Passport to Citizenship

"Back in the old [Army] days," General Dwight D. Eisenhower told a Senate committee last month, "you had a tough job finding anyone in your division who could speak good English." Though the Army had never gone abroad to hire foreign mercenaries, it had long filled out its ranks with aliens living in the U.S. (In World War II, an honorable service record gave aliens citizenship in three years instead of five.) Last week, going a step further, the Defense Department announced that it would soon recruit 2,500 carefully screened displaced persons living in the U.S. zone of Germany.

The U.S. was not about to set up a mercenary Foreign Legion. The 81st Congress had laid down some specific safeguards in passing the 1950 Lodge-Philbin Act, which had been conceived and argued into law by Massachusetts' Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. He thought that the U.S. was missing an opportunity to recruit fighting men, with something to fight for, among exiles from Iron Curtain countries living as displaced persons in Germany. No more than 2,500 "skilled military specialists and technicians," unmarried and between the ages of 18 and 35, will be accepted. The men are not to serve in national groups, but will be brought to the U.S. for basic training and then sprinkled into existing units. No German nationals, no citizens of Atlantic pact or Marshall Plan countries are eligible. After five years of honorable service, each man will automatically become eligible for U.S. citizenship.

The Army, which liked the terms of the Lodge Act, is still dead set against any large-scale recruiting campaign abroad. As Ike Eisenhower warned, "When Rome went out and hired mercenary soldiers, Rome fell."

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