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Show fGENERAL $03 HUGH S. IIjohnson il Jour: DONOVAN'S SOLDIERS Wild Bill Donovan, the able law-yer, law-yer, who turned out to be a whiz-bang whiz-bang soldier, a fighting fool and a medal of honor man in the World war, is advocating something new in raising armies. He wants us to stop sending our kids first to war. He says that the only excuse for It was that they have greater endurance in a sudden spurt of speed, though not In long, steady pulls. Since soldiers are, to a continuously greater extent, going to war on wheels and pulling mechanical levers instead of ,club-bing ,club-bing muskets, he thinks men up to 500 anil even older could do just as well. I know what is eating Wild Bill. I have felt it gnawing me. He is reaching the age where, if we don't pass a law or something, he might have to stay out of any possible shindy himself. Seriously, Bill's got something there. Boys scarcely more than children fight wars. There are more reasons for this than Colonel Donovan gives. One is that, where there is any element of volunteering, volunteer-ing, they are more impulsive and ; If - COL. WILLIAM DOXOVAX j He would keep youth out of uar. rush first to the recruiting sergeant. A youth has fewer responsibilities to a family, a farm, a business, or a job. Men in actual combat service are only a fraction of the troops used in war. Supply and other auxiliary services require more soldiers than does fighting. There is no sense in culling out a physically perfect kid and setting him to rolling pills in a medical supply department in Kalamazoo. Kala-mazoo. If we relaxed physical requirements to run-of-mill standard stand-ard and created classes for "special and limited military service" for the less than perfect, we would greatly reduce the drain on the best of our youth crop with no loss in military energy. We tried that toward the close of the World war and it worked. Furthermore, if we impose no arbitrary age limits, but only limits of physical fitness, even for combat com-bat service, we shall be using greater great-er common sense, and be getting far greater economy in the use of our national manpower. ALASKAN FRONT A glance at the map of the North Pacific will show that we are closer to Russia than any other good neighbor except Canada and Mexico. Mex-ico. At Bering straits, Siberia and Alaska almost touch. That is under the Arctic circle and is not a dangerous dan-gerous menace. But, far to the south of that, our Aleutian islands lie like stepping stones on the way to Kamchatka. The outlying Russian Rus-sian islands of Komandorski and Bering seem to be a mere extension exten-sion of the Aleutian archipelago and are within a few miles of the American Amer-ican Near islands. We have no fortification or air bases in the Aleutians, notwithstanding notwith-standing that they skirt the shortest of the Great Circle route between Seattle and either Japan or the Siberian Si-berian coasts and that enemy air bases there could threaten the whole North Pacific and our main defensive defen-sive line Alaska, Hawaii and Panama. It is a threatening and dangerous situation. I know of no professional authority that does not agree that, purely for defensive purposes, we must guard this flank. The army has authority for an auxiliary air base at Fairbanks, Alaska, but the proposed main operating air base 's at anchorage at the head of Cook inlet. This will require $14,000,000 to complete and urgently and immediately im-mediately demands $4,000,000 to start. The strategists of the house appropriations ap-propriations committee "economized" "econ-omized" here, while refusing to do so to one billions of vote-getting handouts. They blacked-out the anchorage. an-chorage. They "economized" also on reserve airplanes for the army cutting the number asked from 476 to 57. Part of this cut the war department de-partment approved in view of the increased foreign purchases of military types, but it did not do so aj to 166 planes of a type the need for which was not lessened by expanded airplane production capacity. |