Merger Now?

Among Army and Navy officers the hottest question of the 'week was not the atomic bomb but the merger of the armed services. It was so hot, in fact, that burly Admiral Jonas Ingram, commander of the Atlantic Fleet, angrily declared that the proposed single department was "too much in line with Hitler." The U.S. Army, favoring the merger, still had the offensive. The slower-moving, more conservative Navy, although it had had ample warning of the Army's intentions, had to fall back on denunciation while it looked around for more effective weapons.

There was a case to be made against merger. But the Senate Military Affairs Committee, listening to Navy's witnesses last week, heard no convincing arguments against the unified department.

Inviting Attention. The Navy's star witness, able Secretary Jim Forrestal, in vited the committee's attention to an alternative plan drawn for him by Ferdinand Eberstadt (investment banker and onetime vice chairman of WPB).

The Eberstadt plan called for organizing a National Security Council, on which the Secretary of State would sit with the Secretaries of War and Navy and a new Secretary for Air, and with the chairman of a new National Security Resources Board.

At this point the committee began to ask questions. Would this plan preserve the unity of action the services had worked out, laboriously and wastefully, during the war? How would the plan work, in smaller detail? Secretary Forrestal's answer was unsatisfactory. The details, he said, would have to be withheld: they were under study by the Senate and House Nav al Affairs Committees. Besides, he added, he was not actually sponsoring the plan, yet ; he just hoped that it would be studied.

Against, Not For. So the Navy had no plan: it was just against the Army's plan. Flinty Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King sailed into it with all his guns blazing. A single military commander of armed forces (distinct from the civilian President) would be "potentially a man on horseback." Furthermore, said Ernie King, without batting an eye, the merger would weaken civilian control over the armed services.

It was the committee who blinked at this observation : Admiral King was famed during the war for keeping civilian noses out of admirals' business. They blinked again when orthodox Admiral King said he thought a single department would "lend itself to the dangers of orthodoxy." But they stopped blinking and began asking angry questions when the Admiral insisted that the Navy's postwar program was not to be "adjusted downward when the Army sees fit." At that point Ernie King had walked into the blades of one of the Army's best meat-chopper arguments: George Marshall had pointed out, the week before, that the Navy had informed no Army man before setting up its $3 1/2 billion-a-year postwar naval program. Marshall's point: the taxpayer had a right to ask for a carefully coordinated defense program.

The Navy's other witness, General Alexander Archer Vandegrift, U.S.M.C., had his own argument: what would become of the Marine Corps and its esprit de corps under the merger? The Army had answered that in advance; it would go on operating as it always had, under the Navy and its Under Secretary.

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