Jittery Japs threaten raid on U.S. coast
Scared by bombs in home waters, Tokyo promises reprisals
By the United Press
Allied counterblows striking ever closer to Japan appeared today to have prompted Tokyo threats of action against Hawaii, Australia and the U.S. mainland.
The war was carried into Japanese home waters for the first time when an Allied submarine, believed to be American, torpedoed and sank or damaged the 2,250-ton freighter Unkai Maru No. 1, off Izu Peninsula, within close striking distance of Yokohama.
The peninsula is just southwest of the biggest Japanese naval base at Yokosuka and Tokyo’s concern over the attack so close to home was indicated by a broadcast warning the Japanese to pay no attention to efforts of “Allied propaganda” to exploit the attack.
Other developments included:
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Renewal of a series of raids by British and U.S. fliers on Japanese war bases in Thailand and Malaya, especially at Bangkok.
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A propaganda article in the Tokyo newspaper, Times-Advertiser, suggesting that an invasion of the United States was “by no means impossible” because purported losses suffered by the U.S. Navy had made the threat of landing on the U.S. mainland a real one.
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An interview given to Chilean newspapermen to Tokyo by Masayuki Tani, chief of the government press bureau, suggesting that “action” might be taken by Japanese forces against Japan and Australia if they “interfered with Japan’s liberty” in the Pacific.
The sinking of the Unkai Maru No. 1 in Japanese waters was perhaps the most important psychological blow yet struck at the Japanese.
From the naval base at Yokohama, it is only 50 miles to the end of the Izu Peninsula. The great cities of Yokohama and Tokyo lie only a few miles farther away and in the same sector, Nagoya, one of the biggest industrial cities in Japan.
All members of the crew of the freighter were reported rescued, according to the Tokyo broadcast.
Asserting that the attack was really “insignificant,” the Tokyo statement said, “American propagandists will probably make more of this attack since the American people have been deeply disturbed.”
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
ALBUQUERQUE – One reason I like to be in New Mexico is that you get some attention paid to you out here.
Why, I can go in and see the governor any time I want to. If I lived in New York, I’d have to make an appointment a month ahead of time to see the governor. And I wouldn’t do that, because I wouldn’t have anything to see him about anyhow.
Out here things aren’t so congested. In a country where you can see for 80 miles, a fellow like me can get somewhere. What I’m trying to lead up to is that I’ve been made a New Mexico colonel again.
Four years ago Gov. Clyde Tingley, in some kind of a civic convulsion, appointed me a colonel on his staff. And now the present governor, John E. Miles, has lost his head and made me a colonel again. Twice a colonel but never a bridesmaid.
There are three of us fellows here in Albuquerque who have lunch together occasionally. One is Lt. Col. C. R. Smith, of the Army air base. One is Earl Mount, my contractor friend. And one is me. Mr. Mount is a New Mexico colonel too.
Well, we meet for lunch and there we are – three colonels. But we stand on all the formalities. Our friend Smith is only a lieutenant-colonel, so he goes to the foot of the line. Mr. Mount is a straight colonel, so he takes his place next.
But I rank both of them, for I am twice a colonel, you see. They must defer to me in all things. They dare not start eating till I have taken the first bite. When they address me, I insist on being called “Double-Colonel.” At the end of each sentence, they not only have to say “sir” to me, they have to say “sir-sir,” in recognition of my double rank. And of course it would be akin to treason if they ever let me pay the bill.
It’s wonderful to live in New Mexico.
Reader pays fine
Some of you may have read a few weeks ago about my getting a ticket for overtime parking and being fined $1.
Well, shortly after that, there came a letter about it from a reader in Cincinnati, and in the letter was a dollar bill, to reimburse me for the fine.
The reason I tell this incident is that I thought you might be interested in knowing what I did with this magnanimous Cincinnatian’s dollar bill.
I kept it.
When this column suddenly stopped last fall, the last one was from Cleveland.
Well, at that time I was just starting a trip which was never finished. (I start more unfinished journeys than anybody in America). Last fall’s jaunt was to be a flying trip up through Canada to Alaska.
I put the car in storage in Cleveland, went to Ottawa for three days, then flew across Canada one night. I expected to do Alaska and be back in Cleveland to pick up the car in about six weeks.
But I never got to Alaska, and I’ve never been back to Cleveland. During these idle months out here, I rented a second-hand car to run errands in.
And then suddenly came Pearl Harbor, and our newly planned trip to the Orient vanished in thin air. It became apparent that my travels would be mostly within our own borders for awhile. So I got an awful yen for that little car sitting there so dead in Cleveland.
I wired the editor of The Cleveland Press, with faint hope, asking if anybody on the staff would like to take a vacation and drive my car to California. The editor put the telegram on the bulletin board. He had three volunteers in 15 minutes.
Volunteers draw for trip
Then he tore up three small strips of paper. Two he left blank; on the third he wrote the word “Go.” And then he had the three volunteers draw the slips from his hand.
The first had nothing on it. The second had nothing on it. The third was drawn by a young man named Clarence Judd. He girded his startled wits about him, kissed his family goodbye, and left that very night.
He took the southern route, through Oklahoma and New Mexico. He honored my own top speed limit of 60 miles an hour, but he drove terrifically long days – one day he drove 20 hours.
He went right through Albuquerque, and completely forgot That Girl was here, or he would have driven out and let her look at the car a minute.
He arrived in San Francisco at 11 one night, just four days and 3000 miles after leaving Cleveland. He said he wasn’t even tired. He said he was so crazy about the car he could hardly bear to give it up.
He stayed 36 hours, rode on San Francisco’s famous cable cars, went to the Top o’ the Mark and looked down upon the city, hoped we’ll pull a blackout for him but was disappointed, and then hopped a train.
So that’s how I’ve got my little automobile again. The first time I drove it, after the long separation, I actually felt embarrassed. But now we’ve got the hang of each other once more, and we motor with a flip and a flair.
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
NEW YORK – In yesterday’s essay, I described as “unmistakably Hitlerian” the attitude toward the art of the drama and I might have said toward all art and science, too, which Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt revealed in her refusal to cross a picket line of the musicians’ union at a New York theater.
At the time of writing that, I was afraid I was being a little severe, and I am still uneasy but for another reason. For Mrs. Roosevelt, herself, in her own daily piece flatly says, “I do not cross a picket line and so I turned in my tickets.” This substantially confirms the version of the theater people who said she said, “I can’t cross a picket line – fair or unfair.”
Do I exaggerate the seriousness of this declared attitude of one who unquestionably partakes of the office of President of the United States? I am afraid I don’t.
Nazi art is national-socialist
If you substitute the word Nazi for the word union in this episode you will have, in principle, the attitude of Adolf Hitler and the Germans. In Nazi Germany, the only art is national-socialist art. Mrs. Roosevelt probably will concede that non-union art may be art, nevertheless, but if it is non-union or is merely condemned unjustly and without trial by a union, on an issue having nothing to do with art, she will not give it a hearing.
It makes little difference whether you burn books for Hitler’s reasons or merely refuse to read them because they do not bear a union label. I even detect something in Hitler’s favor here because he never admits that any non-Nazi or anti-Nazi art is art at all and rejects all non-Nazi science as untrue.
Mrs. Roosevelt, on the other hand, would not discriminate between a fair picket line and an unfair one which means to me that she would uphold
Mrs. Roosevelt doesn’t concern herself with the rights and wrongs of a picket-line situation and in this particular case the union was absolutely wrong because there was no controversy over wages, hours or anything else between an employer and any employee. It was simply that a union tried to compel an employer to hire four unnecessary hands to loaf a certain number of hours a week and pay them $337.50 a week for that.
Now I am not going to rear back at this point and make the usual stipulation that I have profound respect for Mrs. Roosevelt’s general motives in all she does, because it seems to me that people who say that are always more eager to show how very refined and intellectual they are than to pay respect to her, But I will concede that with the finest original motives. Mrs. Roosevelt and many others who believe themselves to be liberal have sacrificed principle for an attitude.
Hitler just anschlussed Austrians
I think no person should make a blanket commitment to support any organization, right or wrong, except his country, but it is well known that many of our leading citizens do undertake to support unions even though they be in the wrong. That means that in each such case the victim of the wrong receives a gratuitous kick when he is down from those who, in justice, ought to pitch in and help him.
Very often the victim is an absolutely innocent and helpless third party who has nothing to do with the dispute. Often he is a small employer who is commanded to disemploy his own wife or daughter in a little mom-and-pop store and hire an outsider from the union. And more often the victims are unoffending American citizens, with all the duties of citizenship, who have refused to join some union and whose boss has refused to make them join.
To say “I can’t cross a picket line – fair or unfair” in any such case is to embitter the victims and to spread among the people an indifference to the rights of others They conclude that there ain’t no justice and lose their own sense of right and wrong.
Hitler didn’t ask the people of Austria whether they wanted to join Nazi Germany. He just placed organizers among them and finally anschlussed them by a process which has been copied in some American plants by professional unioneers and upheld by emotional judges in the courts whose countrymen will live to regret the day.
When unity is our great need, unity is not served by a declaration from such a high personage that she will not consider the merits of a case but in accordance with a blanket commitment will uphold the oppressor and oppose the oppressed among our own people.
Clapper: Voice of labor
By Raymond Clapper
WASHINGTON – The first showdown over labor’s growing demand for a voice in the direction of industry has been going on in Washington this week.
That was the real dynamite in the tense OPM meetings to put 100 percent of the motor industry on war work. The industry is ready to change over. It must change over. No rubber is available for tires, so making cars would be pointless even if the Government allowed it. The real issue was whether labor should share in the direction of the change-over, which requires industry-wide pooling of tools, materials and skilled help.
Circumstances accidentally made the auto industry the designated guinea pig for this demand, which is actually a broad, fundamental policy that organized labor, particularly the CIO, hopes to apply throughout big industry.
Let’s forget about labels and isms
Philip Murray, head of CIO, has for more than a year been advocating the “industry council” plan which would bring labor in jointly with management in the direction of industry. The idea has been developed specifically for the auto industry in the Reuther plan, worked out by Walter P. Reuther, a protege of Mr. Murray and one of the most intelligent young men in the auto workers’ union.
The issue raised here is packed with the broadest possible implications for the future, affecting the shape of American capitalism for years to come. Let’s forget about labels and isms and try to understand what’s going on in the world.
The private-enterprise system as we know it has been discarded by two of the biggest of the industrial powers – Germany and Russia. It is under complete control in a third industrial nation, Japan. In the fourth industrial nation, Britain, private capitalism held on but it was so slow and feeble in rising to the demand for war production that the government finally took almost complete direction of it. Nations which have had a big job of war production have in no case depended upon the motive power of private capitalism – even Britain, which would have preferred to do so.
Here in America private capitalism has more vitality than anywhere else. It is younger and has had the advantages of strong resources and a rapidly growing country. It has had a highly friendly environment. Our people have passionately believed in it. They want to see it work. They have treated it better. Therefore it has been less subject to destructive inside attack.
Even so, confidence in private capitalism was shaken during the depression when Government aid was necessary to keep it going. One school of economics, led by Dr. Alvin Hansen of Harvard, believes private capitalism will always hereafter need help from Government public works.
Let Reuther plan alone, they said
As labor has grown in strength, it has sought more power in management. Industrial policies affect employment. Therefore some labor leaders believe they should have a voice in determining those policies. Out of such considerations, Philip Murray developed his program for industry councils in which labor would join management in determining broad policies.
Just a year ago the Government was crying for airplanes, and Walter Reuther, working with Murray, surveyed the auto industry and argued that it could be put to war work on a vast scale if properly organized. He proposed a production board of Government, management and labor representatives with full authority to organize and supervise mass production of planes in the auto industry. The board would assign engineers to allocate tooling and designing, and use of each plant.
This was the general idea of the Murray industry-council plan adapted to the auto industry. But everyone said to let it alone. Let industry handle this job. Reuther is a labor leader. Let him stick to that. Let William Knudsen and the auto industry alone and they will get results in war production as they have in auto production. So just a year ago the Reuther plan to put labor in on the management job was laid away by common consent and the issue became dormant.
I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to finish this story.
Maj. Williams: Heroic airmen
By Maj. Al Williams
On January 1, 1942, at 7:20 a. m., an Army “B-25" (twin-engined bomber) took off from Mitchell Field, Long Island, on a routine training flight. Aboard were five men: Lt. C. W. Van Eewen, pilot; Lt. J. J. Orr, co-pilot; Cadet E. W. Ray, navigator; Pfc. E. A. Onufrowicz, engineer, and Pfc. J. W. Gallik, radio operator.
The big ship negotiated the take-off okay. Then the motors began to sputter and backfire. Ahead and all around for a square mile the shimmering roofs of dwellings could be seen through the sunlit morning mist. The ship could not be held in the air. It was sinking – sinking. The deepest instinct a man ever feels is to pull back the controls in a desperate effort to hold up the nose of a sinking plane. It’s the sheer discipline of flight training – an original “don’t” which instantly washes out this “pull-back” instinct.
In the sea of roofs below there was one single open space, a sandpit, and the gallant Lt. Van Eewen deliberately turned the sinking nose of that giant bomber – all dead weight now – with the pressure on the controls lessening each split second – toward the sandpit. Van Eewen made this heroic decision in a matter of a pared second. But he made it deliberately and cleanly.
Five die in crash
There was a crush – a flash and an explosion which shattered the windows in the homes nearby as the big plane struck the sandpit. Five men died and deliberately they made the decision to save possible scores of helpless dwellers in the homes below and roundabout.
Don’t tell me that Lt. Van Eewen and his crew didn’t know what they were doing nor the consequences of the decision to head for the pit – and death. They knew they were dead men long before they hit the earth. I said “long before” they actually died. And that’s just what I mean. They knew they were done for, and as heroes and true men of the air, they decided to go it alone and spare others below. They couldn’t save themselves, and they knew it. But they knew they could save others and they gave all their skill to this job in those final few seconds – Eternity’s Minute.
When an airplane is wallowing around with the nose sinking, motor failing as the prop turns futily up ahead – turned by the wind – with a crowd, a vast crowd below, and there is no place to hit the ground cleanly without killing God knows how many people; and then the pilot spots a single open space just big enough to crash his soon-to-die craft and eases the controls to stretch the glide for that spot – please believe me – the pilot may find himself elevated to heights of sacrifice he never thought possible, never hoped to attain, and could never attain under ordinary circumstances. The will to live in strong. Men usually die as they live – hard, wide-open, daring or easy and ready to call if all off when the going becomes tough. Some men can’t be killed until they are actually destroyed. The stronger the will to live, the greater the sacrifice involved to thinking in terms of others rather than the last fighting chance for self.
Crew knew its fate
Van Eewen and his crew knew they were doomed long before they died. On the ground there are split second crises. But seldom does a ground crisis present the principal with the perspective of his doom.
What can a man think of in split seconds, pared to limitations not worth measuring under ordinary circumstances? You’d be surprised. You would gasp in amazement at the long line of pictures, events, and estimated consequences that flash through one’s mind when and while panic is tearing the entrails of one’s soul – while self screams for help and screams are throttled by chilling responsibility for lives below in no way related to your own. But the responsibility blazes to incandescency, dimming all other concerns except to see that responsibility discharged fully and completely.
You know you are done, through, to be written off in sand grains of time. You can and do anticipate the thud the blinding flash. And if you have never been through a crash before, you find time to wonder what it will be like. You will determine to keep your head clear in order to trace each and every stage and phase of things, sounds and sensations, as the ground and its unimportant details – tiny creases in the earth and discolorations – begin to fill the windshield in place of the one-time broad horizon views. You are not falling. It’s the earth upsurging at a mad pace toward you. The thud. The crunch of material.
No glory of combat, no glory of delivering a crushing load of bombs against an enemy warship, no racing through anti-aircraft streamers and puff balls for Lt. Van Eewen and his gallant crew. But there’s a warm little place in all our hearts for those heroic lads of January 1, 1942.