WORKING GENTLEMEN

By act of Congress brand new officers in the Army were made gentlemen. Most of those ninety-day wonders in the Army Air Corps thought by this they didn't have to do manual labor. Sometimes they got fooled much to their dislike. When I landed in Liverpool, Greenook to be exact, I was sent to a disbursement camp where I stayed for a short time. While there we were all on K.P. I was Staff-Sergeant and there were many other N.C.O.s and very few Pvts. And Cpls. There were so many brand new Lieutenants they were almost walking over one another. The Camp Commander decided they too needed something to do and we Sgts. needed help in the kitchen. So the order came out that anyone under Major would be on K.P. You could have heard the griping and bellyaching all the way back to the States. I was on the dishwasher, which we called "The China Clipper". As I was very experienced in this, I had put in many weekends on them in Basic Training, it fell my lot to teach these new officers how to run it. They rebelled until the Commander who was an old Army Colonel came by to see if they were doing the job. After a short but to the point lecture, I had no more noise out of them and they made pretty good dishwashers. Bill Mauldin in his book "Up Front" could have made a good cartoon out of this.