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Show Army Clarifies Policies ( Regarding Farm Labor fel Military Units May Be Employed on'Crops f-h '. During 'Emergency Situations'; Individ- f- ' j'J- i- ual Furloughs Not Contemplated. ? .' - 'F-rf' if , j -1 j rf i J By BAUKIIAGE Vf?uJJ Analyst and Commentator. WN'U Service, Union Trust Building, Washington, C. "Home on a furlough. " I wonder how many of my read-era read-era remember that very popular print of two (or maybe more) generations gen-erations ago. Well, never mind if you don't (though I would appreciate a letter from any who do); "home on a furlough" is going to mean something quite different now. I remember the original picture only vaguely. I didn't know what the word "furlough" meant. But I know there was a tousle-headed blond boy In the middle of an admiring ad-miring farm family, telling his adventures. ad-ventures. Today, the farm boy with a conscience, con-science, and the farm family with a farm, are looking forward to the "furlough" that will bring the boy home for work, not the telling of his tales of adventure. It isn't going to be quite that way. The President, when the farm bloc was riding the administration Its hardest last month, went into considerable con-siderable detail as to what was to be done to solve the farm labor question. Since then some concrete steps have been taken but not the ones the farmers, or some of them, would have liked. They would have liked their own sons, or their own hands, who enlisted because they simply couldn't stay "out of the show," back doing the old chores they used to do. But this Is what the army said: "The army does not contemplate furloughing individual soldiers to work on farms," the war department announced in a statement clarifying policies and procedures by which soldiers may be used to alleviate the farm labor shortage. "World War I experience demonstrated dem-onstrated that such temporary releases re-leases of individual soldiers were of little assistance to the agriculture industry and disrupted the organization organiza-tion and training of the army. If furloughs were granted for this purpose, pur-pose, neither agriculture nor the army could be assured that the soldiers sol-diers thus furloughed actually would be engaged In agricultural activities. "Certain emergency situations may develop in which vital crops may be endangered because, of critical crit-ical shortages in local agricultural labor. In such cases, military units may be employed under command of their own officers to supplement the local farm labor until the crisis is over. "Troops so employed will be housed and fed by the army and will be subject to military control at all times. "Requests for use of military units for emergency farm duty must be transmitted to the war department by the chairman of the War Manpower Man-power commission." Another Loophole However, there is another loophole loop-hole which all of the farmers or the farm men in service may not know about A soldier over 38 years of age who is on active duty in the continental United States can get his discharge right now if he can get a statement from his local farm agent to the effect that he is needed. But the application has to get in by May 1. The same thing applies to men overseas and they have until June. (Better tell them by V-MaiL) The President explained to us twice, why a batch of young men couWn't be pulled out of a division and seat home. You can take 10 or 20 soldiers out of an outfit that has just started training and it doesn't make much difference. But you can't take that many men out of an outfit already trained and booked for overseas. Not without crippling the outfit so badly that it really interferes with battle plans. That's his explanation and he made it to us the other day, leaning back in his chair and obviously trying try-ing hard to get over an idea that he oelieves is right There is going to be a "land army." He said he didn't like the term because it made the farmers think they were going to have a lot of green city folks descend on them. He knows what the farmers think about folks who will scare the horses, sprain their ankles, try to milk a cow and when she doesn't give, say: "The valves are stuck." One farmer wrote me he'd rather have grasshoppers than city folks on his place. England's Method The President said to us that Iri England they have increased food production 60 per cent. And they did it with the help of a land army, mostly women with no previous training. They got the training. A lot depends on the training. I talked with a farmer near here who took on a city boy, green as grass. The boy probably thought shorts were something you wore and probably would have looked in the toolbox for a boar. Maybe you heard him talk on the Farm and Home Hour. Well, I met him and the farmer, too. The kid is crazy to get back this summer and the farmer told me he was sick when he had to let him go back to school. City folks are dumb in a lot of ways. But so are farmers. It's true you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. Also, a lot of horses have got the sense to drink if you've got sense to lead them to the water. In spite of dumb help or none at all, in spite of lack of machines and a lot of red tape, the farmers of the country have signed up to raise a bigger crop than they've ever raised. I believe with a little horse sense and patience, they are going to pull through. No team pulled together until they were in harness. If they don't, God help us and the army at meal time. The Weather A Dead Topic As you know, mention of the weather on the radio these days is forbidden. The newspapers can describe de-scribe a snow storm or a hot spell but the radio commentators cannot. There is a good reason for this. A lurking submarine could pick up a newscast, and if enough facts concerning con-cerning the weather were revealed by stations in enough widely separated sep-arated localities, even an amateur meteorologist and the Germans are no amateurs could make a pretty good weather forecast by putting two and two together. But being unable to describe the manifestations of. nature that I see on my way to work In the morning is a terrible handicap to me. Recently Re-cently I've gotten around the difficulty diffi-culty by talking about last week's weather, and before going on the air, reading what I was going to say to the censorship officials and getting their O. K. In no case did they restrict me. The other day, however, I forgot to call up the Censorship Cen-sorship office but the Blue Network didn't forget. I got this message: "Censorship says you have to cut out all references to weather from now on. They say that there was nothing actually censorable in what you have said or what you have written today but so many complaints com-plaints have come in from other stations that you were violating the regulations and so many other stations have been using your comments com-ments on the weather as an excuse for violating the rule, that we will have to ask you to stop discussing the subject entirely." The following is what censorship didn't let me say but what it has no objection to my printing: "It was pretty hard the past week not to mention the swiftly changing scene which nature provided Wash-ingtonians Wash-ingtonians one day, not so long ago a top coat was far too heavy for comfort and in the park, the dark patches were beginning to be studded with jeweled buds and the sunlight seemed to turn into solid gold on the bursting forsythia. On that balmy day I remarked 'Well, we must be due for a blizzard.' "Twenty-four hours later the fine snow began to fall and late that afternoon aft-ernoon and the following morning, the tree limbs and trunks were wrapped in great soft blankets of down even the high branches were wide bands of white but when we went home from work in the evening, eve-ning, the streets were dry and clean again and only here and there in the shadow of a hedge or in the sheltering cups of the brown ivy leaves was a dust of snow like a meager sprinkling of precious sugar on the rim of a doughnut." |
