All Out Price

The ghastly cost of all-out war, now and for generations to come, bit deep and sharp into the awakening consciousness of the U.S. last week. Passed by the House was an $8,243,839,031 national-defense appropriation bill. When approved by the Senate and signed by the President, it will bring the U.S.'s already foreseen defense cost in World War II to $68 billion --more than two and a half times the military cost of World War I.

Still to come is Franklin Roosevelt's expanded Victory Program, reportedly to be announced within the month. A group of defense officials last week finished mulling over the plan, gave the considered opinion that it would run the cost of defeating Adolf Hitler to something between $120 and $150 billions. Even to the most figure-wise of financial experts, these figures were far beyond comprehension.

But in hearings on the defense bill, OPM made a stab at guessing what U.S. industry was in for.

In 1940, only 7% of the U.S.'s productive capacity was busy with defense work. This year it is estimated at 25%. Next year it will be 49%. In 1943, it will be 54%. What this tremendous shift will do to the U.S., in swift shortening of butter supplies in favor of guns, in great blotches of unemployment, no man had the imagination fully to realize.

Yet the job to be done has to be done right. The Third Supplemental National Defense Appropriation Bill gives ample evidence that that is what the armed services are striving to do with might & main--and with more vision than before.

A minor item in the bill is $1,556,496,246 in Lend-Lease money (including only $78,000,000 for Russia). Also in the bill is better than $1 billion for the Navy: for airplanes, arming of merchant ships, etc.

But the Army's end is the big one: $5,127,647,652. Beyond its provision for upping the strength of the Army to 2,000,000 men, the bill also shows the results of the Army's orderly ferment about the changing tactics of modern warfare: it provides for a new kind of military outfit, an organization that grows directly from military thought and experimentation in this year's maneuvers.

The new outfit is the Tank Destroyer Battalion, a fast-moving, hard-hitting team whose job is to go out and hunt tanks, not wait for them in passive defense. Brought to its most efficient peak in the Carolina maneuvers by First Army's wily Lieut. General Hugh Drum, the TD Battalion is already beyond the paper stage. The Army announced that 52 of the battalions had started organization and training, that it was abandoning its more static Tank Defense groups.

For the present, tank destroyer outfits will have to use truck-drawn cannon and the few self-propelled artillery mounts now available. Later they are likely to have 3-in. cannon mounted on medium tank chassis. And already in production is a trackless tank (TIME, Dec. 1).

For speeding up the rest of the ground forces, the Army in hearings and by press handouts announced that it was buying more than 100,000 multi-wheel-drive trucks, some 20,000 jeeps, was remodeling three more divisions (the Sixth, Seventh, Ninth) to fit the pattern of the experimental Fourth. They will become in effect half-armored outfits, with infantry to back up the tanks.

For the Air Forces the bill provides 16,000 more planes, 25 new flying fields (eleven outside the continental U.S.). It also carries funds for a mobile anti-aircraft warning service (16,000 officers and men) that seems less outlandish this week, after the U.S.'s first taste of war from the air.

To man these defenses, the Selective Service System readied a new draft call for 500,000 more men. Getting near the bottom of the draft barrel, it is preparing to review occupational deferments, is also prepared to repair minor physical defects like bad teeth and hernia to make limited-service registrants available for full military duty.

Already planning production for an Army of 3,200,000 or more, the U.S. will soon have to draw on not only the cream but the milk of its reservoir of military man power. A lot of men, already drained off into defense work, other civilian jobs that rated indulgent deferment from the draft, may now have to be diverted to the business of fighting.

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