Old Soldiers' Soldier

The great transition was taking place without violence. Across the land, veterans of World War II tried to make the best of this best of all civilian worlds.

In The Bronx, ex-Pfc. Peter Boucouvales, paralyzed from the waist down by the bullet which had lodged in his neck, lay between clean sheets in the Veterans Administration Hospital. The corridors were cheerless, the windows dirty. His lunch of filet of sole, peas, rice, cole slaw and lemon pie was cold by the time it got to him, but filling nevertheless. Lying in bed, naked to the waist, Boucouvales gazed down at his full stomach. His belly was getting so big, he told the nurses, he ought to be switched to the maternity ward.

In Manhattan, a grim-looking company of men marched to the office of the New York Real Estate Board and stated their case. They were veterans who could not find a place to live. How about some of those big, empty houses on Fifth Avenue? they hinted. Before they marched out they said, "We're sick and tired of words."

In Atlanta, Denver, Chicago, Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Indianapolis, men traipsed in & out of branch offices of the U.S. Employment Service and Veterans Administration--griping at the red tape, the delays in paying claims, the poor job offers and the stuffiness of bureaucracy. It burned them up when "Major So-and-So," now in civvies, interviewed them. "You wouldn't catch me calling myself T/3 Smith the rest of my life," sniffed ex-T/3 Smith.

In Boston, veterans flocked to Faneuil Hall to howl and hoot at speakers who opposed a proposed increase in the state bonus from $100 to $1,000.

In Washington USES announced that calls for workers outnumbered job applications by ten to one. The jobs might not be much, they might be sorting potatoes in Monte Vista, Colo., but they were jobs.

No Shock. This was the picture around the nation last week. There were gripes. Few men wanted handouts; they preferred to help themselves. But they would like a place to live--and some shirts and a suit.

Only a year ago the U.S. Army was pouring across the Rhine, the Navy was bombarding Okinawa. By last week more than ten million veterans of World War II were back; seven million were at work; 2,100,000 were at school or on vacation; 83,607 were hospitalized. The country had promised to cushion the shock of their return and the country, for the most part, had made good. No soldier could deny that.

If anything, the cushion was too soft.

On Boston Common, sunning himself on a park bench, an ex-corporal said: "What's the use of working for $20 a week when you get $20 for doing nothing? It's getting pretty monotonous but I haven't been able to find a thing."

His buddy had tried working at his old place. "The fellows acted like they were sorry I was back, like I was cheating them out of the big dough they could make during the war. They didn't expect me back for a couple more years. I didn't feel right. I felt lazy, except on weekends when I wanted to raise hell."

The attitude of many a veteran, parked on his cushion, was: "I'll wait until things shake down." By the time things "shake down" he may find he has been shaken out. But these were matters for personal reflection and decision. The nation had tried to do its best.

"During His Life." The U.S. had come to accept payment to veterans as inevitable--like death and taxes. As long ago as 1636 the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth decided: "If any man shalbee sent forth as a souldier and shall return maimed, hee shalbee majntained competently by the Collonie during his life." The U.S. had been maintaining its old soldiers ever since, although not always competently.

The 4,000,000 who came home from World War I found plenty of promises but a country unprepared either to reabsorb or support them. Veterans legislation was a hodgepodge and the Veterans Bureau was a scandal until President Harding made a halfhearted attempt to clean it up; then the bureau became more concerned with economy--those were the days of Coolidge and Hoover--than philanthropy. Veterans plunged into race riots. The jobless sold apples, and in 1932 marched on Washington. The Government drove them out with cavalry and tanks while the nation watched in shame.

This time the U.S. was ready for its homecoming soldiers, on a scale which men were just beginning to appreciate.

Congress had provided the legislation (the "G.I. Bill of Rights"), and Harry Truman had provided the man. It was one of the President's best appointments: General Omar N. Bradley, the "Doughboys' General." He had not wanted the job; he had wanted to rest and shoot quail. But he walked into the old grey Veterans Administration Building in Washington, said modestly, "My name's Bradley," and sat down.

52-20 & Everything. The legislation to take care of the veterans included more than just the G.I. Bill of Rights. Some of it went back to 1789. It provided: medical care for all; education for those who wanted it ($500 a year for four years towards tuition, $65-90-a-month subsistence); $65-90 a month for those who wanted to train on the job; help in finding jobs through 6,443 local boards; legal aid through the Department of Justice in getting old jobs back; loans up to $4,000 to build homes, start businesses; $20-a-week for 52 weeks for those out of jobs (the "52-20 Club"); Old Soldiers' Homes; and pensions.

Between 1919 and 1929, pensions to World War I veterans and their survivors increased by 866%. Veterans of the Spanish-American War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Philippine Insurrection, World Wars I & II can collect as high as $250 a month. A veteran disabled in peacetime (while still a member of the armed forces) can collect as high as $187.50 a month. Long after discharge, a veteran totally disabled by such civilian misadventures as falling downstairs or getting hit by a truck can collect as high as $60 a month.

Death pensions are being paid to widows, children, dependent parents (whether death occurred as the result of service or not) in rates ranging from $18 to $100 a month.

In one way or another, all of these Government functions and payments on behalf of its veterans come under Bradley's Administration, which employs 106,000 doctors, lawyers, actuarial experts, clerks and investigators; operates the nation's biggest insurance business (15 million service personnel policyholders) and is the biggest socialized enterprise in the capitalist U.S. It is also a business which will expand for many years to come. Examples:

On its medical staff, which is run by Major General Paul Ramsey Hawley, formerly chief surgeon in the ETO, are 2,700 doctors. In the next 10-15 years, Hawley estimates, he will need 7,000. Only a small percentage of the patients will have service-incurred ailments; only 14.7% of the general medical and surgical cases in VA's care today are service-connected cases. But the VA, prodded chiefly by the American Legion, has undertaken to care for all veterans, no matter how, when or where they got hurt. If the country continues that policy, warns Hawley, "hold your hat."

What will it all cost? No one knows, but it is possible to get a rough idea from the continuing costs of previous wars. By the end of last November (latest available figures) the U.S. had paid out:

P: $70,000,000 to the soldiers of the Revolution and their kin. (Account closed.)

P: $46,218,330.57 to the pensioners of the War of 1812, the last of whom died only last month. (Account closed.)

P: $61,646,168.97 to the pensioners of the Mexican War, of whom 50 survivors are still being paid.

P: $96,587,799.25 for the Indian Wars, plus bounty land to most of those pensioners, who included Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and U.S. Grant; 3,787 still survive.

P: $8,123,938,565.93 to pensioners of the Civil War; still surviving: 22,880, who draw a monthly total of $903,614.65.

P: $2,240,004,117.27 to pensioners of the Spanish-American War; almost $12 million a month is currently being paid out.

P: $5,615,270,224.68 for World War I--so far.

P: $538,177,299.85 for World War II pensions--in the first three postwar months.

These figures, representing pensions only, do not include the costs of hospitalization, administration, rehabilitation. To pension, care for and heal all the soldiers & sailors of all their wars so far, the U.S. people have paid out a total of $30 billion.

And the drain has only begun. The veterans of World War II may ultimately number 16,000,000. World War II's huge omnibus program made all former veterans legislation look like nickel jitney rides. Deeply aware of their obligations, nevertheless U.S. taxpayers had reason to feel misgivings, as the nation embarked on the most far-reaching veterans program in history. How long, it might well ask itself, does a war last?

Soldier Bradley had other, more immediate problems. Nobody but a fool would have wanted his job, and Bradley is no fool. A friend said to him: "Inside of two years they'll toss you out of your office window right on your face. And you'll land so hard you'll bounce." His friend had in mind the politics and pressures which swirl around "the country's second lousiest job." Colonel Charles Forbes had retired from the job in 1923 to a federal penitentiary, convicted of selling contracts. Forbes's successor, honest, penurious Brigadier General Frank T. Hines, had left with dignity but no glory.

"All Our Confidence." Essentially the VA is an enormous business and sociological enterprise--and Omar Bradley is neither sociologist nor businessman. But he has other qualifications--a professional soldier's careful mind, a straightforward approach to his tasks, a reassuringly homely character. His is a steady hand.

Born near Moberly, Mo. (where a sign along the railroad proclaims: "Moberly, Home of General Omar Bradley"), he went to West Point, spent World War I in the U.S. and the 23 years afterwards studying for World War II, which was no surprise to him.

In February 1943 he arrived in North Africa. There he commanded the II Corps in the Seventh Army of George Patton. In that brutal and bloody campaign, U.S. troops learned how vastly different real war was from Tennessee maneuvers. Then the flamboyant George Patton overshadowed Bradley, but it was the quiet, bespectacled infantryman in the old trench coat who made the jittery divisions into a fighting machine. George Marshall wired him: "All our confidence in you has been justified."

When the U.S. First Army hurdled the Channel and plunged into Normandy, it was Omar Bradley who was in command. The First broke the Germans' human dam at Saint-Lo. Bradley was lifted then to command of the Twelfth Army Group. Once again the spectacular Patton got the headlines and the popular applause, lancing through France with his Third Army tanks. But it was Bradley, scowling over his maps, mixing an occasional whiskey old-fashioned with orange marmalade, plodding through the churned-up battlefields of France, who held the destiny of U.S. soldiers in his steady hands.

Across Belgium, over the German frontier, into the Saar, halted and thrown back in the Battle of the Bulge, surging forward again in the great Rhine offensive, the tanks and infantrymen of Bradley's great armies rolled on. On May 8, 1945, the tall, spare infantryman said to one of his staff: "With hostilities over, now our troubles really begin."

A General's Sleep. At war's end he came home. He thought he had earned a rest; but the President still needed him.

He plunged into his new job with vigor. As his chief deputy in VA he moved in his old Twelfth Army Group deputy, Brigadier General Henry B. Lewis. With Hawley on the hospital end, they went to work, rebuilding the cumbersome, antiquated bureau, decentralizing the vast machinery.

He knew even better than the American Legion's pompous John Stelle, who trumpeted a blast of criticism at him, that there were delays in filing claims, that medical records were not on hand, that much of his personnel was incompetent. He shut Stelle up with a curt report outlining shortcomings of which even Stelle was not aware. He doggedly applied himself to his business, building an organization which he hopes can do the job. In his flat Missouri twang, he said briefly: "I'm not worried."

There is a quality of greatness about 53-year-old Omar Bradley--in his plain face and his sense of humanity. Once, musing on a soldier's life, he observed that he had spent 30 years training himself to make decisions which would cost human lives. "You don't sleep any too well from it," he said quietly. Now the General's job is patching up shattered lives and straightening out war's endless disorders. The hazards and responsibilities of this peacetime assignment, in some respects, are greater than any he ever had in wartime. But the General sleeps better--and millions of U.S. veterans could sleep better because he is on the job.

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