Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
SAN FRANCISCO – The long rest is over. All long rests are over, for everybody. A new vitality is abroad in our land, and even those of us who are wan and frail sense in ourselves an overpowering impulsion to flail and strike around, doing something.
For four months this column and its author have lain in hibernation. In a way it was a sweet repose, and we discovered that it is pleasant not to work or worry or feel the surge of worldly things. But war changes all these feelings. It makes a restlessness, and an eagerness to be up and about. Hence this column, a month ahead of its planned date, comes trumpeting back to life.
We are under no illusion that there is anything this space can contribute to the great force that America now must have. But we do know that the faintest of us must be active now, even if only for ourselves. It is impossible for hands or minds to lie in easy composure on days like these. Even mine must scramble anxiously back to work. For me, as for millions of others, things did not turn out as they had been planned.
Some six weeks ago That Girl grew definitely better (I will tell you about her in a later column), and I knew that sooner or later I must be on my way. We laid out an itinerary.
We decided upon a winter roaming around the Orient – the Philippines, Hongkong, Chungking, the Burma Road, Rangoon, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies.
All arrangements were made. The red tape was vanquished. Out came the old passport, and on its traveled pages there went more ink of many colors.
The Army takes his seat
Final things were done at home. Bags packed. Money drawn. Vaccination certificates looked up. Letters written. Bookings made. Priorities for travel confirmed.
I was booked to leave San Francisco for Manila on the Clipper of December 2 – the week before the new war came. But at the last minute my seat was taken away by the Army, to make room for supplies urgently needed in the Far East.
Then I found passage to Honolulu by boat, expecting to catch a later Clipper there. But once again the Army parried my thrust. It commandeered the entire boat.
As a last resort, I was arranging on a Saturday to cross the Pacific by bomber. And then came, next day, that shocking Sunday at Pearl Harbor.
Automatically everything was off. I was still in Albuquerque at that time. All that Sunday was a daze. The news seemed too horrible. Albuquerque took it hard – for in the Philippines there are 2,000 New Mexico boys. The jitters began to take hold of people.
Monday was just the same. I don’t remember at all what I did on Monday. I only remember that all that day people were talking, talking, talking, and that nobody knew what he was saying or what he was thinking.
And just after dark came the then frightful rumor that two Japanese carriers were off San Francisco, and that the entire coast was to be blacked out.
That was enough for me. It was definitely some place to go, something you could tie your emotions to. So I went to the phone and asked how soon I could get a plane. They said at 5 the next morning.
Even the flight was warlike. When we left Albuquerque before dawn, we had clearance from the Army only as far as Dagget, Cal. We were over Dagget by 8 a.m. and still no clearance. So we waited up there over the bare Mojave Desert, waited in gigantic circlings in the air until word did come.
Then they cleared us to Palmdale, and again over Palmdale we circled and circled, waiting on the war. Finally they ordered us on, but we did not land at the great air terminal at Burbank. No, we went down in a pasture-like place many miles away and they took us on in by bus. The Army was running things now.
There were gulls in Dover, too
Late that afternoon we did get to San Francisco. The sun was shining, and I’ll always remember the thousands of seagulls sitting alongside the runway as we landed. I remember the gulls off Dover, too, in England.
There were two odd little coincidences for me in this arrival in bomb-expectant San Francisco. For one thing it was exactly a year, to the day, from my arrival in London. For another, San Francisco did have an alarm and a blackout that night, and I slept serenely through it, just as I had slept through my first real air raid on my first night in London. A man with a conscience as clear as that ought to be put in jail on suspicion.
So now we are in San Francisco – looking with deep curiosity into the hours ahead. Nothing has happened here yet, but one is an ostrich to declare that nothing ever will. We shall wait a little while and see.
San Francisco is exciting these days. For there is suspense here, and wonderment of what the night will bring, and a feeling of drastic urgency. Several times I’ve heard these words, said not in braggadocio, but more in a fateful resignation:
“Well, if it comes it’ll be bad here, but I guess we can take it, too.”
Yes, I guess we can.
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
NEW YORK – Yes, they apparently were caught with their hands in their pockets at Pearl Harbor, with a known thug and a notorious sneak-puncher, at that, lurking near, but weren’t we all?
Our present view of the campaign to remilitarize dates only from May, 1940, and even our arguments on that phase of the problem are confused, for there were very few among the isolationists who opposed this program. Those few, incidentally, and lest we forget, were mainly Communists and Nazis, not Americans. Most of the patriotic Americans who were isolationists up to that hour of war believed in militarizing the country but opposed President Roosevelt’s foreign policy which they thought provocative and dangerous. They did not counsel unarmed surrender to anyone. They were for armed and mighty isolation.
But, before May, 1940, and especially before Hitler started this war deliberately and wantonly and in violation of every assurance that he could give to lull the suspicions of trusting, peaceful people, we all were guilty and the entire nation was still off guard when Japan struck.
We even made a god of Al Capone
Not to prettify the case, we had been for a dozen years the drunkenest people on earth. Gin was our obsession, money and luxury and pleasure were our consuming popular interests and we made gods of trashy individuals who photographed well in the movies or shocked us with obscene books which had no other appeal but filth. We even made a god of Al Capone, who pandered to our vices and sneered at our hypocritical pretense of respectability.
For many years, the Protestant clergy was concerned with one issue to the almost total neglect of the mission of religion and that was prohibition which was a constant provocation to drink and a source of crime and political corruption.
In New York, New Jersey, Albany, Chicago and Boston, political corruption thrived so monstrously under Catholic bosses as to impair the people’s confidence in the American way of government and, finally, as to evoke the famous but too little read and almost unheeded “open letter to a boss” by Father Lord, S.J., which recognized this enormity as a special concern of the members of the Church. Irreligious Jews abandoned their faith and a police commissioner of New York who served during the era of wonderful nonsense observed that the young Jewish criminals were ashamed of the old-fashioned piety of their old-country parents and spat at them when the old people came to weep over them in jail.
We were not thinking of our liberties then or the duties of citizenship or any need to be prepared to fight a mad enemy. Profits, high wages, speculation and liquor were our interests and, in New York, at least, the papers assigned specialists to glamorize people who were tearing up money in dives run openly by criminals under political protection. In one of our cities, the mayor collected a dollar a barrel from the bootleggers for permitting them to dig in the public streets and lay a pipe line from their brewery to the outlet and nobody even thought of sending him to prison.
U.S. was too busy having a good time
Long ago, Woodrow Wilson, a dying man, preached a warning that if we rejected the League of Nations this country would have to go armed to the teeth forever in a world of hungry and wolfish predators. We rejected the League and refused to arm even after travelers from Europe brought back descriptions of the rising might of the Fuehrer’s dictatorship and of a Russian army of 10 million men. We were too busy having a good time until the crash of 1929 after which we were too busy with a number of other interests, all selfish or political.
At all events, none recognized any danger until Hitler made his war and even then few Americans were willing to admit that he might one day attack us. Or if it was possible, then it would be up to “the Government,” that rich, impersonal power in Washington, and not up to the individual to get us out of the jam, the same “Government” which Congressmen and Senators preyed upon for cash gifts to their constituents so that they could be re-elected.
Only since May, 1940, have any appreciable number realized that Woodrow Wilson was right and, as a nation, we were no more alert when the blow fell than the commanders at Pearl Harbor.
Clapper: Rubber supply
By Raymond Clapper
WASHINGTON – Something tells me I am going to chase a tired rabbit today. It’s that dreary subject of rubber again, rubber from the East Indies.
We are afraid rubber may be cut off, and the Government is forbidding the sale of auto tires. That’s what the Japanese threat to Singapore is doing.
Months ago, when this danger was being pointed out, the answer often made was that we should start growing rubber in Brazil, the original home of the rubber tree, and thus insure our supply against being cut off by a hostile nation. In that way, it was argued, we could isolate ourselves and be independent.
But that answer was made without looking at the map. We think of Brazil as close by, under our protection from the nations on the other side of the Atlantic. If the Germans start operating from Dakar, they will be closer to Brazil than our Caribbean fleet. If you put it on a basis of miles of water, Germany, based on the hump of Africa, is only across the South Atlantic narrows from Brazil. Rio is farther from New York than London is. On the basis of distance, we might as well try to protect the British Isles from invasion as to protect Brazil from invasion.
Control of naval air units needed
The only point in rehashing this old story is that the Japanese attack on Hawaii has helped us to think more clearly about present war distances and to understand how the oceans serve as military highways, and that in the light of this new understanding we can see our real problem more clearly.
We cannot protect ourselves and the western hemisphere by only having a fleet. We know now that sea protection must be total protection covering all the seas. The answer is in having all naval and air forces under control. Our coasts and outposts never can be safe from attack again so long as naval and air strength is left in the hands of outlaw butcher regimes. This has become for us not some idealistic question of world peace but a practical and necessary method of our own defense.
This defense requires international action, the banding together of nations that trust each other and that can play the game together. The British and ourselves have a running start on the controlling force now. After victory is won we can, together with Russia, China and the Latin American nations and any other nations who wish to protest themselves against aggression, hold and maintain the control which will be won during the war. That is the only kind of defense we can be sure of – the kind of defense that brings all the naval strength and all the airpower under control of our side. And as time goes on, our side can be joined by more and more nations.
American way of life worth saving
The inter-allied war council is the first step. Out of it, and out of like cooperation in economic and other activities which are part of the war, a going compact of nations can grow. It can be the police of the globe, and in time the reconstruction force that would manage the changeover from war to peacetime activity.
This way to self-defense will be a reality and not a delusion.
We don’t need to quibble too much over the precise forms that are adopted to bring this about. Results are what we need. I’ll take a whole step, or a half step, or even a faltering step. Whatever we can get is so much gained. If I seem to be oversimplifying, it is not because I am unaware of the difficult and complete nature of the task. But any amount of trouble and trial and error is worth attempting.
The American way of life is worth saving and it can exist only when there is security in the world outside. We have had to suspend many normal rights temporarily because we are in danger. We won’t get them back until danger from outside is removed.
Maj. Williams: Bomb Japan!
By Maj. Al Williams
There’s one question that should be answered in action right away. Why, if the project is not already under way, has the Government not arranged to use Soviet airdromes on Kamchatka as refueling depots for long-range bombers based originally in Alaska?
There are two roads to be used in an air attack plan on Japan proper. One is the “low road,” extending through our Naval Bases across the wide belly of the Pacific, with Guam as the jump-off point. This is the sea road. The other, the air road, or, as I have termed it, the “high road,” is from Alaska out across the Bering Strait and thence down the Asiatic Coast to Japan. Of the two, it seems to me that the high road is the road offering the quickest and most effective means for bringing this war to the points where its pressure would achieve the greatest results, i.e., Japan proper.
With Unalaska as the last mainland refueling point – and probably a few more such points along the line of islands toward the Bering Strait proper – the longest over-water, over-open-sea flight would be about 650 miles to Cape Shipunski or Petropavlosk (Kamchatka, Asiatic mainland). The entire flight would not be greater than 2,000 miles. From Petropavlosk to Japan proper would be another 2,000 miles.
For tactical reasons, chief among which would be the factor of greater bomb loads, the flight could be from Petropavlosk (Kamchatka) to Vladivostok (where the Reds already possess large airdromes and air bases). The flight from Petropavlosk to Vladivostok is about 1,600 miles. And the flight from Vladivostok to Tokio is only about 800 miles. The mileage of each of these flights is well within the range of our four-engined bombers. And that’s the kind of work the American four-engined bombers were designed and built to do.
This war is an air war
We must realize that this war against Japan is a pure out-and-our air war, and that that air war must be carried to and against Japan proper.
If we fiddle around in the middle of the wide Pacific trying to fight an old-time naval war it will take a long time to lick Japan. Air war! That’s the answer to Japan.
One of the most striking features of using the high road to bomb Japan is that the flight from Unalaska to Kamchatka, across the Bering Strait, would require a minimum of complicated air navigation, because all the way westward there is a line of island stepping stones as guides – the Adreanof Rat and the Near Islands – with the longest over-open-sea jump of about 650 miles. From any point on the Kamchatka Peninsula to Japan (Cape Shipunski or Petropavlovsk) there is the chain of ocean signposts known as the Kuril Islands. All these islands, extending in chains and pointing in just the direction our bombers would have to fly, are worth more than all the expert air navigators the world has ever turned out. These islands don’t move. They are not affected by magnetic influences. In fact, they are as reliable as course directors as the railroads we have and still do follow in our own country when maps and radio guides fail to meet the airmen’s needs.
We can’t afford to blunder
There might have been time and reserve supplies to blunder and muddle through other wars, but this war – particularly the air end of it – won’t permit of delay, blundering, or muddling.
Daring planes formulated carefully by daring men. That’s what we must have and have right away. And I say with all the earnestness in my soul that such daring will not be found in antiquarian general staffs. We must have an Air Commander, unhampered by admirals and generals steeped in infantry or salt water tactics.
To win this war against Japan we must take the initiative. We must carry the air war right to Japan proper. And the only way to get on with the job is to place the power to plan and dare in the hands of airmen qualified to think in terms of modern warfare.
Bomb Japan!
Editorial: The long seesaw
Good news from Russia, Libya and the Philippines is balanced by bad from Malaya.
After the letdown of the Battle of Pearl Harbor we needed a pick-me-up. That has been provided in overflowing measure by the Russians in Europe and the British in Africa, and by our own defenders on Luzon and Wake. As a result, we are apt to get too high unless we watch ourselves.
The truth is – as we all know in our hearts – the sooner we give up expecting miracles of quick victory in the Pacific the better it will be for our morale. Such realism will steel us against the losses which are inevitable in the up-and-down fortunes of battle.
Also it will prevent civilian grumbling, which might otherwise afflict us when rubber priorities and other interferences with our accustomed existence begin to pinch. Once we really get the idea that we are in an all-out war and not dealing with a pushover, we shall feel ashamed even to think – much less talk – of petty personal inconveniences. Petty, compared with what the fighting forces are going through.
To get a sober sight on the immediate military situation, it is not necessary to use imagination or to conjure up future woes. The present facts in the far Pacific are serious enough.
We should not be deceived by the comparative lull in Luzon. The American and Filipino forces under General MacArthur and Admiral Hart have fought brilliantly. Our fliers have been especially effective. And the native troops, who have carried much of the ground defense, have exceeded all expectations.
As a result, the only serious invasion attempt against Manila – the Lingayen landing – has been turned back with the Japanese driven into the sea. But the enemy continues to hold his beachheads at Vigan and Aparri on the northern tip of the island, and at Legaspi on the south, despite heroic efforts to dislodge him.
Although these are not immediate threats of large-scale invasion by ground troops, they provide a chain of encircling air bases, readily supplied from sea. With those airfields the Rising Sun bombers can continue their softening-up raids against the major American air, troop and naval bases in the Manila-Cavite-Olongapo crescent.
Without underestimating the successful defense to date by the small and inadequately equipped American forces, we should recognize that they have not yet met a major enemy attack but only a delaying and preparatory action. The assault on Luzon so far is weak compared with that on Malaya, apparently just strong enough to prevent Manila sending aid to Singapore.
Singapore, not Manila, is the key to military domination and economic control of the Indies with their raw materials. As such it is the major object of Japanese strategy. So, while the enemy fights secondary delaying actions against the American bases on his flank, he is going all-out against the Malayan peninsula.
And on that major front the enemy is pressing the British hard. On the east coast he has taken the best British air base at Kota Bharu, and on the west, he is driving southward through Kedah, near the island naval base of Penang and the direct road to Singapore.
Press dispatches from that jungle front agree that the British are outnumbered in men and machines. The Japanese, in addition to landing on the Peninsula, are able to bring up reinforcements more rapidly than are the Imperial defenders. The reason for this is the same as for the loss of the British battleship Prince of Wales and battle cruiser Repulse – the much larger enemy air force.
If Singapore is to be saved, many more American bombers and fighting planes must reach there quickly. Since the Philippines have too few, and Hawaii-Midway-Wake also need replacements, the American equipment probably must be rushed from the Middle East.
Thus all the fronts are closely linked. While Hitler planes are flying for the Japanese in Malaya, the Nazis are retreating in Russia partly because of air inferiority. Has Hitler taken other planes from the Russian front to support his retreating Libyan army, and to mount the anticipated winter drive through Spain to West Africa or through Turkey to the Middle East?
If so, should the Allies weaken the Middle East and Africa to strengthen Singapore, hold the Burma Road, and relieve Hongkong – not to mention Manila?
This is the kind of dizzy seesaw we are in for this week, and next month, and many months to come. If we are to keep our heads through it all, we must learn not to overestimate what happens on any one front – whether it is advance in Russia and Libya, or lull in Luzon, or retreat in Malaya – but let both victories and defeats fall into the perspective of a long war that we shall win in the end.
Ferguson: Wardens
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
From Washington the Office of Civilian Defense sends out instructions for the guidance of the public in meeting air raid alarms. Most important are these: “Stay home. Choose one member of the family to be warden, the one who will remember all the rules and see that they are carried out – mother makes the best.”
There are subtle implications of profounder truths in the advice. Our homes are places where we can most easily withstand danger of any sort. And our mothers are the best wardens to protect us from peril of any sort, except that of actual fighting.
It seems to me this warning bestows upon the American housewife her old and somewhat worn title of Home Maker. It is a dignified and honorable one, and it would be curious if war – which seems likely to take us all into the industrial field – should touch us with its bloody accolade, and in so doing, set us up once more in our ancient positions of honor.
Men never feel the need of mothers so much as when they are fighting a war. The “World’s Greatest Mother.” Such is the lovely name given to the Red Cross, which for millions of suffering people everywhere symbolizes mercy and healing and love.
A thousand fine overtones echo the same qualities when we repeat the name by which we call our mothers. In any language, and to all men, the word signifies sheltering arms, rest, peace and infinite compassion.
Upon us, then, rests a very high duty. While we think of ourselves as soldiers on the domestic front, our supremest test lies in another direction. Can we be better mothers, too, faithful wardens of the mental and spiritual, as well as the physical well-being, of those who belong to us, and can we make our compassion stretch to take in the forlorn and homeless in our communities?
Background of news –
Air raid defense
By Editorial Research Reports
On April 28 of this year, after two hours of hilarious debate, the House of Representatives defeated a bill to authorize the Commissioners of the District of Columbia to conduct experimental blackouts in Washington.
On December 12, the day after war was declared against Germany, both houses approved a blackout bill which conferred dictatorial powers upon the District Commissioners, including the power to evacuate the civilian population of the National Capital in time of peril, and the power to borrow money in such amounts as may be needed for emergency purposes connected with the defense of Washington.
Amendments offered in a spirit of ridicule during the April debate would have authorized the Commissioners to provide sandbag protection for the White House, the Capitol and the Supreme Court building; to install air-raid sirens on all public buildings “except the Department of Labor;” to provide gas masks and air-raid shelters for members of Congress. The District Commissioners now have power to do all these things under the bill enacted on December 12.
On September 29, a bill was offered in the House to authorize the Office of Civilian Defense to provide “facilities, supplies and services for the adequate protection of persons and property from bombing attacks in such localities in the United States, its territories and possessions as the Director may determine to be in need of such protection but unable to provide it.”
Testifying before the House Military Affairs Committee, October 9, Director LaGuardia estimated the amount of money that would be needed for this purpose at $250,000,000. Immediate action was urgent, LaGuardia said, because … “there is not a city in the United States that has the necessary equipment to meet a war emergency, and I want to emphasize that there is not a city – not a state – that could go out and buy the equipment that is absolutely necessary in the event this country should be involved in a war.”
The situation is the same today as it was two months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at Hawaii. No action has yet been taken by Congress on the bill introduced in September, except for the action of the House Military Affairs Committee shortly before the declaration of war against Japan in reducing the amount of the requested appropriation from $250,000,000 to $100,000,000.
During the last 10 days the War Department and the Office of Civilian Defense have received requests from virtually every city on the Pacific coast and the Atlantic seaboard, except New York, for auxiliary firefighting equipment and supplies that would be needed in case of air attack. Some of the needed materials can be provided soon after Congress makes the required appropriation, but Mr. LaGuardia has repeatedly stated that a year to a year and a half will elapse before auxiliary firefighting equipment can be supplied to all cities in vulnerable areas.
Civilian defense materials, when they become available, will probably be allocated to communities on the basis of need and vulnerability to enemy air operations. Eventually, according to the present OCD plan, every city of more than 2,500 population within the “target areas” of the United States, that is, within 300 miles of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf coasts, will be given supplementary firefighting equipment and special devices to meet air-raid hazards.