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Show :mmw Washington, D. C. i RECRUITING SHOWS PHYSICAL DEFICIENCIES ' The army campaign for new re-. re-. eruits is showing up all too vividly .how the years of depression have left their mark on American youth. Greatest difficulty in securing re-. re-. cruits is not the reluctance of young . men to enlist, but their inability to pass physical examinations. In peacetime, the armed services get most of their recruits from lower-bracket families. Because of economic eco-nomic conditions it is now the lower-bracket lower-bracket families, with the most children, chil-dren, which lack sufficient nourishment, nourish-ment, fresh air and exercise. This has been a particularly se-. se-. rious drawback to recruiting in the larger cities. During one recent . drive to bring the marine corps up to full strength, recruiting officers left the cities and combed the smaller small-er towns in farming communities. There they found a much huskier .type of recruit, but many were rejected re-jected because of poor teeth. In the cities, the biggest drawbacks draw-backs are bad eyesight and underweight. under-weight. WAR DOOMS CROP CONTROL? Henry Wallace's program of crop curtailment and soil conservation is -about to face its toughest year. Reason Rea-son is the certain food shortage in Europe and the demand that American Amer-ican farmers use their surpluses to feed war-torn Europe. There are two causes for the food shortage. One is the fact that many countries have been too busy fighting fight-ing to plant sufficient crops, and their fields have been fought over. Second reason is lack of sufficient .merchant shipping. Four countries Norway, Holland, Denmark, and' Belgium have a total of 10,000,000 .gross tons of merchant vessels -which are immobilized, so far as .supplying the home ports is concerned. con-cerned. Either they are bottled up at home, or they are in foreign ports, unable to reach home. Vessels which a year ago were carrying U. S. fodder to Denmark, to feed Danish cattle, today are di-verted di-verted to other trade or riding at anchor. Meantime, the cattle are eating up the existing supplies of fodder. When these are gone, the cattle will have to be killed. And the killing will be done by the ' Germans, who will consume the cat-Ac cat-Ac . . : This is just one simplified illustration. illustra-tion. No such constriction was inown in the early days of the World war, because the United States, still neutral, insisted on . maintaining its shipping to the neutral neu-tral countries of Europe. But now Its shipping is barred by the neutrality neu-trality act from belligerent ports and combat zones. All of this is sure to bring heavy demands on the U. S. farmer, also on congress to appropriate relief money to help Europe's starving; . populations. And this, in turn, is sure to upset crop control. For it was high food prices during the World war which increased acreage and also sent many farmers heavily into debt to buy new land. DIPLOMATS MAKE WARS? John Q. Public thinks the diplomats diplo-mats make the wars and could stop them. Argentine Ambassador Espil has a letter saying, "Your country should submit itself to becoming a part of the United States." (No Latin American Amer-ican country is prouder of its independence inde-pendence than Argentina, less likely to become part of the U. S. A.) Uruguayan Minister Richling gets so many letters he is working overtime over-time to answer them. The tenor is: "You must get rid of the dangerous Germans." j FRENCH FLEET The White House is not advertis-l Ing it, but the disposition of the French fleet was one vital point which came up in secret discussion . with the French just before their capitulation. Roosevelt wanted to make sure that the French navy would not fall into Nazi hands. For France's "warships could just about tip the balance of naval power and give the Nazis a powerful striking 'arm In the south Atlantic against Latin -America. The French have two brand-new 26,000-ton battleships, the Stras-, bourg and the Dunkerque, probably the fastest in the world; also two new 35,000-ton battleships, the' Richelieu and the Jean Bart, the latter not quite completed. These, dded to the German fleet, would give Hitler 10 battleships against 15 for the United States, all much older end slower. When you consider that 12 U. S. battleships are kept in the Pacific, with only three in the Atlantic, you Set a rough idea of how difficult it would be for this country to defend the Monroe Doctrine if Hitler got the French fleet. Another thing he "light get which would add to our Monroe Doctrine problem is the French naval base at Dakar, on the bulge of Africa jutting out toward Brazil. Note The United States recently has launched two new war monsters, 'but it will take several months ta complete them. : |