America Untouchables

I

No man likes to fight for a principle which he knows from personal experience is not being put into practice, yet that is exactly the situation which the ordinary soldier or sailor in the United States armed forces faces today. Called on to defend the thesis that "all men are created equal," he is at all times acutely conscious of his membership in the lower stratum of a pernicious caste system that separates officer from enlisted man by an almost impassable gulf.

It is not in purely military affairs that this problem exists. In drill and on manoeuvers, as in actual warfare, there must be some one man who is responsible for giving the word to march, to charge, or to fire. There is no question but what the wisest, the best trained, and the most experienced soldier in a squad, a company, or a division has to have the absolute authority of a dictator.

But why must the inequality necessary on the field of battle carry over into private life? The enlisted man in the army of our democratic country, for instance, is not permitted to address the wife or daughter of a commissioned officer on the street, even if he knows her. Wives of officers in the Navy do not consort with the wives of the gobs and the petty officers, no matter what their status in society before they were married. The draftee, no matter how much of a social lion he may be at home, is prohibited from going out with the army nurses, because the successors of Florence Nightingale are second lieutenants, and as such are reserved for the boys with the bars on their shoulders. It is true that there has been a certain relaxing of restrictions since the Selective Service Act pulled a sizable portion of the eligible males into camp. Now a respectable draftee, who knew the colonel's daughter before he was tapped for the United States version of a Yale honorary society, can take her out in the evening. The catch is that he must doff the uniform of which he is supposed to be so proud and probably must meet the young lady doff the post. There are countless numbers of such little differentiatious between the castes, ranging from the exclusiveness of officers' clubs on posts to the segregation between stripes and commissions in town and city dance balls and bars.

Our army has instituted schools where draftees can learn to become officers, but the only figures available indicate that merely a small handful of enlisted men have been picked for advancement.

Defenders of the status quo claim that without maintenance of some sort of discipline at all times, on and off the army grounds, there could be no discipline in an emergency when it was needed. Soldiers will not be likely to trust and obey a captain with whom they have become familiar and perhaps got drunk, according to their theory, and familiarity of any sort breeds not only contempt but disobedience. But the lieutenant who sees his captain or even his colonel staggering out of the bar at the officers' club will have the same feeling toward him as a private would, and at the same time the privates do not seem to distrust their sergeants after they have gone off together on a weekly tear. The very way in which the sergeant is taught to become a real influence over his squad is by living with them, eating with them, and getting to know them as well as he does his own brothers.

II

In the German army, which at the present time looks to be the class of the world, curiously enough there is none of this feeling of caste. The effect of Nazi doctrines, for some perverted reason, has been to knock the props out from under the old Prussian junker army officer caste. Now the private in the Germany army is made to realize that he is the most privileged citizen in the nation and the equal of anyone. The sergeant in the Nazis' army, unlike the civilian farmer or laborer, can rise from his ranks, and he can do it with the same ease as an American private gains his non-com stripes. William Shirer, in "Berlin Diary," tells of visiting the Kiel Navy Base and finding officers and men to be in close and friendly contact with each other. When he visited the fleet, officers and men were throwing a Christmas party together with the greatest of cameraderic. This would never happen in our Navy. German army officers sleep on the same ground as their men, eat out of the same field kitchen, and actually go with them into battle. Another of the journalist-writers tells of traveling through Paris just after the occupation and seeing an officer, who had just taken a squad of his soldiers to dinner at a restaurant, pointing out on a map to them in a fatherly way the spots of interest they were going to visit together on a sightseeing tour that afternoon.

This democratic spirit is one of the greatest strengths of the German forces. A young captain who has risen from the ranks knows from experience how his men feel, what they can do, and what their limits of endurance are. He can coax the last ounce of energy out of his unit at the moment of crisis. In the modern style of mechanized warfare carried on by small detachments, an officer's close contact with his men is of more importance than ever.

It is certainly a farcical and paradoxical situation that the fascist country should have the democratic army.