WAR ECHO

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 288, 30 July 1932, Page 8

WAR ECHO

AMERICAN WAR VETERANS DEMAND FURTHER GRATUITIES. 1 MARGH ON WASHINGTON America saw a new expsditionary force gather at Washington last month when 50,000 World War veterans marched to the National Capital to demonstrate in favour of immediate payment of another soldiers' bonus. At Cleveland, Ohio, nine hundred exsoldiers on their way to Washington to demand cash bonus payments h'alted a Pennsylvania passenger train bound to Pittsburgh and insisted they be permitted to ride. Railroad officials, who earlier had held thres freight trains when the veterans toolc command of the Pennsylvania yard on Kinsman Road, attempted to per- , suade the men to leave. The train was a fast xnail. . After lengthy discussion the vete- ; rans, who eame from Detroit and Tolej do, permitted the train to proceed, but were quoted by railroad dispatchers J as saying they would not permit any 1 more trains to pass through the yard until their demands were met. Some of the nearly 2000 members 1 who were camped in a pasture near ; the tracks forced ahout thirty shop- ' men to quit work and stopped a switch ! engine which was making up trains. Earlier the marchers, World War veterans from Detriot, Toledo, Grand Rapids, and Cleveland, had sung lustily in their camp after being promised that they would not be prevented from boarding a freight train, but the train failed to pull into the yards long after it was due. About 500 to 600 men started from Cincinnati in groups of 200 in trucks provided by Cincinnati business houses. They camped at night at Hillsbro, Ohio, the trucks moving up . 200 men at a time. Beterm'ined to Stay. 1 Two hundred veterans at Steuben- ! ville were prepared to start for the i capital, while the Evansville, Indiana, | group moved on in their trucks toward Wheeling, West Virginia, for the night's stop. With but 73 dollars in the civic cash-box and only 270 dollars worth of food in the commissary, the Washington Chief of Police, Pelham D. •Glassford, announced to-night that he can no longer assume responsibility for the feeding of the 2500 "bonus marchers" there-or for the 8000 more soldiers expected there hefore the bonus parade "I will not' ask Congress for any more money," Chief Glassford explained. "There are some funds expected to come in from several eharity entertainments to he held. But : that is all." If the food runs out, the police chief 1 thinks the best thing to do is to assist the veterans baclc home. He talked of giving them forty-eight hours in which to leave the town, in the event that there is no food for them. But the 2500 men there to petition Congress for the immediate payment of their adjusted service certificates maintained they were going to stay there until they got the bonus. A hundred or so New Jersey marchers who arrived could find no shelter but the park. They comp'lained to Representative Isaac Bacharach (New Jersey), who promised them a barracks before long. On their way to Washington, four hundred Chicago marchers found themselves stalled at Poplar, near Baltimore, when a train crew sidetracked a freight train the veterans had commandeered at Aberdeen. Flagged by railroad police, the train crew received orders to put the train on a siding. The locomotive was then uncoupled and pulled into Baltimore while the empty coal gondolas .and freight cars in which the veterans had esconsed themselves remained on the siding.