When the U.S.S. St. Paul was ordered home for a much-needed yard overhaul at the height of the Korean war, her crew decided to leave a parting gift for the orphans on the island of Fusshi-Do, whom they had collectively adopted. They took up a collection which netted nearly $400 and sent the money to CARE for forty food, blanket, and clothing material packages for the child refugees on Fusshi-Do.
They had found these orphans when they took up bombardment and AA position at the upper reaches of Inchon Bay during the hectic days of the Inchon end-run play in September, 1950, that threw the Red invaders back behind the 38th Parallel. CruDiv Five had already been up and down the Korean west coast a number of times; there had been plenty of tight squeezes, and the boys of the St. Paul considered themselves action-toughened veterans. But then the whaleboat crew went ashore on the rocky little island of Fusshi-Do to set up a navigation marker. And there they found the children.
There were some fifty of them, mostly toddlers, all huddled together in the single room of a mud-hut. Some of them were whimpering with hunger; some stared at the bare walls out of apathetic eyes that were glassy and hot with fever and thirst. There was an old man with them, a teacher, likewise shaking with the ague of hunger, dysentery, and malaria. With the few English words he had, the old man tried to explain to the boys from the St. Paul: These tots were orphans. None of them was much older than six or seven. Some of them had lost their parents before the war, but most of them were war orphans. They all had been gathered at the Inchon Christian Orphanage which missionaries of the Holiness Church had established in 1946. Then the invaders from the north had come, and Inchon was captured. The orphanage buildings had been taken over by the invaders. The children and
their nurses and teachers were kicked out. Nobody cared what happened to them. The old teacher had tried to keep them together while they wandered aimlessly around the countryside. The larger and stronger ones carried the smaller babies. Many fell by the wayside, but other waifs joined the roving band of human jetsam. Eventually they had reached the precarious sanctuary of the little island of Fusshi-Do. There they were caught between the fire of the Reds and the American counter-offensive. There was no other shelter but the little mud-hut. For weeks now the kids had eaten nothing but a few shellfish and mussels gathered from the little puddles that the outgoing tide left along the rock-studded foreshore of their little island.
The St. Paul's Foster Fathers
The St. Paul's boat’s crew reported back aboard. They described the plight of the little kids in the mud-hut on Fusshi-Do. Their pity and willingness to help caught on like wildfire throughout the ship. The galley requested permission to send warm food ashore in the whaler. The men bought the Ship’s Store empty of condensed milk, canned food and fruits, soap, candy bars, and cookies. Everybody volunteered for the working parties that were to repair the walls and patch the leaking roof on the shack of the orphans.
The nearby well was found to be polluted. The men cleaned it out and built a roof over it. The ship’s doctor examined every one of the children carefully. They all suffered from rickets, heri-beri,. or some other malnutrition disease.
The more the men of the St. Paul saw of the waifs of Fusshi-Do, the closer they took the sad little lot with its winning smiles and polite bows to their hearts. They could not do enough for the orphans of Fusshi-Do. By night there was work to do. The St. Paul, from her anchorage, was hurling salvo after salvo from her 8-inchers into the burning city of Inchon and at the Red front lines. In day-time the men of the St. Paid turned their various talents to making life once more livable for the kids. Some turned tailor and cut their own skivies down into new garments for a little boy or girl. Others tried their hand at shoemaking. An MM2c found an old brewing vat and with some ingenious welding converted it into a serviceable bathtub for the orphanage. The men of the St. Paul collectively had adopted the waifs of Fusshi-Do.
But then came the orders for the withdrawal of the St. Paid from her anchorage off Fusshi-Do. The men put their heads together and came up with the collection. The money was dispatched to CARE. The packages with much-needed food and blankets were supplied from CARE’s stockpile in Japan and flown in by the Air Force.
The significance of the occurrence does not lie alone in the fact that in the midst of bloody action U. S. bluejackets should have come to the aid of some suffering youngsters. The U.S.S. Toledo, later occupying the same station, took up the care for the orphans of Fusshi-Do where the men of the St. Paul left off. Still later, the “adoption” procedure was continued by the Navy’s 532nd Engineering Boat and Shore Regiment and by men of Fleet Activities, Inchon. U. S. naval history is full of similar incidents. In the “Old Navy,” the famed Battleship Texas was known at the “Christmas Ship,” because her men never failed, if they were in port on Christmas Day, to play Santa Claus to all the under-privileged youngsters of the port-town, whether Stateside or abroad.
What gives the action of the men of the Si. Paul added significance is that spontaneously, almost without a second thought, they should have turned to CARE as their agent for bringing an added fillip to the benefits the men themselves had already bestowed on the waifs of Fusshi-Do.
The trust implied in that spontaneous choice is based on the fact that in little more than nine years of existence, CARE has become a symbol to the American people for instantaneous and immediate help where- ever urgent needs exist. More, to many of the peoples of Europe, Asia, and Latin America who have benefited from American generosity, the initials C-A-R-E have become almost a generic term for any form of aid coming from the United States.
The “System of CARE”
It was this American spirit of universal helpfulness which President Eisenhower had in mind when in his address to the World Council of Churches at Evanston, Illinois, in August last year, he singled out CARE to illustrate his point:
“The war was scarcely over, may I remind you, until American hearts were digging cash out of American pockets to help restore devastated regions, to relieve suffering. There was finally established the great system of CARE, CARE packages going everywhere in the world, to feed the hungry, to bring a moment of cheer and of good feeling to millions who were in despair.”
CARE had its conception in the minds of a number of American aid organizations even before the last shot of World War II had been fired. All of these agencies, from denominational groups like the American Friends Service Committee, the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and the Unitarian Service Committee to American Aid to France, the Cooperative League of the U. S., the Labor League for Human Rights of the American Federation of Labor, the International Rescue Committee, and others devoted to the relief and aid of specific national or civic groups in Europe, were faced with the identical problem: how to dispense their overseas aid in the most efficient manner. The result was that 26 major American welfare organizations banded themselves together to form a joint agency for just that purpose. The Cooperative for American .Remittances to Europe was born. CARE was officially incorporated on November 25, 1945, in the District of Columbia. CARE’s first shipload of food packages cleared Philadelphia in May, 1946, and was discharged at LeHavre, France, two weeks later. A significant American experiment in cooperative giving had gotten under way.
That experiment has been singularly successful. In little more than nine years of operations, CARE has been able to distribute more than fifteen million of its various packages, all of them donated by the American people, and valued at over $165,000,000, to needy people and institutions in some forty overseas countries, from Finland to India, from Great Britain to Okinawa, from France to Peru. As CARE’s services extended from Europe to the free countries of Asia and eventually to Latin America, its name was changed to read Cooperative for American Remittances to Everywhere.
Approximately eighty per cent of these CARE packages contained food. Nourishment was the great need of war-devastated Europe; it has remained the great need in many parts of the world. CARE’s first answer to the need was to take over two million of the “Ten-in-One” ration packages developed during the war for use by the U. S. Armed Forces. The need proved so great and the response to CARE’s public appeal so widespread that the original stock of “Ten-in-One” packages was soon exhausted. CARE developed its own $10 standard food package, soon to be followed by a number of variations, like the British food package in which tea took the place of coffee, the Greek and Italian food package, etc., all of them designed with the particular dietary needs and customs of specific countries in mind. Significantly, CARE asked for and received extensive help from the Navy Procurement Division in setting up specifications for the purchase of all the various items that went into these packages.
Food, Books, and Tools
Soon other than food packages were added to CARE’s growing list: Layette and household linen packages, clothing materials, and other textiles. Five years ago, again a new departure was taken with the inception of the CARE-UNESCO Book Fund Program. The free flow of American learning and research was made available through this program to devastated libraries and institutions of higher education throughout the free world by restocking their war- scarred shelves with the latest American scientific and technological literature, dealing with subjects as divergent as practical medicine and agricultural techniques, chemistry and public health, engineering and factory management.
Again, soon afterwards it became apparent to CARE’s Board of Directors, on which all the member agencies have voice and vote, that the best theoretical knowledge of new agricultural and irrigation methods, for instance, is not sufficient where the tools are lacking to put that knowledge into practice. Out of that understanding grew CARE’s “Self-Help” Program. As Paul Comly French, the Philadelphia Quaker who has been serving as CARE executive director for the past eight years, expressed it on various occasions: “The best way to help others is not by charity, but by helping them to help themselves.”
Under the CARE “Self-Help” Program, CARE plows and agricultural tool packages are being sent by American donors to Korea, Greece, India, and Pakistan; resettlers’ tool packages and carpenters’ apprentice kits to West Germany and Austria; shoemakers’ and mechanics’ kits to Haiti and other Latin American countries.
Another aspect of the CARE “Self-Help” Program was provided by a recent campaign, undertaken with the endorsement of the American and World Medical Associations, the World Health Organization of the United Nations, the American Nurses Associations, and other professional groups, to supply hospitals in India, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other free countries of the Southeast Asia region with much needed surgical equipment and medical supplies of all sorts, from beds to laboratory apparatus. Voluntary aid in the cataloguing of these needs and in translating into accepted American medical and pharmaceutical terminology the frequently outlandish terms with which some of the equipment and medicaments had originally been requested was given to CARE by staff members of the U. S. Armed Services Medical Procurement Agency at the Brooklyn Navy Yard—another indication of the close cooperation CARE enjoys with Uncle Sam’s fighting forces.
CARE’s method of stockpiling large quantities of its food, blanket and other textile packages and tool kits of various sorts with each of its overseas Missions, has frequently enabled CARE to come to the immediate relief when natural disasters struck. CARE blankets were the first foreign aid to reach flood sufferers in Holland when unprecedented inundations engulfed the coastlands of Western Europe in the early spring of 1953. Again, when disasters ravaged the Ionian and Dodecanese Islands in the Mediterranean, when quakes shook Japan, India, Chile, and the province of Calabria, Italy, CARE was the first agency to dispense aid to the victims. When “Typhoon Bess” swept through Central Japan, the CARE Mission Chief brought the first relief to some of the 275,000 victims.
“Friend to Friend”
CARE also jumped instantaneously into the breach whenever man-made disasters overtook an innocent populace. During the ill-famed Soviet blockage of Berlin, “that island of democracy within a Red sea,” the CARE mission chief in the isolated city, a former U. S. Navy lieutenant commander who had been chief communications officer for all U. S. Navy installations in Germany before assuming his CARE post, made arrangements for a private CARE airlift. Throughout the eighteen months of Soviet blockade, American pilots lifted nearly 100,000 pounds of CARE food per week into the beleaguered former German capital.
And when the tragedy of Korea was repeated in Indo-China, CARE once again was the first outside agency—and for a long time the only one—to come to the aid of the more than 500,000 Vietnamese who fled before the Communist invaders.
The far-reaching political implications of such timely CARE aid were vividly underscored by Vice President Richard M. Nixon at the time. In a public message issued on the heels of the truce agreement and appealing to the American people for the widest possible support of the CARE drive for aid to Viet Nam, Mr. Nixon said:
“The hungry must be fed. The ragged must be clothed. The homeless must be given a chance to establish new lives as free men.
“ . . . The fight against world communism is a battle of ideas as much as strength. Government- to-government assistance, important as it is in long-range plans, cannot be as personally effective as the simple idea of people helping people. I urge every American community to join in sending CARE aid to the refugees of Viet Nam, as friend to friend.”
Much of the total CARE aid throughout the years came from U. S. servicemen. The generosity of GI Joe and his seagoing counterpart has become proverbial in every country they ever visited, be it as friend or foe. Members of the Occupation Forces in Europe and Japan got into the habit of repaying hospitality they had received from private families with CARE packages ordered through the PX. Hospitals, orphanages and other institutions were aided by U. S. fighting men through the medium of CARE.
There is, for instance, the case of an Air Force Captain and his pretty blonde wife, who accompanied him to Japan when he was assigned to the Far East Air Force command. For thirty months the couple was stationed at the Misawa Air Base of the FEAF. They came home with a great liking for the Japanese people and a deep compassion for the most needy among them, the war orphans. But there are limits to what you can do on an officer’s pay. Then the Captain’s wife won $50,000 in a nation-wide “give-away” contest of the Auto-Lite Company, on the condition that she and her husband give it all to their most favored charities. Spontaneously they decided to turn half of their “winnings” over to CARE; the rest they distributed in smaller amounts to various local charities. The $25,000 given to CARE, they stipulated, was to be used in the rebuilding, enlarging and equipping of two Japanese orphanages, the Heian Orphanage at Kyoto, and the Hirosaki Aisei-En Orphanage at Aomori. The larger part of their gift, $17,400, went to the Kyoto institution, the balance of $7,600 to the Aomori orphanage. Now back in Japan on his own request, serving as intelligence officer with FEAF Headquarters in Tokyo, the Captain had a chance to visit Irish Memorial Hall, the new main building of the Kyoto children’s home now in the process of construction, as well as at the other improvements on the two orphanages made by CARE with his and his wife’s wholehearted gift.
Not infrequently, the folks back Stateside, learning by letter or through the press what aid their boys had given, went to work and raised CARE funds of their own for the same purpose. Celebrating his homecoming from a North Korean PW camp, an Army officer donated $500 for CARE food packages to help save some of the lives of the thousands of starving children he had seen in Korea. Drew Pearson, the columnist and radio commentator, heard of it and broadcast an appeal to private citizens to match the officer’s CARE contribution. The total was $15,000.
“There is no truce against hunger and cold” was the slogan under which the Women’s Club of Elyria, Ohio, inspired by a letter from a young officer of the 45th (“Thunderbird”) Division to the local newspaper, raised $2,850 in a three-day campaign. The money sent 325 CARE food, textile, and tool packages to especially needy Korean families.
The Marines’ Orphanage
When the First Marine Air Wing established its operational base at Pohang in Korea, there were the homeless and orphaned kids again, scores of them. Wistful eyes hopefully focussed on the face of every passing Marine, a tiny voice would squeak, “Hi Joe!”, and a child’s hands were ready to clutch at a crust of bread or maybe even a piece of candy. It was just as it had been in Europe during the war, only more so. This time there were more kids around. There still are more homeless and orphaned kids in South Korea today than there are in any other country that has seen fighting during the past decade or so.
The sympathetic Marines of the First Wing shared as much as they could, even when at times their own rations were short. But more and more kids congregated. Some got under foot while serious work was going on. There could even be accidents if something was not done about it.
At PX and mess the boys stuck their heads together. Someone donated his take in a lucky crap game. Others anted up. A suitable building was found and repaired in off-hours. Some equipment was scrounged; a few painted planks made acceptable blackboards; a few native teachers and nurses whose schools had been destroyed and who had fled before the invaders were willing to volunteer—and before anyone could say “Geronimo!” there was the Marine Memorial Orphanage, named in honor of the First Wing pilots who had failed to return from their last strike.
Successive Marine Air Groups attached to the First Wing carried on with the support of the orphanage. It became definitely “our orphanage.” They called the youngsters “our kids.”
There is a limit to which even Marine ingenuity can stretch meager supplies. As more and more children flocked to the orphanage, things got scarcer and scarcer. At first the Marine Memorial Orphanage housed only about a hundred kids, soon 300, and then 500, and Korean civilian welfare officials kept clamoring to have several hundred more admitted. But there was no more space. There was never quite enough food, or bed linen, or blankets, or clothing. There simply wasn’t enough of anything to go around among so many.
Dr. Charles Joy, the CARE mission chief in Korea, visited the orphanage. He saw what the men of the First Air Wing had done or had tried to do. He also saw what was lacking. During a short Stateside furlough he mentioned the Marine Memorial Orphanage in a talk before the assembly of the James A. Garfield High School in Los Angeles, California. The boys and girls at Garfield High are old friends of CARE. Every year since CARE began, they hold a little school-wide drive, sending the proceeds on to CARE for general relief. This time the youngsters put an extra effort into their campaign. They raised $549. The money purchased seventy CARE food, underwear, and blanket packages. Dr. Joy, back in Korea, delivered the whole batch of CARE packages to the Marine Memorial Orphanage.
The spontaneous aid given by the men of the Si. Paul and the Toledo, by the First Marine Air Wing, the FEAF, and the whole of the Eighth Army, and the equally spontaneous response their gifts evoked from the folks back home set a pattern, which was followed this past Christmas with the CARE- Armed Forces “Matching Program” for Korea. General Mark Clark was chairman of the “Matching Program,” which won the unqualified endorsement of General Maxwell D. Taylor, General Clark’s successor as commanding officer of the Eighth Army, and of AFAK (Armed Forces Assistance to Korea), the coordinating arm of the servicemen’s voluntary relief activities. Under the Matching Program, every CARE package ordered by members of the Armed Forces for holiday distribution to their “adopted” schools, orphanages, hospitals and other institutions, or to needy families and villages, was matched, dollar for dollar, with a second CARE package donated by the American people at large.
Uncle Sam Cooperates
But Korea remains only a case in point. Armed Forces have supported CARE’s aid work in many other parts of the world. The U. S. Government, too, has availed itself on many occasions of the purchasing, shipping, and delivery facilities of CARE in carrying through its own foreign aid program. State Department rehabilitation grants sent CARE scientific books, CARE medical and laboratory equipment to Finland and West Germany. CARE purchased radium in aiding West Germany university clinics in the treatment of cancer and allied diseases. CARE purchased iron lungs are used in polio treatment in Austria, West Germany, Japan, and Burma.
Governmental cooperation with CARE has gone even further. Agricultural surplus foods, which otherwise would have spoiled in rented warehouses, have frequently been allocated to CARE for immediate relief of needy areas.
When the worst drought in recorded history hit Yugoslavia, CARE engaged in what was officially described as “the largest relief operation ever undertaken by an individual agency within a single country.” On the basis of a carefully worked-out special ration system, CARE distributed nearly fifty million pounds of surplus butter, powdered milk, and egg powder among some twelve million especially needy people over a six-month period. Special CARE observer teams, all of them American citizens, toured the mountainous country in jeeps, checking that the food actually reached the most needy among the 28 million population without any political or religious discrimination of any sort.
At that time the story of “Hugo Panic” made front-page news throughout the United States. “Hugo Panic” was a Croatian farmer who during the war had hidden out the crew of a shot-down U.S. bomber. Through his contacts with the resistance movement fighting against the German and Italian occupation forces, he arranged to have the six-men crew picked up one rainy and stormy night by a U.S. rescue plane. The thankful airmen, who had bailed out of their burning and doomed craft, had nothing to give the heroic Croatian in appreciation for having risked his own life in befriending them. But they left a promissory note with him, saying that Uncle Sam would pay him $500 whenever he needed it.
“Hugo Panic”—that is the nearest the Americans could come to pronouncing his real name—probably knew that the note was not real legal tender. But then came the drought and the famine that followed it. “Hugo” sent the carefully kept note to U.S. Ambassador George V. Allen at Belgrade. Allen went to see him, taking a CARE package along for a gift. After hearing his story, the ambassador concluded that here was a debt that indeed should be honored. “Hugo Panic” shook his head. What good was $500 to him? There was nothing he could buy. What he needed was food for himself and wife and mother and three children. Ambassador Allen settled the debt by having CARE deliver a $10 food package per week to “Hugo Panic” for fifty consecutive weeks.
Agricultural surplus, allocated to CARE by the Foreign Operations Administration, is presently aiding orphanages, hospitals, and needy people in thirty European, Asiatic and Latin American countries. When this form of close cooperation between Uncle Sam and CARE was first established with the now famous “Operation Reindeer” during the Christmas season of 1953, Navy Personnel again took the lead in contributing the dollars, each of which sent a FOA-CARE package with eleven pounds of nourishing foods abroad. Captain C. A. Fine, USN, then commanding officer of the Naval Training Center, Bainbridge, Maryland, was in receipt of a letter from Senora Claudia de Bazan, wife of the mayor of Colon, C.Z., reading in part:
“You will be interested in knowing that the FOA-CARE package selected by lot to be the first delivered in Colon, Republic of Panama, was one of the packages so generously donated by you. Due to the close proximity of the Coco Solo Base and the many Navy ships which have visited us in passing through the Panama Canal, we in Colon have always felt particularly close to the American Navy. So it seemed particularly appropriate that a package donated by Navy personnel should happen to be the first given away.”
And it seemed no more than fitting that the commanding officer of the Coco Solo Base, should represent the Navy donors when these FOA-CARE packages were distributed as a timely Christmas gift from the American people to the needy of Panama whose thanks the mayor’s wife was conveying in her letter.
Even after doffing Uncle Sam’s garb, men and women of the Armed Forces retain in many instances their close attachment to CARE as an agency to carry out their own individual and organizational foreign aid programs. The World Veterans Federation, for instance, founded by ex-Marine Harold Russell who became famous for his portrayal of the handless veteran in “The Best Years of Our Lives,” is utilizing CARE facilities to the fullest in its “Helping Hand” mutual aid program.
Rear Admiral Richard P. Glass, USN, when head of the American Naval Mission to Greece, officiated at distribution of the CARE Braille kits, wheelchairs, and CARE food packages, all of them donated by the World Veterans Federation to aid disabled and needy Greek war veterans and former resistance fighters. At the presentation ceremonies held at the headquarters of the Greek Confederation of War Veterans in Athens, Admiral Glass summed up the meaning CARE holds for the U.S. Armed Forces, for the whole American people and for the many people throughout the free world to whom the timely arrival of a CARE package frequently meant the difference between utter despair and new hope. Said Admiral Glass on that occasion:
“These gifts deeply express the sentiments American disabled veterans hold for their fellow veterans in other countries . . . CARE has made it possible for many Americans and American veteran’s associations to express their warmest sympathies and gratitude to those who suffered to preserve democracy. CARE parcels have become the building blocks which have been cemented by the sincere friendship and mutual understanding of the American people for distressed people everywhere."