CIVILIAN DEFENSE,SUPPLY: Apathy

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CIVILIAN DEFENSE

In Washington the ranks of home-front watchers—air-raid wardens, fire guards, auxiliary police, etc.—had become so thin that OCD officials asked the armed services for help in staging a thumping parade at month's end. Their hope: that the spectacle of Civilian Defense Volunteer Office uniforms and equipment, sandwiched in among warlike detachments of soldiers and sailors, would stimulate recruiting of home-defense workers.

Washington's total of CDVO men & women has dropped from 70,000 to 48,000 in the past 18 months. Washington needs 6,000 air-raid wardens and 14,000 other workers to bring the organization up to minimum strength. But Washington's plight is not unique.

>Boston is running two intensive recruiting campaigns to fill ranks in the Army Information Center and the State Guard, and preparing for a third this week to round up airplane spotters.

>In Manhattan last month a ten-day high-pressure drive brought in 5,500 volunteers for the protective services; the recruiting rate had dropped from 5,000 in January to 650 in June.

>Chicago workers have turned to victory gardening in their spare time. A local official admitted: "It's hard to whip people into enthusiasm, let alone fear, when we're winning the war."

>Los Angeles volunteering has fallen off badly. Information-center clerks complained that plane spotters are so unskilled that they report "every damn blackbird they see as a Messerschmitt."

Reasons for the slump are substantially the same everywhere : 1) the draft ; 2) new opportunities for young, fit women in the uniformed services or well-paid defense jobs; 3) lack of domestic help, which forces other women to spend more time at home; 4) apathy; 5) optimism. New Orleans' recruiting dropped off one-fourth in May, after the Tunisian victory. And in many a U.S. city discouraged CDVO leaders wondered whether anything short of an enemy bombing could put civilian defense back on its feet.