Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
PORTLAND, Ore. – The Willamette Iron & Steel Corp. is 75 years old, and it had never built a ship in its life. But it’s building them now, all right.
Two years ago it had 60 men working for it. Today the number is crowding 4000. That’s the way things go when you have a war. You can do what you gotta do.
Most of the shipyard workers at Willamette had never built a ship before either. They are green hands who are learning the business, under a cadre of experienced shipbuilders.
They learn pretty fast. Suppose you start as a helper. If you’ve got pretty good sense and try hard, you can be a welder or riveter in four or five months. And your pay jumps from 87 cents an hour to $1.12.
All winter I’ve been hearing yarns about the fantastic wages that ex-gas-pumpers were making in the shipyards. Stories about boys who’d never made $20 a week in their lives, now drawing down all the way from $80 to $150 a week.
I asked about it out at Willamette. They said nonsense. They said their scale was as high as any, but that the most even a highly skilled and long-experienced artisan could make, even with overtime, would be about $112 a week.
For the average journeyman mechanic it would be possible to make $100 in a week by working the regular 10-hour shift for six days, and all day Sunday at double time.
The young ex-delivery boy, working the same hours, could make a maximum of $78.30. His average weekly wage is actually below $60 (of course that ain’t hay).
Men work 10-hour shifts
At Willamette they work two 10-hour shifts – finding they get more done that way than in three eight-hour shifts. The men work six days a week, 60 hours. The first 40 hours are on straight time; the extra 20 on time and a half. And if they work on Sundays or holidays, they get double time.
The work is hard, but so is a lot of work. It is terribly noisy; in fact the din of riveting would drive me to the bughouse. It is chilly and miserable in winter weather, but fortunately, the northwest doesn’t have much really tough winter weather.
During blackouts, work stops completely and all lights go off. The men don’t leave, but sit right where they were. That’s partly because it would be dangerous to clamber around in the dark, and partly so no time will be lost when the lights go on.
The sight of a huge ship being built wasn’t as thrilling as I had thought it would be. It’s just sort of like building a house – using steel plates instead of board siding.
They start at the bottom and just keep riveting or welding on plates, building up a story at a time, until they get to the top. They put in cross-plates as they go along, making the thing into rooms, you might say. The ship is really just an unspeakable number of cells, riveted together, if you look at it in the simplest way.
Navy wants still more speed
The really interesting part comes after the ship is launched, when the ship-fitters start putting in all the gadgets. It takes just as long to finish a ship inside, after it’s in the water, as it does to build it from nothing up to launching time.
Friends tell me it is traditional that shipyard workers loaf. I had never heard this before, but I watched anyhow. It didn’t appear to me that anybody was about to keel over from the mad pace, but I didn’t see any actual loafing.
For one thing, you don’t look awfully busy while you’re building a ship. You have to spend a lot of time twisting through little openings, and fitting plates together, and adjusting your tools. It isn’t as though you were supposed to be running up and down, waving and yelling.
The ships here now are running several months ahead of schedule, and I remarked that the Navy must be very pleased.
“Not especially,” was the answer. “Our schedule was set pretty loose to begin with, because we were inexperienced. And anyhow the Navy isn’t satisfied nowadays with your speed, no matter how fast you go. And that’s the way it should be.”
This rather staid old ironworks, which for three-quarters of a century has turned out heavy castings in a great, dark, dirt-floored, hangar-like shed, has now mushroomed and spread all in a year until it teems like a beehive. To the oldsters in the works, it seems incredible that it could have happened at all.
Yet I asked the president what would happen if they got word from the Navy tonight, exactly doubling their contract. Could they get the men, could they handle the confusion of building more shipways, could they expand rapidly enough to make a go of it?
Easily, was the answer. In fact, they more or less anticipate a huge new load before long.
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
NEW YORK – It is expedient politics to say that the great division of our unions into two rival and generally hostile groups is a deplorable thing and most citizens not in politics repeat the same phrases by way of proving that they are pro-labor.
The reasons why politicians say what they say are various and always subject to suspicion, but those other Americans, the non-politicians, who accept their opinions ready-made from the orations and editorials, just don’t know what they are talking about. They are emoting when they should be thinking.
A unified or combined organization of the CIO and the AFL, under the present laws and under the leadership of any of the men now prominent in union politics, would be disastrous to every American worker and would confer on the bosses of this new combine a power to govern our Government by the same brutal, cynical, thieving, irresponsible methods that have distinguished their rule of the unions up to now.
Union bosses who never have been anything better than very low-grade politicians would acquire the rights but none of the responsibilities of management in all the industries of the entire nation, including agriculture, and every man and woman who toils would be compelled to contribute to their financial and political power over the Government established by the Constitution.
Methods are utterly Hitlerian
No man or group of men on earth today can be trusted with such power, and at least until Congress passes laws recognizing and forefending this danger by establishing the authority of the Government over unions, the reconciliation of the CIO and the AFL is to be feared and opposed in the interests of all the people.
Between them, the CIO and AFL claim 10 million members, a figure which may be discounted about 50 percent to allow for exaggeration and that large element of captive and unwilling members who were driven into union man-traps by the unioneers and the Communists of the Labor Relations Board. But a unified organization would quickly realize that figure of 10 million and, in the course of the industrial war effort, would run it up to 20 million and probably more.
All these human beings, the equivalent of a large nation, would have to pay fees, dues, assessments and income taxes at the source, through the check-off, into central union treasures which, under existing laws, are under the hands of the boss unioneers who may use the money as they wish and steal it if they wish and need account to nobody.
That great central pool, or sea, of money would be sufficient to buy the governorships of a majority, possibly all, of the states, buy or capture all the legislatures and buy a majority of both Houses of Congress and the central bosses still would be private citizens, without official responsibility to the nation and subject to no authority but their own will. That the best of them would be ignorant, if cunning, and dishonest, if plausible, men is provable by a glance over the roster of union leadership today from which these new bosses of the nation and the head-boss, who would become the President’s boss, must come.
The strongest of them are as fiercely Nazi as Adolf Hitler, himself, except only that they reject his concern with religion and his anti-Semitism. Their methods of propaganda, their ethics and their brutal contempt for the human rights and dignity of the individual man and woman are utterly Hitlerian and the reason why they fight so fiercely against Government authority by law over unions is that they strive toward a day when they will be stronger than the Government, with power over the Government and all human life in the nation still without responsibility.
Congress alone can avert disaster
They claim a first lien on the earnings of all workers who fall into their power and even today when concern is expressed over a proposal to establish a forced-savings plan with a small check-off to pay for the war and resist inflation, the union check-off is an established thing affecting hundreds of thousands of toilers who simply kiss their money goodbye and never learn what is done with it.
The AFL. has not reformed. Some spectacular criminals have been sent to prison, no thanks whatever to William Green or the AFL, but Green and the entire executive council sat with George Browne throughout his evil career and Green and Joseph Padway, the general counsel, praised and upheld him. And the central union body of Los Angeles adopted a formal resolution of sympathy for the unspeakable Willie Bioff as a fellow union politician when it was well known that he had been master of a stable of harlots and was a traitor to and exploiter of labor.
The CIO has not changed either and any amalgamation of the two bodies, plus the vast new strength which would be captured in the war industries, inevitably would establish as the highest governing authority of the nation the boss-leaders of an unofficial, irresponsible, reckless, ruthless power, lacking conscience and skill in American methods of government and not apparently even aware of the existence of the soul in the human beings.
But this reunion is inevitable and Congress alone can avert the final, total disaster by enacting laws permitting the nation to control the unions, lest the union politicians acquire power to govern the Government.
Clapper: Looking ahead
By Raymond Clapper
WASHINGTON – Talking with the press, Sen. Connally, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, predicts the fall of Singapore.
The Senator has good sources of information. He must be reflecting the best judgment available here. No doubt he is trying to do a public service by undertaking to prepare the country for this blow. Predictions often go wrong and we’ll all hope this one wall, too. Yet the plight of Singapore is such that we must face the possibility of its loss.
But let’s face it with our feet firmly planted on the ground. The main thing is for us to steel ourselves against being shaken if that blow comes. We must not be thrown off balance by the shock. Nor must we be thrown off balance by the outburst of bitterness which undoubtedly will be heard in Great Britain.
British entitled to take it hard
We must expect the loss of Singapore to go down hard in England. Remember they have been taking blow upon blow for two years. They have had to bear up through one glorious retreat after another. Singapore symbolizes to the British their control in the Far East. Its loss will provoke hard recrimination, no doubt. Parliament probably will rock with savage language. The British are entitled to take it hard. But we must bear that in mind and not be shaken by the emotions that will sweep England if this disaster comes.
The loss of Singapore will add to the difficulty of winning the war. That we must face. It means a longer tame before we can obtain raw materials from that area, such as rubber. It means that other territory probably will soon follow Singapore into Japanese hands. The Japanese will gain oil and other materials which will enable them to prolong the war. We shall have to supply oil from our own shores. The drain on the shipping of the United Nations will be increased. Loss of footholds will make the task of the united fighting forces more difficult. The prestige of the white man in the Orient will suffer severely. These and many more adverse effects may be expected if Singapore should go.
But they must not demoralize us any more than the Russians were shaken by the sight of the German army almost at the gates of Moscow. That only spurred the Russians to more heroic resistance. They stayed with it and turned the Germans back. We cannot hope to have such a quick turn of good fortune. But we must stick until the turn does come.
Everything we have is at stake now
No doubt some piping voices will be heard in this country. telling us to give up. Some Americans perhaps will begin to ask why we should go on with the war in the Pacific. You can almost hear their insidious questions now. What interest have we in the Far East? Why should we go on with the fight? Why don’t we dig in at Hawaii and let the Japanese have everything west of there? Why not stay on our side of the ocean?
We probably shall have the same kind of people here that France had when the Germans got too close. The French asked what was the use? They decided to quit. They thought they could do business with Hitler. The pitiful degradation of France today will not be sufficient to convince some of our people, perhaps.
Everything we have is at stake in this war. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, money, and all the things money can’t buy – they are at stake. They will be at stake until Germany and Japan are crushed. These things that are all we live for will be in danger until the regimes which have brought this war on the world are beaten down.
As President Roosevelt and everyone else who has understood the menace has said repeatedly, the enemy must be beaten everywhere and anywhere he may be. We ought to know by now that there can be no compromise. Pearl Harbor surely has told us that beyond argument. All we have to do is remember that – and if we do, we can take the bad news in our stride and keep right on going.
Maj. Williams: Number One war?
By Maj. Al Williams
“Japan must be bombed to defeat.”
Which is America’s Number One war? The War in the Pacific or the War in Europe? Both wars must be won by airpower. And we hold the trump cards in the world today, in the shape of the production facilities to win.
Now, which war gets the first of these trumps? Churchill and Stalin, along with those most intimately interested in European affairs, naturally insist that Europe’s war comes first. And to get this ideal across. Churchill came over here himself. Stalin didn’t come himself, but he sent his Number One man, Mr. Litvinoff. The outcome of the Pearl Harbor attack, by air forces, was just as amazing to foreign strategists as it was to the folks back home here. All hands had again sunk their blue chips on a great naval engagement and wiping the Jap fleet off the Pacific in a brush-off smack. All that happened in Europe between airpower and seapower hadn’t made a dent in their calculations.
Every major conflict in the European combat zones between air forces and the old type of seapower resulted in a knock-down and drag-out victory for the former. Over there, seapower had lost all its home bases, or rather, the use of its repair and servicing bases to air bombardment. But did that daunt the old seapower supporters? Not by a long shot! Didn’t they keep right on trying to fix the blame for Crete and Dunkirk on something or other, like the lack of co-ordination between the Navy and the Royal Air Force? What they really meant, by trying to tag Dunkirk and Crete “naval regattas staged by the Royal Air Force,” was that the results were wrong because they – the admirals – were not in command of the air forces.
Admirals are not fliers
The most pitiful thing about all this is that I know of no admiral in England or America who grew up in a cockpit, who knew what he was talking about when it came to air business from personal experience, or who knew how to fly a combat plane on or off a carrier, or fly a long-range flying boat or any other combat type plane on a mission – at the head of his own forces.
But getting back to the question, which was is the U.S.’s first war? That brings up the old, bitter question as to what should be done with the munitions, planes, guns, and tanks we are building. We agree unanimously – build, build, build munitions. Not one leading non-interventionist was against rearming this nation, and neither was a single interventionist. But where and to which nation should the stuff be shipped? That was – and is again – our most pressing national question.
What was actually shipped to Europe and Africa I don’t know. But the stream of munitions was definitely set in those directions. Now, MacArthur and Hawaii are clamoring for planes and guns and tanks and ships. If MacArthur had the equipment we shipped elsewhere he would still be in control of all the Philippines, and the Jap Navy would today be at the bottom of the ocean.
If we lose the Philippines, and it seems disastrously possible, and Hawaii, we have a job before us in licking the Japs which will take years and years. If we go about this job in a compromising fashion – a sort of compromise between air and sea warfare, trying to blow the Japs out of each and every one of the hundreds of Pacific islands they have fortified and now hold, it will be a job of far greater proportions than the entire European War to date. The only way to beat Japan is to bomb the source of Japanese military power and the source of Japanese war munitions, Japan proper. And that’s a full-out, all air war job through and via Alaska.
Invasion possibilities
We are not going to land an invasion successfully anywhere on the major territorial points in the Far East until American airpower dominates the air over those points. Can out-building the Axis three-to-one in airpower do that job? I don’t know. If we were close to the combat front and could use the flight delivery method from factory to combat zone, three-to-one numerical superiority would suffice. But carting aircraft thousands of miles across a hostile ocean, open to sub and air attack, where one sinking can account for hundreds of crated planes, will most likely necessitate a far greater margin of out-building than three-to-one or even five-to-one production.
Remember that this delivery by flight to combat zone doesn’t mean only long-range bombers. It means protection for the bombers in escorting short-ranged fighter planes and dive bombers and all the shorter flight range air weapons that go to make up airpower.
The Japs now undeniably dominate the air power over the Philippines and the Far Eastern Asiatic combat zones. If we lose our footholds out there – and through airpower – we lose the first major phase in that Pacific war and face the ten times harder task of winning the last phase of the same war to dominate the Pacific. Which is America’s Number One war – European or Pacific?
Portugal favored for war exchanges
WASHINGTON (UP) – Portugal, it appeared today, may be selected as the neutral ground where American diplomats from Axis countries and Axis diplomats from the Western Hemisphere will be exchanged.
Mass exchange of all diplomats – including those from Japan and the Far East – in Portugal involves a trip of thousands of miles for the affected nationals, but it appeared to be the only common meeting ground to which all the belligerent powers would assent.
A South American exchange point, it was understood, figured in some of the negotiations but was believed to have been abandoned in favor of Portugal.
Because of the difficulties of the exchange, it may be weeks or even months before it is accomplished.