What Say the Veterans?

The 10,000,000 or more U.S. veterans of World War II will largely determine U.S. policies after the war. What do they think about? What do they talk about? A lot of them* talk like this: > "Somebody has got to win this war, and I guess it's up to us who know what war is like," said one pilot, typically, in expressing a willingness to return to combat, "and that's not idealism, it's common sense." Said another airman: "If the people of this country think that things are tough as hell now they'd better damned well soon get used to it, because things are really going to get tough. That is the way it has to be if we are to survive." > Consensus on the length of the war: five years from now. Casualties: "Beyond anything that has been said publicly." No veteran would say he thought the Axis would win the war, but many said, "We are not winning it yet." > On isolation v. postwar cooperation: "When this war is over I do not ever want to hear of any foreign country." > "If they would put some of these bastards that are striking and loafing in the Army at $50 a month, we'd get production," says the average soldier. To a country which is told that it is producing 5,500 planes a month, absenteeism does not seem so criminal; it does seem criminal to men who have seen so few planes that they regard them with reverence.

Headlines v. Realities. "Why don't you tell the truth?" is a question the veterans ask the newspaperman. "Why is it that good news makes better communiques and bigger headlines than bad news?" Observed a marine: "When a man sees his friends die he loses his indifference to realities." Few sailors or marines could understand Admiral Halsey's statement that the Japs will be beaten this year, and few airmen who have been in combat could agree with General Arnold, who told officers in India last fortnight that he had a date in Berlin one year hence and "I'll meet you six months afterward in Tokyo." > A submarine officer landed in San Francisco and promptly got drunk, which was not his custom. Next morning he explained to a friend: "I haven't been in my own country since the war started. I was naturally dying to get back--you know, 'this is my own, my native land stuff.' But when I looked around and talked to a few people I felt worse & worse. People in this country just don't know we are in a war, a difficult, bloody war. I could see they had no idea what we are up against and sometimes it seemed that they didn't care. My God, a few bombs would do a lot ot good."

>-"Wv have just returned from one year of active duty in the combat zone," said an airman. "Arriving on the West Coast, we were granted furloughs. Great was our rejoicing. We went to all parts of the country.. . . The country not only seemed to have changed. It had changed. People were complaining of rationing, the shortage of luxuries ... it was disgusting to us. Some of the Australians had not seen a potato for a year and a half. I talked to a man in a defense plant getting $380 to $420 per month. His job of inspecting kept him busy only four or five hours a day. Any attempt to do other work brought rebuke.... At another plant No. 8 copper wire was being thrown away in pieces 2 to 18 inches long. . . . One of our men talked to his uncle in an aircraft factory.

He could do very little on that job because several men were working on the same job. . . . One officer in our outfit told of a contracting company who gave their workers visitors' badges so that Government inspectors would not find them loafing on the job."

> "The only test is combat--whether it's a weapon or a general or a second lieutenant or a private. WTe Americans brag too much about ourselves before we know what we are talking about, and we get some awful let-downs." > A high-ranking officer recently returned from overseas: "Any attempt we made to get the blunt truth into our communiques was blocked. Most of us believed the American people could take it, but the tendency in higher quarters was to shield the people from the hard, cruel facts. . . . Whether this was deliberate shielding of the people, or an attempt by the area command to look good to the folks back home I do not know. . . ."

> A Flying Fortress pilot: "I've got to get out of the country and stay out until I can come back for good. I've been home two months and I'm getting soft and complacent like everybody else. Out there I know what I'm up against, at least."

* More than 100 soldiers, sailors and marines from the Pacific battle areas, interviewed by TIME.

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