Where Do We Go From Here?

(See Cover)

The country was not yet preparing for Armageddon; it was merely trying to win a dirty, small-bore war in Korea. As of last week, before the President sent his message to Congress, even this effort was on a minor scale. For obvious reasons there was no thundering of a war machine: no thundering war machine existed.

Navy and Air Force lifted some of their World War II equipment out of mothballs. Aircraft companies began stripping plastic covers off old Corsairs, Hellcats, Bearcats, B-26s, B-29s. The Independence class carrier Bataan had been reactivated, modernization of the old (1942) Essex was stepped up to a round-the-clock operation.

These sounds across the nation were only an industrial murmur. The most reverberating martial noises came from the West Coast. For several days last week, vehicles rolled along Route 101 from the Marines' Camp Pendleton to the Navy's station at San Diego. Forty-five-ton Pershing tanks lumbered across the beach and into LCTs. Buses disgorged men in green camouflaged uniforms who boarded attack transports.

Transports were combat-loaded, i.e., "backwards," kitchen gear put aboard first because it probably would be needed last; assault vehicles loaded last so they would be on top and could be spewed out onto the grey ships. On the quay stood a few tight knots of women. The men were the ist Provisional Marine Brigade, well-trained and well-equipped but fewer than 5,000 strong. Their commander told them: "There will be casualties among you." At week's end, heavily convoyed, the expedition departed.

Great Hopes. From West Coast ports sailed two carriers laden with planes. Farther westward, occasional warships crept into Pearl Harbor, vanished into the reaches of the Pacific. Through Hawaii flowed the other, inevitable, steady stream of war--commercial airliners out of the Far East carrying hundreds of civilian evacuees. Two airborne arrivals flew directly on to Washington. They were Generals J. Lawton Collins and Hoyt S. Vandenberg, chiefs of the nation's ground and air forces, fresh from consultation with Douglas MacArthur. Their colleague, Admiral Forrest Sherman, was in Washington consulting with Congressmen. The day after the Korean Reds breached the 24th Division's line along the Kum River (see WAR IN ASIA), Collins and Vandenberg landed in Washington with this word for reporters: "Our troops are doing damn well and everything will come out all right."

This was everyone's great hope. But in the third week of the "police action" in Korea, with the policeman still being roughed up by the thugs he had gone to arrest, the details of just how the military expected to bring such hopes to realization were far from clear.

Nor was it clear just what had happened. Aside from the obvious fact that they were outnumbered, why were U.S. troops being pushed around in Korea? Why weren't there more troops? Why, after spending $50 billions in four years, was the U.S. so badly prepared? Why was the machine so inadequate? And now, how long would "this thing" last? What would it take to win. whatever needed to be won --how much money, how many tanks, how many planes, how many men?

The Unmaking of an Army. In a spacious office of the Pentagon, sharpening his own pencils, frugally turning out unnecessary lights, adored by his secretaries and subordinates and admired by his colleagues, sat the nation's highest military official. He knew some of the answers. The son of a schoolteacher, a graduate of West Point, and one of the great Allied commanders of World War II, General Omar N. Bradley had become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Over the past year, his grey, sad and knobby face had appeared dozens of times in the committee rooms of congressional committees. Always he was listened to; sometimes he was heeded.

To understand what had happened, Bradley could, if he would, refer inquirers back to some recent history, to wit, the weeks immediately following World War II. He might have pointed out how the U.S. destroyed and left strewn around the globe billions of dollars worth of arms and equipment. It was too expensive to bring the stuff home; it would not be needed anyhow in the long years of peace which lay ahead. No more would big military forces be needed. In response to demands from home which shook U.S. politicians to their shoes, the victorious U.S. military force had been demobbed. Bradley knew the story well. He had had to stand by and watch the unmaking of that mighty Army. Appointed head of the Veterans Administration, he had cushioned the shock for thousands of civilian soldiers returning to civilian life.

Swish of the Ax. But the most critical decision was made in 1948, when peace was no longer a sure thing but only an outside possibility. Harry Truman had made that decision in a presidential election year. He had rejected the recommendations of Omar Bradley, his other military chiefs, and his Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, who had set the minimum cost of an adequate military force at $18 billion. Such an expenditure could only be borne by jettisoning some of the promises of Mr. Truman's Fair Deal. The President ordered his budgetmakers to cut the military figure to $14.3 billion.

The blame could not be laid solely on Harry Truman. His was a popular policy. Such economizing had the support not only of the Fair Dealers; many a conservative was for that kind of saving, arguing that the military always asked for more than they needed anyway. The military gritted its teeth and went along. Omar Bradley, who had asked for an Army of 837,000 as the minimum that would be needed just to perform "an emergency, one-shot mission," agreed to an Army of 677,000 because, he said, he recognized the limits of what a nation could spend for security "without imperiling its economic survival." His words illustrated the country's dilemma.

So with the tight-lipped compliance of the late James Forrestal, the slash was made.

In more recent months, as the cold war got hotter, a Secretary of Defense might justifiably have asked for another examination of the policy of economy. Louis Johnson, Forrestal's successor, finally did, but only after he was prodded into it and then in a not-very-loud-voice (he asked for $350 million more). Up to that point the only sounds from Louis Johnson's office had been the swish of the ax and Louis Johnson's reassuring roars that he was simply cutting off fat, never touching a muscle.

A House Without Utility. This might all be understandable, or at least explainable. A little harder to understand was how the variation between $18 billion and $14.3 billion could make so much difference--the difference, perhaps, between the prompt nabbing of an international felon in Mr. Truman's police action and what was actually happening. The money finally budgeted for national defense was no niggling sum; it was one-third of the national budget.

The situation, in some respects, was comparable to building an expensive new house appointed with everything but electricity. Foundation, overhead, framework, maintenance swallowed up the bulk of the costs. Comparatively small expenditures after that were what provided real utility.

The original "hard core" recommendation of the military chiefs would have bought twelve divisions, 420 combat ships including 16 major carriers, a Marine Corps of 98,000. It would also have bought the 70 air groups recommended by the President's own air policy (Finletter) commission, a congressional committee, and by the House three times, resoundingly.

The week the North Koreans struck, the last of 14 large carrier air groups was being decommissioned. The Valley Forge, with the eleven other warships of the Seventh Task Fleet, was the only carrier in Far Eastern waters. In the week when the U.S. embarked on its police action, it had only seven large carriers out of the 20 it had at the end of World War II. Half of its ten divisions were pinned down in occupation duties. The troops available were scarcely strong enough to back the nation's global commitments. The Forrestal budget would at least have given the armed forces the extra competence they needed to move four to six divisions anywhere, to meet an emergency.

A House Haunted. The effects of economy, graphic in general, were even more discouraging in detail. The details were in reports of exercises curtailed, of research and weapon development squeezed down, procurement postponed and pared. New weapons, hopefully discussed, were still mostly only on drawing boards or in the head of Vannevar Bush.

Last October, speaking before a House committee investigating the B-36 controversy, General Collins remarked: "We [the ground forces] have also had to operate on limited funds for antiaircraft and for research and development, particularly in the guided-missiles field ... Only day before yesterday, en route from Japan, I stopped at the Army's Detroit tank arsenal for a few hours and saw our proposed changes in tank design. These plans are splendid and show we have the know-how. Only one element is lacking--the money. However, if the funds were made available tomorrow, it would still be two years before new and improved tanks would be in production."

Such statements, shrugged off at the time, echoing through the records, came back to haunt the policymakers as Russian tanks, plowing through U.S. ground defenses, rolled south. Because of economies, at the beginning of the fight U.S. troops in Korea had no adequate supply of 3-5-in. bazookas which will penetrate eleven inches of tank steel.

But Not North Korea. But outside of economies, the nation was simply not prepared to fight this kind of war. It was caught up by new doctrines. It had been waiting for an all-out atomic war. The great tool was to be the B-36. It was that kind of war that Louis Johnson had in mind when he said: "I want Joe Stalin to know that if he starts something at 4 o'clock in the morning the fighting power and strength of America will be on the job at 5 o'clock." The joke going around the Pentagon was: "Louis said we could lick the Russians--he didn't mean the North Koreans." In short, the U.S. was at least partly prepared for a thunderous Armageddon. It was not prepared at all for the North Koreans.

Gaping Limitations. It could be said for Omar Bradley, the old infantryman, that he had not made the mistake. He had preached an infantryman's belief in the foot soldier. "Air power, like every other weapon," he wrote, "has gaping limitations for war as we shall know it for many years to come . . . We shall once more be forced to gain the inevitable victory over our dead bodies--those of our soldiers on the ground."

Where Bradley had erred, insofar as coping with the present situation was concerned, was in his concentration on Western Europe. It was true that he saw the Communist menace in Asia. He wanted to draw some kind of a line there. He thought the U.S. should at least send a military.mission to the Chinese Nationalist government on Formosa. On that point he was out-talked by Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

But it also appeared that General Bradley had not fully anticipated the extent of the military job which U.S. troops, planes and ships might be called upon to perform in Asia, where Russia saw and was now exploiting the chance to move in force without committing any Russians, at the same time effectually sucking in U.S. military strength.

The unostentatious, cool, soft-spoken tactician, who led the II Corps in Africa and Sicily and commanded the Twelfth Army Group in France in World War II, had never been in the Pacific until February of this year. Then he made a ten-day trip to the Far East. He had found U.S. troops in Japan "well-equipped, well-trained," he said, "but unfortunately poorly housed."

Well-equipped for what? Certainly not for what happened a scant five months after his return, when the housing of the 24th Division became suddenly not only poor but deplorable.

To the Point of Exhaustion. A thoroughly honest man, Bradley would no doubt agree that such questions were embarrassingly hard to answer. But there was a more formidable question. What did the situation require now?

No exact answer could be given. Since Russia held the initiative, it depended on what Russia would do next. The argument was being made that Korea might actually be the beginning of Russia's all-out assault on the Western democracies and that nothing less than total U.S. mobilization was adequate to the crisis.

There was some justification for such reasoning. Suppose the Red-led troops of Communist China were determinedly and ceaselessly thrown into Korea against U.S. forces never able to do better than just hold the dike. Suppose such pressure was exerted against Indo-China and Formosa to the point of ultimate U.S. exhaustion. U.S. military strength, worn down by attrition faster than it could be built up, would scarcely have the reserve strength left to oppose 175 Russian divisions in Europe.

Creeping Mobilization. But total mobilization at this juncture would put under arms millions of men whose military services are not yet required. The U.S. would be top-heavy with a military burden which indeed might wreck it.

The job was twofold: first, to win in Korea against the only enemy so far in gun sight--the North Koreans. Second, never to forget the possibility of all-out war, while at the same time trying to maintain some fiscal equilibrium.

For job No. 1, the requirements which Bradley and his colleagues gave to the President approximated, ironically enough, what the U.S. would have had in its military locker if Harry Truman had listened to his Defense Secretary in 1948. Official estimates, always subject to change, are that it will take six divisions to stabilize a Korean line of defense and turn the tide.

For these troops in battle the Army would need casual replacements (euphemism for men who take the places of the wounded and dead). Troops would have to be sent to Japan to replace those MacArthur will have sent to Korea. Regular Army divisions, now at about 70% of their strength, would be increased to a full 18,000 each. To these will have to be added supporting artillery, engineers, antiaircraft outfits, etc. Certain National Guard regiments and battalions would be mobilized and fully equipped, two more regular divisions would be added to the Army's ten. Three divisions would be set up as a base for further manpower expansion--to keep creeping mobilization abreast of creeping crisis. In round numbers the immediate requirements would probably total 636,000 men.

Creeping Costs. How many tanks, how many bazookas, how many recoilless rifles, how many planes, how many bombs, how many carriers, how many cargo ships, were questions not even the experts could answer yet. The needs could not yet be measured in dollars & cents. On a rush basis, costs would be high. The overall cost of limited mobilization and stepped-up procurement would certainly leave the country with a total defense bill more comparable to the $18 billion the Defense Department had asked for two years ago.

The cost of these preparations plus the "dirty, small-bore war," even if it spread no farther than Korea, might add at least $10 billion to the nation's already outsize 1951 budget.

Something for History. How, meanwhile, was the U.S. to stay strong? This was a problem for extraordinary judgment, both in matters military and matters economic. Obviously, the nation's strategic air power must not be neglected. The error had not been the continued development of strategic air power, which might continue to forestall an Armageddon. The error lay in failing to maintain a balanced military force, which would also have meant balancing the consuming necessities of that military force with the civilian economy.

That equation would involve austerities, if not hardships. It was significant that Harry Truman now conferred with his fellow Missourian, Omar Bradley, every morning regularly at 9 o'clock. It was significant that Bradley sat in at some Cabinet meetings. The country's business until recently had been good living. Now the country's business was preparing to fight.

The problems of trying to keep a balanced military force on hand, of acting as liaison between the J.C.S. and the White House, were the thankless responsibilities of Omar Bradley.

Not old (57), he was spare as a cornstalk. His greyness of face was due to an intestinal bug which he had picked up during his most recent trip to Japan. Partly because of his own demands to be shown everything, he was sorely overworked. He had been through years of terrifying strain. Once he said he did not think he could keep it up "if the end weren't in sight." By the end he meant his date of retirement from the J.C.S.: August 1951. His deep-seated calm probably accounted for his durability.

Not a bookish man, plain and homely, he holds to concrete propositions which he pursues with earnest intent. He was pursuing a concrete proposition a year ago when, pleading for military funds for the North Atlantic pact nations, he said: "With our allies, strong or weak as they may be, we face a long period of tension . . . We can surely anticipate that any aggressor will alternately press and quell the crises, hoping to hold the signatory powers in perpetual irresolution. But irresolution ... is born of fear and selfishness, and of such meanness that all despise it. Our rise to leadership must be attended with such courage as will ever give it first rank in the history of great actions."

As he continued to pursue the proposition even in the most humiliating week of the Korean war, anxiety but no irresolution sat on Omar Bradley.

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