Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
SEATTLE – All my life I’ve wanted to know jujitsu.
Like most men of small dimensions and slight courage, I’ve always felt that if I only knew jujitsu, I could throw all these modern Greek gods nimbly into the ashcan and emerge a hero.
So now I have met a jujitsu expert, and I’m on my way. This fellow not only knows jujitsu, he has gone so far beyond it he could make hash out of a whole squad of regular jujitsuers.
I did not ask this expert to show me any jujitsu tricks. In the first place he was so big I was afraid he’d kill me on the first lesson; and second, he gave me four books on the subject. I’m going to study at home by candlelight, and then burst out all of a sudden one day throwing people right and left.
My jujitsu friend is Svend J. Jorgensen. He is a Seattle policeman. He is a hearty, good-natured guy who looks just like a cop. He is 50 and built like a yoke of oxen. Even if he didn’t know jujitsu, I’ll bet he could beat hell out of you.
He was born in Denmark, came to this country when he was 19, went to sea for four years, worked in Alaska, was a physical instructor in the U.S. Army in the last war, and joined the Seattle police force a few days after leaving the Army in 1919.
Patrolman Jorgensen has never fired a shot in his 23 years on the force. He is proud of that. “I’d rather have a medal for not killing somebody than for killing somebody,” he says. During his police career he has captured 67 gunmen, one murderer, and 30 safe-crackers. “And never fired a shot,” he says.
Used it on only three
I asked how many of those nearly 100 desperate cases he had actually had to use bis jujitsu on. Patrolman Jorgensen looked a little disappointed. “Only three,” he said. “The rest, I just got the jump on them.”
Jorgensen could shoot ‘em dead if he had to. He is a super crack shot. He holds 127 medals – more than anybody on the force – for sharpshooting. He has won the Distinguished Pistol Shooting medal in the National Rifle Matches at Camp Perry.
Jorgensen got interested in jujitsu shortly after joining the police force. What got his heat up was one night when a Seattle tough guy, with a gun in each pocket and another stuck in his sock, killed two rookie policeman and a detective.
“They got killed because they’d never been trained to protect themselves,” he says. So he started figuring out how policemen could take guns away from bad men.
First he got an American to teach him some jujitsu tricks. Then he took lessons from a Japanese expert. With that basis, he began inventing his own brand of jujitsu. Today his jujitsu is only 15 per cent Japanese, and 85 per cent Jorgensen.
Years ago the police department started Jorgensen teaching jujitsu to the force. Now every man on it has had some training. Jorgensen has taught thousands of people. He has trained the military police at Fort Lawton and Fort Lewis. He has trained detachments of U.S. Marines, Coast Guardsmen and National and state guardsmen. He has trained Border Patrolmen at El Paso and policemen from eight Western states. He has even trained some girls at the University of Washington – just in case. Thank goodness I’m too old for college.
Jorgensen knows hundreds of ways to disarm and knock out tough eggs without using your revolver. But there’s one hypothetical situation that always stumps him. “Suppose,” you ask, “that the bandit is 20 feet away, with his gun pointing at you?”
“I’ve never yet figured out how to get a jujitsu hold on a bullet,” Jorgensen says. “If a man is 20 feet away, you better start shootin’ before he does.”
Children know jujitsu
Jorgensen has two grown daughters and a boy of 15. “Do the girls know jujitsu?” I asked. “Sure they do,” he said, “but they’ve never had to use it. One of them is married. She hasn’t even had to use it on her husband.”
The boy is already a hero. He saved a child from drowning when he was 11, and got a medal. Patrolman Jorgensen himself is no mean life-saver. He has rescued three people from drowning and 11 from gas. What burns him up about his kid is that be made this rescue before his father had got around to giving him a life-saving course.
In his off-time Jorgensen runs a little school called “Jorgensen’s Jujitsu Gym.” It is in the back end of a restaurant. He takes private pupils, averaging about 100 a year. He trains them in classes, twice a week for three months. The course costs $30.
He has written four booklets on his favorite subject. One of them, called “American Police Jujitsu,” has sold more than 40,000 copies.
Jorgensen is so wrapped up in his subject that he sometimes comes in for a little kidding from the other policemen. For instance, at roll call the other morning–
“I have here a cablegram concerning Patrolman Jorgensen,” the captain said to the assembled policemen. “It is such an unusual recognition of his work in jujitsu that I wish to read it aloud.” And the captain read approximately as follows:
“In view of the distinguished place Patrolman S. J. Jorgensen occupies in the world of scientific self-defense, it is hereby requested that the Seattle Police Department detach him for this period of emergency, in order that he may be matched by our Government with the best jujitsu expert in Japan. They shall then wrestle it out in a previously designated meadow, and the winner shall decide who wins the war. (Signed) Gen. Douglas MacArthur.”
Jorgensen is still a little skittish when you mention it.
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
WASHINGTON – The House of Representatives recently passed by an overwhelming vote a measure called the Smith Bill to curb the power of the brutal and malignant union politicians who, with a total numerical strength of not much more than seven million workers, many of them unwilling captives, are trying to establish a Fascist or Hitlerian form of government.
The bill then went to the Senate, where it is now being smothered, obviously under orders from the White House. Thus, again, although the Lower House angrily revolted against the assumption of the legislative function by the President, the function of the legislative branch is being defeated and the citizens of the nation are being sold down the river by their elected representatives in a treacherous betrayal of trust.
Meanwhile, President Roosevelt has moved into the situation to box up John L. Lewis in a trap of his own making and has made a deal with the bosses of the AFL and the CIO whereby they and their power over the workers will be utilized for political purposes, but not necessarily for national defense, by the ruling power and personality.
Murray quickly slaps down Lewis
Lewis made a false move when he tried to muscle into the commanding position in a reconciled and consolidated union organization embracing the AFL and the CIO. He was quickly and publicly slapped down by Philip Murray, the president of the CIO, and is now discredited, although he is a resourceful and power-hungry dictator in his own union, the mine workers, and may not yet be counted out.
He and his family are tremendously ambitious and audacious and as long as John has the treasury of 385,000 mine workers under his personal hand and his brother Denny, has command of the CIO construction workers, a union which is a sort of political and economic concentration camp for miscellaneous captives and helpless wails, they will be dangerous not only to the whole mass of workers but to the very American people as a nation.
As soon as Lewis had been publicly rebuked by Murray, the President, with his great sense of timing, moved in to recognize the AFL and the CIO as the controllers of “labor,” although they both embraced only a very small minority of the total of employed citizens and, as has been observed before, include countless mute and faceless captives who were driven into their corrals by manhunting organizers of the subordinate internationals and locals, many of whom, like professional hunters of wolves and other wild vermin, receive a bounty of so much per head for the slaves they deliver.
This leaves Lewis on the outside and confers on William Green, with his following of underworld criminals and trained picket-line thugs or goons, a nominal or apparent power which doubtless flatters that strange, bumbling consort of thieves and ignorant, brutal union gauleiters. That power, however, is illusory, not real.
The President is using the bosses of the AFL and CIO for his own political purposes which plainly and irresistibly tend toward a totalitarian state. Although the flattered bosses think they are co-operating, they are, in fact, only collaborating in is present-day Parisian political sense of the word.
*Unioneers might boss next President
Meanwhile, the Senate has held steady and ignored that alarming situation which the House acknowledged in passing the Smith Bill and not for any reasons of duty or patriotic statesmanship but for purposes of collaboration, again in the Parisian sense.
The Senate refuses to challenge the President’s assumption of its own Constitutional duty and function to enact laws for the preservation of the citizen’s freedom and the power of the unioneers, under the President, is growing day by day as more captives are herded into the compounds of the unions and their treasuries and the private loot of unprincipled and utterly unregulated little Hitlers increases by millions of dollars.
No single man or woman in the United States, in or out of the totalitarian union movement, with its Brown Shirt vigilantes, knows within a hundred million dollars how much money the unioneers skim off the pay of the worker every year. It is well beyond a billion a year and the power of this money at the polls in cities, states and Congressional districts is approaching a point at which it will be sufficient to buy the election of mayors, governors, legislatures, Congressmen and Senators obedient to the boss-unioneers who, in turn, would serve the political program of the President. At the end of President Roosevelt’s reign, the unioneers might boss the next man or, if he were an efficient dictator, the dictator might boss or even liquidate them and centralize the whole power in himself.
The Senate is inviting this future in obedience to intimations that the President prefers to handle the union matter in his own way and obviously for his own political purposes.
Clapper: Pacific scene
By Raymond Clapper
WASHINGTON – Fortunately both the United from our States and the British are busy now trying to dispel the earlier impression that they regard the war in the Pacific as a secondary operation.
An unhappy belief was spreading that the Pacific area was to be allowed to worry along as best it could while the main effort was thrown against Hitler.
Concern was felt deeply in some quarters here that Roosevelt and Churchill were shipping into the idea that it did not matter how far Japan advanced if Germany could be crushed first because the mop-up job then would be easy. The public caught that idea largely from a speech by Secretary of the Navy Knox, who said just after the Roosevelt-Churchill meeting something to the effect that Hitler was the chief enemy.
Now Secretary Knox says he was misunderstood. He says we will fight everywhere, as this is all one war. Prime Minister Churchill, in defending himself to Commons, says now that the Pacific war is not a secondary operation. Mr. Roosevelt says we are sending all possible help there. If it were not for red tape here, we probably could send more, but that is something else.
Military men praise MacArthur
Here is a most difficult matter of balance. If while crushing Japan, we allowed Hitler to win, the victory in the Pacific would be a hollow one. Neither could we allow Japan to overrun the entire Southwest Pacific while we were defeating Hitler. Indeed, if Japan should make contact with Hitler through the Indian Ocean and the Middle East, the United Nations might find it impossible to win the war. True, once Hitler was beaten, forces of the United Nations could concentrate on the Far East, and Russia would also be free to join in crushing Japan.
But there are other considerations. Could we ever be forgiven if we stood idly by while the people of Australia were invaded and captured by the Japanese? If we allow the Dutch East Indies to fall, Australia will have to be supplied with oil from our own Pacific Coast or from the Persian fields. It takes six weeks to get supplies to the Far East and not an hour is to be lost.
Even more tragic than all of this is the plight of our own troops in the Philippines. Gen. MacArthur is conducting a delaying action which is winning the praise of military men as a work of genius. If there was anything we could do for him that was not being done, it would be criminal. Already in history is the heroic fight of our doomed Marines at Wake Island who are now Japanese captives. I suppose relief was impossible or it would have been sent.
Jap drive threatens Christianity
Now the question is whether to allow the rest of the Southwest Pacific to go. Evidently the decision already has been made that everything possible must be done to hold it. Some assistance seems already to have arrived. At least the dispatches from the scene suggest that. But it is not enough, as is clear from the frantic appeals of the authorities in Australia.
Singapore’s test is approaching, and if it falls the Japanese position will be strengthened immeasurably. Beyond all that is the future of western civilization in that enormous area. The Oriental tidal wave threatens to wipe out all vestige of Christian civilization, including that of Australia. There are factors in this one does not like to dwell upon because of their awful implications.
Even the later crushing of Japan on her own islands might not make it possible to undo the damage that would result from temporary victory over the United Nations now throughout the Southwest Pacific. Once lost, it might be gone forever, regardless of the ultimate fate of Japan herself, for Japan is a nation of some 75 million people among perhaps a billion Orientals.
Beside such considerations, the mere loss of raw materials which are concentrated: in the Southwest Pacific would be trivial, even though that area provides our only adequate sources of certain primary essentials such as rubber and tin. It is not merely that wealth and materials may fall into Japanese control completely, but that the Christian civilization is under threat of being driven from that part of the world.
Maj. Williams: The real loss–
By Maj. Al Williams
“Japan must be bombed to defeat.”
I think it was unfortunate that in the various accounts of the terrible tragedy which cost the lives of 22 persons on an airliner, so much stress was placed on the death of Carole Lombard as contrasted with the loss of 15 Army pilots.
Who isn’t sorrowful when any life is destroyed – and who wouldn’t grieve that a beautiful and talented lady, known to millions through her screen appearances – was lost?
But we are in war, and the loss of 15 Army pilots deserves greater emphasis.
Those 15 airmen represented the trained manpower edge capable of swinging the tide of any major air battle in defense of the American coasts or in protecting the gallant MacArthur and his little band of heroes.
Here’s a fellow who’s got the right idea about this war. In a postscript appended to a dues notice I found: “Second notices are a waste of paper, envelopes, ink, saliva, postage, lead pencils, typewriter ribbons, labor and wear and tear on machinery and mail bags. Don’t help the damned Japs and Germans by being a party to any such nonsense.”
Prophets of war
A lot of prophets are pointing out that they were able to predict eventual war with Japan. But too many of them thought we would have to do nothing but sail out some week-end and run the Jap Navy out of the water by the seat of its kimono.
In spite of all the lessons of the war in Europe, too many Americans believed that the Japs had not profited by those lessons and therefore would not apply airpower to Hawaii, the Philippines, Malaya or the Dutch East Indies.
Some of those who talked and blasted threats against Japan are now the lads who have to break the news to the American people that Singapore is likely to fall. And in telling they are also confessing, without words, that their ideas of modern war just don’t work out in practice when a bunch of bombing wings is able to work on the old form of land or sea warfare they planned.
Not enough planes
One of the recent frantic moves which seems to have originated in the Army and Navy is the widespread acquisition of all commercially-owned airplanes equipped with engines over 400 horsepower. Of course, this is the outcome of not having enough airplanes in either the Army or Navy to enable their pilots to keep up practice or even flight-pay flights. The Truman Senate Committee report indicates this.
The catch in gathering up a lot of similarly named and designated private commercial planes is that no two of any one type are equipped with standardized instruments, carburetors, carburetor heaters, generators starters or even propellers. This fact crates a service and repair problem of such stupendous dimensions that not even the Army or Navy can hope to surmount or solve it. Every panicky, ill-considered step in marshalling our air strength breeds a dozen engineering diseases in its wake.