Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Forrestal was replaced as secretary of defense by Louis Johnson, onetime national commander of the American Legion, who favored the air force, as Forrestal had favored the navy, in these intramural battles. Although the supercarrier had been authorized and appropriated for, and although construction had begun under Forrestal, Johnson used a vote of two to one in JCS against it (Admiral Louis Denfeld in the minority) as excuse for canceling the contract. The subsequent “Admirals’ Revolt” took the form of anonymous letters to Congress charging corruption on the B-36 contract, as well as public charges, which were quite correct, that the plane was already obsolete. The whole scandal received a full-scale congressional investigation, the “B-36 affair,” as a result of which the B-36 was discredited, Admiral Denfeld was removed from the JCS, and Johnson, having alienated everyone by his efforts to save money, was replaced by General Marshall (1950).

The Unification Act had excluded retired officers from the post of secretary of defense, but this clause was made inapplicable to General Marshall so that he could succeed Johnson in 1950. Thus, the supporters of each of the three services held the position successively in less than a two-year period. Marshall said that he took the job to get UMT, but the act, as passed in 1951, was in a form which allowed the Administration to prevent its execution, and it never went into effect. In its place, troops were raised for the services, chiefly the army, by successive extensions of the wholly unsatisfactory Selective Service Acts.

The interservice battles of 1945-1950 were largely a victory for the air force, which got rid of the supercarrier and UMT, and thus obtained the biggest bite from the budget. Much of this bite went to SAC, which had been created in March 1946, and was taken over from General George Kenney by General Curtis E. LeMay in October 1948. At the time, SAC was really SAD. Starting in 1946 with only a single group able to deliver the atom bomb, for most of this period it struggled along with the 300-mph B-29. “It lacked planes, bases, equipment, and trained men.” Above all, it still operated on the old premise that the outbreak of war would be preceded by negotiations and mobilization. LeMay changed all that. He was not a desk soldier, nor was he a paper pusher. Ruthless, efficient, and singleminded, he flitted about from base to base in a self-piloted plane, a big cigar clamped at a belligerent angle in his set jaw. He gave SAC a single purpose (“mission”), isolated it from everything else in the defense chaos by moving its headquarters from Washington to Nebraska, and demanded immediate and efficient war readiness.

With sufficient funds LeMay would have kept a third of SAC in the air at all times, ready to go; another third at “war readiness” for quick takeoff; and the final third on call within a few hours. Until 1952, when he began to get the new eight-jet intercontinental B-52’s, he bridged the gap with modified B-36’s and medium-range, six-jet, B-47’s. With the support of Air Secretary Thomas K. Finletter, he established bases within range of the Soviet Union, in Europe, Greenland, North Africa, and Okinawa. By 1955 he had a force of remarkable efficiency and high morale, a success resulting from three factors which provide a lesson for all organizational success: a clear-cut mission, leadership, and continuity. The last quality was achieved by retaining LeMay in command of SAC for eight years, in violation of the established armed services practice of three- to four-year periods of rotation of duty.

In all this turmoil of controversy in 1947-1950, the army had not been idle. Its struggles for promotions, pay increases, perquisites, and assignments were ensured success to some extent by creating a new kind of army, an army top-heavy with officers and paper pushers who worked from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., five days a week, and had very little fighting effectiveness. This was done by setting up a structure of officers and auxiliary activities which absorbed almost the total budget of the department in noncombat lines and filled the combat units with a small number of short-term draftees of very little combat value. In January 1952, for example, the Department of Defense had 5 million employees, of which 3.7 million were in uniform and 1.3 million were civilians. Those in uniform used up $37 billion for pay, food, housing, and clothing—that is, $10,000 per head—in a total defense budget of $46 billion. The 1.3 million civilians cost $5.2 billion, or $4,000 a year each, leaving only $3 billion in the total defense budget for equipment, research, and other costs which contribute directly to defense. The army’s share of the 3.7 million uniformed personnel was 2 million, but that provided only 12 divisions, at most 150,000 men, for combat.

In spite of these enormous expenditures, the puny combat effectiveness of the “standing army” was shown in the Korean War when nine-tenths of the officers in combat were Reserves who had to be called from their peacetime activities to fight. The army solution to the disappointments of Korea was more of the same; in June 1951, the Selective Service Act of 1948 was amended to drop the draft age from 19 to 18 and raise the authorized limit on the men in active service from over 2 million to 5 million. That is, the qualitative deficiencies of Korea were to be solved by quantitative increases of the same inadequate quality, a step which might not improve America’s defense position but could justify increasingly rapid promotion for officers.

The last few months of 1949 include the major turning points in the whole period 1947-1963. Three events which marked this were the well-publicized B-36 crisis, the loss of China, and the secret H-bomb crisis which followed the explosion of the Soviet Union’s first A-bomb in August. Another significant event of the period was the organization of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) following the treaty of April 4, 1949, signed in Washington. This mutual defense pact “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage, and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law,” had, as signers, the United States, Canada, and ten West European countries (Iceland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and Italy). In February 1952, Greece and Turkey joined the pact, and in May 1955 the West German Federal Republic became a member. The agreement was largely anchored on Germany: it flowed out of the threat provided by the Berlin blockade, and directly implied the merging of West Germany into the Western Camp. As the chief step in this process, the three western zones of Germany were merged into one, and, in September 1949, the military rule of Germany was replaced by the Adenauer regime.

Throughout this period, fear of communism was growing within the United States. The real threat, if any, behind this fear is still uncertain. The Soviet and Communist hatred of the American way of life is well established, and the existence of the American Communist Party as a willing tool of an international Communist conspiracy directed from Moscow is also beyond dispute. Such Communists were undoubtedly engaged in subversion and espionage, and were assisted in these efforts by “fellow travelers” and other sympathizers. Moreover, some Communists and fellow travelers were undoubtedly present in government and, to a greater degree, in some other areas, notably certain labor unions, higher education, and especially in the more creative end of the entertainment field, such as the theater, writing, and Hollywood scenario production. On the other hand, the number of Communists in the United States, according to the FBI, was only about 75,000 in 1945 and fell steadily to 50,000 in 1950 and to 3,000 in 1960.