First Call

This week the U.S. begins rehabilitating the first veterans of World War II.

Ready for approval by Veterans' Administration's Vocational Rehabilitation Service are applications from more than 1,000 ex-soldiers and sailors no longer able to fight, no longer able to earn respectable livings at old jobs. Under a program quietly authorized by Congress last March, these men (and hundreds of thousands to follow) will be taught new trades, paid pensions ($100 a month for a married man with two children) while learning. Eventually they will be eased back into civilian life in new jobs.

V.A. will do no training itself but will contract with factories--like Ford, General Motors--public and private schools and individuals. A veteran may be taught anything from typing to tattooing. In rare cases V.A. may finance law or medical schooling.

To qualify, the veteran must prove that battle or training injuries prevent his taking up an old trade. He must have at least 10% disability but be physically able to take the training. He must finish the course within four years, can expect help (but no promises) in landing a job once trained. V.A. is already developing skilled interviewers to route veterans to trades best suited for them which promise decent livelihoods. A major problem: spotting goldbrickers who will apply for training solely to get pensions.

Until the program gathers speed (and veterans) it will be financed from V.A.'s general funds -- $600,000,000 for fiscal 1943. Judging by World War I's aftermath, when training for 180,000 men (a third of them dropped out) cost $645,000,000 the program may eventually cost $1,500,000,000, handle 400,000 men. It must wind up six years after war's end.

Said Administrator Frank T. Hines: "If we don't make a success of it this time we ought to be ashamed of ourselves."

But unmentioned by him was the big lesson from World War I and one he knows well: the neatest, best-planned veterans' program can be knocked into a cocked campaign hat by veterans themselves, once they are organized into a lobby with one eye on the U.S. Treasury, the other on themselves.

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