Sober Army

Agitators for a return to prohibition got a douse of cold water this week when the Office of War Information released the findings of a survey on drinking in the U.S. armed forces. After gathering information from almost all U.S. camps and ports, from the adjacent "hot spots" and "sin zones," after interviewing commanding officers, provost marshals and chaplains, OWI concluded: 1) there is no excessive drinking among troops; 2) drinking is not a serious problem; 3) no American Army in history has been so well behaved. Some OWI findings:

P:The night of a pay day at Camp Crowder (near Joplin, Mo.), when the troops had received about $1,000,000 in pay, 16 soldiers were arrested for drunkenness--less than one in a thousand.

P:A poll of an average Air Corps detachment showed that out of 100 soldiers, 58 drank no alcoholic beverages, 31 only beer, eleven hard liquor.

P:The best-selling beverages in & around Army camps are: coffee, malted milk, milk, soft drinks. At Fort Lewis, Wash., 400.000 bottles of one soft drink were sold in one month at post dances.

P:Less than 1% of all soldiers riding trains were nabbed by MPs for drunkenness.

P:In one month last fall 25,970 soldiers from Camp Edwards, Mass., visited the nearby towns of Falmouth, Hyannis and Buzzards Bay. Of these, 42 were arrested for drunkenness.

Some reasons for this startling sobriety: hard training makes hangovers all but unendurable; strict penalties for drunkenness (30 days in the guardhouse at Randolph Field); liquor curfew hours in some towns adjacent to camps; sale of 3.2 beer in camp canteens (in World War I camps were bone dry and bootlegging was rife).

Concluded the OWI: "This is a civilian Army, as a Selective Service Army must be. Men do not change character when they put on a uniform. If they drank as civilians, they will probably drink as soldiers--but probably not so much. If they found their fun in tawdry places as civilians, they will hunt out the tawdry places as soldiers. . . . Because Selective Service is a lottery, it produces an Army which is nothing less than a cross section of the civilian population. Such an Army is certain to enroll a small percentage of delinquents, even actual criminals. These men are a police problem to the military just as, in peacetime, they would have been a police problem to their own communities. . . . This American Army may or may not be the best in history, but it is certainly the best behaved."

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