armed forces; those physically unfit to serve in other capacities at the same pay, which should not be high. There should be no deferments for college students or anyone else."

This, he admitted, would play hob with the nation's educational institutions. "But I, for one," said Scientist Conant, "have with much reluctance come to the conclusion that such sacrifices are demanded by the extreme peril which the free world now faces."

* The eight: rifle, Browning automatic rifle, .30 caliber light and heavy machine gun, .50 caliber machine gun, mortar, rocket launcher and recoilless rifle.

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