DEFENCE OF THE NEW WORLD

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 120, 14 February 1941, Page 10

DEFENCE OF THE NEW WORLD

Aim To Make U.S. Army One

Of World’s Finest

EQUIPMENT PROBLEMS

The i nited States is to have one of the world’s finest armies—but not for many, many months. That, at least, is the consensus of nearly a score of Washington newspapermen who have just completed a 4000-mile tour of United States Army forts and schools at which they were given an unprecedented and unhampered opportunity to study at close hand the progress of national defence, wrote Joseph G. Harrison. in tiie "Christian Science Monitor” some weeks ago. Everywhere we saw unceasing activity and an unflagging determination to give the American people the type of Army they have ordered within the shortest possible time. At the same time, it. was paiiffully evident that the Arabian Night trick of rubbing a lamp and thereby creating an Army no longer works and that American industry, despite its tremendous potential capacity, is a long, long way from supplying the Army with equipment it needs. Though the Array never goes out of the way to advertise its unpreparedness. little attempt was made to conceal the fact that it will he at least a year before any amount of new equipment is actually ou hand and that it will i>e several years before material will reach a point where headquarters can relax its unremitting drive for speed, quality, and quantity. After all. it took Germany seven full years of dictatorship to build the Arrav and Air Force that overran Poland, France, and the Low Countries. Two Views Possible. Thus it seems fair to view national defence from two distinct angles. The first concerns tlte very real progress being made in handling the rec'-nt flood of volunteers, in expanding field and school training facilities, in letting defence orders and in instilling the drive and the morale necessa’j - to build an immense army on short notice. The second concerns the handicap to training and the menace to national and hemispheric defence impUcit in America's acute shortage of many types of essential .material.

To any one familiar with army conditions ns they existed last spring, a swing through some of the country's major forts would bo a revelation. Old barracks, outmoded hangars, cramped facilities are disappearing as fast as the wreckers can tear them down. In

their place there are rising acre ou acre of new barracks, mess halls, runways. schools, concrete highways, artillery ranges and army administration buildings. In every part of the country room is being made for the hundreds of thousands of new draftees who will soon start their year's course in military training and for the overwhelming flood of equipment which is now "on order'’ but which will come in time. Fast Changes Made. But this is only a beginning. In addition. the army has established increasingly well-trained and impressivelooking mechanized and motorized divisions, new anti-aircraft battalions and units of parachute troops. It has practised transporting light field artillery by planes and has carried on extensive. but little publicized, experiments with a robot plane which n.ay revolutionize bombing. But. above all, the army is in the process of overhaulin.g its entire book of stratenw in line with the latest developments abroad. In many ways, the army or two years hence will not lie an enlargement of (lie army of the summer of 1040. It. will be a new organization changed beyond recognition, and a world leader in efficiency, quality, and esprit de corps. It is more difficult to get to the root of rhe problem of equipment, since production figures in certain categories are necessarily classed as military secrets and since the situation changes from day to day. Tlte over-all picture, however, is one in wltieli the Army training programme will be seriously handicapped for a year or so because of certain acute shortages. These shortages are most pronounced in artillery and training planes. Officials at Randolph Field, which has first call on such planes, admit that the number of students a plane has now reached the danger point and that bad weather this winter will cut sharply into a training schedule already inadequate to produce the number of pilots and instructors needed. Field artillery training today is being done almost wholly with pieces of 75-millimeter and 155-millimeter. both of them good guns, but both of them of World War vintage. The Army has given large orders for the new 105millimeter gun. which has been called the outstanding ordnance development of the current war, but as yet few are iu evidence. Delivery is also slow on the new and highly efficient 37-milll-meter anti-tank gnu.

Despite these bottlenecks in material, for whieh Ute Army cannot rightly be blamed, the progress being made in national defence is impressive. Given time. North American and perhaps Western Hemispheric impregnability is assured. Not given time, it is anybody’s guess just what sort of a New World defence this country could offer against, a united attack from a totalitarian Europe and Asia.