3,200 Casualties

Starkly eloquent was a casualty list issued last week by War Shipping Administrator Emory Land. The number of U.S. merchant sailors killed or missing stands at 3,200, or 3.8% of their full force. Armed services casualties, by comparison, are only three-fourths of 1%. Said Admiral Land: "Patriotism, courage and devotion to duty are among the outstanding attributes of the seamen who man our Merchant Marine. . . . Seamen who have been through hell and high water voluntarily sign on for another voyage and keep delivering the goods."

Their 3,200 casualties made one stout answer to charges of bad morale on U.S. freighters. From pink-cheeked ensigns of Navy gun crews has come many a report of lax discipline among the rough men of the fo'c'sle. Young officers are sticklers for regulation; free-mannered merchant sailors deride them as "junior jerks" and "90day wonders." Admiral Land's rebuttal of lax-discipline charges: "Only one-half of 1% of the entire Merchant Marine personnel at sea in 1942 were guilty of misconduct serious enough to report on logbooks."

Not on any logbook was a story current in the U.S. fortnight ago: that wounded Marines had had to unload cargo at Guadalcanal because merchant sailors indulged in a sit-down strike. In Washington last week an inquiring House Naval Affairs subcommittee scotched the strike story: neither the Navy nor WSA had any record of the incident. The report first appeared in the Akron (Ohio) Beacon-Journal, but City Editor Charles Miller admitted he might have been misled by one alleged eyewitness; he had not understood that Marines customarily unload cargo in battle zones, that merchant sailors do not, and are busy operating winches, keeping steam up ready to move ship in case of attack. He was. he said, "a sort of landlubber."

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