Navy Spanking

Still straining to feed the armed services' hunger for manpower, Selective Service took another step last week toward the draft of fathers by August.

It ordered the one-week furlough now granted to new recruits restored to the old period of two weeks. Family men will need more time to wind up their affairs before going off to camp; by Sept. 1 the furlough is to be three weeks.

Heart specialists, meanwhile, were winnowing lists of 4-Fs in a nationwide experiment to determine how many men rejected for cardiac ailments might be salvaged for limited service. First reports were encouraging: of 2,000 men examined in New York and Philadelphia, 400 were found fit. If that percentage held up, Selective Service would have tapped a useful pool of manpower in its own backyard.

Another agency for military procurement, FBI, put on a special weekend roundup that located 638 draft-dodgers in 20 cities. G-men are handling about 15,000 draft complaints a month, have "located and made available" 86,543 men--enough for six infantry divisions.

But the week's spiciest draft news came from the House Committee on Naval Affairs, which soundly and publicly birched the Navy Department for: 1) deferring too many of its civilian employes; 2) maintaining a landlubber corps of young, healthy sailors in Washington.

An investigating subcommittee headed by New Dealer Lyndon B. Johnson, of Texas, a naval lieutenant commander on inactive status, discovered that the Navy had belatedly revised its policy after investigators turned up records of 893 deferments, at least 207 of them open to criticism. It also found that the Navy had 6,556 enlisted men (more than three battleship crews) working in Washington alone, sternly recommended that they be replaced by WAVES, draft-proof civilians or limited-service recruits now barred by the Navy's strict physical standards.

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