TREASURY DEPARTMENT

WAR FINANCE COMMITTBeVember 18, 1944.

   

 

 

 

OFFICE OF STATE CHAIRMAN

Dear Fellow Faculty Members:

You read General Eisenhower's appeal to the home front for support
of the 6th War Loan Drive. Certainly no more need be said to an intelligent
faculty and employee group of the University of Kansas, The starting date
is Monday, November 20, 1944.

However, our personal experiences indelibly stamp their impressions
upon us. Last Monday at Rotary meeting here in Lawrence I heard Marion
Covey, a member of the Third U. S. lMarines, who was wounded at Bougainville,
say: "Morale is not built by having Bing Crosby and Joe E. Brown or other
Hollywood celebrities twenty miles back of the lines entertaining. TMorale
is built when a government for which you are fighting gives you a waterproof
cigarette case and a waterproof match box. When you have been in the slough
and slime, with mud matted in a two-weeks growth of beard, when you are
hungry and wet and tensed to an indescribable degree, when you are throwing
hot lead at the enemy, and his machine gun never ceases to chatter, - you
reach for a cigarette, and that is all you want then. And if you find that
your cigarettes are wet and your matches won't strike, then morale is made
or lost right there.

"When your machine gun jams, and you find the Japanese government
has put a brush connected with the ejector to clear away the grains of sand
to keep the Jap machine gun from jamming, you wonder why you haven't an
ejector with a brush on it. The thing that counts at that moment is some-
thing to save your own life. You think of your existence, and you wonder
about home." :

Mation Covey has been in seven American hospitals, and his taut,
drawn face, sharp eyes and cutting words make you know that he has been
places we have never been or ever will be. Those cutting words were, "Since
I have been back all I can see is you fellows chasing the almighty dollar
and having a swell time."

And that is the way it appears to those boys. But he wouldn't want
us to have a long face and to whine and complain. Really what he wants is
to come back to the home front the way he hopes to have it, Let's make it
that way by over-subscribing this 6th War Loan Drive with a smashing triumph
to show to the boys in every arm of the service that the least we can do is
to do the most that General Eisenhower asks.

Sincerely yours,
= a on
KA

irman for thd University Drive.

P.S. The University has a fine record to maintain. Buy your bonds at your
bank, then please phone Mrs, Hulteon at K.U. 83 or send a communication to
this office, stating the amount of your bond. A KU, drive has never failed.

FCA