Army & Navy – MORALE: Soft Beds and Hard Facts

The Navy long ago took over swank establishments like Honolulu’s Royal Hawaiian Hotel for bluejackets returned from combat. About 5,000 Army airmen rest each month at topflight resort hotels in the U.S. Finally, last week some of the same kind of luxury was dished up for G.I. Joe himself.

G.I.s returning from overseas duty began arriving at 35 hotels in Miami Beach, three others in Santa Barbara, Calif. Within a fortnight, others in Asheville, N.C., Lake Placid, N.Y. and Hot Springs, Ark. will be opened. (Total capacity: 17,-ooo—less than 1% of Army Ground Force and Service Force troops now overseas.)

It was like something G.I. Joe had dreamed of but never expected to realize. One veteran of Italian foxholes complained that he could not sleep—the Miami Beach beds were too soft. There were badminton, tennis, golf, shuffleboard, but most soldiers preferred to loaf in the sun. Wives could be brought along for a mere $1.25 a day.

Reasoned Luxury. As usual, G.I. Joe looked for the reason behind this “environment characterized by mental and physical relaxation and comfort,” as the War Department called it. The reason was not hard to find.

The U.S. soldier had drifted so far from his civilian past that he had often begun to develop different thinking processes. Sometimes he had grown to hate civilians, who could buy almost anything with war-swollen wages, could even go on strike if they chose. He had also tired of battle, become bitterly homesick.

Under Congressional pressure the War Department started early this year to bring back a few men who had been overseas longest, and reassign them to duty within the U.S. It was a soldier’s dream—the “rotation policy.”

But by last week some 5,000,000 men were outside the U.S. and rotation was about to be abandoned, or at least sharply curtailed. Reason: by October 1, nearly all the soldiering jobs within the U.S. will be filled by WACs, limited-service men and some combat veterans. Henceforth, 21-day furloughs at home will be the best the Army can offer to men who have been overseas 18 months or longer. Then they will be sent to “redistribution centers” (as the resort hotels are called). From there most will be sent back overseas.

Re-educating Joe. During each of his seven to 14 days of luxury the soldier can do anything he likes for 20 or 22 hours. The other two to four hours G.I. Joe spends being “thoroughly oriented to the realities of the situation confronting us” so that he may “have a clear understanding of the need for his own continued personal participation in the war.” Some lecture titles: “Cheers and Gripes,” “The Home Front,” “Why More Duty?”

The hardest facts confronting Joe and his War Department are these: Joe is still needed overseas but Joe simply does not like to fight. In several representative groups interviewed last week at Miami Beach and Santa Barbara, not a man was found who wanted to return to combat: “If I had wanted to fight I’d have joined the Marines.”

The War Department hopes that its combat veterans can be convinced that their “continued personal participation” is necessary. But selling Joe on that proposition is not absolutely necessary: he will be sent back into a combat zone anyhow, if he is physically and mentally fit.

Meantime, while Joe was enjoying himself and being indoctrinated, he got a thorough physical and psychiatric checkup, had his teeth filled and his papers put in order.