THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, September 7, 1996 TAG: 9609070182
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: 52 lines
A reader, Frances Nunnally of Richmond, writes that she ``had to respond'' to a recent column about GIs who converted a dish-washing machine into a temporary laundry for their fatigue hats while they were on kitchen police during World War II.
The KP pusher was not amused with our abuse of his beloved dish-washing machine. He put us to doing pots and pans - by hand.
``I served in the British Army, 1941-1946, and we had a dish-washing contraption similar to the one you described,'' Nunnally writes. They called it Old Bertha.
``I worked in the mess hall of the Suffolk Regiment,'' she recalls, ``and we fed many hundreds of men each day. Although Old Bertha served us well, once a week for reasons of hygiene, it required that we wash all plates and utensiles by hand in hot soapy water.''
Soap in ``beleaguered England'' was not exactly kind to your hands, she notes. ``After they had been submerged in that brew scrubbing plates for several hours, the skin was peeling off our fingers in strips.
``When we girls had dates that night, we were hard put to explain the condition of our hands to boyfriends or dancing partners. Not a thousand tortures would have elicited from us that our glamorous war jobs consisted of running a dish-washing machine and washing plates.
``Did we ever use Old Bertha as a laundry facility like your GIs did? You bet we didn't. Our lady sergeant was very strict and totally without humor.''
Ah, Lord. For 35 years the U.S. Army has been abolishing kitchen police.
KP may be eliminated here and there a while, but always, somewhere, some miserable GI will be pushing a broom or scrubbing a mess hall floor or peeling potatoes or washing pots and pans or cleaning a grease trap or serving on a chow line or unloading supplies on a dock or dusting rafters or filling salt and pepper shakers or doing any one of a dozen other tasks.
But the military cannot bear to let KP die. It accomplishes many things at once.
KP affords cheap labor. It can be used as a punitive measure to discipline an unruly body. It serves as a kind of shock treatment to scour from a raw recruit's mind any notion he has civilian rights. It inspires a kind of bonding among poor souls toiling in the kitchen. It makes a man appreciate all the more a one-day pass from bondage.
But of all the challenges to GIs on KP, none bulks as large as those valiant ladies in Britain having to bedazzle their escorts from noticing their dish-washed hands.
Being ever so much smarter and alluring than the men, I'm sure they succeeded.
I'll doff my fatigue cap to Frances Nunnally and her sisters - as soon as I find it in the attic. by CNB