The Rush Goes On

In spite of the chilly statement of War Secretary Henry L. Stimson, fortnight ago, that the Army will soon accept no more volunteers, the War Department went right on recruiting; and the rush to enlist continued through the third week of war.

In the second week of war, the Army signed up 17,717 recruits--7,071 more than it had taken the first week. From Dec. 7 to 23, the Marines accepted 7,557 applicants.

The Navy refused to say how many had joined since the record 11,303 enlistments in the first eight days of war. But it was amply clear that neither the Navy nor the Marine Corps will have to draw on the 60,000 men they had resigned themselves to picking from Selective Service lists.

Just how many men tried to enlist and were turned away, it was impossible to say. Military men figured that some 170,000 men had volunteered in the first two weeks.* Not more than one in three was taken.

> In Beaufort, S.C., retired Major Charles Pinckney Elliott, 81, who served in the Spanish-American War, the Mexican fracas of 1916, and World War I, asked to be taken back into active service. Request gently refused.

> A pugnacious little featherweight, Cail McCaughey, tried to enlist in Philadelphia, was turned down--too small. An Army recruiting officer told him to try the Navy upstairs. "Nuts," said Featherweight McCaughey. "I was up there three times. And three times I got thrown out."

> In New York City, 50-year-old Maurice Milton Rogoff was refused by the Navy. He came back with a letter from an Admiral under whom he once served as a petty officer, was accepted. > Told by the Navy that his son James was missing in the attack on Hawaii, William J. Leight Sr., marched down to a recruiting office in Los Angeles with William J. Leight Jr., saw him enlist in the Navy. Young Leight asked for duty in the Pacific.

> In Waterloo, Iowa, five Sullivan brothers signed up together in the Naval Reserve.

> The isolationist Chicago Tribune proudly reported that enlistments in Chicago were 50% higher than in New York City --taking into account the difference in population.

> Fifty young inmates of the Kansas reformatory asked to be allowed to join the armed forces.

> The Army relaxed its rule on men paroled from prison, agreed to accept them if they are not "morally unfit." But the War Department ordered corps commanders to pay strict attention to a law of 1877 which forbids the Army to accept any man who has been convicted of a felony.

* About the strength of the U.S. Army when World War II began.

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