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t HE U.S. Army in 1950 was a shadow of its former self. From a peak of nearly 8.5 million uniformed members in 1945, its strength as of June 26, 1950, stood at 591,487 soldiers. Organized into ten combat divisions, eleven separate regiments, and a host of smaller support units and military advisory missions, the force lacked almost 40,000 of its authorized 630,201 soldiers. It boasted just one combat-ready division, the lightly armed 82nd Airborne, as a strategic reserve. International crises in early 1948 led to strong bipartisan support for limited rearmament. Congressional reauthorization of Selective Service encouraged army leaders to plan for a total strength of 900,000 officers and men in twelve divisions by the end of fiscal year 1949.1 By early summer of 1948, however, fiscal concerns again trumped considerations of strategy and readiness. In effect, President Truman acquiesced in congressional allocation of $3.1 billion in additional funds for defense “but was unwilling to let the Services spend it.” Simultaneously, Truman decreed that planning by the Department of Defense should in no way contemplate establishment of “a ‘structure’ which would require in excess of $15 billion to maintain during the fiscal year 1950.” The result was a reversion by the Regular Army to a situation similar to the post–National Defense Act of 1920 days of skeleton units unable to sustain readiness but theoretically capable of rapid expansion in time of war.2 The fact that an expansible army is by definition not an expeditionary army went unmentioned by Secretary of the Army Kenneth C. Royall despite congressional testimony to the contrary by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Omar Bradley. Nevertheless, Bradley and his immediate subordinates accepted what 13 2 Postwar or Prewar Army? C h a p t e r 2 14 they hoped would be a short-term readiness gap in return for promises of executive support for universal military training (UMT). This controversial proposal would have created a pool of over three million potential soldiers by 1958. However, President Truman balked at the political and financial cost of implementing UMT, and Congress failed to override him. Thus, the Joint Chiefs were forced to accept a limited implementation of the draft to make up its shortfalls .3 Other austerity measures followed. Within the army’s divisions, infantry regiments lost one of their three battalions; field artillery battalions lost one of their three firing batteries. No regiment possessed men or equipment to operate its organic tank company, and divisional tank “battalions” in the Far East Command consisted of just a single company of poorly armed and armored M24 Chaffee light tanks, not the M26 Pershing medium tanks stipulated in their tables of organization and equipment. Significantly, the U.S. Army’s leadership forced these changes on operational units without reducing mission requirements or revising tactical doctrine—a factor of crucial importance in the first weeks of the Korean War. Hence, although organizational changes based on combat experience in World War II made the post-1947 infantry division much more lethal than its World War II antecedent, fiscal restraint limited divisional strength to a peacetime ceiling of 12,500 soldiers instead of the required 18,900. Within units in Japan these artificial ceilings were unevenly distributed . Since administrative requirements remained constant even as personnel requirements fluctuated, strength reductions fell most heavily on maneuver units, not headquarters elements.4 From September 1945 to April 1949, Occupation duties required the full attention of the maneuver formations of the Eighth Army. This reflected General MacArthur’s requirement that Eighth Army units first discharge these duties, then provide general support of U.S. policies within the theater and only then take steps to prepare for combat in case of a general emergency. In the early months of the Occupation these duties included the maintenance of law and order, crowd control, the disbanding of the Imperial Japanese Army, and the repatriationof forcedlaborers.Missionsexpandedin 1947and1948toincludesupervision of elections, mounted “presence” patrols in the countryside, and the seizure of property looted by the Japanese from foreign nationals before 1945.5 This was no small task; in just one month U.S. soldiers recovered over 1,050 kilograms of silver bullion and 7,954,040 kilograms of foreign coins. Many officers with combat experience in World War II were unhappy with the army’s new imperial mission, which one of them derisively termed “tax-collecting.” For officers and senior noncommissioned officers life in Japan quickly came to resemble...

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