Red Badge of Courage

The tales told at war's end will not all come from men in the fighting forces. Red Cross workers will also contribute their share. This week, as the Red Cross opened its $125,000,000 War Fund Drive, some of those tales began to drift home.

> Twenty-eight-year-old Red Cross Field Director Thomas S. Montgomery could hardly miss being nicknamed "Tiny"--he stands 6 ft. 8 1/2 in., weighs a whopping 275 Ib. Too oversized to enlist, he squeezed his bulk into a Red Cross uniform, soon became noted on Guadalcanal for his frontline chant: "Chewing gum, candy, popcorn, soda pop. What'll you have, boys?" Wandering about the jungle alone, Montgomery recently met a group of marines. Said he: "Aren't we pretty close to the front lines now, fellows?" Said a marine: "Front lines, hell. They're half a mile behind us. This is a patrol." Says Tiny Montgomery: "I ducked the bullets and watched them wipe out a machine-gun nest. I was glad to get back in one piece."

> Pretty Susan Tate used to live in Washington, D.C. Now she is attached to the Moresby Hospital in New Guinea, is used to being proposed to three times a week. Her job is less adventuresome than Montgomery's--to cheer the wounded, write letters home, fulfill odd requests. One request: to cable $65.50 worth of unbroken I love you I love you I love you's to a soldier's girl back in the States.

Belt of Kindness. Behind Tiny Montgomery and Susan Tate stands an organization that has put a belt of mercy around the world. In the last three years the Red Cross has distributed $63,000,000 worth of supplies in war-torn countries. To Great Britain have gone: hospital equipment, medical and surgical supplies, clothing for civilians bombed out of their homes; to Russia: bandages, anti-gangrene serum, insulin; to China: quinine, vitamin tablets, cracked wheat; to France: clothing, flour, chocolate.

Not until the war is over will the world hear the full story of the work being done by the Red Cross among United Nations prisoners of war. All that may now be told is that shipments of food and small luxuries are getting through. In 1941 and 1942 the Red Cross forwarded $6,000,000 worth of supplies to United Nations prisoners and U.S. civilian internees. The standard package for prisoners: powdered milk, cheese, oleomargarine, corned beef, pork, liver pate, canned salmon, dried prunes, orange concentrate, biscuits, chocolate bars, sugar, Nescafe, cigarets. Also welcome : eight tons of insecticide.

Boxes of Blood. Most dramatic of all Red Cross activities is the collection and distribution of blood plasma. Out of the South Seas have come pictures of natives bringing up boxes of dried plasma to base hospitals. Out of every theater of war where U.S. troops have seen action have come the thanks of Army & Navy doctors, the deeper thanks of men whose lives were saved. The Red Cross to date has furnished the Army & Navy with 1,500,000 pints of blood. Wanted by the armed services: almost four times more.

Little Things. U.S. fighting men know that perhaps the greatest service being performed by the Red Cross is the one that seems the humblest--keeping up the morale of lonely men, whose homesickness is notorious. Said Red Cross Worker How ard Barr in Washington last week: "American soldiers were literally stunned when they saw Africa for the first time. . . . They thought they would find burning sands and blazing sun. . . . Instead they found intense cold . . . completely modern cities . . . Arabs and other natives who were unlike anything they had ever seen. . . . For the first time they really felt as though they were far away from home."

In the maintenance of morale, the Red Cross has discovered it is the little things that count--the piano set up in an old auto showroom in Algiers, the county-fair smell of hamburgers rising amid the Oriental smells of New Delhi, the Wild West movies in the jungles of New Caledonia. Morale, too, means keeping in touch with home. Has the sergeant's baby been born? The Red Cross will find out. Did the Corporal forget his sister's birthday? The Red Cross will send a message.

Vociferous gripers, U.S. service men gripe not about the Red Cross. The word they have for it: swell. Summed up one private in England last week: "It's wonderful just to have an American girl to talk to." And U.S. service men know that the Red Badge of Courage may sometimes take the shape of a cross.

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