No More "Y"?

Well-filled bellies help morale, but, as any good officer knows, soldiers need something more. Last July the expanding U. S. Army created its newest unit to supply that need: the Morale Division of the Adjutant General's Office. Put in charge of Army morale was tall, ministerial Colonel Henry Henderson Pfeil. His job was enlarged last week by National Guard mobilization (see cuts, p. 20), will soon be further enlarged as conscripts enter the Army.

Colonel Pfeil's main task (under the technical supervision of Adjutant General Emory S. Adams) is to keep the boys from getting homesick. His weapons: motion pictures, ping-pong, baseball, pool tables, camp huts where soldiers can dance, play games (crap shooting is discouraged), write home under the eye of impregnably respectable middle-aged hostesses.

Last week imaginative newsmen wrote that the Army was looking for squads of sweet young things to gladden the new soldier boys. Colonel Pfeil & associates pish-tushed these reports, harrumphed that Army hostesses will be just as impregnable as ever. How many Colonel Pfeil needs will be determined when he knows how many new huts (each one generally has three hostesses) he has to build for incoming Guardsmen, conscripts and one-year volunteers.

The Division has lately spent $200,000 for recreation and welfare, hopes soon to get $2,500,000 more from Congress. Biggest morale prop is the cinema: the Division already has more than 100 theatres at Army posts, expects to set up many more in new camps for conscripts and National Guardsmen. Colonel Pfeil has found that soldiers prefer Westerns, Hedy Lamarr, Ann Sheridan (in that order), dislike Connie Bennett and English actors.

The methods of Colonel Pfeil's outfit were familiar to any veteran of World War I, but the setting up of the Division itself entailed a departure so drastic that Colonel Pfeil and Adjutant General Adams refused to talk about it. The change was in the status of such organizations as the Y. M. C. A., Knights of Columbus, Salvation Army, 26 other welfare agencies which elbowed each other in the A. E. F.

The Army recognizes that these agencies served nobly during World War I. But the Army also remembers that officiousness, waste, jealousy, sanctimoniousness often did Army morale more harm than good. So acute was this memory that the Army decided recently to take over all welfare and morale activities at military posts, gradually relegate outside assistance to "nearby towns and cities." In short: no more "Y" huts inside the sentry lines.

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