UNITED STATES ARMY

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 72, 26 March 1935, Page 11

UNITED STATES ARMY

PLANS FOR I NCREASE

A NEW AIR BASE

Pians for a great increase in the United States military strength and for a new air base on Hawaii are revealed in a request from the army and navy for bigger appropriations from Congress and, while it is necessary always to distinguish between what the services ask and.what Congress grants them, there seems little doubt that much of the present programme will be carried out, states the "Manchester Guardian".

Among its chief features are— A new aeroplane base on Hawaii costing more than £2,000,000 and designed as the focal point of a whole new series of such bases extending down the Pacific Coast from Alaska to the Panama Canal, to be parallelled by new bases on the Atlantic side and in the Caribbean Sea.

The increase of military aircraft to a total of 2,300.

The expenditure of £80,000,000 on the modernisation of the army., The increase of army strength fr6m 130,000 to nearly 200,000.

It is also known that a former Attorney General, Mr. Mitchell Palmer, has been asked by President Roosevelt to prepare tentative plans for a great increase in the American merchant marine with Government aid. Mail subsidies, which have proved a source of extravagance and corruption, would probably be abandoned in favour of straight grants to shipbuilders and operators for the construction and use of vessels of designated types. lucluding the present great naval building programme, the total now asked or already appropriated for new equipment during the next few years is well above £200,000,000.

It is semi-officially argued in Washington that the entire programme is purely " defensive," and in answer to the Japanese, who have expressed alarm at the proposed aeroplane base on Hawaii, it is ppinted out that the plans provide^ for Atlantic bases as well. Another argument, echoing Mr. Baldwin, is that Hawaii would become to the United States what the Rhine now is to England.

The whole programme is not unnaturally being subjected to sharp attacks from American Pacifists, who insist that it is unnecessary and wasteful and more likejy to stir up the danger of war than'to allay it. They, urge the United States to withdraw'permanently from the Orient, pointing out that their material interests there are only a small fraction of those of the European Powers and arguing that continued efforts to maintain a stake in the East'are likely to bring-about a war which would destroy American trade and investments there and cost at the same time the country many times the value Of those interests.

• General Douglas McArthur, the chief of staff of the army High Command recommends to the Military Committee of the' House of Representatives the purchase of 800 armoured aeroplanes, to cost £18,000,000,50 as to give the army an aerial armada of 2320 modern aircraft, as recommended recently by Dr. Newton D. Baker, a former Secretary of the Navy.