But without leadership we soon sink back into smug apathy, and the kind of thoughtlessness which led Americans in the first six months of 1941 to buy 35 per cent more automobiles, 42 per cent more refrigerators, and 51 per cent more electric ranges than in the same period of 1940—all of these luxury articles being built of materials vital for our defense industry. The French too, right up to the collapse, went on eating tremendous meals, loafing behind their Maginot line, and reading illustrated magazines with pictures just like ours showing magnificent fleets of planes and tanks. An unwitting reader of some of our great periodicals would get the impression that we have one of the world’s most powerful tank armies and that our warplanes could darken the skies. We lay down the magazine with a sigh of content. Good old U.S.A. We knew we could do it. What was all that talk about unpreparedness?
Q. Haven’t we a tank army?
A. We have four armored divisions now being organized. We see them under such titles as “Uncle Sam’s Mighty Tanks Move Into Action,” and only the closest examination of the picture reveals that most of the tanks are armored cars. In 1940 we produced 20 light, no medium, and no heavy tanks a month; in 1941, 260 light, 130 medium, and no heavy tanks a month; and in 1942 we shall produce 390 light, 300 medium, and still no heavy tanks a month. I quote from an authoritative release of July 4, 1941: “None of the four existing armored divisions is regarded as complete and ready for combat on the European scale because medium and heavy tanks have not arrived yet, and because coordinated practice with the air arm regularly attached to the divisions has not yet been possible and because much of the training time must be devoted to the basic training of new men.” There is the mechanized force of the United States of America in the third year of the mechanized world war. Our armored strength consists of light tanks only, completely useless against heavy or medium tanks. But most appalling is the revelation that this late in a war in which every victory has been won by the famous dive bomber plus tank team, we seem not to possess any such team at all, for that must be the meaning of the statement that there has been no practice of coordination between planes and tanks. These teams cannot be improvised. An army without them today is like an army would have been without artillery yesterday.
In effect we still do not possess an effective armored force and the production figures indicate we shall not have one in 1942 either, for until we have heavy tanks we cannot face heavy tanks. What have the Germans in the way of mechanized armament? We cannot tell what changes have taken place since the Battle of Russia began, but we know that their losses are constantly replenished from the industrial plants of all Europe now working feverishly for the Germans. At the Battle of France the Germans had ten Panzer divisions and it was these steel hack saws which cut the body of France into bleeding ribbons and ended the French nation in five weeks. The Germans captured from the French 4,000 or 5,000 tanks and since that time have produced incessantly until it is estimated that they entered the Battle of Russia with a total of 20 to 30 Panzer divisions and with at least 25,000 tanks. The German Army is obviously the army we are preparing to fight. Its armored strength is conservatively estimated about twenty-five times ours, and it has more than two years of battle experience. We not only have not got an army that could take part in modern warfare at all, but we are not even preparing to create such an army. We may get one. We will get one if we have time. We will get an army if we go to war in time to keep the British between us and our enemy for the period it will take to build an army. We will never get an army so long as we are satisfied with what we have.
We American people have been like a neurotic who refuses to listen to bad news; who will not go to a physician for fear of what he may find out. We could afford to view the matter less darkly if it appeared that our production would give us an effective fighting machine sometime in the future, but this does not seem to be the case. Our gun production indicates that we expect to be ready to fight a modern army sometime around the 1950’s. It shows that in the middle of 1941 we had a production of 4 big, 29 medium, and 20 small antiaircraft guns per month. At that rate it would take a year to make enough antiaircraft guns to guard New York City alone. In mid-1942 we shall, if we are lucky, have a production of 22 big, 23 medium, and 300 small antiaircraft guns monthly. At this rate we should be able properly to guard the large cities of the Eastern seaboard in about ten years.
In 1941 we did not produce any 155 mm. cannon, but we will make fourteen of them monthly in 1942; just as we produced no 105 mm. cannon in 1940, but put out 22 per month in 1941 and in 1942 hope to make 155 a month. At this rate we ought to be able to finish enough artillery to match the German artillery in about 1951. We are still turning out 37 mm. antitank guns, although tests have shown that this gun will not penetrate the armor of the tanks it would have to meet. Even our famous Garand rifle apparently cannot be manufactured anything like fast enough to supply the growing army. In mid-1941 it was being turned out at the rate of 22,500 a month; and in 1942 it is due to be produced at the rate of 52,000 a month. That is only 624,000 a year. At this rate it would take well over three years to equip the two-million-man army which is our initial goal in the face of the fact that the forces it is being built to meet number upward of ten million.
In airplanes we have the one advantage that we came so late into the field that we have few obsolescent types. The British and Germans have the immense advantage of daily contact with battle experience. In mid-1941 we produced 206 fighters and 60 bombers per month for ourselves and sent an average of 390 planes monthly to Britain. Our aid to Britain, “all out, short of war,” amounted to this, that after two years of war we were sending Britain about one-eighth as many warplanes as Germany’s production, believed to be around 3,000 a month. Even in 1942 when we shall have reached capacity production, we expect to send Britain only 650 planes a month, and to make only 600 bombers and 600 fighters monthly for ourselves. That is, even in the third year of war we propose to have a production of only about three-quarters the German production. We have pitched our sights far too low. We might as well quit if we cannot set the sights up.
Raymond Swing always tells me as he rakes in the pot, “Knick, it is not good hands that win in poker; it is better hands.” So it is in this war. We shall never win with a good army, navy, and air force; they have to be better than the enemy’s and bigger too. Before the Battle of Russia some military critics held that we did not need even the 1,500,000 men we now have under arms; that we needed only a highly mechanized force. Now we see that to win in this war an army needs mass as well as machines. As yet we have neither.
Q. Why haven’t we at any rate planned an adequate army of four or five million men with at least as many armored divisions as the Germans?
A. Because to plan an adequate army would indicate we intended to go to war. To make it big enough and well enough equipped to fight the Germans would indicate that we intended to fight the Germans. The consequence of our ostrich hypocrisy, our faint-hearted catering to the pacifist, isolationist-obscurantist bloc is that we not only do not but we cannot build an army to perform the function for which it was called into existence: fight the Nazis. If we equip it to go abroad, up go cries of alarm from the Wheeler-Lindbergh crowd: “Foreign war! See, the President is going to put us into a foreign war!”