Decision in the Air

The only real argument over the record-breaking, $15.9 billion defense budget (see above) was how the money should be divided up among the services. The House bill gave Army, Navy & Air Force just about what the President had asked for--with one significant difference.

The difference, explained Representative George Mahon, reflected the conviction of the committeemen that "the only force under heaven that can now deliver the quick and devastating blow is the United States Air Force." Said Mahon: "We put the emphasis of air power in this bill."

More Planes, Please. Mahon had hardly completed his mild, deliberate introduction to next year's blueprint for defense when Georgia's crusty old Carl Vinson took the floor. A smart, longtime supporter of a big Navy who had come to a realization of the importance of air power, Carl Vinson was not arguing against the air. He simply wanted more planes for the Navy's air arm. The bill, he said, pointing an accusing finger at Mahon, would put the replacement rate for aircraft so low that the Navy would be down to 4,000 planes within six years. Cried he: "They are stagnating the Navy air arm and letting the naval operating air force die on the vine . . ." Vinson's quarrel was not with Mahon but with President Truman and the Budget Bureau, for it was they who had trimmed down the Navy's requests.

Super-Carrier, Too. Vinson was, in fact, firing without bothering to sight in on the target. Actually no service had much to complain about. Under the committee bill there would be:

P: An Army of 677,000 men with twelve divisions and a budget of $4.5 billion P: An Air Force of 440,000 men with 9,875 aircraft in 58 groups (instead of the 48 the President had recommended) and a budget of $6.2 billion--up about $800 million from the President's budget. P: A Navy and Marine Corps of 527,000 men with 731 ships (including eight heavy carriers), 7,783 planes and a budget of $5 billion.

There was even $43 million in the bill for the Navy's controversial 65,000-ton, $189 million supercarrier, from which the Navy hopes to fly atom-carrying bombers in competition with the Army's B-36. And this week the keel was laid without ceremony at Newport News, Va. (One flying admiral put the case for the A-bomb carrier in horsy terms: "You don't ride your racehorse to the Kentucky Derby; you carry him in a van.")

"Not Our Boys." As the debate rolled on, Missouri's knob-nosed Clarence Cannon pitched in. As chairman of the House Appropriations Committee he held too important a post to make a foolish, tactless speech. But Missourian Cannon made one anyhow, with a blast that all but declared war in the first breath, antagonized all possible allies in the next.

Cried he: "Moscow and every other center in Russia we must hit within one week after the war starts and it can be done only by land-based planes such as we now have. We will not necessarily have to send our land army over there. In the next war, as in the last war, let us equip soldiers from other nations and let them send their boys into the holocausts instead of sending our own boys . . .

"We will absolutely demoralize the enemy. We will destroy all his lines of communications. We will blast at the centers of operation and then let our allies send the army in--other boys, not our boys, to hold the ground we win."

Moscow pounced quickly on Cannon's remarks to prove to its own people that the U.S. planned an attack on Russia, and to tell Western Europeans that the U.S. wanted them to fight the ground war if it came. If Cannon thought he was stating the case for the Air Force over their naval competitors, he was mistaken. The Air Force's Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg was indeed confident that his airmen could reach almost anywhere with their intercontinental B-36 bombers, starting from U.S. bases. But no responsible airman claimed that the Air Force could win a war without the naval ships and planes to keep command of the seas and an army to finish the job by invasion.

In a Box. The Cannon blast apparently had no influence on the House, one way or the other; it was just a low-order expression in an isolationist side street. When the vote came, the House refused to boost the Navy's air appropriations and rolled through the full $15.9 billion appropriation unchanged.

Unless the Senate trimmed the Air Force back down to the size Harry Truman requested, Defense Secretary Louis

Johnson would find himself in an awkward box. He met the issue head-on at a press conference with a classic head-ducking remark. "I am supporting the President's program," announced Johnson flatly. Then he added warily: "And I'm not quarreling with Congressmen."*

*Perhaps an unwitting paraphrase of an old congressional straddle: "Some of my friends are for it and some of my friends are against it, and I'm for my friends."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.