Finding Fighters

The plan, said General Omar Bradley, "provides a system that would require nearly every man to serve in our forces, first on full-time active duty, later as a member of a National Guard or reserve organization for a period of years. This is the cold and unalterable fact. The sooner we face it, the better chance we will have for survival."

Congress--though dead serious about rearmament--was trying hard not to face it. Especially, it hated to face aroused mothers of 18-year-olds whose angry threats filled their mailboxes. Aroused himself, Secretary of Defense George Marshall appeared before the House Armed Services Committee to fight for his U.M.S.T. bill, which would lower the draft age to 18 (TIME, Jan. 22). Marshall was the vigorous pleader of old. He was quietly bitter about the rickety state to which the Army had fallen. He pointed out that MacArthur had been forced to fill out U.S. divisions with Koreans. He was urgent. The U.S. must move men into Korea at the rate of 15,000 men a month, he explained, and even a stepped-up draft would produce only 50,000 trained soldiers a month by August.

"I Did That." Marshall was planning no short-term plans. When a Congressman questioned the low ($30 a month) pay proposed for a draftee during basic training, Marshall said: "I was thinking of the taxpayer. I want an enduring system, not one that's going to collapse of high cost." Missouri's Dewey Short, a man constitutionally opposed to universal military training, complained that the merger of the draft with U.M.T. looked like "a shotgun wedding" to him. "I did that," said George Marshall. "I'm glad you've the courage to admit it," said Short. Retorted a coldly indignant George Marshall: "I'm not admitting it. I'm telling you I did it."

After V-J day, Marshall reminded the committeemen, "Before I knew it, the whole Army had dissolved in my lap. I simply couldn't find any Army from one day to another ... If you divorce this thing, we're sunk again. I don't want to be a party to that."

Two days later, the Congressmen hopefully tackled Assistant Secretary of Defense Anna Rosenberg. How about the 799,000 4-Fs? "Here is what the country is disturbed about," explained Chairman Carl Vinson. "We read where some football player or prizefighter, able to draw $10,000 a season and perform all the work of star athletes, just hasn't got the physical strength to carry a rifle, a hand grenade, or to cook." And as for those disqualified for mental deficiencies, "even if a man can't read Latin or Greek, he can do a little fighting."

"Like Anyone Else." Mrs. Rosenberg replied that physical standards were already down to World War II levels, that mental standards were being lowered "as far as security will permit." The 4-F files were under review, she said, and she estimated that about 150,000 4-Fs could be drafted for limited service (a figure she later revised to 75,000 to 80,000). "Athletes will be regarded like anyone else," she said. "If an athlete has a punctured eardrum, he will be inducted, because men with punctured eardrums are taken."

The armed services, Anna Rosenberg explained, are frankly unenthusiastic about limited servicemen and near 4-Fs. They cannot be shifted readily; they are apt to demand costly disability benefits on discharge. The services have often found that low I.Q.s are disciplinary problems.

"Deeply Disturbed." But Chairman Vinson was still shying away from a decision on 18-year-olds ("They make splendid soldiers," said Marshall). He suggested upping the draft age to 30 and including men who had been married only since Korea. Grumbled Vinson: "As things now stand, only one out of ten men of draft age is being inducted . . . Something must be done." His Senate opposite number, Texas' Lyndon Johnson, chimed agreement, added that Americans are "genuinely disturbed" at the prospect of drafting 18-year-olds.

Said the to-the-point New York Daily News: "What's so sacred about 18? . . . Nobody likes to see U.S. boys of any age go off to or near any war. But just why this big hooptedoo about 18, as against 19? Frankly, we don't get it."

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