U.S. At War: Hurry Home

On one day 31,445 soldiers arrived in New York on seven ships from Europe; the huge Queen Elizabeth brought an entire division. In France, at shove-off camps named for U.S. cigaret brands, more thousands of men got their sailing papers, clambered aboard ships. By this week 532,258 shouting, cheering G.I.s had arrived back home in the States.

Redeployment was well ahead of schedule and still gaining speed. Speediest of all was air transport. Last week the Army Air Forces gave out some eye-popping statistics of history’s biggest air passenger movement: in a 72-day period up to mid-July, 125,370 military personnel had been flown from the European and Mediterranean theaters to the U.S. They had come in 3,425 heavy bombers and about 600 Air Transport Command planes. The Army thought that virtually all the wounded would be home in a week or so.

On the average there had been a passenger-carrying plane over the Atlantic every six minutes. At New York, Miami, Washington, Bradley Field, Conn., and Hunter Field (near Savannah), Ga., as many as 100 aircraft turned up in a single flight. Proudly the A.A.F. pointed to its safety record: only three bombers had been lost; not one life had been lost in the A.T.C.’s transporting of 67,200 troops. Naval craft of three nations (U.S., Britain and Brazil) patrolled the three routes (via Iceland and Newfoundland; via the Azores; via Natal, Brazil, and the Caribbean). They were a chain of beacons, supplying weather data to the homing aircraft. Ashore, long range planes stood by for rescue missions.

The redeployment movement was another example of U.S. speed and organization. In France and Italy were many centers where G.I.s are assembled, processed, filtered out to the embarkation camps. Ancient Reims is the hub of an assembly area made up of 18 tent cities named Boston, Brooklyn, Cleveland, New York, San Antonio, St. Louis, Carlisle,†etc. The general idea in redeployment camps: keep morale high with plenty of recreation, shows, liberal leaves, a taste of home in advance. Thus “Boston” has “Tremont Theater.” At “Brooklyn” is a home plate from Ebbets Field, a bag of Coney Island sand,

† A redeployment camp for nurses, named for the Army Medical Field Service School at Carlisle, Pa.