Out of Pocket

At Byrd Field, Va. six enlisted Air Corps men shivered in a drafty hangar, cooked their meals over an outdoor fire, slept on bare mattresses.

At Langley Field, Va. the Red Cross provided food for the families of Air Corps soldiers.

In Atlanta, a flush Air Corps captain lent $1,200 to penniless enlisted men.

In Newark, an Army flyer lent $400 to his strapped confreres.

Hotels and restaurants gave credit until they could give no more to Army flyers without money away from home.

A radio operator from Chicago, flying with the mail, went for two days without food until his friends scraped up a dollar, bought him a meal.

Citing such incidents, Eastern zone headquarters of the Air Corps declared last week that in trying to fly the mail Army men had got themselves $250,000 in personal debt. Base pay of second lieutenants is $125 per month, of enlisted men about $21. Transferred from home stations for mail duty they have been forced to pay for their own subsistence. An Army flyer downed in a strange town with the mail must dip into his own pocket for hotel, food, taxi bill. And by last week many such pockets were empty.

To help Army postmen out of their financial hole, the emergency airmail bill in Congress provides all those on airmail duty with a $5 per day expense allowance. But for a fortnight the House and Senate shuttled the bill inconclusively back & forth while flyers ruefully counted their pennies.

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