Training

Strong in the U. S. last week was a sense of impending crisis; stronger still was growing realization of the country's unpreparedness. In an enormous urge to action, the great clamor was to hurry up, spread military training.

>Under pressure of the emergency, the Army's authorized strength is being upped to 400,000. Resurrected was a dramatic World War I poster by James Montgomery Flagg. Twenty-three years later. Uncle Sam once more looked hard at the young men of his country, pointed a sharp, arresting finger, said "I Want YOU" (see cut).

> Conscription was grimly urged by Princeton's President Dr. Harold Willis Dodds, by Harvard's President James B. Conant. Four-hundred graduates of Eastern colleges met in New York, asked Congress to provide funds for camps similar to the Plattsburg (N. Y.) camp of 1915 (see p. 44).

>Announced by War Secretary Woodring was an authorization to Army Corps Area commanders to establish courses at Citizens' Military Training Camps, for training about 3,000 business & professional men who could pay their own expenses.

> An organization headed by Joseph Otmar Hefter of New York was recruiting men for an "American-Jewish Border Regiment," called for "young tough Jews . . . willing to face hardship, danger and death in the defense of America and of American Democracy."

^ Introduced in Congress were measures for home defense on the basis of voluntary service; ready was Colonel Julius Ochs Adler's (New York Times) bill for compulsory training. Colonel Adler said calmly that if the bill became law and Hitler remained on the loose, "We'd be an armed camp for a great many years."

>To mobilize "community man power" was the idea of Nelms Black, New York advertising man, who saw the possibilities of his neighbors' hobbies (radio, yachting, shooting, etc.) being used in home defense. Hobby-riders could provide equipment, instruction. Name of his organization: Reserve Man Power.

> Eager to help, unable to enlist, an inmate of Southern Michigan State Prison suggested through the prison paper that idle machinery left over from the last war be moved to the prison so that he and his colleagues, in their enforced idleness, could manufacture munitions & armaments.

Willing as the country was to get itself under arms, there were definite limitations last week to widespread training. Universal service, fully applied, would involve at least 7,000,000 men. With the present physical facilities and officers' corps, the Army can absorb about 50,000 new men a month.

But just as vital to the country's defense will be the training of workers in war industries. The U. S. Office of Education, which has long conducted a program of vocational training, annually turns out an approximate 500,000 men skilled as lathe operators, welders, aircraft mechanics, machinists, sheet metal workers, etc. The President wants 750,000 more workers added to the program. There are already 1,030 schools, which could add late evening and night time classes, turn out 1,250,000 skilled workers a year.

The National Youth Administration was preparing to expand its program to give 446,000 more young people a chance to learn mechanical trades. CCC camps were already training aviation mechanics, placing them in plants. Serious limit to the training of industrial recruits was a shortage of machine tools.

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