Out in Great Lakes, Illinois, a Navy captain recently received a letter reading: “Sir, if I don’t get my leave check within a week I’m going to put you on report to the President of the United States!” It was signed J— H—ex-Seaman First Class.
This was but one of thousands of letters that have been pouring into the Army and Navy terminal leave disbursing centers since August of 1946 when Congress first authorized payment for unused leave. Some have been abusive, many of them coming from men who have had their first big chance to talk back to Army brass and Navy braid. Most, however, have indicated appreciation for the prompt service the payment offices are actually giving.
Although certain inequities in the operation of the Leave Act still exist, the truth of the matter is that the Armed Services are doing a bang-up job in making terminal leave payments. More than five million payments averaging $218.00 each have rolled out since the offices were put into operation. But though things are now running smoothly this has not always been the case. For back when payments were first authorized, the job confronting the services seemed hopelessly impossible.
Services Unprepared
The Armed Forces Leave Act came as a mild bombshell to the War and Navy Departments. Though all forces had long advocated terminal leave benefits for enlisted personnel, they had recommended that legislation be passed before demobilization. This, of course, hadn’t been done. When the act was finally signed into law by President Truman, there were more than fifteen million veterans who had returned to civil life- fifteen million potential claims; fifteen million men and women who had to be educated in terminal leave procedures.
But worse than this, the forces were in the uncomfortable position of having nothing but very sketchy personnel records on such subjects as enlisted men’s leave, furlough, and brig time. This lack wasn’t the fault of the services. High-speed military maneuvers, involving millions of men, didn’t leave time for the submission of detailed reports on such relatively unimportant statistics. But fault or no fault, the services had no basis on which they themselves could compute the unused leave of their personnel.
Granting that payments should be made anyway, the only logical solution was to depend upon the veterans for the information. But this was a procedure entirely foreign to the services—a procedure, in fact, foreign to any money-spending agency of the U. S. Government.
The standard creed of the Treasury watchdogs always has been “a certified voucher (in quintuplicate) for every dollar spent.” The proposed procedure would mean that Uncle Sam would have to dole out cash to everyone who claimed it, without having any method for checking the validity or accuracy of many of the claims.
This was the problem that the Armed Forces dropped into the lap of the Senate and House Military Affairs Committees, the groups of Congressmen charged with the responsibility of drafting the bill. The recommendation was simple. “If you want us to pay the men, you’ll have to let us rely upon their estimates.”
This immediately started a heated Congressional controversy. Estimates . . . what constitutes an estimate? Should the claimants be required to swear that their statements were actually true? Should a severe penalty be set if it later appeared that the statements had been wrong?
“Yes,” said the conservatives. “No,” said the others, and fortunately they were in the majority. “The war has been in progress for over four years,” they argued, “and some of the men have been in even longer. Can you remember exactly how many days you took oil in 1940? In 1941, ’42, or even ’44? If we make the men swear to the accuracy of their statements, we’ll keep a lot of men from even submitting claims; and chances are, we’ll make liars out of those who do. We owe the veterans the money. There’s no reason to make them perjure themselves to get it.”
The end result was that the committees wrote into the bill that servicemen and women need only make estimates “to the best of their knowledge and belief,” that penalties would be exacted only where actual fraud existed in the submission of the claims.
Half the battle was won at that point. By one simple paragraph the committees wiped out the effect of inadequate service records. In that same paragraph they relieved memory-weak G. I.’s from the threat of prison bars. They provided a stepping-off place for the planning of the mechanics of payment.
How to Pay
It’s a simple thing to say, “Pay these fifteen million men and women, and do it within a year.” It’s not so simple to make the actual payments. Certain basic procedures have to be followed. Claims have to be checked against discharge papers, computations have to be made, checks have to be written, bonds have to be made out, completed claims have to be filed, payments have to be made. It is all a very involved process.
Because of the tremendous number of claims to be paid (ten million for the Army alone), the Army early decided to decentralize the procedure. Using finance offices already in existence throughout the United States, the Army designated thirty of them to handle leave claims. Although special mechanized equipment was installed in the New York office, the Army relied largely on manual methods for checking and paying claims.
Possessing no ready-made payment centers, the Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps chose to centralize their payments, the latter two services setting up offices in Washington, D.C. The Navy went even one step further. Not only did it centralize payments, but it set up a super-mechanized production line to do all the processing. The first large scale operation of its kind, it has attracted the attention of businessmen and efficiency experts the country over.
The Navy Plan
The Navy set up its office at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, the station where more than 700,000 recruits received their training during the war. Commandeering two drill halls that a few years ago had resounded to the thumping of thousands of feet and the harsh “hup hup” of the drill masters, the Navy set up shop in an enclosure more than 1,000 feet long and 95 feet wide.
The building itself was something to see. With an area greater than three football fields, it was like putting a roof over a small city. Once the overhead lights and desks were installed, it was almost impossible to see from one end of the building to the other. And into this building the Navy hurried 1,200 men and women to do the actual work.
In charge of the office was a captain in the Navy Supply Corps who had been wartime skipper of the Naval Supply Depot at Seattle, Washington. And in the words of the Captain himself, it has been the “toughest billet” he has ever had.
“Here I was,” he remarked, “literally caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Almost four million veterans had to be paid, my whole staff had to be trained, billions of dollars were involved—and Washington, the vets, and the press were calling for speed and more speed.
“Fortunately we had a plan,” he continued. “The brains in the Bureau of Supplies and Accounts—that’s the group that does the supplying and paying for the Navy—had gotten together with the International Business Machines Corporation. Between them they had worked out a plan for a complete production line procedure—something similar to the lines used for motor car assembly.
“Well, we all turned to, hoping to make it work. But right at the start it almost had us licked. The plans called for the building of a table over four hundred feet long. Believe it or not, but we couldn’t get enough lumber to set it up!
“Remember how tight the lumber situation was back in September of 1946? It wasn’t any better in the Services. The Navy, for example, had turned all its excess lumber over to civilian distributors. All that the Ninth Naval District had on hand was enough to keep up the few building repairs that were needed.
“Sure, we could have got a release on new stuff by going to Washington for it, but that would have taken time. Just when I was about to call it quits one of my Navy storekeepers came up to me and said, ‘Captain, you want a production line built, don’t you? Well, why don’t we use a bunch of the Navy mess tables that are lying around. Each one is 20 feet long. Twenty of them should do the trick.’
“Believe me,” the Captain concluded, “that storekeeper deserves a special medal. We butted twenty of the tables together, and in less than an hour the table part of our line was complete.”
In operation the line worked much like a long conveyor belt. On either side of it were placed weird-looking business machines which could add, subtract, multiply, and perform all other operations even to the automatic writing and signing of checks and bonds.
Claims were received from the mail clerks at the far end of the line, were computed en route, and at the other end the completed checks and bonds were slipped into envelopes for transmittal to the waiting veterans. There were no hitches. The line operated as smoothly as its bigger brothers at Detroit and Willow Run.
This was the system that many experts didn’t believe would work. This was the system that had been entirely untried before the Navy placed it into effect at Great Lakes. This was the system that, before two weeks had elapsed, was shoving out completed claims at the rate of 20,000 per day.
The mess tables weren’t the only emergency innovation. At the close of each day the production line was covered with checks and bonds adding up into millions of dollars. To collect all of them for safekeeping during the night would have meant disrupting the whole procedure. Again, someone came forth with an ingenious idea—this time its author was a civilian clerk.
“Why not put cages over each of the tables?” he asked. It was really a practical suggestion. Steel screens were quickly made that could be bolted and locked over the line without moving a single paper.
Before a month had passed the Terminal Leave Office was receiving a steady stream of representatives from industry who were anxious to see the results of applying machine methods to purely paper work transactions. The Navy had built a better mousetrap, and experience was proving the truth of the rest of the proverb.
These visitors discovered that by using the mechanized line the Navy Terminal Leave Disbursing Office was able to turn out over 20,000 claims a day. A staff of 1,200 was all that was required. The Army, relying largely on manual procedures, had employed a staff of 2,500 but was able to pay a daily average of only 37,500 claims. On the basis of payments alone, the mechanized line had proved itself 12 per cent more efficient than manual methods.
But payments were just a part of the picture. In addition to mailing out claims, all terminal leave offices are required to submit many tabulated reports to the Treasury Department and the General Accounting Office. Where manual methods are employed, these reports must be specially prepared. But at the Great Lakes office, the reports are prepared automatically as the claims slide over the production line.
Thus the production line is proving each day that the benefits of mechanized methods aren’t limited to products of iron and steel. The Great Lakes office promises to be the forerunner of a paper work industrial revolution.
More Gripes
By December of 1946 the Armed Services were paying claims at the rate of 64,000 per day. Offhand, it would seem that everyone should have been satisfied. But as Barnum might have said, you can’t please all of the people—ever.
One soldier, barely a week after he had placed his claim in the mail, wrote a follow up letter to the officer in charge of the payment center in his district. “Look here,” he wrote, “my wife already has two kids and we’re expecting the third any day now. I need my terminal leave money to pay for it. I can't slow up my wife, but I hope to hell that I can speed you up. How about it?”
A sailor submitted a claim, and had written on the line calling for the total days of “bad time” the figure 1,095. “Bad time,” of course, meant the number of days which the veteran had spent AWOL or in the brig. As this particular sailor had been in the Navy only three years, the checkers at the payment center naturally questioned his claim that he had spent the entire period either in jail or absent without leave.
In reply to a query on the figure, the sailor wrote: “I thought you meant what you said. So far as I’m concerned, I had a bad time all the time I was in the Navy.”
One soldier, reluctant to give up his discharge certificate for even a few weeks and equally reluctant to get it photostated, became thoroughly disgusted when the Army claim office repeatedly returned his applications.
In a burst of supreme derision he growled out on paper: “You’re willing to take my word for the amount of leave I didn’t get. Right? If you’re not willing to take my word that I actually was in the Army, you can take your old bonds and checks and stuff them right up your sleeve!”
He never did send in his discharge papers. And needless to say, he never did receive his payment.
Some of the letters stated legitimate gripes—gripes springing from inequities in the Armed Forces Leave Act itself. Wrote one veteran: “I have just received my bond of $125. You guys have sure got your nerve! I’m broke. I have been turned down from jobs until I am blue in the face. If the $125 is rightfully mine, it should be mine to do whatever I please with. I could use that money right now. But, no! You guys have to throw that bond stuff in my face. All I have to say is it’s the rottenest deal I’ve ever had. I’m broke—I’m hungry—and every time I look at that lousy bond, it makes my stomach turn.”
This complaint isn’t a new one to the payment offices. In fact, many letters on the same subject are being received daily, all personnel objecting that their bonds can’t be cashed for five years. Their general opinion is that if they are entitled to payment they are entitled to it in cash—and now!
Fortunately, prompt remedial action is likely to be taken. More than 20 bills have been introduced to allow immediate cash redemption. Some of these will undoubtedly come up for an early vote before the 80th Congress.
Another complaint stems from former reserve personnel who transferred to the regular armed forces prior to the passage of the Armed Forces Leave Act. Under directives then in existence all leave accrued while in a reserve status was lost upon transfer. But under the Armed Forces Leave Act, veterans transferring to the regular forces after its passage were entitled to compensation for leave accrued while reserves. Legislation has been proposed by the Navy to correct this situation.
Warning to Vets
Legislation, however, can’t solve all the difficulties still inherent in the administration of terminal leave payments. The solution to several major problems, for example, rests directly with the individual veterans themselves.
When the payment offices were first placed in operation, the Services had anticipated that claims would be submitted promptly. In fact, they based their plans on the premise that 90 per cent of all claims would be in the payment offices by December 31, 1946. But the veterans, it seems, had other plans—or, in reality, no plans at all. Over one-half of the eligible claims still remain outstanding.
What is the result of this procrastination? The Armed Forces Leave Act provides that all claims must be submitted by September 1, 1947. Claims that are not received by that time cannot later be submitted. In other words, if veterans let the first of next September slip by without sending in their claims, they won't get paid.
Not only is procrastination dangerous to the veterans themselves, but it is costing the taxpayers of the United States a lot of money. Payment offices no longer have a backlog of work; procedures designed to process 64,000 claims a day are now lying idle a part of each week; the number of claims currently being paid has dropped to an all- time low of 40,000 a day.
Production obviously has been cut nearly in half. The added cost to the Government thus becomes apparent. Not only must office staffs be retained at capacity peaks, although work in some offices is now almost at a standstill, but the ultimate completion of the project will be greatly delayed. This is a problem which only the veterans themselves can solve; the Congress and the Services are powerless to act.
Still another problem exists which is the primary responsibility of the veterans. And that problem is the proper filling out of claims and the submission of all necessary vouchers. According to reports from payment offices, fully three-fourths of all correspondence and delay in payments has resulted from the failure of veterans to read instructions and to follow specific directions. Again, such failure adds considerably to the cost of administering the Armed Forces Leave Act.
As it now stands, the Armed Forces are doing their part in performing one of the biggest paying jobs ever attempted by any branch of the Government. To enable them to carry on with that job, the cooperation of every veteran is required. Fortunately, this cooperation should not be too difficult to obtain, for it is obvious that the veterans owe a duty to themselves and to their fellow taxpayers to submit their claims correctly and to submit them now.
If all veterans do cooperate with the payment offices, then the Armed Forces Terminal Leave Act can go down in history as one of the best administered pieces of legislation ever to come out of Congress. When the payment centers finally close up shop, when the offices and drill halls are at last returned to their normal uses, then the forces can adopt as their epitaph for the venture the words of a letter received from a well-satisfied customer of the Great Lakes office:
“Terminal leave bond and check rec’d. Supporting documents rec’d. The watch is relieved. The joe pot is secured and the liberty party is mustering on the quarterdeck, so I’ll blow. But before I do, many thanks for the prompt handling of this matter.”