The War Department was waiting for final action by Congress to bring home 200,000 of the country's war dead now lying in graves in the Pacific or European battlegrounds. Search teams were going through the jungles of New Guinea and the Philippines to find makeshift cemeteries. Not all the bodies were recoverable. After the fall of Corregidor, the Japanese ignored US pleas and cremated the American dead along with their own soldiers.
Plans were underway for a war memorial at the National Cathedral in Washington.
Some passengers on West Coast troop trains might have come in contact with a veteran who was infected with smallpox.
The Army was closing 12 hospitals and two convalescent facilities by June 30 because of drop in patients and available medical personnel.
The Sunday Times had a page headlined "The Veteran," that was mostly devoted to news affecting veterans. The lead story of the section was on therecent standards that had been put in place for on-the-job training of vets under the GI Bill of Rights. Those vets who entered apprenticeships or received unpaid on-the-job training were entitled to the same educational benefits of $55 a month ($90 for those with dependents) as were veterans who were attending college. The government had set new standards to ensure that the trainees receiving benefits actually were being trained for real jobs and to prevent employers from using the program as a short-term source of free labor. To qualify for the program, the jobs actually had to require special training and paid positions had to be available at the completion of the training. The article warned that although these programs were administered by the states, if the vet was receiving benefits for training from a company or in a state that did not adhere to the standards, his or her federal GI benefit would be cut off.
The National Conference on the Education of Veterans in Colleges and Universities called on General Omar N. Bradley to clarify his directive of March 14 on the GI Bill of Rights, which had been aimed primarily at "malpractices" in on-the-job training, "short courses" and correspondence schools. The directive required that any veteran receiving benefits had to be pursuing a bona-fide course of vocational training. The college educators wanted assurances that this mandate did not allow VA "training supervisors" to prescribe the courses that veterans attending accredited colleges and universities could take, which the educators felt would violate the intent and promise of the GI Bill. The conference participants also asked the government for increased funding for facilities to deal with the flood of veterans and for help in securing textbooks that now were locked away in armed forces warehouses to deal with the campus textbook shortages. The colleges and universities were also short of between 7,000 to 10,000 instructors.
As an outgrowth of criticism leveled against the Veterans Administration, Congress had established a separate Department of Medicine and Surgery to attract more qualified medical professionals to the service. This had worked well in attracting more doctors and nurses. But the act did not include physical therapists and consequently the VA had only a fraction of the physical therapists that they needed to deal with their patient load and most of the ones they did have lacked the professional qualifications that were required by civilian hospitals. Very few of the physical therapists who had served in wartime stayed on when their tour of duty was completed. The article noted that at this time there were only 3500 qualified physical therapists in the entire nation. The VA pay scale was low since the occupation was not granted professional status under the existing civil service classifications. The annual income ranged from $2100 a year to $2980. The VA sought to have the minimum raised to $2320 up with a top of $4300 for supervisory positions, less than the price of a mink coat advertised that day in the Times.
A free course in small business management for veterans was being offered by the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association, at Lexington and 92nd.