Home Sweet Home

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In the daytime, as they rolled through the sweltering prairie heat, they ran out of water. The toilets wouldn't flush. At night, they curled up against green-plush, straight-backed seats, fitfully brushing at insects and soot that kept pouring in the windows.

Soon they learned to take the backs off the seats, improvise hot and prickly beds from two seats with the chairbacks in between. Another man would sleep on the other chairbacks—in the aisle. Some dozed on their luggage.

For six days and five nights they traveled in this fashion from Boston to California—500 veterans of the European war, now on their way to fight another war. When they got off the train at Camp Beale, Calif., they let out a G.I. gripe that could be heard all the way back in Washington.

Other trainloads of soldiers went through the same sort of experience—and they all griped. It did not cool them off to see civilians whizzing by in air-cooled Pullmans, or to hear a rumor that German prisoners of war were also riding in Pullmans. P.O.W.s ride in Pullmans only when they are certified as ill; Italian Service Units sometimes get Pullman service.

Action. In Washington, ODT complained that the Army had grossly underestimated the flooding tide of redeployed fighting men. The Army denied it. But ODT's Colonel J. Monroe Johnson put his head together with War Department officials, swiftly worked out a program:

Beginning July 15, civilians would get no sleeping-car accommodations on trips under 450 miles, unless they are lucky enough to pick up reservations on trains making longer runs. This would rule out civilian sleeping berths on such heavily-traveled runs as New York to Washington, New York to Boston, St. Louis to Chicago.

It would also free 895 sleeping cars for the Army, to add to its present 4,055, which include 1,239 troop sleepers owned by Defense Plant Corp. It would leave traveling civilians with what was described as a "rock bottom" of 3,000 such cars. Another 1,200 troop sleepers were to be built by the end of the year, but none of these would be ready before September.

Fact was that the overburdened railroads were facing an overwhelming freight load, plus a passenger-train redeployment of 21,000,000 man-moves (an average of seven trips each for 3,000,000 men). For months to come, neither soldier nor civilian was likely to find traveling in the U.S. much to his liking.