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Show Troop Shift to the Pacific rQ Big Job With Human Side j Need to Finish the Fight Against Japanese Jfi-lf Prevents Wholesale Release of Vets; L 'il4 Move Will Tax U. S. Shipping. By BAUKHAGE News Analyst and Commentator. tVNU Service, Union Trust Building, Washington, D. C. The American vocabulary has been enriched by a new word which has burdened the notebooks ol war department stenographers in Washington Wash-ington lor a long time. When I was In San Francisco I saw its meaning fraphically illustrated. The word is "redeployment." No, ( didn't make a typographical error. er-ror. Reemployment we have heard about before. ReDeployment is different. dif-ferent. And in that word, as in Hauptmann's "tear," can sparkle "all the Joy and all the sorrow of Ihe world." ' This new word isn't in any dictionary. dic-tionary. And In all the echoing acres of the Pentagon I could find no official of-ficial definition of it but in Its current cur-rent application it simply means ihifting a lot of American boys out of the European theater of war where the curtain has gone down. That process is causing many a headache In the Pentagon. It will cause many a heartache at home and abroad. It will cause some happiness, hap-piness, too. For the boys and the families of toe soldiers and sailors who are cast for the second act in the tragedy of World War II (and that is most of them) redeployment means heartaches. heart-aches. For the others it means happiness. hap-piness. But whether they go back to Main street and take up the plowshare plow-share or the pen, the hammer or the ichool book, or whether they go on to fresh battlefields, it is a headache head-ache as well as a heartache for the high command. Heartache, Headache For Officers Before writing this article I had a long conversation with one of the highest of the high command and I can tell you redeployment is both headache and heartache for him. He and all his officer comrades who have sons and gTandsons of their own fighting at the front want them back as much as any rear rank private's pri-vate's mother, dad, sweetheart or wife, wants him. But few outside those more or less Intimately concerned realize the mechanical me-chanical implications of managing this major migration of history in the moving of more than three million mil-lion men. Have you any idea how long the mere physical process of simply loading soldiers, one after another, on ships and sending them back to America would take? I do not have official figures although al-though they should be released shortly, but I have an estimate on good authority, of the time which . would bq required to transfer three million men now in Europe across the Atlantic to east coast ports. Assuming As-suming that the transport facilities available were devoted exclusively to this mission, perhaps three, hundred hun-dred thousand men a month could be carried home. That would mean that 10 months would be required to transfer them all. And, of course, that is a fantastic supposition, since ships as well as men, are needed in the Pacific and so are ships to carry the endless supplies which the army of the Pacific will require to carry on all-out warfare. Redeployment, materially and morally, is a tremendous task and, as a result of personal conversations with the top men upon whom its twin burdens rest, I can assure you that the question of morale is, if anything, the greater of the two In their consideration. There is no question that the suffering suf-fering and the repercussions of the lengthy separation of young men from their normal life will become greater, now that V-E Day has come and gone. The army high command knows til is and that is why so much time has been spent on taking every possible step to minimize the suffering suffer-ing hichthis slash that cuts across the heartstrings of America's social life, will cause. I happen to know that busy with the terrific burden of bringing Eu-ropes Eu-ropes war to a successful termination termina-tion and beginning the final portion of chapter two, General Marshall himself for many long months has spent hour after hour of his crowded crowd-ed days and interrupted nights working on this problem. Everybody Must j Play the Game i There are some phases of this shift of our main war effort from f one side of the world to the other which many do not realize but for which they must be prepared. In the first place, it will be no easy task for those who have fought the good fight in Europe to be trans- ferred to the Pacific without a chance of furlough in between. Some will have that privilege but not all. And even for the lucky ones the second sec-ond parting will be hard unless the families play the game. There is another group who will see America's shore but will not be allowed even to touch American soil. They are the ones who will pass through the Panama canal on a nonstop non-stop trip to points in the East. That will be a tough experience to see Old Glory waving from flagstaffs in the Canal Zone and to watch its colors fade in the distance. It simply sim-ply cannot be helped. But perhaps, temporarily at least, the hardest test of patience and self-discipline self-discipline will fall upon those who know that they are to be discharged, dis-charged, but who, because war takes the priority and the fighters must go first, can only sit and wait in Europe. Aside from the personal anguish which this delay will mean, it Is bound to raise a clamor from motives mo-tives natural enough but nonetheless nonethe-less selfish, of those whose economic situation is suffering from the neces- i sary delay in reinforcing our civilian civil-ian manpower with the soldiers whose services are no longer needed but who cannot be moved back home immediately. Before General Gregory, in charge of the great housekeeping department depart-ment of the army, the quartermaster quartermas-ter corps, left for France in anticipation antici-pation of V-E Day, I had a long talk with this gray-haired, fatherly man who is loved by his comrades with a warmth of affection that outglows the well-earned stars on his shoulder-straps. When I talked to him about redeployment, re-deployment, although he is responsible respon-sible for the physical rather than the moral welfare of the soldier, it was of the latter of which he spoke first. How are the folks at home going to take it? That was the question on his tongue, just as it had been in the minds of the high officers and officials with whom I had talked before. be-fore. I learned a lot from General Gregory Greg-ory and his aides about the tremendous tremen-dous industrial effort which it takes to produce what the army wears and eats and with which it is shaved and laved and sheltered. As long as there is a man in uniform he must be fed and clothed and furnished supplies from helmets and raincoats to socks and shorts to say nothing of a thousand odds and ends including writing paper, soap (they have a kind that will serve to wash clothes as well as bodies, and shave with too, and lather in salt water), tobacco, tobac-co, bug-powder, cigarettes, bandages, band-ages, shoelaces, razor blades, matches ... ad infinitum. Thousands of men clad in woolens required by European weather will have to be supplied with cotton for the tropics. Thousands moving from the tropics toward the more northerly north-erly latitudes of the Japanese islands is-lands and China must have woolens to replace their cottons. Meanwhile, they will have to continue con-tinue to wear and to wear out what they now have on. Another factor is the length of the Pacific "pipe-lines" the great distances dis-tances from base to front. The "turn-around" time of the voyage of ships is longer than the voyage to Europe and there must be enough supplies at hand for the troops to cover the period between each delivery. de-livery. All this will require continued manufacture by private industry for military use for a long time which means that much longer to wait for final conversion to civilian production. produc-tion. This is why this new word "redeployment" "re-deployment" is not a happy one and why it holds within it so many headaches head-aches and so many heartaches which will Iry the coolest heads and strain the stoutest hearts. |
