Hemisphere Defense

VOLUME 166

NUMBER 1

JULY 1940

BY LOUIS JOHNSON

The Assistant Secretary of War

ON April 9, 1940, Germany occupied Denmark. On that day, the present war jumped the Atlantic Ocean. Greenland is America. Denmark, its erstwhile owner, has lost her sovereignty. Who will rule over Greenland is the business of America.

On May 10, 1940, the German blitzkrieg flashed into the Netherlands. On that day the war was brought within seven hundred miles of the Panama Canal. The Dutch West Indies are in the Western Hemisphere. The swastika now flies over Holland. Who may try to take over these possessions is the concern of the free American Republics.

In the hands of an un-American power, these parcels of New World territory may prove dangerous to the security of the entire twenty-one American Republics. To talk of oceans as formidable barriers against a war three thousand miles away is therefore empty prattle. The guns may not yet be shooting, but reverberations from the shock of battle in Western Europe we feel now in the Americas.

The security of this hemisphere depends on the maintenance of two fundamental conditions: first, a Panama Canal open for the transit of the United States fleet; second, an America that denies aggressors operation of bases anywhere in the western world. So long as these requirements are met, the Americas will be safe from a foreign aggressor.

Traditionally, the Navy has always been our first line of defense. It remains so today. But it is a one-ocean Navy, with danger lurking in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. To divide our fleet would court disaster. It is a sound naval doctrine that a second-best Navy is as valueless as a second-best poker hand. We must be able to move it promptly, in its entirety, wherever it may be needed. The importance of the Panama Canal for this purpose becomes obvious.

Within American waters, the United States Navy probably could oppose successfully any single fleet which can now be brought against it. We cannot feel assured, however, that it could deny access to this hemisphere under all conditions. The recent trend of world affairs has disclosed possible naval combinations of greatly superior strength not to be lightly discounted. Years are required to effect material increases in naval forces. We can scarcely afford to stake our existence as a free people on a single barrier.

Copyright 1940, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

The Atlantic Ocean never has been an insurmountable obstacle. It has been jumped before. In the War of 1812, the British landed troops along Chesapeake Bay because our navy was too small, and marched on to Washington. During the War between the States, the French dropped anchor in Mexican waters and set up a puppet state in that country because we were too busy fighting elsewhere. What has been done before may be done again.

II

As was recently demonstrated in Europe, even vastly superior naval power is not a certain denial of invasion. Warfare has definitely entered the third dimension. To be sure, direct violation of continental America by air is impractical today, whatever it may become tomorrow. The danger lies in the establishment of enemy intermediate bases in such localities as Greenland, Bermuda, the West Indies, and the northern coast of South America to the east; or in Alaska, Hawaii, and similar areas to the west. The complete denial of such bases to an aggressor is beyond the unsupported capacity of the Navy. Recourse must then be had to our Army.

In furtherance of the common objective, the first duty delegated to the Army is the provision of garrisons in our overseas possessions for the protection of our naval installations. This project is nearing completion. The Hawaiian Islands now constitute a real Gibraltar in the Pacific. Recent additions to our garrison in the Panama Canal Zone have rendered it reasonably secure except from landbased air attacks, and we are taking steps that will soon protect us against that contingency. Material increases in our military forces in Puerto Rico have helped to convert the Caribbean Sea into an American lake, thus adding to the defense of the all-important Canal. An air outpost will soon be developed in Alaska. The objective has been nearly reached, but the accomplishment has absorbed nearly one third of our active military strength.

The second task confronting the Army is the protection of America against raids. In pursuance of this end, the Army and Navy, acting as a team, must deny an aggressor bases from which he can institute an attack on the Canal or against any one of the American Republics. The protective wing thus spread over the Western Hemisphere is by no means entirely altruistic. It is indicated by stern military necessity. The establishment of an enemy base anywhere in the Americas is a definite and serious threat against the United States. If we cannot wholly prevent such landings by sea or air, at the very minimum we must be fully prepared to eject the invader promptly.

For this purpose we must have a small, adequately trained, properly armed, highly mobile, seasoned force capable of acting instantly in the event of an emergency. With this requirement in mind, the War Department, with additional funds authorized by the President last September, organized five triangular or streamlined divisions. These units are now equipped with modern material and have undergone a six months’ period of intensive field training. As compared to the World War divisions, an actual increase in fire power has been coupled with a decrease of nearly two thirds in personnel. Mobility has been greatly accentuated. The triangular division includes no animals of any kind. All loads are carried or drawn by automotive equipment. Increased appropriations for the new fiscal year will enable the Army to create four more of these modern military teams, or a total of nine compact fighting units. Note, however, that this force will not greatly exceed that employed for the subjugation of Norway.

Another valuable asset is our mechanized cavalry brigade. Its basic arm is the combat car, in effect a light, fast tank. These modern chariots are supplemented by scout cars, lightly armored vehicles, whose mission is to contact the enemy, determine his intentions, and thus pave the way for attack, and by highly mobile artillery to support the effort. Motorized infantry has recently been added to this mechanized brigade. Within a few months we expect to expand this unit into a division. It will be the fastest and hardest-hitting force in our Army. However, it will not match even the mechanized force used by the British in Belgium.

To round out the national-defense team, we must have a highly effective air force. The ability to deny the American skies to all possible aggressors is beyond our immediate capacity. For the world of today, our air power is small indeed. The President’s expansion program aims to correct this deficiency, but no matter how we try we must reconcile ourselves to some delay. Appropriations cannot be translated into planes and engines or pilots and mechanics in a month, or even in a year. Planes cannot be bought at the counter. Engines are not available in factories. Pilots cannot be recruited from chauffeurs. Airplane mechanics cannot be picked up in automobile garages. We cannot escape the time factor.

In addition to the Air Corps, we need anti-aircraft in quality and quantity to protect our land forces and installations from air attack. Although our strength in this field is today inadequate, within the next year we can be assured of greatly increased numbers of necessary weapons in this field.

The mass use of combat aviation in other parts of the world is no immediate threat to America. No aggressor can now operate against the Americas in great numbers. Before he could do so in the near future he would have to acquire bases on this hemisphere. To deny him such steppingstones is the foundation of hemisphere defense; and to do so successfully we dare not depend on air power alone, particularly since it is not now obtainable; nor upon passive antiaircraft defense, for the production of anti-aircraft artillery is another of our narrow bottlenecks; nor upon either of them alone, even if fully available. Successful defense is a team effort consisting of a compact, properly balanced force of all arms of all services, for land, air, and sea warfare.

III

Another problem confronting the War Department is the provision of a basic force which can be expanded to meet the full needs of a grave emergency. As already indicated, our primary M-day force is our Regular Army. It must be kept in a continual state of readiness. The supplementary M-day force is the National Guard. Its units are now receiving modern equipment in quantity, but it will be many months before the project is completed. Next August, National Guard organizations throughout the country will engage in intensive field exercises in conjunction with the Regular Army triangular divisions. The total number of men involved will exceed three hundred thousand. Twenty-one days will be utilized for this purpose instead of the usual fourteen.

We should not forget, however, that this is the first occasion in our peacetime history that such extensive field training has been undertaken. We should not expect seasoned, experienced soldiers from a three-week period in the field, but we should get more satisfactory results than we had in the past. What in the last five years have been known as military manœuvres were in fact little more than troop assemblies. The National Guard has been termed ‘Minute Men.’ If rushed into campaign conditions without adequate equipment or additional training to crush a stalwart foe, they might not last very much longer. The Dutch commander-in-chief recently said of his citizen soldiers: ‘ They held on bravely against an overwhelming foe, but they were not equal to modern weapons.’ We must assure ourselves without delay that these words will never apply to us.

The Officers’ Reserve Corps constitutes a reservoir of about one hundred thousand commissioned personnel who have received a considerable amount of training. These patriotic individuals, who have so generously contributed of their time, will meet the increased need for officers to man our wartime expansion. In many cases their military knowledge is largely confined to theory. Comparatively few have had any extended active service with troops. Many of them will be given the opportunity to take part in the manœuvres this summer. A greatly increased number will soon be offered active service for a period of six months in connection with scheduled increases in the Regular Army. And yet the majority will entirely lack troop experience. Leadership and technique cannot be acquired solely from the careful perusal of books.

The most serious of our nationaldefense problems lies in the procurement of munitions. We must assure ourselves that the Regular Army and the National Guard, our Initial Protective Force, can take the field at a moment’s notice, properly armed and equipped. We must meet their requirements in munitions so that they will not later be overpowered because of lack of supplies and equipment. We must be prepared to meet the needs of wartime augmentations to our armed forces. In short, we must provide emergency equipment for five hundred thousand men, their maintenance in the field, and the prompt supply of an expanding wartime army of not less than one million men. This project, in all its ramifications, is known as the Protective Mobilization Plan.

To accomplish this end, we not only must provide the existing force with a complete supply of modern arms and equipment, but must accumulate without delay a war-reserve stock of items not immediately available from commercial sources on the outbreak of war. If a million men are to spring to arms overnight, the arms must be on hand for them to ‘spring to.’ Because munitions are quickly expended when guns begin to shoot, it is necessary that there be enough on hand to tide over the early months of battle. In simple terms, an adequate war-reserve stock for our country should include enough munitions to maintain a force of one million men for a period of at least six months.

This equipment we do not have. Given sufficient time, the appropriations recently made by Congress will eventually provide the more critical portions of this material. But military arms and equipment cannot be bought in the open market. We have enough money to buy anything that is for sale, but munitions are not available in a warehouse. We have the capacity to build them, but we cannot do that in a hurry. Weeks, months, and in most cases a year or two may elapse before we can get all the military equipment we need.

IV

The service of supply has assumed a rôle in the warfare of today at least coequal with that of the combatant forces. Nations have learned that, in general, it takes twice as long to manufacture, assemble, distribute, and issue to the soldier his equipment as it does to make him a well-trained and proficient fighting man. It takes time to produce tanks, artillery, gas masks, and other munitions for which no counterpart can be found in ordinary civilian production.

The question naturally arises as to why our Army is still threadbare in view of the military appropriations made during recent years. Under our budgeting system, funds are allocated by law for specific purposes. During the past ten years, a total of only about one quarter of a billion dollars has been allotted to the purchase of new equipment. Including replacement of worn-out items and modernization of armament left over from the World War, the total amount applied to equipment has been only about five hundred million dollars. Nearly half of this sum was not made available until July 1, 1939. Modern armies cannot be created with such limited funds.

The amount appropriated for all military purposes since 1930 totals slightly more than four and one-half billion dollars. Approximately one half of this amount has been devoted to the pay of personnel. The American soldier receives a minimum of twenty-one dollars a month. According to wage standards in this country, surely seventy cents a day is not excessive. Yet in comparison with other armies of the world this constitutes very high recompense. One European government pays its soldiers sixty-five cents a month. Food, clothing, training, shelter, maintenance, repair, and similar items account for the remainder of military expenditures in our Army.

In 1939 this nation expended approximately 10 per cent of its total income on national defense. Only two important nations in the world, New Zealand and South Africa, have spent proportionally smaller amounts. In 1922 we voluntarily abandoned armed security in naïve confidence that a cynical world would emulate our example. Since then, the premium on our national-defense policy was not paid. Now we must make up the deficits with compound-interest charges attached.

This program, of course, will cost money, and, based on our own standards, more than any previous military expansion. It must be remembered, however, that compared to other countries we have only begun to build up our sinews of men and supplies. What is an appropriation of approximately two billion dollars to our American economy, which is running above seventy billion dollars today? Contrast it, for instance, with what Germany is spending on her munitions. It is estimated that, before 1939, 80 per cent of her forty-billion-dollar economy went into the production of munitions. Since then she has added the munitions of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland, Belgium, and their arsenals and their productive facilities, including such extensive works as the Skoda in Czechoslovakia.

Preparedness is the most important challenge to America today. We must achieve it at whatever cost is necessary. Extensive as our program may be today, it might become but a drop in the bucket compared with what we may have to pay if we do not utilize our brains, our energy, and our resources toward getting ready now.

Our bottleneck is not money but time — time to convert money into guns and ammunition; time to erect factories and build airplanes; time to train and develop skilled labor and efficient management in the art of munitions manufacture; time to do those things which we have so long neglected. If we do not meet this challenge, we may not only have to pay the defaulted premiums on our national insurance, but have to face the loss of the policy as well.

V

To equip our Army, we need seventy thousand different items. The vast majority of them are commercial in character and are easily obtainable in the open market. There are, however, about thirty-seven hundred of them that present special problems.

Of these thirty-seven hundred, twentyfive hundred are in ordinary commercial use, but the demands for them in quantity in time of war might become so great as to impose a severe burden on industry. To avoid this contingency, thousands of manufacturing plants have been surveyed and production schedules worked out that will take care of our full needs.

The last group of twelve hundred articles presents a more critical problem. It includes items not in ordinary use. For many there are no commercial demands. These are the munitions that are critical in building for national defense, and of which we must accumulate an adequate reserve.

For the production of these items we cannot depend on our government arsenals alone, since they were intended to be little more than experimental laboratories. For years they have operated on a restricted basis with antiquated facilities and reduced personnel. Their activities have consisted principally of the maintenance and repair of left-overs from the World War. Their equipment is being rapidly replaced and their capacity enlarged. They will soon be producing at accelerated rates, but at best they can satisfy little more than 10 per cent of our war needs. For the bulk of our munitions we must therefore turn to private industry.

We have no Krupp, Schneider, no Vickers in America; no munitions industry comparable to those abroad engaged almost wholly, in time of peace, in the production of implements of war. We must, therefore, rely on the conversion of our civilian plants into munitions factories. It is obvious that an industry geared to an economy of peace cannot be converted to war production overnight.

Recently we have placed educational orders with a number of plants, enabling them to obtain manufacturing experience on a limited scale. What is even more important, a small number of machine tools have been secured and production studies made. When quantity production became necessary last fall, dividends in both time and money savings accrued to the government. Unfortunately, educational orders could be extended to only six companies last year, hence the cumulative benefit is meagre today. This year, increased funds have resulted in one hundred and fifteen orders. Within the next few months we expect to fortify our munitions front in this manner with an even greater number of firms.

Current educational orders are of great importance in assuring a revival of the munitions art in our industrial structure, but they do not furnish the arms and equipment needed today. For this purpose we must discover facilities capable of manufacturing the required items with as little modification of existing methods as is feasible. Each day saved goes on the credit side of the master ledger under the heading of time.

In the solution of our munitions problems, industry will be accorded every possible assistance by the government. Private business will not be expected to modify its equipment or expand its facilities without financial assistance. The demand is periodic and may be of short duration. Major capital investments cannot be made in projects of this nature without entailing the probability of serious losses. Therefore the government will make available funds to assist in the conversion or expansion of plants and the erection of such new installations as are found to be necessary.

We must move fast. How to get up speed is largely a matter for the industry itself to work out, but the government, too, is eager and ready to cooperate. Yes, it will take more machinery, more floor space, more skilled and semi-skilled workers, but it will also take greater freedom in the negotiation of contracts between the armed forces and industry and more flexibility in the expenditure of funds. In the latter essentials toward speed-up, the government itself must lead the way. The War Department will do all in its power to simplify and accelerate procurement procedure.

The chief impetus to speed up must come from the continuous use of the tools and machinery already available in our factories. There are limits to the endurance of human beings, but machines do not wear out readily. We must prepare to put on two shifts and even three shifts a day to the full twenty-four-hour maximum, and seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

VI

The War Department is exerting every effort to expedite production of these items so essential to national defense. In 1917-1918, we managed to shift into high gear on the munitions front in about twelve months, but only with the aid of a previous three-year period of extensive Allied armament purchases from our industries. During the past ten months comparatively few such purchases have been made in this country. A generation ago we had a large munitions industry; today we have practically none. Even with our best efforts, we cannot hope, under existing conditions, to match our former achievement. Our industrial plants can produce any article we require, but they cannot put ’time’ on the assembly line.

Hemisphere defense today must consider not only men, bases, and armament, but also a new technique of war which does not necessarily depend on the crossing of oceans by hostile ships, planes, or transports. Air bases are not the only foothold we must deny a wouldbe aggressor. There have been significant victories during the present war on land, on sea, and in the air by force of arms, but there also have been considerable contributions by the fifth column, the Trojan horse of modern combat.

The greatest danger to the Panama Canal is not in military force from the land, the sea, or the air. It lies in sabotage from within. A vessel might be blown up in the gates. Time bombs might be dropped in the locks. Dams might be blown up or other vital installations damaged or destroyed. Steps have been taken to minimize or nullify efforts along this line, but the possibility of such action cannot be completely denied. As an additional precaution and to provide greater facilities in the Canal, the construction of another set of locks has been authorized. However, under present plans, they will not be ready for use for five or six years. Again, the persistent factor of time!

In the stables of the twenty-one American Republics there must be no stalls reserved for Trojan horses. On our American picket line there can be no room for these instruments of disruption and revolution. They do not advertise their presence. Their operations are insidious. Industrial dissatisfaction is fostered, essential machines fail, products contain hidden defects, fires or explosions occur, all presumably in the normal course of events. It is only by their undue frequency that we mark the work of the fifth column.

These hidden enemies do not confine their sabotage to the industrial front. Their disruptive efforts reach far beyond this limited objective. They extend to the spreading of confusion and discord throughout our entire national life. Their aim is to undermine our free institutions, ensure disunity of effort, and prevent effective resistance to the eventual lightning attack. We must be on the alert for manifestations of this Trojan-horse technique, not only in the United States but throughout the Western Hemisphere.

The fate of civilization may rest on the defense of the Western Hemisphere. That responsibility has been entrusted to the American people. We must not fail.