the urgent need in providing this new building, the least that can be done at this session is to make a start in a matter so patently overdue." 17[1]
Between the time of submission of the estimate and action upon it, the war in Europe passed from a period of comparative inactivity to the furious "blitzkrieg," with the German invasion of Denmark and Norway in April 1940, the invasion of the Low Countries in May, the disaster at Dunkirk in the last week of that month, all culminating in the fall of France in mid-June.
Against this background of rapidly moving events and precipitately deteriorating situations, the proposed appropriation was considered in the Congress.
Action Delayed
On 3 April 1940, the Appropriations Committee of the House of Representatives recommended the adoption of $130,000 of the budget item, being that portion of the expenditure proposed for the drawing of plans and pre- paring of specifications, and recommended against the $470,000 included for the purchase of a site for the new building.
In the 1938 authorization, Congress had assumed that the new building was to be erected on Government-owned land, presumably adjacent to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. When it became generally known that the site of the new building was to be in that region, then somewhat remote, "great opposition developed from the rank and file of the civilian medical profession of the country" and this influence, among others, led to "the abandonment of the plan to move * * * to the Army Medical Center and a return to the idea of constructing it near its present location."
The National Capital Park and Planning Commission had to be consulted under the terms of the act of authorization; it had other plans, however, and recommended a location east of the Library of Congress, and Surgeon General James C. Magee acquiesced in that decision. 18[2]
The Appropriations Committee, however, felt that the whole question of a site was out of order, since the preceding Congress, in passing the authorization act, had not contemplated purchase of a site but had assumed that the building was to be put on Government-owned land. The House accepted the Committee's interpretation of the situation but the Senate, when the bill
- ↑ 17 The article and editorial are quoted in: Congressional Record, Appendix, 76th Congress, 3d session, volume 86, part 14, pp. 1336, 1337.
- ↑ 18 Memorandum of Maj. Gen. James C. Magee. The Surgeon General, U.S. Army, 27 April 1940. On file in Record Group 112. Surgeon General's Office file number 631.1 (Army Medical Museum and Library), from the records of the National Archives.
