UNIVERSAL MILITARY TRAINING

MONDAY, JUNE 4, 1945

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SELECT COMMITTEE ON POSTWAR MILITARY POLICY,

Washington, D. C. The select committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a. m., in the caucus room, Old House Office Building, Hon. Clifton A. Woodrum (chairman) presiding.

Chairman WOODRUM. The committee will be in order.

The Select Committee on Postwar Military Policy is in session for the purpose of considering the query "Should the United States adopt as a matter of broad policy a system of universal training in the postwar period?"

This committee is not a legislative committee. We do not have the power to consider specific legislation, nor to report bills. Therefore, we are not too much concerned with details or any particular kind of legislation.

We are concerned, as I have said, with the question of the broad general policy of postwar military training.

We have listed to be heard on this question many individuals and organizations, and we shall also hear from the armed services before the hearings are closed.

At the conclusion of the hearings the committee will make such report to the Congress as in its wisdom it cares to make.

This morning, as our first witness, we are very happy to have a very, very distinguished statesman, former Ambassador to Japan, the Honorable Joseph C. Grew.

The committee is very glad to have you here at this time, sir. STATEMENT OF ACTING SECRETARY OF STATE JOSEPH C. GREW

Secretary GREW. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, I come before you as an advocate of military training for the young men of America. I believe profoundly that our young men should have this training. I do not believe that there is anyone in our country, in the armed forces or in civilian life, who feels this more strongly than I do, and my attitude is based on the experience gained in 40 years of foreign service, especially the 10 years I spent in Germany before and during the last war and the 10 years I spent in Japan before the war we are fighting now.

I believe it is an essential part of our share in the United Nations proposals for world security. And I am glad to know that young men who now make up the Army and the Navy of the United States

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themselves favor military training to defend and maintain, in the perilous years that lie ahead, the liberty they have preserved.

We have never lost a war, and pray God we never shall. But I believe there are wars we should not have had to fight if we had been properly prepared in time, if we had shown the aggressors what might we were equipped to wield.

A great charter of security for mankind is being created by the United Nations at San Francisco. The plans for a world organization for peace call for a series of steps to be taken by the Security Council before force is used to deal with those who would plunge the world into war.

But we must be prepared to contribute our complement of armed. force to the United Nations pool if we should be called upon to do so when all other steps have failed to preserve the peace.

The precise numbers and components of the forces and facilities would be determined by agreements among the member states under the auspices of the Security Council. But it is obvious that such agreements cannot be made until after the international organization is under way.

It is impossible today to foresee the whole future and say exactly what our responsibilities may be in providing our share of force to keep the peace. Yet it is decidedly clear that if we are to have that force ready when it is needed it will have to be provided by whatever peacetime military and naval plan we decide beforehand to carry out. Modern armies and navies do not spring into being overnight.

We should accept, therefore, the judgment of our highest military authority. And that authority holds that unless a system of universal military training is put into effect we shall not have available the reserve of trained men required to make our air and sea and land forces adequate to meet any possible future threats to our freedom. Above all, if our young men are ever again to be called on to defend our freedom it will be better for them and better for us if they are well-trained. We have an obligation to them and to the Nation to give them the best possible training, that they, and the Nation, may survive. Their chances of survival will be infinitely greater if they are trained.

The foreign policy of the United States, in Mr. Hull's classic definition, is

the task of focusing and giving effect in the world outside our borders to the will of 135,000,000 people through the constitutional processes which govern our democracy.

Behind our day-to-day diplomacy in fulfilling that policy lies a factor of prime importance: National determination demonstrated and backed by national preparedness. Without adequate preparedness our diplomacy becomes weak and ineffective. If our diplomacy abroad is to achieve favorable results, our country should be constantly prepared to meet all eventualities. As General MacArthur said when he was Chief of Staff:

Armies and navies in being efficient give weight to the peaceful words of statesmen, but a feverish effort to create them when once a crisis is imminent simply provokes attack.

Looking back to the old days, before 1914, in Berlin, I remember seeing German officers banging their glasses on the table and singing

Der Tag. They were boastful and arrogant, contemptuous of the weak.

We are bound to attack France some daythey said:

When we attack France we may have to go through Belgium, of course. But the Belgians won't fight ;they are weak and spiritless. As for the British, they are all shot up with their Irish and labor troubles; we can count England out of the picture.

That represented the thinking of those Prussian military officers before 1914.

And it has always seemed to me that if, at that time, England had been prepared, even moderately prepared, in those years before 1914, and if, when Germany threatened France, Sir Edward Grey had been able to say to Von Bethmann Hollweg, "If you attack France, Great Britain will come into the war within an hour," I have serious doubts as to whether the German would ever have ventured upon that war; and the scene goes on 10 years to Japan.

In 1932 I went to Japan. Not long after taking up my duties as Ambassador, I wrote to the Secretary of State, then Mr. Stimson, saying, the Japanese military machine

has been built for war, feels prepared for war, and would welcome war. It has never yet been beaten and possesses unlimited self-confidence. I am not an alarmist, but I believe we should have our eyes open to all possible future contingencies.

I was constantly urging preparedness, not in the interests of war but in the furtherance of peace, because might was the only language the Japanese could understand. Military weakness simply invited contempt.

I remember especially my talks with Mr. Matsuoka, the then Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, in the late thirties and 1940. I knew him very well, and instead of going to the Foreign Office, I used to go to his house to see him, and he would walk up and down the garden, we would walk together, sometimes by the hour, and I remember very well one conversation in which he said to me:

War has now broken out between Great Britain and Germany, and the Atlantic Ocean is a war zone. If you insist on sending your ships into that war zone, and you get into a shooting match with a German submarine, and as a result of that war breaks out between the United States and Germany, we will have to come in, on the basis of the tripartite pact as a member of the Axis.

I said:

Mr. Minister, do you mean to say that you are willing to place the entire future destiny of your country in with those of the Axis, where they would be 2 to 1 against you?

He said:

That is my interpretation of the tripartite pact.

Then he said to me:

You had better watch your step, because you in America could not fight a total war. Germany will undoubtedly win this war and will control all of Europe, and we in Japan are the stabilizing force in East Asia.

Of course, he had to use the usual familiar phrase about "stabilizing influence."

He said:

Democracy is bankrupt and this is the day of totalitarian powers. Your people have been brought up in the lap of luxury; they are dependent on their daily comforts, and with your labor troubles, your strikes, your pacifism and isolationism, you would be incapable of waging total war. Your people won't let you. They would not allow you to come in even if your Government wanted to.

Now, that was the thinking of Matsuoka at that time, and it was the general thinking of most of those aggressive militarists over there. They did not understand our country.

Matsuoka, himself, rather surprisingly, was born in this country, in Oregon, and grew up in our schools and always prided himself on his understanding of our country and our way of thought, and thought that he knew our psychology, and after that I remember saying to him: It is surprising that you pride yourself on being an expert on America and should be so wide of the mark.

I said:

It is true that we in our country are not prepared for war.

It is not perhaps surprising, I must say, that the Japanese thought that we were ruled by our isolationists and pacifists, because the only speeches in our country that the Japanese are allowed to read in their papers in the prewar years were the speeches of our ultraisolationists and pacifists, and whenever a strike occurred in America it was always headlined in Japanese papers.

The Japanese people got the idea that it was the majority thinking in our country.

I said:

Mr. Minister, you little understand our country. You don't seem to know our history. If you did, you would realize that we are a pretty inflammable people when something is done against us.

I said:

We go into war, when a war is forced on us, as amateurs. We are not prepared, and the wheels may grind in the early stages, but gradually we will move up through the different gears, and when we get into top gear, as we have always done and always will, nothing in the world can stop us.

I remember the minister's looking at me as if to see if I was joking, and seeing that I was not, he shook his head, as if he were talking to a child.

I tell you that story, Mr. Chairman, merely to give you an idea of the thinking of the people in Japan at that time, and the thinking that led into war.

If at that time we had been prepared, if we at least had had a pool of trained men in our country to draw from, the Japanese understood that, as they would have had to understand it-I question seriously whether they would ever have dared to attack.

If during those years before Pearl Harbor our people had been able to see the handwriting on the wall, if we had been even reasonably prepared at that time, I don't believe for a moment that Japan would have attacked us.

We must not, we dare not, let it happen again. That's why we cannot afford to wait.

I have said that I believe a year's military training is necessary because of our obligations under the world security organization;

because in the world of things as they are, our international policy to be effective must have strength behind it; and because my experience has taught me that aggressors are not deterred by latent superior strength but shrewdly try to obtain their ends by attacking when they consider their potential opponents unprepared and therefore at a disadvantage.

There is one further aspect of the problem which I considered before giving my unreserved support to the demand for a year of military training for our young men in peace as well as in war, and that is the effect on our young men themselves.

During my life I have been intensely interested in education and I have been in close touch iwth educators, universities, and colleges, and I am a stanch believer in the value of academic training. I know there are some who believe that the requirement of a year's military training would take our young men away from colleges and schools, from academic life.

I am convinced, on the contrary, that if this system were to go into effect it would be the greatest possible stimulus to our young men to go into educational life. They are going to realize the disadvan tages of a lack of education. They will be in contact with educated

men.

It is my view that the plan would be in the best interests of our educational institutions throughout the country. It would also give our young men physical conditioning, discipline, an understanding of teamwork, fair play, and that sort of thing, which would be permanent assets to them throughout their lives.

And when those who continued their academic work went back to it, their approach would be more mature and the harvest would be richer. In sum, our young men would gain rather than lose by a year's training to fit them to be members of a civilian army.

These are some of the reasons why I earnestly recommend the adoption of the plan for a year of military training of our youth. Without qualification, I believe it to be in the best interests of our Nation and our people. We must be strong if we would be free.

Chairman WOODRUM. Mr. Secretary, the committee is very grateful to you for your attendance at our meeting, and we have enjoyed hearing from you.

I am aware of the fact that you have very important engagements, and if there are no questions, may I say again that the committee appreciates your coming. Thanks very much, sir.

. Secretary GREW. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman WOODRUM. We have representatives of the Citizens Committee for Military Training of Young Men, Inc., present this morning. Colonel Cooke.

Colonel CoOKE. Here, sir.

Chairman WOODRUM. The committe will be very glad to hear from you at this time.

This is Col. Jay Cooke, president of the Citizens Committee for Military Training of Young Men, Inc.