Army & Navy - Whither Thou Goest . . .

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One day when Texas weather was at its sultriest, an ambulance clanged up to the big downtown Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, picked up a pretty blonde, not over 19, who was lying on a davenport, got her to Robert B. Green Memorial Hospital just before her baby was born. Later that week the young mother was able to tell her story. She had come from a north Texas town four days earlier to rejoin her husband, a cadet at the San Antonio aviation cadet school. Tired and worn down after fruitless room-hunting, she had spent three nights in the ladies' lounge of the Gunter, four days in the lobby waiting for a phone call from her husband.

On the fourth afternoon her hour came. For a while she sat in panic, then, when she could stand the pain no longer, asked a soldier sitting near by to call for help.

Woman's Battle. That case worked itself out to a happy ending, yet the girl and her baby had come perilously close to becoming casualties in a strange, unorganized home-front battle being fought all over the U.S. by a vast, unorganized army of women. They are the wives, mothers, sweethearts or fiancees of service men. Their only plan of campaign is to follow their men.

The enemies these women must fight are the painfully crowded transportation system, soaring prices and low military pay, appalling housing shortages and bru tal rent gouges, plus the thousand and one exasperating accidents of fortune—the missed connections, wrong addresses, misunderstanding of directions or appointments, the unpredictable changes in military orders which can cancel out months of planning and thousands of miles of travel.

No one knows how many women have packed up and moved to be near camps, naval stations or training bases, nor how many are traveling at any one time. No agency has any coordinated information on them. But several agencies can testify that the total is very large—such agencies as the Travelers Aid, U.S.O., Red Cross, Army & Navy Relief organizations.

Special war travel gave Travelers Aid 885,000 cases to handle last year. That was about six times the total for 1941. This year the total climbed to 1,250,000 in the first six months, is still climbing. Agencies come into contact only with women who have run into difficulties in their journeys and need help. They have no estimate of the many thousands who are luckier, or have greater means.

Woman's Reason. The social agencies, like transportation agencies, do their best to discourage unnecessary travel. But they are well aware that any Army or Navy wife may insist on writing her own definition of "necessary," and there is no pat answer to the kind of frank explanation given by one eastern girl who had made the long haul out to California: "I don't know why I came out here. It was such a terrible trip. . . . But when I heard Harry was in San Francisco, I just went wild. I had to get to him. He'd been in the Aleutians and I hadn't heard from him for two months."