Recruiting, 1940-Style

Through the sandy, slash-pine country of southwestern Georgia last week rolled a brand-new U. S. Army truck and trailer. At crossroads, along the main streets of dusty little towns, its five-man crew went to work. Their job was to get recruits. Atop the trailer a loudspeaker barked a persuasive sales talk. Inside there were movies of Army life, three desks for interviewing applicants. It was the first of 18 rolling recruiting stations designed by the Army for its nine Corps areas.

As it has in all U. S. wars, the South was last week turning out more recruits than any other section. In one week last month the Fourth Corps Area (all the Confederate States but Virginia, Texas, Arkansas) set a U. S. peacetime record by enrolling 2,033 men. From the start of the current recruiting campaign on May 16, the South has averaged 1,500 weekly (New York-New England: 200-300).

One reason for Southern enthusiasm was that in the agricultural South an Army private's pay of $21 a month (plus food, clothing, lodging, medical care) looked better than it did in the high-pay industrial regions. One Navy officer gave another reason. Said he: "Most Southerners like to fight."

Had the other eight Corps areas equaled the output of the Fourth, the Army would nave enrolled 121,500 recruits in the two-and-a-half-month period. As it was, 85,000 volunteers signed up for a three-year enlistment. This figure broke another peacetime record. The Army theoretically needed only 95,000 more men to reach its previously authorized 375,000 quota, but since several thousand enlistments expire every month, about 5,000 men have first to be recruited every month before any increase can be recorded.

Army men were jubilant over the physical and mental condition of the new soldiers. Cataloguing its new recruits (after rejecting 30%), the Army found that 62% had attended high school or college, the rest had grammar-school educations. The composite 1940 recruit is a blue-eyed, brown-haired 21-year-old, rural, native-born citizen with a high-school education, 5 ft. 8 1/2 in. tall, weighing 145 lb.

Cockiest of the services is the rough, tough Marine Corps, whose boast is that its men are born looking for a fight. Limited to 20% of Navy personnel, the Marine Corps's strength was recently raised from 25,000 men to 34,000. Last week its roster was full. The Navy, with only 53,000 recruits to go to fill its authorized quota of 193,000, was in no hurry to get them, figured that next March would be time enough to complete its full fighting strength. Reasons for the superior drawing power of the Navy over the Army were better pay, more chance to see the world. A leatherneck recruiting officer put it another way for his outfit. Said he: "It's the . . . old oomph that brings them in. . . ."

These good tidings meant that the recruiting quotas set last May would probably be reached in a few months, but those quotas are already out of date. Today's defense plans call for training 2,000,000 men to operate the complex machines of modern warfare. If the recent accelerated rate of recruiting could be kept up, it would take about six more years before 2,000,000 would be enrolled for training. The Army's only hope for getting that number in a reasonable time remained the Conscription Bill, over which Congress was scrapping last week.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.