Bleats from the Guard

In fine, fustian fettle, Harry Truman stepped on to the rostrum at Washington's Mayflower Hotel last week and told about his first military experience in the National Guard. "I was 21," said the President, and all decked out in a handsome blue uniform complete with "red stripes down the britches." He wore it to visit his old, red-haired grandmother, Mrs. Solomon Young, whose farm had been looted by Federal soldiers during the Civil War. "Harry," she said, looking him over carefully, "that's the first time since 1865 that a blue uniform has been in my house. Don't bring it here any more." Some 400 delegates assembled for the National Guard Association's 73rd Conference roared appreciatively, and then got back to business. For three days, they had filled the air with speeches and resolutions protesting the treatment the National Guard has been getting from the Army.

The Guard thought the Pentagon was out to destroy its units and break it up. Ever since Korea, said Major General Ellard A. Walsh, head of the association, the Army has made it a policy to raid the Guard to find replacements for the troops in Korea. Morale was dropping, the Guard was losing its identity. Some units, said Walsh, had been stripped of up to 70% of their key personnel, and had endured levies "far in excess of a fair share." The Guard wanted it stopped. "Wise commanders," said Senator Ed Martin, himself a former commander of Pennsyl vania's 28th Guard Division, know that men "attain greater gallantry in battle when they fight by the side of comrades who know and understand them."

Actually, the Army, wary of the National Guard's political pc-wer, has taken from it-as few men as possible. When replacements were desperately needed in Korea, a good many specialized officers and noncoms were taken from small, unassigned outfits and from the two divisions in strategic reserve (the 31st and 47th). But the other Guard divisions on active duty -the 40th and 45th (in Japan) and the 43rd and 28th (assigned to Europe) have been trained as units and left intact. Nearly all the troops taken from these four combat divisions were draftees, not Guardsmen.

The bleats from the National Guard Association are caused by the knowledge that most professional military leaders consider the Guard an uneconomical and militarily obsolete organization. As the U.S. tightens up its defense plans, the Guard is bound to suffer. Universal Military Training might spell the Guard's end. The Guard, in short, isn't what it was in Harry Truman's grandmother's day.

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