The U.S. At War, Hello To Arms

Recruiting stations met the first rush by calling in additional clerks and doctors, keeping open 24 hours a day in some cities, sometimes staying open on Sundays.

But the wave of enlistments was no nine-day wonder. Every time it receded a new bulletin from the Pacific helped roll it up again. Good news or bad—either kind made men want to join up.

The Army signed up 10,646 men in the first week, the Navy 11,303 in eight days, the Marine Corps an estimated 6,400 in ten days. Beyond that point, recruiting-office statisticians had last week not had time to figure. Nor could anyone count the additional thousands who had volunteered but had not yet been accepted.

There had never been anything like it, even in the most excited days of World War I. After two weeks, young men and old still stormed recruiting offices: > In Los Angeles, Louis A. Tyler, 42, volunteered for the Navy to take the place of his son killed at Pearl Harbor.

> Dale W. Loffland, one-man printing staff of the Worthington (Ind.) Times, enlisted after setting a Navy recruiting advertisement, left the paper temporarily unable to go to press.

> In Boston, Harold L. J. Sturtevant, kicked out of the Navy when he tore a swastika from the German consular office in San Francisco last January, applied for reinstatement and got it.

> In South Bend, Ind. a carnival worker, rejected by the Navy because he had a naked woman tattooed on his arm, reappeared the same afternoon with the woman dressed in skirt and brassiere.

> At the Greenville, N.C. prison camp, ten convicts volunteered for "suicide-squad duty." Said they: "Up to the present we have done no good deeds for our country. Thus we have an indebtedness to the United States which must be removed."

> Most thoroughgoing volunteer was Ranch Hand Harvey Benschulter of Hay Springs, Neb., who sold his car and horse for $500, put the money into defense bonds, then set out to join the cavalry.