Corregidor tunnels mostly imaginary
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French envoy asks U.S. view on Martinique
Freedom of island from Axis influence sought by Washington
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Background of news –
Ceylon, gate of India
By Editorial Research Reports
After two heavy attacks on Ceylon, off the southwest coast of India, the Japanese have left the island in peace. This may mean either that the enemy forces are being reinforced for an even stronger attack on Ceylon, or that any Japanese invasion of India will ignore Southern India for the time being and move against Calcutta, not far from Burma.
The power holding Ceylon dominates the southern tip of the great Indian peninsula. Ceylon in places is only 35 miles from the mainland, and at one point a chain of sandbanks and reefs, known as Adam’s Bridge, gives almost complete land connection between Ceylon and India. No islands lie in the Bay of Bengal between Ceylon and the Andaman Islands, 800 miles to the east. The Andamans were occupied by Japan on March 23, after being evacuated by the British.
The power holding Ceylon might control also the Arabian Sea and the sea route to Iran through the Arabian Sea. For west of Ceylon, in the Arabian Sea, are the Maldive Islands, about as close to Ceylon (400 miles) as to India. And north of the Maldives, nearer to them than to India, is another group of coral islets, the Laccadives.
On April 13 Prime Minister Churchill announced that Japan had in the Bay of Bengal, ready to strike at either Ceylon or India proper, a formidable naval force of at least three battleships, five aircraft carriers, a number of heavy and light cruisers, and several flotillas of destroyers. Planes from the carriers had sunk the British heavy cruisers, Dorsetshire and Cornwall.
On April 5, scores of Japanese planes bombarded Colombo, capital of Ceylon and a British naval base. Four days later came an attack on Trincomalee, the other British naval base on Ceylon. The dispatches did not make clear whether the attack was delivered from the surface as well as from the air. London announced that heavy punishment had been inflicted on the enemy air force. Tokyo claimed a victory, saying that many more British than Japanese planes had been shot down, and that much British shipping in the harbor had been sunk or damaged. Mr. Churchill admitted to the House of Commons that “practically all our aircraft taking part in the attack were knocked out, or seriously damaged, or became unserviceable.” On April 10, the British aircraft carrier Hermes was sunk 10 miles off Ceylon.
Ceylon, with a length of 260 miles and an average width of 100 miles, is about as large as West Virginia, with a native population of some six million. Of recent years the growing of rubber has increased, and in 1939 rubber exports amounted to some 50,000 tons, equivalent to eight percent of the normal annual consumption of the United States.
For centuries Ceylon had a rich civilization, and the ruins (completely overgrown by jungle until 100 years ago) of the temples and gardens at Anuradhapura, the ancient capital, and Polonnaruwa, the medieval capital, are elaborate and extensive. At the end of the 18th century, the island was taken over by England in the war between England and holland. The severity with which the British put down native riots during World War I left considerable animosity among the natives.
Chinese crush Japs on Burma Road, kill 4,500 in trap
Stillwell clamps vice on Mandalay and foe is forced to evacuate town on border
By Robert P. Martin, United Press staff writer
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Senate Chaplain dies of heart ailment at 67
Washington (UP) –
Rev. ZeBarney Philips, Chaplain of the Senate and Dean of the Washington National Cathedral, died last night of heart disease after a brief illness.
The 67-year-old rector, a lifelong Republican, had served in the Senate since 1927 and had conducted many memorial services for deceased members.
Mr. Philips was installed as Dean last Nov. 26, giving up his post as rector of the Church of the Epiphany here after 17 years.
Sentiment for sales tax seen growing in Congress
Passage of levy expected because of opposition to increase in individual income taxes
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On the home front –
Army will ‘bust’ reserve officers physically unfit
Those with 15 years service will be transferred to inactive reserve or be permitted to resign
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Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
NEW YORK – When, on a recent date, I discussed The Chicago Defender and The Pittsburgh Courier, Negro weekly publications of wide circulation, I naturally expected some unreasonable reaction along with some calm and intelligence discussion of the points of criticism.
The point of my essay, proved by citations from these two papers, was that they expressed by a low cultural level which was not a compliment to the aspiring millions of Negro Americans for whom and to whom they undertake to speak and that they insulted the intelligence and character of their Negro readers by publishing advertisements of various luck charms, good luck incense and books on “unusual love requirements and ancient practices.”
Liberal Negro hails criticism
I offered the opinion, also, that a Negro editor is lacking in sincerity and is imposing on his readers when he bids them be proud of their race but sells space to an advertiser offering a skin cream under the illusory and ignoble promise that it will turn them more or less white.
One Negro wrote that he had long wished that someone would “take a crack at the yellow journalism of Negro newspapers” adding, however, that he shuddered to think what their headlines would be, concerning me, next week.
“Many liberal Negroes are painfully aware of the harm caused by the confusing and misleading statements of these publications but there is little that can be done about it under the present Negro leadership,” he said. “They’ll twist your column around and say you advocated abolition of Negro newspapers.”
Nobody has said exactly that but one communication from an organization called the March on Washington Movement, said my analysis “of the jus grievance,” of Negroes was “vicious,” when the fact is that I did not analyze such grievances at all. This one also said I had linked Negroes in the same category as the Fascist and Communist groups although there was not a word in the whole discussion which even hinted at such a connection. This was a plain, deliberate lie, but our editor printed it nevertheless, so over-fair are we.
So my Negro correspondent who said the column would be twisted clearly called the turn although I didn’t need him to tell me. I got used to this sort of thing in writing of criminals and dictators in the union racket, every factual, provable word of which has been airily ignored by the culprits who have constantly howled “labor baiter” to divert attention from their guilt.
Shocked by university
But I have been shocked to receive a news release from Howard University in Washington which is supposed to be a center of Negro intelligence upholding The Defender and The Courier in the practices cited on the pathetic ground that they are “heroic defenders” of the Negro people.
“He,” meaning me, says this news release from the university, “gave no basic reasons why Negro newspapers are ‘inferior’ to white publications,” and says these reasons can be traced to the segregated place of the Negro. But it is my point that these papers tend to secure that segregation by exploiting a Negro world far apart from the whole community of the United States and that the Negro newspaper, in its pride of race, should be careful always of its racial mission to express the highest qualities of the Negroes not the lowest, in its own particular field, which is journalism.
It would be a pathetic admission by Howard University that these two papers do represent the best ability of Negroes in journalism because, if we are arguing from the basis of my professional opinion, they are very inferior to the standard white journalism.
I hope Howard University does not say that the standard presented by The Defender and The Courier is the best the Negroes can produce and I know it isn’t, myself. This standard is just trash and is imitative, and in a crude way, of all that is discreditable or least admirable in the white newspapers.
Degradation of leadership
The University even says the Negro editor must stoop to “trite and detestable matter” by way of appealing to the Negro masses so as to acquire power and influence among those masses “who need his teachings most,” which strikes me as an argument for deliberate degradation of the leadership by clever men who know better so that the clever man may use the masses according to their own versatile ethics and personal ambitions.
The University further explains that these papers are “big business” and then says that this big business must resort to “sordid exploitation” of the credulity of its mass clientele so that it may live to befriend them.
At this point I have to ask myself whether Howard University is for the Negro or against him, respects his intelligence or regards him as a very low-grade person. The arguments do not make the University’s position quite clear to me.
Clapper: Wallace speaks
By Raymond Clapper
WASHINGTON – Not only because of his importance in the Administration but because he may have had a hand in the conduct of the post-war world, the views of Vice President Wallace have a special bearing on the future policy of the United States.
For that reason his address before the Free World Association becomes more than just another speech by a Vice President.
Mr. Wallace does not regard this as merely another imperialistic war. He does not regard it as only a war to smash aggressors although that is the first ne
This war, as Mr. Wallace sees it, is an interruption in a long match of freedom for the common man, a threat to the continuation of that march and for that reason a people’s war that must be won so that what he calls the people’s revolution may continue.
150-year revolution traced
Mr. Wallace therefore considers a complete victory as only a necessary prelude to a resumption of a long-drawn-out people’s revolution which he considers as having been in progress for 150 years, dating roughly from the American Revolution.
He regards this revolutionary movement as world-wide, and as part of it he lists the French Revolution, the Latin-American revolutions of the Bolivarian era, the German revolution of 1848 and the Russian revolution of 1918.
Each of these, Mr. Wallace says, spoke for the common man in terms of blood on the battlefield. Some went to excess. But the people were groping their way and more and more of them learned to think and act together.
The Nazi regime has attempted to interfere with that advance of human freedom, and it must be defeated along with its Allies. But Mr. Wallace says the people’s revolution aims at peace and not at violence. He considers that the four freedoms enunciated by President Roosevelt “are the very core of the revolution for which the United Nations have taken their stand.”
To realize these freedoms, Mr. Wallace believes we have a duty to produce to the limit, to transport as rapidly as possible to the battlefield, to fight with all that is in us, and to build a just, charitable and enduring peace.
Century of common man
Putting it half in fun and half seriously, Mr. Wallace says the object of this war is to make sure that everybody in the world has the privilege of drinking a quart of milk a day.
This must be, he says, the century of the common man. Methods of the 19th century, with economic and military imperialism, will not work in this century, Mr. Wallace says.
Therefore he says India, China and Latin-America, for instance, have a tremendous stake in this people’s century.
Implications are clear
As yet Mr. Wallace has not spelled it out, but the implications are clear. After this war imperialism as it has been practiced by western nations must go. Industrialization must spread. Colonial areas must not be exploited without regard to their own development.
What we have seen in Russia in one generation, the industrialization of a peasant country, must be repeated in other places.
Mr. Wallace phrases his ideas in general language. But inside the generalities are wrapped up many concrete ideas which are destined, if they come into effect, to work deep changes in many parts of the world.
When he says no nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations, when he says that cartels must be subject to common international control, he is looking straight at the god of things as they were and is laying down a challenge of which a great deal more may be heard as time goes on.
The Pittsburgh Press (May 12, 1942)
The transportation headache –
Railroads await order to install preference rating
Company officials, watching increasing traveling congestion, sees needs for action giving prior rights to those on war missions
By Dale McFeatters, Pittsburgh Press staff writer
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Women’s Army Corps approved by Senate
Washington (UP) –
The Senate, by a vote of 38–27, today passed a bill to set up a Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. It rejected attempts to restrict the women to service in the United States.
The measure, which has been approved by the House, now goes to the White House for President Roosevelt’s signature.
It would permit the Army to enroll a maximum of 150,000 women in the auxiliary for non-combat service with the Regular Army.