Support for the Burke-Wadworth Universal Service & Compulsory Military Training Bill

In August 1940 the members voted to support the Burke-Wadsworth universal service & compulsory military training bill. The Post Adjutant communicated this fact to the Virginia members of Congress and urged them to support this bill. Historical Note: On 16 October 1940 male residents of the United States between the ages of 18 and 35 registered nation-wide for possible induction into the armed services of the country. It was the first machinery for the introduction of peacetime conscription in the country's history, being the operational consequence of an act of Congress signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt a month earlier. It grew directly following the disastrous fortunes of the French and British war parties in the military campaigns in the spring of 1940, when a hundred thousand German specialists overcame a massive Franco-British (largely conscript) army in a few weeks of May and June.