Rush to the Fireside

Army headquarters in Paris announced that "lack of shipping" would slow up redeployment by a month. Impatient, homesick G.I.s hit the ceiling. In the office of Stars & Stripes the angry staff members wrote and printed a letter that would surely have been censored if it had been sent to the composing room as an editorial.

The letter pointedly asked if the delay was not caused by failure to use all available merchant marine ships, speculated on whether enough idle bottoms had been pressed into service as troop carriers, wondered if the Army had not failed to "act aggressively." The soldier editors ap pealed to Washington newspapermen to search out "the truth."

The truth was that the Army, still ahead of its redeployment schedule, was working with might & main to get troops home. The Army was being torn apart in answer to public demand, and would have to be rebuilt from the ground up after redeployment had been completed. Last week the War Department announced that by February all troops eligible for redeployment will be home from Atlantic theaters; by next June, from the Pacific. To speed the job, ten aircraft carriers, 26 cruisers, and six battleships will soon be run into service as troop carriers.

They would more than make up for the loss of the great Queen Elizabeth and the Aquitania, which the British announced would be taken off the job of returning U.S. troops.

The Queen Mary will stay in the U.S. transport service, but Elizabeth and Aquitania had other obligations, which should be understood by U.S. troops. British and Canadian soldiers want to be sped home, too. The Combined Chiefs of Staff, reassigning the two ships, decided it was time to give them a chance.

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