Army & Navy – HEALTH: VD Among the Amateurs

A House Naval Affairs Committee last week made plans to investigate an age-old problem: vice as it affects the armed forces. Their first stop this week will be Norfolk, followed by San Francisco, San Diego and other Navy bases.

The Program. In 1941 several U.S. agencies, including Dr. Thomas Parran’s Public Health Service and Charles P. Taft’s Office of Defense, Health and Welfare Services, joined in a program to cut down the rate of venereal disease. Though all early venereal figures are suspect, the rate of infections per 1,000 men in the Army in 1917 was given at 107; in 1861 at 184. Last year it was 37.8, higher than it had been in 1939.

The agencies’ first aim was to eliminate the red-light district. This project annoyed many Army commanders, who argued that running prostitutes into the street would only increase the difficulty of venereal control. Nonsense, said Charlie Taft: a housed harlot could infect 20 to 75 soldiers a night, while the problems of a streetwalker limited the number of her prospective customers to five or six, and “red-light districts tend to advertise the product.”

Charlie Taft’s agency proudly noted last week that 350 communities throughout the U.S. had closed their hitherto condoned houses of prostitution. Only a year ago 75% to 90% of venereal disease cases were incurred in such houses. Messrs. Taft and Parran and their committees had also persuaded most better-class hotels to keep a sharper eye on their bellboys’ habit of sneaking in “call girls.”

With the cooperation of local police the agencies have recently launched a drive against cheaper, nonconforming hotels. Police in New York last fortnight arrested three proprietors of down-at-heels, midtown hotels “for allowing prostitutes to receive members of the armed forces and others.”

The Problem. If Messrs. Taft and Parran had made things difficult for the prostitute, why had the syphilis and gonorrhea rate among soldiers & sailors not decreased faster? Army Medical Corps doctors, who have been constantly tightening prophylactic measures, knew it really was going down, noted that it dropped (on the basis of incomplete averages) to an annual rate of 25 per 1,000 in November, December and January. But they knew, too, that they faced a problem spawned by war: nonprofessional prostitution.

Said Dr. John H. Stokes of Philadelphia in the Journal of the American Medical Association: “The oldtime prostitute in a house or the formal prostitute on the street is sinking into second place. The new type is the young girl in her late teens and early twenties . . . who is determined to have one fling or better. . . . The carrier and disseminator of venereal disease today is just one of us, so to speak.”

From around the U.S. came overwhelming evidence that the khaki-mad “victory girl” was a worse menace than the prostitute :

> Lieut. Commander Michael Wishengrad, the Navy’s New York venereal-disease control officer, said that nonprofessional pickups between 15 and 19 accounted for three out of four infections. Eighteen-hundred random cases reported to Washington indicated at least 64% of infections come from “amateurs.”

>Lieut. Commander Clarence J. Buckley, Wishengrad’s Philadelphia counterpart, put the figure higher: “These kids outnumber the streetwalkers four to one.”

>Though Mexican workers now occupied San Antonio’s famed “spicetown cribs,” the rate of delinquency among young girls had increased 350% in two years. One of every four girl “car hops” at the city’s drive-ins was found to be venereally infected. Said a social worker among the professional prostitutes: “The girls are sore as all get-out. They say the young chippies who work for a beer and sandwich are cramping their style.”

>Wrote a correspondent from Norfolk: “Whereas, before Pearl Harbor, the majority of Norfolk’s prostitutes were professionals, today probably 85% to 90% are amateurs. Many are young girls lured to Norfolk by the promise of big-paying jobs. Hundreds of these girls arrive each week. They hang around bus terminals while phoning for a room somewhere. . . . Farm girls and clerks from small towns find it easy to have all the men they want . . . many do not charge for their services.”

The U.S. was learning what had been learned in other countries over a three-year period. According to the British Medical Journal, juvenile delinquency has increased by” 50% in Britain, where four-fifths of all venereal infections are from amateurs. In Australia the Medical Journal of Australia cites an even higher percentage (85%) for amateurs.