Two Army officers lose lives in fire
Blaze destroys building at Camp Grant
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Ford foundry workers want Lindbergh taken off payroll
Flier called bad influence on workers
‘Pro-Nazi attitude in the past’ assailed in resolution
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The Pittsburgh Press (April 10, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
TUCSON, Ariz. – Do any of you remember Rudy Hale and his wife, the snake-catchers I wrote about several years ago?
They lived way out on the Arizona desert, ran a filling station on the side, and made their main living by catching rattlesnakes for zoos, collectors and serum manufacturers. When I first wrote about them, they had caught some 25,000 rattlesnakes with their bare hands in nine years.
A couple of years after that, I stopped past to see them. They were down-in-the-mouth. They had so depopulated the snakes that they had to drive 25 miles to find one.
1 stopped past again this trip. Their house and filling station were boarded up, and a big sign said, “Closed–Keep Out.” I couldn’t find what had happened to them, for the desert is mighty empty out there, and there was nobody to ask.
I guess they just ran clear out of snakes and had to leave.
Finally reads a book
Something strange happened to me the other night. I actually read a book. Can’t figure out what caused me to do it. It certainly isn’t like me. For in the last seven years I’ve read fewer books than all the village idiots put together.
But in Phoenix one night I couldn’t get to sleep, so I read a book. It was John Steinbeck’s “The Moon Is Down.” It’s a very short book, so I’ll give it a very short review, to wit:
I liked it. but not as well as “Tortilla Flat” or “Of Mice and Men.”
Two and a half years ago, when we were in Tucson, I bought a pair of blue pajamas.
Since that time those pajamas have been twice to Panama, all through Central America, several times across the continent, twice across the Atlantic, to Africa and South America. They are well-traveled and well-worn.
Last week they split across the shoulders from simple old age. I hung onto them a few days, until the splits multiplied to the point where I couldn’t get into them without getting all tangled up. So I threw them away.
The funny part is – and I didn’t plan it deliberately – those pajamas went to their final resting place in the city where they were bought two and a half years and some 75,000 miles ago. Isn’t life wonderful?
Ernie’s praised
This column has never been published regularly in Tucson, but has been running recently as a substitute for Westbrook Pegler’s while he was on vacation.
Consequently the paper sent one of its reporters over to the hotel to see what kind of monstrosity I really was. During our conversation the reporter said:
“I’ve been reading your column for a few weeks. Much to my amazement, it’s pretty good.”
I didn’t know whether to hit him, or take him out and buy him a drink. Much to his amazement! Fah upon him. Much to MY amazement would be a better way to put it.
The other day, when I was visiting the Peglers, we got to talking about picking up hitch-hikers. I don’t ordinarily, but nowadays I always stop for anybody in uniform. Peg does, too, but he doesn’t trust even a soldier hitch-hiker too far.
So I got to telling about the soldier hitch-hiker I picked up the other day and carried for 400 miles. This soldier told me that his request for leave came through so unexpectedly he didn’t have time to get money wired from home, so he started out without a penny.
He had a long way to go and his time was short, so I lent him $10 so he could eat, and also ride the busses at night when hitch-hiking would be slow. He said he would send the money as soon as he got home.
“I’ll bet you $10 you never get your $10 back,” Pegler said. So the bet is on.
Soldier, don’t let me down. I want that $10 of Mr. Pegler’s awful bad. Everybody else tries to hook him because they think he’s rich, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t have my share.
I’ll let you know how it turns out.
A woman in San Francisco sends in what seems to me a pleasant plan for helping win the war. It’s to turn slot Machines into purveyors of defense stamps.
If you get two cherries and a lemon, a defense stamp pops out. Three plums – three defense stamps. The jackpot – a defense bond! If it clicks, says the lady, she envies the pocket of Uncle Sam.
“In case you don’t use this idea,” she writes, “turn it over to Maj. Hoople.”
U.S. Army Department (April 11, 1942)
Army Communiqué No. 185
Philippine theater.
Despite fierce resistance by the small American and Philippine force, the enemy was able to effect a landing on the island of Cebu on April 10. The Japanese force now debarking on that island is estimated at 12,000. The landing is being supported by dive bombers and a heavy fire from hostile naval vessels. Tank units have been landed by the Japanese.
The defenders continue to resist stubbornly and the invaders have been unable to advance inland more than a few miles at any point. Enemy casualties have been heavy.
Corregidor and Fort Hughes in Manila Bay were subjected to intensive air attacks during the past 24 hours. However, our casualties were few and the damage inflicted as slight.
Our fortified islands were under intermittent fire from enemy artillery in Bataan and on the south shore of the bay.
There is no communication between our troops in Bataan and those in Corregidor.
There is nothing to report from other areas.
U.S. Navy Department (April 11, 1942)
Navy Communiqué No. 70
Southwest Pacific.
The U.S. submarine Perch has been overdue for more than a month and must be presumed to be lost.
The Perch was one of the U.S. submarines operating in the vicinity of Java and her last position report placed her in the Java Sea.
The next of kin have been notified.
There is nothing to report from other areas.
Navy Communiqué No. 71
Southwest Pacific and Indian Ocean.
Recent detailed reports reveal that the damage inflicted on enemy ships by U.S. submarines as announced in Navy Department Communiqué No. 66, paragraph 1 (a) to (e), inclusive, should be corrected to read as follows:
a) One light cruiser was sunk in the vicinity of Christmas Island, south of Java.
b) One light cruiser was damaged and is believed to have sunk and a third cruiser was damaged in the vicinity of Christmas Island.
c) One large transport was damaged near Bali.
d) One supply ship was damaged in waters near Lombok Island.
e) One destroyer and one large transport were sunk in the vicinity of Bali and an unidentified vessel was damaged.
Further, it is now known that all the results except that noted in item (d) above were achieved by one submarine on a single patrol.
Far East.
A U.S. submarine returning from an extended patrol in enemy waters has just reported the sinking of one 7,000-ton merchant vessel and one small naval vessel of the submarine chaser class.
This same submarine further reports that on the same patrol, it damaged and possibly sank a 4,000-ton freighter.
Except as noted in paragraph 1, the above sinkings and damage have not been reported in any previous Navy Department communiqué.
There is nothing to report from other areas.
The Pittsburgh Press (April 11, 1942)
‘98 days of hell’ on Bataan drives heroes to surrender
Eyewitness tells how 15-day Jap attack broke U.S. stand
By Frank Hewlett
This delayed dispatch, from the only American newsman who remained with Gen. Jonathan M. Wainwright’s army in Luzon, gives the first eyewitness account of the last days of the Battle of Bataan and reveals for the first time that the exhausted U.S.-Filipino forces surrendered.
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U.S. submarine lost off Java
Craft missing over a month, Navy reports
Crew of 50 may have gone down with submersible
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Four more Allied vessels attacked in East Atlantic
Blasting of three ships announced by U.S. Navy; survivors of other craft reach Canadian port
By the United Press
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Litvinov urges united action against Nazis
Claims victory impossible without destruction of Hitler
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AVG destroys 23 Jap planes in three days
Numerically superior foe loses 12 of 20 fighters over Burma
By Karl Eskelund, United Press staff writer
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‘Sea guerillas’ fight on around Philippine Islands
Sizable flotillas of torpedo boats ready to make more hit-run attacks on Japs, Navy says
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Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
SILVER CITY, N.M. – Silver City is one of these high-altitude once-tough old mining and cattle towns of the Southwest.
Most of the picturesque two-gun men and iron-nerved sheriffs have died off now, but Silver City has many a more tractable resident who has a glamor about him.
Such a man is Wayne Mac V. Wilson, who never shot anybody and who has never been shot. He is an Easterner who came to New Mexico more than 40 years ago.
He is past 60 now, but walks with a lilt, smokes a pipe, knows more funny stories and tells them better than anybody else in town, and dresses as though he were still in Princeton, where he went to school. And in spite of all this youthful gaiety, he has probably been through more torture than anybody else in the city.
Wayne Wilson first came here for tuberculosis when he was 19, and in college. In a year he was able to go back to school. He got his diploma, and worked a few years in Philadelphia, but he worked too hard and broke down again. That time he came here for good. His lungs have never bothered him since.
But, a few years ago, he did come down with spinal tuberculosis. That is the main thing I want to write about. Before the doctors realized what it was, several of the vertebrae in his upper spine had been destroyed and his backbone, as he describes it, was just like a willow twig – it wouldn’t stand up straight.
The pain was indescribable, and gradually his legs started to get paralyzed. Even in bed, when he’d lift one of them, he couldn’t tell which way it might go. Doctors said he would be dead within a few months.
Suspends motion in spine
Then he finally got hold of one doctor with a different idea. This doctor’s idea was not to operate, but to suspend all motion in Mr. Wilson’s spine – from that day until it had healed itself. The only way to do that was to make him rigid.
So this doctor made a plaster cast of Mr. Wilson’s back, and then had a permanent mold made, and built this solid mold into a special steel bed. The lower half of the bed was canvas, for the Wilson legs to rest on.
Then they put Mr. Wilson onto this rack, and told him he might have to lie there two or three years. The natural thing happened. With no exercise and never changing position, his internal organs became disturbed and he took on terrific gastric troubles.
There had to be a solution to that, so they found one. They rigged up another thing, whereby he could lie on his stomach half of the time. This new apparatus was a canvas arrangement over a wooden frame, which they would place over Mr. Wilson’s chest and head, and strap down tight. Then they would turn him over, and he’d lie on his stomach, with the hard mold still fitted to his back.
Of course, it took several people to turn him over twice a day, so he thought up an arrangement to take care of that. He had the bed fitted with spindles at each end, and the whole rack hung on these two swivels. That way, one nurse could simply turn a crank at the end of the bed and twirl Mr. Wilson, rack and all, right over. “Just like turning a roast pig on a spit,” he says.
Mr. Wilson lay in this thing for a year and a half. The doctors told him the terrible pain would start to subside in six weeks, and it did. After that, he never minded his imprisonment a bit. He never got despondent; in fact, enjoyed himself.
Read books, wrote letters
During the 12 hours of the day he’d spend flat on his stomach, he read books and wrote letters. How did he do that, you ask? Well, his shoulders stuck out beyond this canvas rack, so he could put his arms under the rack.
Then they put a low table under it, and put either a book or writing paper on the table, and Mr. Wilson went to work. For, you see, there was a hole cut in the canvas for his face to stick through.
During the entire year and a half that Mr. Wilson was encased, he had a drink of whisky every evening. It helped his digestive system, and gave him something to look forward to all day long. Also, he was never lonesome – he had lots of visitors, attracted to him, he says, by the fact that he always had a drink to offer them.
Mr. Wilson finally got out of his rack three years ago. Then he was in a solid plaster cast for several months. Then a steel and leather brace affair. He even abandoned that six weeks ago. It took him a year to learn how to walk again.
Today, you’d never know there had ever been anything wrong with him. He’s one of the chipperest men in town. And he works hard, too.
He’s head of the Grant County War Bond drive, and they have set some sort of a record here in selling $600,000 worth of bonds to a population of 20,000. They say it will hit a million before long.
Mr. Wilson’s father was a colonel in the Civil War, and stayed in the Army afterward to fight Indians in the West. Mrs. Wilson’s uncle was Gen. John C. Bates, once chief-of-staff. So there is a lot of military in the family, but none in Mr. Wilson.
However, as somebody in Silver City remarked, he’s the kind of fellow who, if he were a military leader, you would follow to the death.
Just to hear his latest story with the last breath, if nothing else.
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U.S. War Department (April 12, 1942)
Army Communiqué No. 186
Philippine theater.
Fighting is continuing on the island of Cebu, where the Japanese have landed troops at several different points. Among the places on the island where the enemy has established beachheads are Cebu City, Toledo, Argao, Pinamungajan, Naga and Talisay. Thus far, little progress inland has been made. Japanese losses are reported to be mounting.
Our harbor defenses in Manila Bay were repeatedly bombed today by enemy aircraft. Our guns engaged in an artillery duel with enemy batteries on the south shore of the bay.
There is nothing to report from other areas.
The Pittsburgh Press (April 12, 1942)
Battle for Philippines still rages
U.S. sub sinks two Jap ships, hits another
Japanese storm ashore on island of Cebu but suffer losses
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