Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
SAN FRANCISCO – San Francisco is gradually taking on the outward signs of a city at war.
When I arrived, the city looked the same as usual. I rode in from the airport with a man who lives here and had been away for a week. “Why,” he said with surprise, “it looks just like it did when I left.”
But day by day things are changing. The warlike effect isn’t great yet, but there are touches here and there.
There are piles of sand on the streets, and you see buckets of sand in apartment houses and public buildings. Permanent air-raid sirens are being installed. Bars and other public places are blacking out their windows. Hundreds of Neon signs have been turned off for the duration, and the city has lost some of its Christmas-tree color.
So far, only one building in town has been sandbagged. That is the telephone building. It probably was done at the Army’s request. Two helmeted sentries stand guard.
The sandbags are stacked in a pyramid-like slope clear up to the second story. Whoever supervised the job must have visited England, for it has been done well. And as soon as the bags were in place, carpenters built a board framework over them, to prevent weathering.
That is one thing that often makes London look ratty. In a damp climate the bags will weather and fall apart in less than six months. The sand dribbles cut and gives a moth-eaten effect. The English have boxed in many of their sandbagged places.
War hits Christmas shopping
Typical war placards are beginning to spring up. You see the famous “Open for Business as Usual” sign that became so popular in England.
When I first saw these signs here I thought, “Aren’t they a little premature? There haven’t been any bombs yet.” Then I discovered that the signs had been up for some time, and they don’t mean business as usual despite the bombers. They mean business as usual despite the strike.
A hotel and restaurant strike has been going on here for months. The hotels are operating anyway, and that’s what the signs mean. When the bombing do come they don’t have to get new signs.
In Chinatown all the stores left open have signs saying, “This Is a Chinese Store.”
And the discovery that knocked me cold is that about two-thirds of the stores in Chinatown are closed and padlocked by the Government – because they were owned by Japanese!
The opening of war hit Christmas shopping an awful smack. People apparently were afraid to venture from their homes. But city officials and the papers have been drumming it into the public that the best way to conduct the war is to keep on going about your natural business. The first scare is over now and people are coming out again. You can hardly get through the streets.
The big stores, incidentally, have all put in new wartime hours – 8:45 to 4:45 – in order to give people time to get home before dark in case of a blackout.
Authentic ‘war face’ appears
There are no barrage balloons over San Francisco. Yet there is something else that gives vaguely the same effect. I just happened to notice it today when I looked out the window.
The day is clear and the wind is blowing. And from the flagpole of every high building in town there flies a huge American flag. The wind blows them out straight, and they make quite a startling picture against the whitish sky. I stood at my window and counted more than 40, just as I used to count barrage balloons from my window in London.
You seldom see an airplane over San Francisco now. There are no guns on rooftops, as you see in London. But on some of the grassy hilltops you can see sound detectors and guns.
There are no gas masks for the public. You don’t see many uniforms on the streets – probably because nobody is getting leave these days. Occasionally you see a soldier in a tin hat.
There are no barbed-wire entanglements here. From high office buildings, looking down on the docks, you can see a white ocean liner painted completely black in one day. And then in another day or two it has disappeared. The public has been barred from the Embarcadero, or waterfront.
There are no crisscrossed strips of paper on windows to prevent shattering, but there probably will be soon. There is one big building here whose front is entirely of glass. I’ll bet passerby in the last week have remarked 20,000 times, “Boy, what wouldn’t a bomb do to that!”
The people of San Francisco must have read pretty thoroughly about England, for they seem to know how to talk correctly, and how to put an authentic “war face” on their still peaceful city.
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
NEW YORK – I just don’t believe that any considerable number of American citizens would object to legislation which would relieve them of the obligation to quit their jobs in war industries at the command of union bosses and compel the bosses to observe the requirements of ordinary honesty and business practice in the administration of union funds. I am convinced that the overwhelming majority of the people of the United States would welcome the protection of such laws and of further provisions to compel the observance of decent election methods in all votes on union representation and on strike issues. The union bosses, themselves, are almost alone in their objection to such measures for the protection of the rank and file and the defense of the nation; and those statesmen of Congress and of the Administration outside Congress who think these bosses speak for their membership are making a grave mistake.
Labor could not suffer in any imaginable way from such enactments and the benefit to the nation in the prosecution of the war would be so obvious that it need not be explained.
Not all union bosses are selfish
The union bosses are not all necessarily selfish in their opposition. Some, of course, are surly dictators, but the most conspicuous of these could be brushed into retirement tomorrow by the back of the President’s hand, with no sacrifice of the rights of the miners.
Others are just dumb, ignorant union politicians who haven’t the faintest appreciation of the idealism which should animate the union movement and are no more fit for national authority over big groups of workers than a stupid alderman is to serve in time of war as President of the United States. Of this latter and larger group, most undoubtedly feel that they are patriotic, but simply lack the intelligence and imagination to appreciate their responsibilities and to perceive that the old union customs now are publicly for the first time and discredited.
The argument that strikes must on no account be forbidden, even in time of deadly national peril and in the interests of national security against an enemy who would abolish unionism from the face of the earth, is based on the freedom of men to work or not. However, the same people who angrily present this argument contradict themselves in demanding the right to exclude men from employment who refuse to join their union.
And, moreover, capital, which is now being drafted right and left and restricted in its activities in the interest of national security, is itself labor in the very real sense that it is the product of the toil of individual men and women. A worker’s wages are the reward of his labor and when they are invested in the stock of a corporation they are still the reward of his toil but, in this phase, by some superstition are widely regarded as an evil power and may be commandeered without any protest from the workers themselves or the unioneers. This is commandeering labor after it is done.
Such laws would not be punitive
No time is a right time to clamp chains on the workers to bind them in slave groups under the rule of union bosses, but this has been done both by Congress, in the enactment of the Wagner Act, and by the Supreme Courts of the nation and of several individual states. But any time is the right time to break these bonds and no time is more appropriate than this hour when the whole American people are fighting a hideous and utterly ruthless enemy who must be conquered lest he impose on all Americans the same slavery that he has imposed on the Poles, Czechs, French, Danes, Norwegians and Dutch.
There is not even a pretense of an excuse for the continuation in high or powerful union office of such crooks as Umbrella Mike Boyle, who runs the electricians in Chicago and, having treacherously sold out his own subjects in the past, raises a legitimate suspicion that he might sell out a graver responsibility now. Boyle showed himself a traitor to his subjects a long time ago, but union politics and depravity permit him to remain in a position to pull the switches on our second greatest city, in time of war.
The vicious crooks who infest the New York waterfront are not labor leaders but union bosses and betrayers of labor and inasmuch as union customs and laws do not empower the workers to throw them out, the Government, which performs this obvious duty, will not only serve the national interest but earn the deep gratitude of the dumb, scared slaves of this rotten system.
Such laws would not be punitive laws. They would be laws of emancipation and the workers would honor those who fought them through to adoption.
Clapper: Source of hope
By Raymond Clapper
WASHINGTON – The real new order is having its foundations laid right now by those two master craftsmen of democracy – Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. This Christmas week of 1941 will be a week of new hope for our kind of civilization.
For there is taking place among the Allied nations a unity of resolve and a mustering of men, materials, and spirit to put the basic principles of the Atlantic Charter into living application.
This charter, announced as a set of hopes, is now to be a guide to action.
As White House Secretary Stephen T. Early has said, talks going on are preliminary to creating a supreme war council. These include all of the Allies. They look toward a united front to defeat the Axis and to win the peace.
This time we intend to be practical
The large source of hope in this is that force and the ideals of a free and peaceful world are being put into harness to pull together. We never have had that on our side before. We have used force at times in the past. And we have tried the idealistic pen as in the Kellogg-Briand Pact. We have never harnessed the two together, not even in the League of Nations attempt. The war was won and then an attempt was made to set up an ideal world organization totally disassociated from force.
This time, I think, we intend to be more practical. We know now that force must be used sometimes in the cause of justice. If it were to be announced some morning that the police force of a large city was to be disbanded at high noon, who doubts that by midnight bands of desperadoes would be looting the town? Right may be right, but it isn’t always strong enough to get along without a gun to protect itself.
A supreme war council, or whatever it might be called, can bring together the resources on our side and, by the very act of uniting them, give them greater strength than if they were used individually. It is like a rope. A handful of strands becomes stronger if you twist them together.
Hitler’s inferiority will crack Axis
There will be bad news from time to time. Hitler appears to be in serious trouble but we must expect him to make a desperate stab to cut his way out. The Pacific may give us some anxious days. Fortunes of war never run smoothly. But the strength on our side is so overwhelming that Hitler has had to admit to his people that in Russia he has been up against a superiority of men and materials. Naval strength on our side has shown its strength in keeping the supply line to England open. In time it will show what it can do in the Pacific. War production insures that in time the planes necessary to complete victory will be made. The Axis simply cannot out-produce our side. Each day that the war goes on brings nearer the time when Hitler’s basic inferiority will force the Axis to crack. I am as sure of this as of anything I know. The unity of action which is in sight on our side insures it.
An article which Vice President Henry Wallace has written for the January Atlantic Monthly on the foundations of peace maps the path still further into the future. Vice President Wallace already is deep in work on how to make the peace grow out of the daily actions now being taken by the Allies. He would put into effect now, long before the armistice plans for buying raw materials and for organizing a free flow of them as soon as the fighting stops.
Work must be started on this while the war is going on, the Vice President believes. He says the overthrow of Hitler is only half the battle. The Atlantic Charter outlined the goals. The job now, says Mr. Wallace, “is to work out as definitely as we can while the war is still in progress, practical ways and means for realizing them.” In this article Mr. Wallace outlines some of the actions that he feels must be taken in this complicated task, as part of the full winning of the war.
Maj. Williams: Seapower’s doom
By Maj. Al Williams
Before we move another foot in this war against Japan, let’s realize and force admission from the interested parties, if necessary, that the backbone of seapower, as we knew it, has been broken. We are no longer tolerant of those who would offer explanations as to why air bombs sank battleships or why it might not have happened, if something else hadn’t happened.
American, British, and Japanese warships have been sunk by air bombs in Asiatic waters. Those are the facts – facts we had to learn the hard way, and for this reason they are facts we should remember. I do not agree with those who offer opinions that the British battleship, “Prince of Wales,” would not have been sunk if the fighter planes available had been on the scene, claiming further that the fighter planes were not on the scene because perhaps the commander of the “Prince of Wales” hesitated to use his radio to call for help.
Answer is simple
Another is Adm. Yarnell’s argument, printed in a recent issue of Collier’s, trying to explain the Crete defeat of British warships by German airpower. The answer to this, too, is simple. Logically, it is evident that planes don’t need warships, but warships can’t stay afloat without planes.
The British have been cleaning house by getting rid of their over-age admirals and generals. British newspapers have aided this house-cleaning by publishing the ages of each and every British admiral and general. This is a young man’s war. I don’t mean young men in the combat forces to do the actual fighting. That’s always been evident in every war. What I do mean is that our successful leadership of the several forces in this war will be accomplished by younger officers. Young men “on the make” – on the way up. Young men will dare and challenge the new conditions of warfare with new ideas. But not those who have arrived and have little to gain in the way of rank – who are basically holding on to what they already have.
Need new ideas, too
We’ll have to find new ideas to win this war, and new ideas necessarily mean “new men.” From current reports I presume there are going to be investigations into the Army and Navy to determine the responsibility for the Hawaii and Philippine disasters. The commanders in each sector will undoubtedly be blamed. They should be blamed for the “napping,” but the deeper blame is higher up. It’s one thing to blame a single player at fault on a ball team, but losing ball teams are eventually and rightly charged up to bad managerial ability.
Those men who fought and died in the Far East fought with what they had at hand, while the men who failed to give them more of the right kind of tools are elsewhere.