(See Cover)
But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll. . . .
The moral, blunt as a rifle butt, of Kipling's ballad, is that in peacetime democracies keep their little armies on starvation rations and hard words, and when war comes, wish they hadn't. After every war the U. S. has fought, it has disassembled its fighting machine, on the theory that there would be no more wars. Result is that most U. S. wars have been fought wastefully (with unnecessary loss of life) and "heroically" (inefficiently) by bungling, unkempt armies. Exception was World War I, where the A. E. F. gave a good account of itself. But even then, to get a U. S. army into the field as a fighting unit took 16 months, and only the Allies' ability to hold the Germans gave a small corps of U. S. professional officers time to whip a huge citizen army into reasonably presentable shape.
Today U. S. military history has again come full cycle. Against the threat of the most powerful war machine in the world a small professional army (214,927 in 1939) is the nucleus under a Protective Mobilization Plan (P. M. P.) for development of a force of 1,200,000. To the U. S.'s 14,079 professional Army officers, bogged for years in a slow promotion list, consistently shortchanged on military appropriations, a war-frightened Congress has this session voted $3,007,988,155, is readying $3,911,995,417 more in appropriations and authorizations. With Britain backed to the wall before Adolf Hitler's armies on land and in the air, the job of transforming those dollars into a field army must be done quickly—perhaps, if 30 Britain should lose or surrender her fleet, within six months. While President Roosevelt's Defense Commission and U. S. industry carry out their own vast mobilization, the Army must: i) list its needs, from quinine to tanks and airplanes; 2) carry out a vast building program; 3) train close to a million raw and semi-expert troops; 4) feed them, doctor them, fit them to the most complicated set of weapons in the history of warfare; 5) educate a citizenry—accustomed to regard its soldiers alternately as romantic heroes or expensive jingoistic nuisances—in what its Army (really a specialized public service like a police or fire department) is and needs to be.
Last week Civilian Aides from 44 States, nine corps areas were called to Washington to be educated by Secretary of War Stimson. In Army headquarters in the rambling wartime Munitions Building on Washington's Constitution Avenue, they also met and listened to the Army's No. 1 soldier, General George Catlett Marshall. What they saw was a rangy, lean (182 Ib.) six-footer in negligently neat mufti, a field soldier with reflective blue eyes, a short, pugnacious nose, broad, humorous mouth, a stubborn upper lip. What they heard was a dry, impersonal voice, setting out with simple precision the necessities of the U. S.'s No. 1 modern military crisis, the work that has to be done to meet it.