States; and until he attains the age of forty-five, or until the expiration of a period of ten years after such transfer, or until he is discharged from such reserve component, whichever occurs first, he shall be deemed to be a member of such reserve component and shall be subject to such additional training and service as may now or hereafter be prescribed by law *** but nothing in this subsection shall be construed to prevent any such man, while in a reserve component of such forces, from being ordered or called to active duty in such forces.

Reading the print of section 3 as it stands, I maintain that every physically qualified dischargee of our draft Ármy automatically becomes a reserve for about 10 years, because the only exception in section 3 (c) of the act merely relieves the serviceman who has had 3 years of training and active service from reserve military training in peacetime, not from an actual call to arms as a reservist in an emergency. Consequently, there we have General Marshall's ideal armed force: A "small" standing Army and millions of citizen reserves, without militarizing a whole generation of our youth in peacetime.

Why this great rush to get our 18-year-old into military camps in peacetime?

Why not at least wait until our returning servicemen can join in our deliberations. Right now they are held incommunicado by War Department regulations unless they favor peacetime youth conscription.

Let's by all means begin now to provide for a strong but not oversized peacetime Regular Army and Navy, but without totalitarianesque compulsions. And let's give American boyhood a break when we are at peace.

Has everything done by selective service in World Wars I and II been wrong? The answer is "No." The proof: We have decisively won World War I and the European half of World War II by our selective operations in building our citizen armies, and every nation we licked in 1917 and have licked and are licking today has been universally military serviced.

Mr. MAY. Any questions?

Mr. KEARNEY. I wonder if you have given any thought to the possible future of the National Guard of the United States in any peacetime set-up.

Mr. CONKLING. I have always felt that the National Guard hasn't been developed to its strength. I feel really that it has been the "Orphan Annie" of the Regular Army. I have never heard of any real crusade in any city, county, State, or anywhere in the United States where they really went at it to build up the National Guard. I don't think anybody else has.

Mr. KEARNEY. If they did go at it, of course, the National Guard would have been filled.

Mr. CONKLING. I think it would be much larger.

Mr. KEARNEY. You think they should play an important part in the postwar set-up?

Mr. CONKLING. Absolutely. Heaven knows their record is sublime in State and National affairs.

Mr. MAY. Thank you very much.

(The full statement of Mr. Roscoe S. Conkling is on file with the committee.)

Mr. MAY. Our next witness is Mr. Norman Thomas, president, Postwar World Council. Mr. Thomas is well known to this com

mittee; and we will be glad to have your statement, Mr. Thomas, and will be interested in knowing your position.

STATEMENT OF NORMAN THOMAS, PRESIDENT, POSTWAR WORLD COUNCIL

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, I appear today as a representative of the Postwar World Council, a national organization, nonpartisan in character, of which I am chairman. It happens that in the matter before you the position which I shall take is also the position of the Socialist Party, which, however, will set forth its case through another spokesman or in a brief, or by both methods. I only am responsible for the particular form in which this case is presented.

As I understand it, you are considering the military policy of the United States rather than any particular bill, and these hearings are more narrowly devoted to the place of postwar military conscription for universal military training in that policy.

I begin by stressing what you gentlemen doubtless realize, but which is too often overlooked on both sides of this discussion. There is no such thing as shaping a military policy in a vacuum or as a thing in itself. Clausewitz and other theorists in the arts of war were entirely right in arguing that war is the extension of diplomacy or of the foreign policy of nations. No matter how sincere advocates of conscription or any other military policy for the United States may be in claiming that they are not thinking of particular potential enemies but are merely advocating a general policy of insurance against war, nothing of the sort is possible. No nation has ever practiced conscription and competitive militarism except with a view to specific potential enemies. The expense of the process makes it necessary to win popular support for conscription by playing up rivalry, fear, or suspicion of competitors. Other nations assume, as a matter of course, that a competitive military policy is an expression of a competitive imperialistic policy and act accordingly. Never in history has it been otherwise. Never will it be otherwise.

It is, you will agree, completely impossible even for a nation as strong as the United States to gain absolute security by any kind or degree of military preparation. Always some conceivable coalition against us, provoked by a wrong handling of our foreign policy, would be stronger. Therefore, I repeat, you cannot shape a military policy except in the light of the general economic and political policies which the United States will support in the world.

Hence, the present War Department propaganda for postwar military conscription is consciously or unconsciously disingenuous. First, it assumes incorrectly that conscription can provide protection, irrespective of national policies. Then it proceeds to add to that error by deliberately ignoring and obscuring in the high-powered propaganda the obvious fact the potential mass armies provided imperfectly by 1 year's training will be useless against the first impact of a third world war begun by surprise attack from the air by rocket bombs and other new developments. Even in this war, if England had had great mass armies, they could not have done for her in 1940 what her air force did. At most, mass armies, unless the United States is to

take the agressive in actually occupying a large part of the world, will be useful only in a secondary stage of war, and they cannot adequately be prepared in advance. This is the position taken by such experts as the British General Fuller, father of the tank, and by Hanson Baldwin.

I cannot imagine that General Marshall himself, or any other official advocates of conscription, will seriously argue before your committee that the training of our able-bodied youth for 1 year is the vital and indispensable part of the defense system they will demand. Its heart will be highly mechanized forces, expertly trained. The emphasis will be on the development of aviation and electronics and the new weapons which the Germans produced late in this war. No competent American military leader would dare to repeat the mistakes of the French who had the longest unbroken tradition and practice of military conscription, but had so neglected the proper use of modern aviation and armor that Hitler overran them with fewer men than they had under arms.

I remember when my old friend George Fielding Eliot, who appeared before your committee, used to say that the French were bound to win because they had a continuous tradition of conscription and that the Germans make up for the lost years between 1919 and 1935.

Actually the Germans had to use their imagination and minds on a "horrible" level and they more than made up for those years. In other words, what I am emphasizing is that it is a luxury.

Repeatedly we opponents of conscription have got certain of its advocates to admit, at least in private conversation, that what they really wanted was to keep in being an elaborate system of camps and supply agencies and, above all, to indoctrinate the Nation, not in love of war, but in the acceptance of executive authority which is at the heart of militarism. Lieutenant Colonel Conkling, out of experience in two wars with the Selective Service System, goes further and argues that the War Department and the Army high command which deny to military personnel the right to oppose the postwar conscription, which it uses the taxpayers' money so freely to advance, is motivated in considerable part by the natural self-interest of a military hierarchy in perpetuating jobs, ranks, and power. I should add that an even greater danger is the vested interests that makers of supplies, both capitalists and workers, acquire in competitive armaments and competitive imperialism which are always united like Siamese twins. You will have to take account of these self-interested motives in judging the case for conscription that some of the advocates present. And your committee and Congress itself should consider very seriously the effect upon democracy of War Department and Army propaganda in the policy-making field. For that is what is involved in the advocacy of conscription by official agencies backed by asociations of men commanding great wealth.

In what I have been saying about the essential relation between a military policy for the United States and (a) our foreign policy in general; and (b) the technological nature of modern war, I am not trespassing on the field of the military expert but arguing what is common sense. Repeatedly I have summed up these points by a statement that no one has challenged; if mass armies and peacetime conscription for them are essential to our defense against attack, or to

the degree that they are essential, we shall be increasingly disadvantaged as the decades go on. In this respect we cannot possibly compete with the U. S. S. R., or, later, with China. It is our business to do all in our power to make an end of military conscription throughout the world, not merely for the glorious cause of universal peace, but in our own selfish interest. If instead, without trying the obviously better way, you gentlemen now take a step which will fasten conscription upon mankind, a new generation of Americans in a not distant future may curse you for helping to forge the weapon by which our enemies were aided and our defeat made sure. If military conscription is the secret of defense, Russia will win. She will have the greater population, the strategic position in which mass armies are most useful, and the kind of totalitarian government to which peacetime conscription is far more appropriate and effective than to our democracy.

To avoid war with Soviet Russia is a must for American statesmanship. This cannot be done by appeasement or a refusal to face facts, one of which is that in the long run Russia will win if by playing the old militarist and imperialist game we fasten it upon the world. Have you ever puzzled over the fact that at present American Communists whose slavish and exclusive loyalty is to Stalin should favor conscription, although with increasing frankness most of its advocates urge it as a necessary step in arming against Russia? May it not be that in the long run the Communists believe the U. S. S. R. can win if rivalry in conscription should determine the policies and the war techniques of Russia and the United States? Even more probably, may they not believe that conscription in America will help to produce the attitudes on which Communist agitation and later Communist totalitarianism can thrive?

This is, of course, speculative. What is not speculative is the fact that the greatest single help to peace would be a movement toward the total abolition of military conscription and a policy of progressive disarmament following the disarmament of Germany and Japan. A movement like this could not fail if the two most powerful nations, the Soviet Union and the United States, should institute it. No one has a right to say that such a movement is impossible until it has been tried. A little less than 20 years ago Stalin, through Litvinoff, asked for this very thing at Geneva. In spite of what I have said to the effect that military conscription, if it is an advantage at all, would strengthen Russia more than the United States, Stalin might be wise enough to see that assured peace is even more to the interest of his own country. In time the Russian people might come to realize it in spite of the barriers Stalin puts up against communication. Perhaps a beginning could be made by proposing a 5- to 10-year arms holiday in which there should be no conscription. If that worked well it would be very hard to reestablish the old military competition and to persuade people to turn over all their sons to the state for 1, 2, or 3 years. At any rate, it is a crime against the peace which is our heart's desire not to make this approach to the problem of security and lasting peace.

It would be easier to make it if the results at San Francisco should prove more encouraging than now appear likely. It is still possible to hope that those results will at least make further adjustments easier. At all events, war weariness in all countries, including

Russia, and our own certain superiority in effective strength give us 5 or 10 years of grace to work out our problem in better terms than adoption of the system which did so much to plunge Europe into ruin.

I have heard the argument, as ridiculous as it is dangerous, that under the provisions of this new world organization we may be constrained to resort to conscription to do our part in a police job. Unsatisfactory as are the San Francisco arrangements, they aren't that bad. At the worst, the policing of the world won't require general conscription or be aided by it. It's a job for specialized carefully selected and well-paid forces. We shall not need conscription in order to play our part in a sheriff's posse of nations to be called out against an aggressor. No sheriff in his right mind, trying to bring some sort of order into a lawless county, would urge every man in it who had never carried a gun to arm himself, and every woman to become a pistol-packing mama. The competitive armament which our adoption of conscription would certainly fasten on the world would produce an analogous situation among nations. Any valid system of international force for security, Ely Culbertson's quotaforce system for instance, depends upon international control of offensive armaments and general disarmament.

Under Secretary of State Grew did his country a great disservice when before your committee he used the disingenious argument that conscription was necessary for us today in our association of nations when he well knows there can be no world war unless America and the U. S. S. R. are on opposite sides, and our adoption of conscription now will be a symbol and aggravation of the drift to the war with the U. S. S. R.

Again I insist that the best key to any sound policy of security and peace would be agreement with the Soviet Union on disarmament. That will depend on many things which we cannot here discuss. One of them is so important in relation to our future security that I must mention it briefly. It is that we try to bring an end to the war against Japan by laying down terms which will deny her the possibility of aggression, but which will not destroy the only strong independent nation in Asia and turn her embittered people over to Communist machinations. Unless America appears as the author of terms which will make her the friend of all the peoples of Asia rather than the underwriter of white imperialism, British, Dutch, or even American, Stalin will win the war even if he does not enter it. He will certainly win it if we bribe him by helping him make China an Asiatic Poland. What Congress should be considering is not conscription for peacetime but terms which might shorten a war of annihilation. We can win such a war with or without Russia's help but at such a cost on men, materials, our own ideals, and the friendship of Asiatic peoples that we should have lost in relative security what in peacetime - conscription can restore.

So terrible would be a third world war that the victors, if any, would merely enjoy the advantage of the wounded in the kingdom of the dead. Your real concern is with the policies that will avert war. In a country definitely not persuaded of the power of non-violent resistance it is inevitable that Congress, at any rate pending international agreements, will concern itself with providing an army and a navy. Such forces must be composed of carefully selected well