What It Takes

The President called in the members of Congress' Armed Services Committees and talked frankly. He admitted that the U.S. military high command had seriously underestimated the speed and power of the North Korean ground attack and had gone in too slowly with too little. "Now that is being changed," he said. "We're going in with what it takes."

All week long official Washington was trying to look concerned but calm, determined but not belligerent. It was a difficult, and perhaps impossible, role to bring off. The Administration was trying to wear two faces without looking like Janus: a militant, chin-out attitude towards Korea; an unruffled, unmilitant countenance for the rest of the world to see. Harry Truman indicated he would not be stampeded into ringing all the alarm bells to put out a fuse-box fire.

Out of Reserves. The two faces resulted in some confusion: first the Administration said it would not call for reserves; next day it authorized the draft. Harry Truman announced that he had authorized the armed services to bring up their strength to a new (but undisclosed) ceiling. Under the Administration's .economy program, the combined forces now stood at 1,370,000. To reach their authorized strength of 2,006,000, the services would need to fill these gaps:

On Hand More Needed

ARMY 593,000 244,000

NAVY 427,000 240,000

AIR FORCE 350,000 152,000

Why hadn't the President called up the 26 National Guard divisions? It would provide more men than needed, and disrupt the nation's whole life. If some Guard divisions were called and not others, there would be complaints of discrimination. Explained a defense official: "We don't need great masses of men. We just need to bring some units up to strength."

On the Ground. The Army wanted at least three divisions to replace those that might be sent to Korea. The Navy was planning to take four carriers out of mothballs to ferry fighter planes to the Far East, another five when it had men to man them. The Air Force had 4,600 combat planes in storage. Pilots were on hand as soon as the money was available --since November the Air Force has had to ground 9,355 pilots because it didn't have money to keep them flying.

Both the Navy and the Air Force hoped to satisfy their specific needs--mostly in technicians--without the draft. The Army also wanted specialists, but had no hope of getting all the manpower it needed from volunteers alone. This week the first draft call went out--for 20,000 draftees for Army service. All over the nation draft boards riffled through their files, and picked names from the 1,440,000 1-A's among the nation's 9,790,000 registered 18-to 26-year-olds. They would start with the oldest first.

"Business as Usual." The draft was the Administration's most militant action, but there were others. In quiet fashion, almost stealthily, a creeping mobilization of crucial industries began (see BUSINESS). Said an official of the National Security Resources Board: "We are taking our cue from the President, who has indicated things are to be 'business as usual.'" For this attitude the Administration had explanations: it didn't want to start a wave of consumer buying, and it didn't want to give Russia an excuse for going to war.

There were voices insisting loudly that this was not enough. Snapped New York's Governor Thomas E. Dewey: "It must now be clear to all that Communist imperialism does not intend to stop with Korea. [But] we find in this country politics asr usual, business as usual, and strikes as usual." He demanded immediate curtailment of all federal expenses not essential to defense, allocation of steel and other metals to military production, halting of all "luxury production" that interfered with rearming.

How long could the Administration wear two faces at once? Like most masks, it did not fool the enemy and only encumbered the wearer, making it hard for him to step lively and surely. If Russia did not want a world war now (as the Administration assumed), then it could only holler at increased U.S. mobilization; if Russia did indeed want war, it would never be at a loss for pretexts to start one. It was elementary prudence to get readier for Armageddon--or more Koreas.

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