From the Ranks

If Army brass hats wondered what had happened to G.I. morale, they could get one answer from the mid-Pacific Stars and Stripes, which blew off recently in an editorial. Said Stars and Stripes:

Enlisted men have had all they want of being treated as "second-class citizens." They have watched officers in forward areas enjoy bigger and cheaper supplies of liquor, better clubs, the best seats at theaters, all the dates with nurses (officers) and Red Cross girls. Soldiers & sailors are returning from World War II, said Stars and Stripes, "hating and detesting military life."

The root of their bitterness: "A caste system inherited from Frederick the Great of Prussia and the 18th-Century British Navy [which] is hardly appropriate to the U.S.," a caste system "connoted by the words 'enlisted' and 'commissioned.' "

Said Stars and Stripes: "The aristocracy-peasantry relationship characteristic of our armed forces has a counterpart nowhere else in American life." To the argument that the system is needed for battlefield discipline, Stars and Stripes retorted: "Such privileges and preferences actually destroy respect for rank, undermine morale and efficiency."

Last week, in the opinion of tidy, martinettish Lieut. General Robert Charlwood Richardson Jr., chief of Army forces in the mid-Pacific, Stars and Stripes went too far. It headlined a story of the Manila riots: "Patterson [Secretary of War] Branded Number One Enemy by Jeering Mob." "Nellie" Richardson forthwith forbade the editors "to refer in your newspaper discourteously to the President of the U.S., the Secretary of War, the Chief of Staff of the Army or to others in authority in the Army."

Editorial writers promptly dropped all editorials, the gripe column. General Richardson hurriedly explained that he "was willing" to let them gripe, he just did not want them to call names. Said Editor (Master Sergeant) Chick Avedon: "That's different. . . ."

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