Cinema stars playing host to nearby service forces
Will have half dozen to 20 men as New Year Day dinner guests trade ad gets good reception
By Harold Heffernan
HOLLYWOOD – Smartest, most inspiring message yet delivered to Hollywood is a full-page ad in trade papers by the William Morris Talent Agency. Written in the jargon of show business, it pictures a giant clown carrying a bludgeon and standing beside a circus tent labeled “Freedom” yelling, “Hey Rube! – Take Your Places.”
The text reads: “The traditional call to arms – the rallying cry of show business – again thunders through the great American world of entertainment. The big show has been attacked! Down through the pages of our country’s history – whenever security and decent living were endangered by the wanton acts of international outlaws – our fathers and our fathers’ fathers closed their fists about every last weapon at hand to defend their Nation’s life and liberty. Our country needs us now. There are a thousand ways to help – a thousand ways to roll up our sleeves and heed the traditional battle cry of show business. Take your places! Grab the best weapon at hand – and come out fighting! Hey Rube!”
Various stars are hosting all the way from a half dozen to a score of United States Army soldiers at New Year dinners. John Garfield will have 10 at his home.
Reports without confirmation are that 20th Century-Fox, which recently dropped jane Withers, is seeking a new deal with Shirley Temple. Shirley will be definitely “big” after the general release of “Kathleen.” Even the mail-fisted New York critics gave her comeback the glad hand.
Columbia signed its last player contract of the year with a 16-day-old miss named Norma Jean Wayne. The infant has started work in “Blondie’s Blessed Event” and will continue in future Blondies as a regular member of the Bumstead family.
First page of the “Tuttles of Tahiti” script carries a now-ironical description of the picture’s setting: “There is a sense of vastness, peace and pacific isolation.”
That “man to man” relationship between Mickey Rooney and Lewis Stone in the Hardy family series gets a feminine twist in “The Courtship of Andy Hardy.” Andy’s sister (Cecilia Parker) becomes involved in an affair and when the judge attempts to take over for lecture, the mother (Sara Haden) intercedes, declaring, “This is a woman-to-woman situation.”
Johnny Weissmuller, who has never had to do anything more than babble incoherently in the Tarzans, is now taking diction lessons in preparation for the next adventure. He’ll speak 400 words of English in it.
M-G-M’s talent scout, Billy Grady, is preparing a defense short designed to dispel war rumor mongering. It is titled “Beware of General They Say.”
Cary Grant gets $100,000 for making “Arsenic and Old Lace” at Warner Brothers, but doesn’t draw a cent of it. Three checks go out from Warners, one for $50,000 to the British War Relief, one for $25,000 to the USO and another for the same amount to the American Red Cross. Grant specifies that all the money must be spent in this country, where he earned it.
The fellow warming up in the bullpen at Sam Goldwyn’s lot is Gary Cooper, who seems to have first call on the Lou Gehrig role in the life story of the great first baseman, scheduled to start soon. Although Goldwyn prefers to keep the fans guessing, it is almost a cinch that Cooper, already under contract to him, will show his heels to other leading contenders – Eddie Albert, Ronald Reagan, Dennis Morgan and William Gargan, among them. Regis Toomey is top man for the Bill Dickey role.
Another casting enigma continues at Warners, where the brothers can’t settle on an actor to impersonate Will Rogers in the biography written by the beloved screen comedian’s widow. Mrs. Rogers insists on Spencer Tracy, who isn’t available, and may settle for Stuart Erwin, whose career has been in something of an eclipse.
One of the nonsensical last-moment injections into “Hellzapoppin’” by Olsen and Johnson is a slide interruption on the screen reading, “If Stinky Williams is in the house, please go home.” The action continues a few minutes and is again interrupted. “If Stinky Williams is in the house, please go home. Your mother wants you.” As the film resumes, the shadow of a small boy is seen on the screen getting up from his seat and slinking up the aisle.
Over the set where Orson Welles is shooting “The Magnificent Ambersons” is a huge sign: “Please do not bomb! Welles shooting.”
The Pittsburgh Press (December 30, 1941)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
SAN FRANCISCO – Today we continue with our free advice on how to conduct yourself when the bombs begin to fall.
The questions were asked by the staff of The San Francisco News, which apparently expects to get blown up at any moment. The answers are by this column’s Ye Olde Bombe Department, which sees and knows all. Well, practically all. We’ll start off with one we can’t answer, and get the embarrassment over quickly.
Q. Comes the gas, and we without masks, do we get on the floor or grab the air higher up?
A. Honestly, I don’t know. But I think you’re supposed to hold your breath and run, for
gas usually doesn’t cover a very large patch. We never had gas in London.
Q. Shouldn’t we get stirrup pumps so we can deal with bombs? And are those pumps used only on incendiaries, or on any bomb?
A. Only on incendiaries. Other bombs go poof and then you ain’t there no more. I think everybody who can afford it should have a stirrup pump, even in peace time. Even if you don’t get the incendiary out with it. you can control the resultant fire until the bomb burns itself out.
Q. Don’t you have to wear some sort of protective device in order to get close enough to an incendiary to smother it?
A. Yes, preferably. People hold wash-boiler lids and boards and such things in front of them, but not always. I’ve seen people in England try to stamp them out with their feet and get only a burned shoe, although I assure you they didn’t stamp long. You can put on sand with a long-handled shovel without much danger.
Q. Is blue cellophane over lights effective?
A. No. They won’t let you use it here anyway, you know.
Q. Is the cellar a safe place to go in a raid? Otherwise, where is the best place to go?
A. Yes, the cellar is safest place if you’re at home. Lots of people in England get underneath the stairway that goes down to the cellar. That protects you from falling debris. The best shelter here, it seems to me, would be the second basement of a big apartment house or office building. Nothing that I know of, except a long, deep, winding tunnel under 50 or 60 feet of rock, is safe from a direct hit.
Q. What gases do the masks in England protect against?
A. Against all types known to be in possession of the Germans. All civilian gas masks in England now have an extra filter cap taped over the original nozzle. That is because when France fell, the Germans captured a certain French gas against which the British masks didn’t immunize, France having been on our side. So England immediately whipped up a device against this new gas, distributed it thru the ARP service, and soon everybody had the new protection on his mask.
Q. Should I stock up on canned goods, sugar, other foods? Auto tires? Clothes?
A. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to stock up a little, although we’ll doubtless have laws against hoarding pretty soon. They’ve already stopped tire sales, you know.
Q. What civilian defense activities do you think will be most valuable for a housewife to perform? A man? A high school student?
A. I couldn’t say, because the authorities take the whole mass and fit people into whatever they’re best qualified to do. It’s best just to register, give your qualifications, and let the people running it decide.
Q. How can we equip our cars to drive during a blackout?
A. You can’t, unless the rule against driving at all is modified. If that ever happens, the authorities will probably specify an official type of headlight cover that must be used. In London they use just one light, which has a shield over it with tiny silts in it, and a hood projecting over that. It makes a very dim and soft light by winch you can see faintly a few feet.
Q. Since we have no shelters, what’s the point in keeping a bag packed, the better to flee with? There’s no place to go.
A. You might come up and see my etchings.
Q. Is flying shrapnel apt to be a real menace or it is just something you skip?
A. Well, it’s a menace all right, and if the guns are going big, most people in London get under cover. But where the shrapnel all falls I don’t know, for you seldom hear of damage. Personally I heard only two pieces of shrapnel fall all winter in London. But I do know that if you’re on the streets during a heavy raid, the fear of getting hit by shrapnel just keeps pulling you over close to the buildings in spite of yourself.
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
NEW YORK – Adolf Hitler has expressed in many ways his bitter contempt for the softness of the civilized nations, but his people undoubtedly will appeal to this same weakness again when this war is over as they did in 1918.
This weakness of the civilized peoples is Germany’s hope of escape from that inferno which Joseph Goebbels foresaw in his recent cry of alarm to the Germans. It may not spare them this time as before, because, obviously, Joseph Stalin will be very powerful at the peace conference. There might be no such conference, for Stalin is unpredictable, and a man of no such delicacy as President Wilson, and thus might recognize no surrender but push right on into Germany waging a war of obliteration.
In that case, the United States and Britain, in the name of Christ and Humanity, might protest for the record, but it seems improbable that Stalin would be deterred from such a purpose by mere words and equally unlikely that American and British forces would go to the rescue of the Germans. In that situation, moreover, Stalin would have the vigorous personal cooperation of millions of bitter men and women of all the nations which have suffered under the Nazi scourge.
Germans would lose human rights
The application to the German people and country of the exact method which they have used in their treatment of their victims would inflict horrors far worse than the terms of the Treaty of Versailles which Hitler so long denounced as an infamous document and the refusal to recognize and surrender would obviate this time Hitler’s own familiar complaint that Germany, having ceased resistance was double-crossed. Even those methods might be supplemented by some Russian refinements, for Stalin is no less practical than Hitler in the application of power.
Early in the invasion, the Russians, of course, would go through the concentration camps and released upon the Germans, and particularly against the Nazis, all those prisoners who have suffered so at Hitler’s hands and give them their revenge. All Nazi Party members would be rounded up, all Nazi symbols and pagan shrines publicly fouled and all Germans required to wear a badge, probably yellow, inscribed with the swastika.
Germans, of course, would have no human rights and would be dispossessed of their farms and homes and all other property and there would be considerable distress from the impromptu executions of local officials and young students accused of resistance, noncooperation, an incorrect attitude or of singing patriotic German airs. This would be consistent with the German conduct in all conquered countries, particularly in Poland, and, of course, no Nazi could claim any moral right to protest, although non-Nazis might try their luck.
The deportations would be the big event, however. The Prussians, in particular, are fond of the proposition that in the urgent arrangement of a great new historic pattern the immediate distress of individuals and hordes of people is of little moment. According to this, their own contention, they might be herded into ships or cars or driven on foot for resettlement in far and God-forsaken places as they dispersed the Jews wherever they found them, and with no regard for the preservation of family units or the keeping of records.
Reds would become jailers of Nazis
The superstition that the German derives some spiritual quality from the German soil might be recognized as a dangerous admission, proving that Germans must be transplanted to other soil so that civilization might work on them unhampered by the peculiar earth current which makes them so warlike and otherwise intolerable.
The German nation has established all the necessary precedents for a horrible future for the German people, all written in the German laws and the conduct of the German political war machine, this time and the last. The Russians, too, have had some experience in the business of deportations and the dehumanization of masses of people, and so recently that it may be said that they have lost neither the knack nor the mood. And the Germans, having said that certain groups were low grade, undesirable and a general nuisance, would be in no moral position to protest at any inhuman treatment lifted out of the record of their own conduct.
The future is long and foggy, but the Russians seem sure to be the jailers of the Germans and the arbiters of their fate when this war is done and they are not as fastidious or moralistic as the civilized free races, whose restraints the Fuehrer mistook for weakness.
Clapper: War production
By Raymond Clapper
WASHINGTON – Read it and weep. Marines on Wake Island fighting off the Japanese with only four planes, then with only two, and finally with only one plane. American soldiers in the Philippines defending bridges with rifles and hand grenades.
It won’t be our men out there that will lose the Philippines. If the islands are lost they will have been lost here, by our lagging war production.
Months ago many of us wrote complaining about the slow, confused, molasses-in-January defense production. And I suppose some of the others were called on the carpet as I was and dressed down by some of the big shots in office of production management. We were listening too much to New Dealers. What did a newspaper reporter know about production?
I still don’t know anything about production. All I know is what people tell me. Here I have the report just issued by the Tolan committee of the House. This committee reports that the testimony it heard was almost unanimous that production to date had been a failure when measured against the facilities available and the visible needs for war goods.
Change laid to material
This House committee says two major obstacles have impeded war production. First, manufacturers have been reluctant to convert their production from civilian to military purposes. second, the defense agencies of the government have not required such conversion.
The committee cited the automobile industry. Automobile manufacturers said only 15 percent of their facilities were convertible. Engineers and labor-union officials testified that 50 to 60 percent could be converted.
It is a matter of record, the committee adds pointedly, that the entire automotive industry of England has been converted to defense production. Now, after 18 months our automobile industry is to be changed over to war work. But not because OPM forced it. For months OPM resisted officials here who urged conversion.
We are changing over because a shortage of materials forces it. But for 18 months we gave been using up record-breaking quantities of rubber in a boom automobile industry. For 18 months Jesse Jones has fooled around with a one-lunged stockpile effort. His face must have turned red when at a Cabinet meeting the other day President Rosevelt asked him how his synthetic-rubber factories were coming along.
For 18 months record-breaking automobile production has been using up precious chrome. Now chrome mines in the Philippines have been evacuated in the face of the Japanese advance. OPM has just been compelled to order restricted use of chrome steel. For several years Germany and Japan have been buying up such supplies. For instance, they ran up their copper purchases from Latin American countries to several times normal. They were getting ready for war at any cost. Officials here who were months ago pleading that our Government the same thing were considered impractical nuts and were brushed aside as panic-mongers.
War will be won or lost in plants
There is only one point in bringing this up. It is to emphasize that the confusion, divided authority and hesitant state of mind that caused these failures still exists.
Only today the White House has added to the confusion. Secretary Ickes has been running the oil defense program. Now the foreign end of it is being placed under the Board of Economic Warfare headed by Vice President Wallace. Ickes and the economic warfare board had an agreement by which the Wallace board decided policy and Ickes as oil administrator carried out the policy. Now, without prior consultation apparently, a new operation is laid on top of the existing organization. It isn’t a question of whether Wallace or Ickes does it. The objection is to the division of authority, to the overlapping, the setting up of new agencies without even consulting other interested agencies. You find the same story all around here. It’s as disorganized as a junkpile.
This war will be won or lost in American factories. Yet a House committee tells us that the federal agencies have failed to insist upon conversion of plants to war work to the degree that was possible. Right now, because of that failure, plants are being shut down and men thrown out of work. For that double loss soldiers and sailors and marines who are doing the fighting will pay dearly, and paying dearly this very moment.
Maj. Williams: Backward glance
By Maj. Al Williams
“Japan must be bombed to defeat.”
It is always wise and most times fascinating to look backward over our shoulders to see where we have been, in order to understand clearly where we are and where we are going. I ran across an interesting item today, from which the following is quoted:
“Fancy for a moment the disillusionment to come when, in some great conflict of the future, a splendid, up-to-date battleship fleet of the traditional order, with traditional sailors, traditional admiral, traditional tactics, finds itself beset in mid-seas by a couple of great unarmored liner like hulls, engined to admit of speeds and steaming radii such as will permit them to pursue or run away from any armored craft yet built and designed with clear and level decks for airplane launching. Conceive them provided with storage room for hundreds of demountable airplanes, with fuel, repair facilities and explosives, and with housing for a regiment or two of expert air navigators. Then picture the terribly one-sided engagement that will ensue – thousands of tons and millions of dollars’ worth of cunningly fashioned mechanism, all but impotent against the unremitted, harrying and reinforced attacks from aloft, and unable to either escape from or give chase to the enemy’s floating bases of supplies which, ever warned and convoyed by their aerial supports, will unreachably maneuver out of big gun range, picking up from the water, reprovisioning remanning, launching and relaunching the winged messengers of death until the cold waters close over the costly armada of some nation that has refused to profit by the lessons of progress.”
The above was written by Victor Loughheed in his fascinating book, “Vehicles of the Air,” written in 1908 and published the following year. The name of Loughheed is one of America’s brightest lights in the aeronautic field, still available and possessed of the most enterprising creative engineering mind I have ever encountered. It was Victor Loughheed who years ago designed the Loughheed “Vega” aircraft which, with an engine of about 200 horsepower, outperformed the 400-horsepower craft of that day.
I happened on his “Vehicles of the Air” and immediately began wondering about his present activity. There’s a man who should be drafted by the U.S. Government and supplied with whatever finances he needs to undertake original aeronautical research.
To turn such a genius loose upon some job of attempting to refine some imperfectly conceived and designed aircraft would be a waste of an invaluable national asset. In spite the remarkable flight performances of aircraft of today, I believe we have only scratched the surface of aeronautics. In fact, I believe we fly by main force and awkwardness which is a terse version of the old adage, “You can fly a barn door if you have power enough.” Of course, we outfly the birds. We can fly farther, faster and higher. But in point of engineering efficiency – that is, performance reckoned against energy expended – we are ages behind birdflight.
A Labrador duck can take off with about 63 gallons of high-test gas on board.
Council needs power
I know we have what is known as the National Inventors Council. Well, that’s all right. But that Council has only the power to recommend. It can’t do anything on its own orders. That Council should have greater powers. But in addition to such a move, we should immediately summon the outstanding engineering brains – especially in the aeronautical field – and organize them, but only in sketchy fashion because brains of that caliber are hampered rather than helped by mental goose-stepping. At the head of such a body should be placed a first-rate, two-fisted “get results” business executive – certainly not another inventor.
We have the gifted engineering brains, than which there are no finer nor more creative in the entire world. Why not use them? It would not require much more money, and even if it did, we’ve got the money. We need the results of creative engineering now more than we ever needed it in the history of the country.
The field tactics of any war are formulated on the capacity of the machinery of that age to perform. New ideas – new machinery. New airplanes and new aircraft engines. Why not try for them? But above all else, if any such drafting of our engineering genii is attempted, the head man – the Boss – who signs the checks for that group must be a two-fisted go-getter business executive who yells, prays and whispers – results.
Reading Eagle (December 30, 1941)
Lindy offers his services to country
Volunteers for duties in Air Corps, Gen. Arnold announces
WASHINGTON (AP) – The Army Air Corps said today Charles A. Lindbergh had volunteered his services.
Lt. Gen. Henry H. Arnold, chief of the Air Forces and deputy chief of staff of the Army, said, “Lindbergh’s act indicates a definite change from his isolationist stand and expresses a deep desire to help the country along the lines he trained himself for many years.”
There was no indication on how soon there might be action on Lindbergh’s offer.
Last summer, Lindbergh, at that time engaged in making many speeches for the America First Committee in opposition to President Roosevelt’s foreign policies, submitted his resignation as a colonel in the reserves to President Roosevelt by letter. The resignation was accepted.
May be specialist
Officials said that since Lindbergh had severed all connections with the Army last April, his application would have to be considered on the same basis as any other first applicant. Presumably he might be appointed with a commission as a specialist in some category inasmuch as high age – 39 – might preclude him from actual combat flying.
To obtain such a commission, Lindbergh would have a file a formal application and take the regular physical examination.
Unofficial belief was that his application would be viewed favorably and a commission would be forthcoming. However, it might not be as the rank of colonel that he formerly held.
The reserve commission which he relinquished after President Roosevelt classified him with the appeasers, was the Army’s recognition of his “Lone Eagle” flight from New York to Paris in May 1927. Before that flight, he held a lower reserve rank.
The President’s reference to Lindbergh was made at a press conference on April 25, 1941. In answer to a question why Lindbergh had not been called to active duty, Mr. Roosevelt said that during the Civil War, both sides ignored certain people. These people, he explained, were the Vallandighams, who from 1863 on urged peace with the argument that the North could not win.
Clement L. Vallandigham was an Ohio congressman who was arrested by the military for alleged treasonable utterances. He was banished to the South and was later one of the leaders of the Copperheads.
Sent letter to F.R.
A few days later, Lindbergh sent a letter to the president announcing he was forwarding his resignation as a colonel, Air Corps Reserve, to the War Department.
“Your remarks at the White House press conference,” Lindbergh wrote the president, “have of course disturbed me greatly. I had hoped that I might exercise my right as an American citizen, to place my viewpoint before the people of my country in time of peace without giving up the privilege of serving my country as an Air Corps officer in the event of war.
“But since you have clearly implied that I am no longer of use to this country as a reserve officer, I can see no honorable alternative to tendering my resignation.”
Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh had been one of the most outspoken of the isolationist leaders. He had argued that Britain faced defeat and that a stalemate in the war would be better than a victory for either side. He insisted that it would be better for the United States to build up its defenses without lending direct aid to the Allies.
On duty in 1939
Lindbergh was on active duty for several months in 1939, during which time he made a study of production facilities for the War Department.
With the amendment to the Selective Service Act making men from 20 to 44 (inclusive) subject to military service, Lindbergh is subject to military service as far as age is concerned. He will be 40 next February 4.
Threatening letter to FDR admitted
SAN FRANCISCO (UP) – German-born John Kirk Coleman, 31, today was held for federal grand jury action on his admission he wrote President Roosevelt a threatening letter.
Coleman, naturalized in 1933, admitted to U.S. Commissioner Francis St. J. Fox he had written the president on December 15, demanding that he join in a “blitz-peace or be destroyed.”
“You have ten days in which to inform me of your decision whether I must proceed with the first and only justifiable destruction of a man by a man in the history of mankind,” he added.
Coleman also said he wrote a letter to the Washington Star demanding a trial because he had “knowingly and deliberately” threatened the president.
Jap Diet to meet
BERLIN (Official Radio Received by AP) – Advices from Tokyo today said that the Japanese Diet (Parliament) would meet in special session tomorrow.