[Ocd News Letter: Official Bulletin of the Office of Civilian Defense, Number 13]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

The Awful Truth About
If history repeats itself, so do many of its problems. In the following article, written during World War I, a great writer with salty common sense points out axioms that are again highly pertinent. This article appeared in the April 1942 Reader’s Digest, with whose permission it is now reprinted.
When citizens hear that volunteers for war work are badly wanted, and then look out their windows and see no work at all rolling up to their front doors, they are apt to feel rather hurt and say: “I am ready to do my share, but if no one gives me anything to do I can’t do anything.”
Yet patricAs cannot expect the organizers of war work to run up and down streets knocking at doors and crying: “Come! You are the very person I need!” However much urgent war work is waiting to be done, nine-tenths of the volunteers will have to put themselves to a certain amount of trouble to discover the work. They may even have almost to beg for the privilege of doing it. They are rather hurt, for they are not asking a favor. “I went and offered my services,” a woman will say, “and he looked at me as if I were a doubtful character, and you never heard such a cross-examination as I had to go through. It was most humiliating.”
Axiom: The trouble and annoyance incidental to getting the work are themselves an inevitable part of war work, just as much as handaging the brows of heroes.
No sooner have you, an eager volunteer, brought to bay and caught the word work than you discover it is not the right kind of work. It is either beneath your powers, or beyond them; or it is unsuited to your individuality, your social station, vour health, your hands or feet. You had ^expected work that- showed you at your best-—picturesque work, interesting work, work free from monotony, work of which you could see the immediate beautiful results, important work without the moral risks attaching to real responsibility. And the chances are ten to one that the work you have actually got is dull, monotonous, apparently futile; any fool could do it, though it is exhausting and inconvenient.
Axiom: Unsuitableness is characteristic of nearly all war work. Lowering your great powers down, or
by Arnold Bennet^
forcing your little -powers upXto the level of theLwork offered—this, wo, is a ;^art of war work.
Again, you have got to get away from the illusion that you can live a new life and still keep living the old life. Everybody occupies every one of his 24 hours either in idleness or usefulness. If war work is brought in, something will have to be expelled. The essence of war work is that it may not be “fitted in.” If it does not mean sacrifice, it means naught.
Axiom: If a teacup is full you cannot pour anything into it until you have poured something out.
Nearly all who take up war work are under the illusion that, being a fine and noble thing, war work ought to change people’s dispositions so as to produce the maximum of cooperating effort with the minimum of friction. Let us suppose that you are to sit on a committee or a subcommittee. Among its members are Miss X, who used to be a mannish and cheeky young maid; Mr. Y, who used to be an interfering and narrow-minded old maid; and Mrs. Z, who used to be nothing in particular. You enter the committee room and see these three with a few others almost equally unpromising.
You, however, are not downcast. You feel the uplifting power of a great ideal. You are determined to make the best of yourself and of everybody. But in less than 5 minutes Miss X is calmly offering the most absurd proposals. Mr. Y is objecting to the rulings of the chairman and implying that the committee ought to do nothing at all. As for Mrs. Z, she voted both for and against the first resolution.
“Is it conceivable,” you exclaim in your soul, “that these individuals can behave so in such a supreme crisis? They cannot, realize that we are at war!” Your faith in committees is practically destroyed. You are prepared to stand a lot, but there is a limit. You cannot be expected to work with people who are impossible. You will send in your resignation at once.
I hope you will not send it in. For at least half the committee are thinking these same things of you! You ought to have known that people are never more, themselves than in a crisis. You ought to realize that it takes all sorts to make a world, even a world at war.
Axiom: The most valorous and morally valuable war work is that of working with impossible people.
OCD Newsletter
OFFICIAL BULLETIN of the Office of Civilian Defense
WASHINGTON, D. C, JUN^O, 1942 • Number 13
CAP Wing Tips
Whenever Pilot Jack Mosley, author of the “Smilin’ Jack” comic strip, encounters anyone skeptical of the OCD Civil Air Patrol, he hands him a card reading: “Meet me at your convenience 40 miles off Cape Hatteras in a single-engine land plane 400 feet above the ocean.” If anyone ever accepts the challenge, it will probably be another CAP flyer!
CAP planes “bombed” Youngstown, Ohio, with 150,000 pamphlets. “This could have been a Nazi bomb,” declared each pamphlet, which likewise urged citizens to sign up with their local Defense Councils.
Responding to a request of the Defense Coordinator of Detroit, CAP pilots flew over the auto city during a recent blackout and, with CAA and Army permission, snapped photographs. Thanks to these photos, the effectiveness of the blackout was then determined.
In New York City, the American School for Design is cooperating with the New Jersey CAP Wing in making detailed camouflage plans for airports. Many students, including prominent stage designers, architects, engineers, artists, and businessmen, have already sighed up in the CAP. Flown over airports, they sketch the terrain and make models of the flying field. Before-and-after pictures of the models are kept in confidential files for use in camouflaging the airports.
Gov. John W. Bricker, Ohio, was recently mugged and fingerprinted, in accordance with CAP admission requirements. An aviation enthusiast, Governor Bricker is now a full-fledged CAP member.
Immediately after a tornado had ripped a path two miles wide and Tour miles long through Crowell, Tex., CAP flyers from nearby Wichita Falls scouted over the wrecked area. They reported by parachute letters to highway patrolmen that one block was afire, streets were piled with debris, and a river was overflowing.
When an Army bomber crashed near Portsmouth, Ohio, CAP members were.summoned to guard the plane until authorities took over. Similarly, in Kansas CAP members assumed the same responsibility when a civilian plane (not a CAP ship) cracked up.
Although women constitute merely 3 percent of all certified pilots in United States, nearly 9 percent of CAP membership are female. A survey of 24,423 of the CAP pilots and student pilots revealed that 2,102 were women. One of the few women squadrons is in St. Louis. Another is in Georgia. The only men among these 60 women members are medical and personnel officers.
CAP officers see courier and cargo service as one of the most promising fields for service by thousands of the Patrol’s pilots and planes. Experimental service for the Army has carried urgent shipments all over the East, and flights for defense-plant shipments are being arranged.
Light planes which use little rubber and no more gasoline than a family car can carry several hundred pounds at 100 miles per hour.
New Stirrup Pump
Specifications for an inexpensive, light-weight stirrup pump, prepared by War Production Board engineers at the request of the Office of Civilian Defense, have been \ released to more than 200 manufacturers. Sufficient steel for approximately 2,000,000 pumps will be made available to the manufacturers, WPB informally informed OCD.
^Designed for sale to householders, State and Local Defense Councils, the pump will sell for approximately $5 as compared to prices ranging from $8 to $23 for types now available.
The acute rubber shortage necessitated a substitute material for the hose. Plastic hose has been developed and tested by the Board of Fire Underwriters, the Bureau of Standards and the Bell Telephone Laboratories.
The pump specifications provide rust-resistant treatment for steel or iron parts and porcelain-enamel coating on the barrel and plunger. Design specifications, which are not patented, may be obtained from the OCD. Information about priorities, however, should be secured from the WPB.
Defense Councils Pieuse Copy
“ ‘What can you and I do to help win the war?* . . . might indeed better read, ‘What more can you and I do to win the war?’ ...	x
“We need more men and women in our civilian protective services. ...
“Almost every war community needs more war nurseries, and they must be manned by trained volunteers. . . .
“If you are a clerk in store ... it is on you that the responsibility rests for seeing to it that the millions of customers who visit our retail establishments each day are given the information about shortages and price controls and rationing and not the wrong information. . . .
“Every automobile in this country must be made to last for the duration, lest our war production be as cripped as though the plants themselves were bombed. . . .
“Is there an active volunteer organization in your Defense Council which is devoting itself to finding rooms for the hordes of new war workers? ...
“Is there another part of your Defense Council which is doing something about the unhealthy, unsanitary trailer camps for war workers which are springing up in so many communities? . . .
“Is there an active Victory Garden drive in your community? . . .
“Is there an organization in your community which is teaching housewives how to prepare healthier meals for war workers and our rising generation of boys and girls— teaching housewives how to make household equipment last longer, for the duration—teaching them new tricks about the preservation of clothing for the duration? ...”— From Director James M. Landis’ address on “America’s Town Meeting of the Air,” broadcast June 4 from Wheeling, W. Va.
What Your Councils Are Doing
J
Is your Defense Council mentioned in this column? If not and it is doing something newsworthy, write the Editor, OCD News Letter, Room 1004, Dupont Circle Apartments, Washington, D. C.
In St. J ohns,'Mich., the American Legion donated the cannon on the courthouse lawn in the Salvage for Victory program.
The Charlotte (N. C.) Rotary Club contributed $3,650 to the county Defense Council specifically for medical supplies.
Cooperation has been pledged by the Indiana Funeral Directors’ Association. Undertakers throughout the State have offered the use of 870 ambulances and 2,557 men to civilian defense authorities.
Wilhur, Wash., a town of 1,000 in a wheat-growing area, recently sent 600,000 pounds of metal scrap in an eightcarload shipment Name of the shipment: “Bundles for Tokyo.”
Although all air-raid wardens in Syracuse, N. Y., are men, each one has a woman trained to replace him in an emergency, and also to serve as a “welfare warden” or “block mother”—someone who lives in the block, knows her neighbors, and can bring them all the available information on nutrition, rationing, etc.
The Defense Council of Plainfield, N. J., has appropriated funds for decontamination and casualty depots. The boys’ and girls’ field houses of the high school will be remodeled with showers and other necessary equipment installed to handle gas casualties.
Everett, Wash., reports two mobile hospital units. Each is complete with a 25-bed hospital and surgery equipment to handle minor and major operations. To each surgery is assigned 2 surgeons, 6 nurses, 2 anaesthetists. Each has its own portable sterilizing equipment and lighting system. Functioning with every hospital unit are two emergency ambulance units, each a panel truck equipped with stretchers, 5 women trained in first aid, and a driver.
Rockford, III., has mending services for men in uniform conducted every evening by the American Legion Auxiliary and the Navy Mother’s Club.
The Philadelphia Civilian Defense Committ.ee has distributed questionnaires to every household to discover the air-raid preparations taken. A plan to enlist the city’s 2,700 insurance agents making weekly collections as daytime air-raid wardens is under way. Among others, milk and bakery men covering definite daily routes will likewise be urged to serve as wardens in their areas.
Thanks to civilian defense, white and Negro residents of the area surrounding the Sojourner Truth housing project in Detroit have buried their differences, according to the Detroit News. Charles W. Wallace, sector warden of the district, reported that several of the white wardens who bitterly opposed the Negro housing project have revised their opinions “since they’ve had an opportunity to
meet our Negro neighbors and learn something about their way of life and their own problems.” Many Negroes living in the project are now taking air-raid warden instruction courses.
Under the youth-training program of the San Francisco Civilian Defense Council, the “Junior Commandos” have been designated as the official youth organization of the city. It will supersede any semiofficial or independent organization now attempting to conduct youth programs. Directors include Judge Foley, Miss Josephine Randall of the San Francisco Recreation Department, and Robert Simcoek, secretary of the Y. M. C. A.
With dog» serving as donors, a blood bank in Pullman, Wash., has saved the lives of various animals brought to the Washington State College Veterinary School. The two students who developed the process have given 103 transfusions to dogs, cattle, and horses with blood held in the bank from 40 days to 4 months.
Local 144, Window Trimmers and Displaymen’s Union, CIO, in New York City has voluntarily set up over 30 war window displays in the last month, under supervision of the city’s civilian defense headquarters.
In recognition of Cincinnati's outstanding job collecting salvage materials, a citation of merit has been awarded the Hamilton County Defense Council by Dan T. Moore, director of the Fifth Civilian Defense Region.
A resolution passed by the city commission of' Bismarck, N. Dak., brings civilian defense volunteers injured in line of duty under the protection of the State’s workmen’s compensation laws. The resolution provides that the volun-ters be sworn in as city employees, but they will not be paid.
Labor-Mgt Urged To Protect Plants
To insure greater air-raid protection for industrial plants, OCD Director James M. Landis recently urged that joint employer-employee committees be established. Composed equally of employer and employee representatives, the committees should resemble the managementlabors ones set up by the War Production Board in its Protection Drive.
“In the interests of national safety and maximum production,” Director Landis declared, “it is important that some framework for cooperative effort be set up. We believe that this can best be achieved by the formation of a joint employer-employee Committee on Air-Raid Protection in each industrial plant. The functioning of such a committee will do much to insure continuous and maximum production and the safeguarding of the lives of the employees and of the plant itself.
“The mutual interests of employer and employee in the protection of lives and property will permit such committees to act upon a most cooperative basis.”
Eidice 1309-1942
“Two days ago Lidice was a peaceful mining village a mile off the main highway from Prague to Kladno. There were about 90 houses in Lidice, and high above them all rose the graceful spire of St. Margaret’s, a church built in 1736. One of its main streets was Wilson Street, named in honor of Woodrow Wilson. Most of the people who lived in Lidice were miners, but the town had lovely old inns, some blacksmith shops, several stores, a shoemaker shop, and a wheelmaker’s shop. Two days ago Lidice was merely one of the thousands of anonymous and silent villages in Czechoslovakia and in Europe which were stubbornly resisting the Nazi tyranny. It was like many an American village. Its people fought for freedom.
“Today Lidice lies in ashes. The Nazi hordes have swept down upon the peaceful town and wiped it physically from the face of the earth. All male inhabitants of Lidice have been shot. Josef Bartunek, a tailor, is dead. Frantisek Kotmel and Frantisek Poklop, blacksmiths, are dead. Stepan Horak and Josef Senfelder, who owned inns in the village, are dead. Jan Zid, the shoemaker, is dead. All the women of Lidice have been shipped to Nazi concentration camps. Every child in Lidice—their fathers murdered, their mothers gone forever—have been sent to Nazi “educational institutions.” Not satisfied with having choked every breath in the village, the Nazi hordes then reduced Lidice to rubble. . . .
“Wherever and whenever free men continue to fight tyranny, they will remember the name and learn to say: Leed-eat-say. . . .
“This stumbling Nazi strategy of terror can have no other effect but to harden the will of the Czech people and all of the other people of the United Nations who are today determined to crush the Nazi terror.” Report of Jan Masaryk, foreign minister of the Czechoslovakian Government in Exile.
OCD Publications
Issued April 1—June 10
Treatment of Burns and Prevention of Wound Infections. Medical Division Bulletin No. 4, Central Control and Administration of Emergency Medical Service.
Suggested Regulations for Theatres for- Blackouts—Air Raids.
Suggested Regulations for Large Apartment Houses in Blackouts and Air Raids.
A Technical Manual on Citrated Human Blood Plasma (Restricted).
A Technical Manual on the Preservation and Transfusion of Whole Human Blood (Restricted).
Protection and Maintenance of Public Water Supplies Under War Conditions (Medical Division, Sanitary Engineering Bulletin No. 1).
Instructor’s Manual for Air Raid Warden Schools. The Medical Division of the Office of Civilian Defense.
England
“You will please boil water before using it to drink and cook,” came a voice from a sound truck. Following a simulated 3-hour air raid, Nottingham, England was having an all-out civil defense drill.
“The townspeople took) everything with deadly seriousness,” reported Lt. Barry Bingham, OCD observer in England. “They have reason to. They know first hand what bombs do.” Lieutenant Bingham regretted that members of the U. S. Citizens Defense Corps could not see Nottingham during the practice. “Americans would then know they cannot give too much time to make their corps effective life-saving organizations,” he reflected.
As an example of the realism with which these English men and women played their grim war game, 30,000 were counted as homeless. Several control centers and warden posts were marked as “hit.” Parachute troops were “landed,” and aid was forthcoming from four neighboring towns. Two hundred bombing “incidents” involving 1,000 casualties were handled. Although the General Hospital was among the buildings “hit,” all the “wounded” were cared for.. When a shortage of blood plasma threatened, a fresh supply was rushed from the Ministry of Blood Transfusion.
Volunteer utility workers laid three-quarters of a mile of steel pipe as an emergency system. In districts where the regular supply was cut off, “stand pipes” were attached to hydrants for public use. Gas workers tackled “incidents” by rerouting through uninjured mains and by bringing in a temporary supply of gas from a nearby town. To cope with disrupted sewerage, pumps were installed.
Several bridges and highways were reported “demolished.” Police rerouted traffic. Twelve hundred men remained 6 hours as fire fighters. Operating from 10 vehicles and 3 tanks, 11 decontamination squads of 154 men handled 15 major “gas incidents.” Tarpaulins were dispatched to the homes where roofs were damaged.
“Experience has taught these Nottingham people,” concluded Lieutenant Bingham, “that air-raid defense is deadly serious business. Common sense should drive home its importance to every American.”
Mexico
Promoting international defense and good .will; Tijuana—just over the California border—sponsored a “Civil Defense Day.” Mexican film stars and some of the country’s outstanding boxers participated.
Don’t Use Pitch!
Pitch does not extinguish incendiary bombs, according to tests made by the Chemical Warfare Service of the United States Army.
Despite some newspaper Stories to the contrary, instead of extinguishing incendiary bombs, pitch actually accentuates the incendiary, explains the Chemical Warfare Service News Letter. “Tests by the Technical Section and the Chemical Warfare School demonstrate that pitch mate-rials are not only useless but are dangerous and aggravate the damage,” the bulletin warns.
U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 466865