If the Nation Calls

It was a solemn meeting of the nation's wartime leaders. The President was flanked by General George Marshall, Fleet Admiral Ernest King, Home Front Czar James Byrnes. Top men of the House and Senate military affairs committees had been called in to listen. At that meeting, held at the White House one day last week, Franklin Roosevelt once again asked for a national service act.

The President read a report from Secretary Stimson. He asked Jimmy Byrnes to reiterate the needs of industry. Admiral King spoke briefly. George Marshall made the strongest appeal of all.

Said Marshall: men half sick and half frozen are being forced to fight in France and Italy because of lack of replacements. He had 431,000 men in hospitals now. Hard and costly fighting is coming up. Scrupulously staying in his place as a military leader, Marshall assured the Congressmen that he was not trying to tell them what to do; but they had given him the job of fighting a war and it was his job to tell them what he needed. He needed a national service act affecting all men & women between 18 and 60.

Same day President Roosevelt sent a formal message to Congress asking for the kind of bill his military leaders recommended, asking also that Congress take immediate action on the stopgap May-Bailey bill. In a joint letter Marshall and King once again backed him up.

To Shorten the War. The armed services, they declared, will need 900,000 new men in the next six months. Allowing for the fortunes of war, production also must be increased, not reduced, in many categories of weapons. War industries will need at least 700,000 workers.

The Navy's vast rockets program and ship-repair work have been jeopardized by shortages of manpower. Merchant shipbuilding, with its notoriously high labor turnover, will always be in a critical state while labor is free to go where it pleases. High priority programs on the Army list which are also feeling the labor pinch are small-arms ammunition, tanks, tires, cotton duck, mines, smelters, basic metal fabrications--all industries involving hard and dirty work, mostly at low pay and therefore unpopular with U.S. workers.

Administration officials say there is enough manpower to go around, but the shortages are local. Those shortages, which are critical, are now beyond control (see CANADA AT WAR). Various expedients to channel the labor supply--by cutting off raw material to nonessential industries, by ordering draft boards to get tough, by giving pep talks, showing movies, using bluff--have never been adequate and are not adequate now. The U.S. is still larded with the fat of peacetime.

As a stopgap, Army & Navy top men would agree to the May-Bailey bill, which would penalize workers in nonessential jobs and force 4-Fs into war work. But they say that the only final solution in a total war is a national service act.

The Unanswerable Question. Nevertheless--as Congressmen told the President --there was no chance of passing such an act; there was even plenty of opposition to the May-Bailey bill. There was outspoken skepticism that the Administration knew what it was talking about. The labor pinch is not so critical, said such various organizations as the N.A.M., the Socialist Party, the C.I.O., the A.F. of L., that it warrants drafting workers. According to their lights, their spokesmen protested that a labor draft would weaken the position of organized labor; that it was undemocratic; that it would lead to further regimentation of industry.

All such objections the services met with one question: if the nation can compel a man to die for his country, why can he not be compelled to work for it?

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