The nationwide collection of used rubber has passed the halfway mark. It’s too early for an accurate estimate of the amount that has been turned in, but two things are certain: There isn’t yet enough for military needs and essential civilian uses, and there can’t be too much. If you’ve been putting off your contribution to the drive, don’t wait any longer. Take every scrap of rubber you can spare to the nearest filling station today.
By Frank Tremaine, United Press staff writer
A Marine air base in Hawaii –
The odds sometimes were four Jap Navy-0 planes to one U.S. Marine fighter. The Jap planes were faster and more maneuverable, but when the score had been added in the Battle of Midway Island June 4, the Marines had shot down 43 Jap fighters.
Four Marine fliers hopped off from Midway shortly after they were warned that Jap fighters were approaching, and the first three Marine planes hit the Japs a few miles from Midway.
Capt. M. E. Carl, 26, of Hubbard, Oregon, goes on with the story:
They were still in perfect formation. We found three divisions of fighters of about five planes each – a division covering about the same number of bombers. Off to the right, we sighted another formation, while others elsewhere totaled about 80 bombers with fighter escort.
Capt. Cary [John F. Cary of Hayfield, Minn.] made the first pass and got the first Jap. Then, he made another pass and I think he got another Jap. But in this pass, he was wounded in both legs. He dived toward the water and flew toward Midway with Zeros on his tail.
Make crash landings
Meanwhile, Canfield [2nd Lt. Clayton Canfield of St. Louis, Mo.] got one.
His planes was also damaged and he followed Capt. Cary to Midway, where both made crash landings.
I was trailing Cary in the attack, but had trouble keeping up. Fighters got between us and I think maybe I got one of them. Then I went straight down 9,000 feet, got away from them and headed for Midway. I picked out a fighter below me, dived on him and got him, but two of his pals were on my tail. I slipped away from them, turned and had one looking down my gun barrels, but the guns jammed, so I dodged into a cloud and returned to Midway.
2nd Lt. R. A. Cory, 21, of Santa Ana, Cal., who was officially credited with two planes, said he and Capt. Francis P. McCarthy of Newton, Mass., had been on patrol and had just landed and refueled when the attack started.
Runs ‘rat race’
He related:
We got up about 8,000 feet when we ran into a rat race. We were circling with about eight Jap planes. McCarthy was about four planes ahead of me. He got two Japs and I got one of those behind him. Then McCarthy dived on several Japs below us; I turned out the other way. I couldn’t get rid of the Japs on my tail, but I dived on a dive bomber below with the Japs still riding me. But I got the dive bomber.
I was up about 15 minutes trying to get back to the island. When I finally got back, they were still following me. I made a quick circle and came in with the Japs still following me. One was shot down by a ground gun. My plane had about 60 holes in it.
2nd Lt. Charles Kunz, 23, whose wife lives in Springfield, Mo., was in the last division of fighters to hop off from Midway. They sighted the Japs approaching at 14,000 feet.
Four Japs burning
He said:
We climbed to 17,000 [feet] and attacked from an excellent position. I was the first plane in the second group of three.
So, when I started to attack, four Japs were already burning. I made a run and got one. After the initial attack, everyone was on his own. I made a second attack and got one of the Jap planes. Then the Zeros hit me. I dived straight for the water from 9,500 feet, a Zero firing bursts at me all the way. I made a snap pullout and thought the Jap wouldn’t be able to keep from crashing in the water, but he also pulled out. I stayed near the water and headed for home. The Jap finally left me. Apparently, he had run out of ammunition after scratching me only twice.
Lt. Kunz proudly displayed a couple of furrows on the side of his head where bullets had grazed him.
Japanese seek to humiliate American troops
By H. R. Knickerbocker, Chicago Sun foreign service
H. R. Knickerbocker, noted correspondent, has just returned to the United States after covering the war in the Pacific for the last six months. He arrived in Hawaii shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor and covered the ensuing battles in the Netherlands East Indies and down to Australia. This is one of the articles written from the vast amount of material he gathered.
“Every imaginable humiliation, indult and injury is being heaped upon American and other white prisoners by the Japanese…”
San Francisco –
American officers are being paraded by the Japanese through the streets of Manila in their underwear to the jeers of the Jap soldiery. The fate of the women captured by the Japanese is not to be described except in medical journals.
When our Army was marched captive from Bataan to Manila, all who fell out or faltered were bayoneted. It is over 100 miles from Bataan to Manila. The captives were marched 20 miles a day under the tropic sun. Many fainted and the Japs carried out their promise of torture and death.
Every imaginable humiliation, insult and injury is being heaped upon American and other white prisoners by the Japanese, who are determined to reduce our people to the condition of coolies. The Jap general who received the first offer of surrender from our starved, exhausted, heroic troops on Bataan flagrantly insulted Colonel Williams, the American officer who carried the offer, fired pistol shots around his feet and refused to consider the terms of capitulation until General Edward L. King himself went in person to lay down his arms.
Starved out
The Philippines fell to the Japs because of starvation and neglect, and not because they suffered military defeat. Our Army of Bataan, perhaps the bravest in our history, would be fighting yet if it had only had food, but it had nothing, and it is the bitter feeling of the survivors of those five bloody months that they were let down.
Every soul on Bataan had the most profound faith that relief was coming from the United States. Their most popular song, to the tune of “Camptown Races,” was:
When’s that convoy coming in, Franklin, Franklin?
When’s that convoy coming in, Franklin D., Old Man?
Going to sweat all night, going to sweat all day
Going to sweat that convoy coming in
Until she hits the bay.
They kept singing this song until that tragic day when the infantry rose to advance and the men found they could not walk 50 feet.
For many reasons, the Army of Bataan will go down in history, but the most remarkable feature of its five-month battle was that it fought it without planes. This does not mean that the troops had air inferiority; it means that they had no air force whatsoever. It was wiped out the first day of war.
Had 2 planes left
When General Wainwright surrendered, he had precisely two damaged pursuit planes and one training plane. The Japs took full advantage of this, and there was never a moment from Dec. 8 to April 9 when the troops were out of the sound of Jap war planes.
In the history of the present war, only Malta has suffered more continuous bombardment than that poured upon our troops in Bataan and Corregidor. Their lack of air support handicapped them exactly as though each soldier had had his right arm tied behind his back.
All these observations are the result of six months of travel throughout the Southwest Pacific battle area and this with the few survivors who got out before the Jap flood overwhelmed our men.
The option these survivors have of the Jap Army is of value for our guidance in the battles to come.
They say the Japanese are possessed of fanatical willingness to die, and the tales of their suicidal exploits are not overdrawn. But this quality is not a military advantage unless the Jap troops are so numerous that the loss of men will never be felt. This is not the case with Japan. She has only 80 million people to draw upon.
No list of the military merits of the Japs should obscure the expert judgment of American officers who fought them in Bataan. They say that the Japs are overrated.
Lack initiative
They have the courage of suicidal weasels, but they borrowed from the Germans that same lack of individual judgment and initiative which has so often been called the single but sometimes fatal fault of the German military leadership.
They fulfill their orders perfectly but after the order is fulfilled, they seem not to know what to do. According to men who were there, every second of the five-month Battle of Bataan, the Japs could have taken Bataan several times if they had possessed imagination.
For example, at the beginning of the campaign, it would have been possible, so they say, for the Japs to have landed on the Bataan Peninsula behind the American lines.
Later, they tried it and failed in their famous attempt when about 1,000 Jap soldiers stripped to their singlets and swam ashore. They were aided by life preservers from the American steamship Merritt which took American relief supplies to Japan for the succor of the victims of the 1923 earthquake. These soldiers were justly doomed, trapped in caves and destroyed.
Jump on mines
Furthermore, the Jap contempt for death leads them to acts of sheer folly, as when, in their attack on the Abucay Line, the first line of defense established in Bataan, they sent assault troops to jump on the American landmines and explode them with their bodies instead of doing the same thing more cheaply with artillery fire.
As each found his mine and jumped upon it, he shouted “Banzai” just before his body was atomized by the detonation of two pounds of high explosive directly under his feet.
All that could have been done by artillery, but the Jap command apparently considered one of their soldiers cheaper than a shell. In this spirit, they also sent their men to be living bridges cast over the American barbed wire entanglements. Two lines of Japs advanced and, also shouting “Banzai,” flung themselves across our wire. A second wave of Japs then stepped on this carpet of writhing, tortured bodies to try to reach our trenches.
Classification to show uses for materials
By Dale McFeatters, Press business editor
After July, practically everything you buy will have been checked by the government.
In a broad sense, the shirt or suit you purchase, the book you read and the soap for your bath will have been identified to the War Production Board.
The WPB will come by this knowledge through its new Allocation Classification System, a plan affecting all manufacturers and distributors, military or civilian, and designed to show the uses to which materials are being put.
How much, what kind, etc.
The WPB hopes the system will eliminate a variety of forms which business and industry now must submit, but primarily the war agency wants to know such things as how much wool, cotton, leather, etc., are going into civilian clothing, as well as into uniforms; the quantities of metals and foodstuffs used by food processing industries; and the kinds of materials consumed for household use.
Eventually, the information gathered will be the basis for allocation of all kinds of materials to all kinds of industries. It will govern the flow of every raw material into both military and consumer goods plants and warehouses.
Effective July 1, jobbers, suppliers and manufacturers must stamp one or two symbols on their purchase orders and contracts. One symbol will designate the nature of the purchaser such as:
| Purchaser | Symbol |
|---|---|
| Army | USA |
| Navy | USN |
| Lend-Lease | LL |
| Foreign purchasers | FP |
| Domestic purchasers | DP |
Another set of symbols shows the use to which material ordered is to be put – what industry calls the “end-use.” The symbols are numbers, ranging from 1.00 for aircraft to 23.00 for parts and sub-assemblies for all classifications. The numbers are broken down into other numerical classifications to specify items in greater detail.
Retailers needn’t worry
For example, the symbol 6.00 represents war equipment and supplies, while 6.20 donates clothing and subsistence. Class 17.00 covers education and information and 17.10 represents the printing and publishing division of this field.
Retailers needn’t worry about the symbols, but wholesalers must identify their purchases.
Here’s the way the system will operate:
A clothing store places an order for a supply of men’s shirts. The jobber, in ordering from the manufacturer, marks it “DP.” The manufacturers, if he needs cloth to make the shirts, gives an order to the mill and marks it “DP 15.00,” the number representing the general classification for wearing apparel.
Records to WPB
If the Army ordered a supply of shirts from a manufacturer, it would stamp its order “USA 6.20,” the letters identifying the Army and numerals denoting the clothing subdivision of the general class 6.00.
Records of the transactions will pass into the hands of the WPB, which will observe the distribution and consumption of goods and later determine the quantities to be allocated to various industries.
The Pittsburgh Press (June 24, 1942)
Cairo –
Premier Pasha, speaking in Parliament today, urged the Egyptian people to “cooperate in every way” with the British forces who are defending Egypt against an anticipated Axis drive.
San Francisco –
The Jap-controlled Manila radio said today that eight persons:
…found guilty of printing and distributing anti-Japanese booklets have been executed in the Philippines.
New York –
The BBC today broadcast a dispatch by a London Daily Telegraph correspondent in Egypt saying that the border positions held by the British were not strongly fortified and that they probably would not make a serious stand there.
Washington –
President Roosevelt was informed today that 100,438 tons of scrap rubber were collected by the petroleum industry in the first six days of the collection drive which ends June 30.
Last night we felt so cheerful – but this morning we feel awful.
For several weeks, this country has been on a sort of optimistic jag, induced by mixing a dash of victory news with several jiggers of hopeful forecasts.
There’d be a second front in 1942 – perhaps three or four.
The battles of Coral Sea and Midway had removed the threat to Hawaii and the Pacific Coast. As for Japs in the Aleutians – we’ll knock ‘em out when the fog lifts.
Raids by a thousand planes a night on German cities were only forerunners of bigger raids to come – by two, three and even five thousand planes.
This might break the German people – their morale showed signs of cracking and European unrest bordered on revolt.
The Russians were holding and counterattacking.
The British had numerical and equipment superiority in Libya.
Maybe it would be a short war, after all!
In this rosy glow, the stings and aches of Pearl Harbor and Guam, Malaya and Singapore, Manila and Bataan, Java and Burma, Makassar Strait and the Atlantic sinkings somehow faded.
Amid defeat, we had become grim and united and hard – ready to sacrifice profits, give up strikes, observe rationing and buckle down in many unpleasant ways for a long and painful struggle.
Defeat awakened us, but the sedative of a little progress and much wishful thinking made us sleepy again.
Some of those with big money started again to waste it. Read the article in the current Life Magazine which begins:
Last week, as some Americans were gambling their lives to smash the Japs at Midway, other Americans were busy gambling millions of dollars at race tracks.
Belmont’s greatest season… $27,773,297 for the mutuel machines in 24 racing days… $385,042 wagered on a single race… tracks near Washington and Chicago reporting the lushest days in 15 years… a new $2-million track near Camden built with labor lured from defense plants by premium wages and vast quantities of steel diverted from guns and tanks and planes… special trains for fans…. Roads thronged with cars burning up priceless rubber, and gasoline paid for with seamen’s lives.
A new epidemic of strikes broke out – mostly small and scattered, but rapidly increasing. A wildcat strike in a steel mill… a slowdown in a shell plant… here a “work holiday” and there a walkout… dues picketing… food rotting on tracks because truckers wouldn’t take it through a picket line… disputes over higher wages and overtime… demands for longer vacations… conciliators working desperately to avert a growing number of conflicts.
Politics stirred and became active. Don’t complete the tax bill before the election. Don’t cut the draft age until after November. Damn Henderson – he won’t let the senators control his appointments. Pay a dollar an ounce for silver we can’t use when you can’t get tin we must have. Don’t talk about withholding taxes or compulsory savings till the returns are in. Discount the rubber crisis be cause the folks back home don’t like rationing.
The public got careless. Maybe the rubber shortage wasn’t so bad – somebody will invent something. Drive ‘em while you got ‘em. And, so, from Rocky Mountain resorts came stories of a thriving tourist business, some places enjoying the best trade in years. Folks driving from the rationed seaboard out to Colorado… don’t worry, somehow one can get back.
And now, the morning after.
Tobruk taken and the British driven from Libya.
Egypt and the Suez menaced by Rommel’s armored forces and a great army of paratroops in Crete.
Gallant men and women fighting to the death in the outskirts of Sevastopol.
The oil of the Caucasus and Near East gravely threatened.
Japanese encamped on another Aleutian island.
China’s back to the wall.
General Emmons warning non-residents out of Hawaii, because:
The outcome of the Battle of Midway has given many people a false sense of security.
Japan strengthening her outposts toward Australia and threatening Siberia.
Shells falling on Pacific Coast soil.
India seething with unrest and potential revolt.
It wasn’t as good as it seemed yesterday, and probably isn’t as bad as it looks today.
One big trouble is that we haven’t had enough unvarnished news.
Too few facts and, in their place, too much speculation and prediction.
This isn’t a good diet for a people which has been used to more news than any other in the world. Naturally, out of the speculation and prediction they easily become overly-optimistic if those in high places – the ones supposedly “in the know” – emphasize the bright aside, as happened so frequently during the last few weeks.
This country needs facts; it needs truth – no matter how unpalatable. It needs the bad along with the good.
It needs to know that the war won’t end this year: that the future is still very dark; that the agony and privations of war are only beginning.
To know this finally; to steel ourselves against the worst; to stop the psychological ups and downs of recent months; to dig in and quit our wasting, striking, politicking, grasping and griping; this is the basic training for victory on the home front.
635 saved from 13 ships in Caribbean; 88 dead in New England sinking
Numbers in circles on the map indicate the total number of Allied ships sunk in that area since mid-January by Axis submarines and mines. The toll has reached 320. The X’s indicate where a U.S. vessel went down 75 miles off New England with a loss of 88 lives and where a British ship went down 175 miles from the Panama Canal.
A Caribbean port (UP) –
The sinking of 16 more United Nations ships – 13 in the Caribbean, two off the United States Atlantic Coast and one in the Gulf of Mexico – raised to at least 320 today the toll of vessels Axis submarines and submarine-laid mines have taken in Western Hemispherical waters since the middle of January.
The latest sinking was revealed today when the entire crew of a small Yugoslavian merchantman reached an East Coast port after their ship was sunk by a U-boat in the Gulf of Mexico June 19. The vessel was, the captain said:
…torn to pieces by a terrific explosion which followed a second torpedo.
Altogether, 354 United Nations vessels have been victims of torpedoes, shells and submarines in this area, but 34 reached port.
This compilation, believed conservative, shows 148 ships lost along the Atlantic Seaboard, 96 in the Caribbean, 23 in the Gulf of Mexico, 15 in the South Atlantic and 38 off the Canadian coast.
Rescue vessels sunk
The 13 vessels, the Navy disclosed yesterday had been sunk in the Caribbean, went down from June 3 to 14, inclusive. The Navy said that 770 persons, including 135 passengers, were aboard the ships and that 635 persons, including 126 passengers, had been rescued. They were brought to this port, or made their way to it.
In two instances, crews were on sinking vessels twice before they reached here. The ships that rescued them were torpedoed and sunk.
But one of the heaviest death tolls recorded since the Axis submarine campaign began was on a medium-sized U.S. cargo-passenger ship sunk off the U.S. Atlantic Coast about 75 miles from New England. Survivors revealed yesterday that 88 lives were lost when three submarines attacked their vessel. The second sinking off the East Coast revealed yesterday was that of a medium-sized British ship.
List Caribbean sinkings
The 13 Caribbean sinkings included:
A small Norwegian ship.
A U.S. cargo ship.
A British merchant ship, an American-owned, Honduran-registered cargo vessel.
Four British ships, a Dutch passenger vessel.
An American cargo ship.
An American passenger-freighter.
A small American merchantman.
A U.S. freighter.
Survivors described their experiences.
Mrs. Edna Theresa Johansson, 48, of New Orleans, stewardess on one of the American ships, and the only woman on it, said the ship was torpedoed a few hours after leaving port.
Meet sub near vessel
Hearing an explosion, she grabbed a bag she had packed for such emergency, and shouted:
We’ve been torpedoed.
She related:
Someone said, “Not yet.” And then another torpedo struck about 50 feet aft from where the first had exploded.
All aboard were able to get away in lifeboats, and about 350 feet from their sinking ship, they met the submarine. It flicked its searchlights on the lifeboats a few minutes, and then disappeared.
Additional explosions rent the ship, and it soon sank.
The ship’s third officer, James R. Glover, 25, of New York, said they were adrift four hours before they were rescued. He said the captain of the submarine, in riding boots, flared breeches and a leather jacket, emerged from the conning tower and tried to find out the ship’s destination. The survivors in Mr. Glover’s lifeboat gave him a false answer, and he asked whether they needed anything. Told that they could use cigarettes, he said the submarine could spare only 24.
The survivors told him:
We’ll see you in hell first.
…but as the submarine pulled away, the commander, nevertheless threw some cigarettes into the boat.
Capt. Robert N. Pierce of San Pedro, Cal., master of another American ship sunk June 11, said the first torpedo struck at 10:40 a.m., killing three members of the crew and injuring four. A second and a third torpedo exploded in a few seconds and the ship slid down.
Captain on two ships that sank
Capt. H. G. Beck, 38, of Houston, Tex., was master of a crew that was twice on a sinking ship. His ship “sank like lead” after it was torpedoed, trapping 12 of the crew below deck.
Seventeen survivors of the crew of 32 were able to get away. Next day, a British cargo vessel rescued them and on June 10, the British ship was torpedoed and sunk. Once more, Capt. Beck found himself adrift, and with only nine of the original 17 survivors of his ship.
The British ship was sunk 175 miles from the eastern entrance of the Panama Canal.
Shells American vessel
On June 10, a Dutch passenger ship, with a crew of 67 officers and men and 27 passengers was torpedoed and sunk. A U.S. freighter picked up the survivors the following morning, and three days later, a submarine torpedoed the American vessel and then shelled it.
The U.S. vessel, besides survivors of the Dutch ship, carried a crew of 40. Of the 94 persons aboard the Dutch ship, 49 were saved by the U.S. freighter – 31 seamen and 18 passengers.
Ensign Malcolm S. McLeod, 22, of Bellingham, Wash., commanded a Navy gun crew aboard a medium-sized U.S. freighter sunk June 13. His crew stuck by their gun until rising water and fumes seeping up from below forced them to abandon it. They didn’t get to shoot at the submarine because it stayed underwater until 12 minutes after the second of the two torpedoes it fired struck.
Praises ship’s engineer
All 56 men aboard got away, but Second Engineer Abe Ediger of Kansas City died in a fall aboard the ship that rescued them.
Ensign McLeod said Mr. Ediger took command of the engine room after the torpedoes exploded, ordered firemen and oilers to safety and put the engines full speed astern so lifeboats could be launched.
Ensign McLeod said:
None of us would be here today if it hadn’t been for Abe.
Survivors of the sinkings of two British vessels drifted only a few hours before they were rescued. The captain, second radio operator and third engineer of a small British freighter, torpedoed June 8, were killed by the explosion. The chief engineer died aboard the rescue vessel.
One million establishments connected with work on commodities must abide by march top
Washington (UP) –
All consumer services connected with commodities – from repairing milady’s corset to patching her husband’s trousers – were placed under a separate price ceiling today by OPA Administrator Leon Henderson to meet peculiar control problems in this $5-billion industry.
The order, effective July 1, covers nearly one million establishments and completes the overall price ceiling program begun April 28 with the announcement of general maximum price regulation.
The highest prices charged last March by each individual seller of service was fixed as a wartime ceiling over consumer services.
There are two important deviations, however, from the previous regulations governing top prices of retailers and wholesalers of services and commodities. They are:
Sellers of seasonal services, such as rental of beach equipment at a summer resort, will be allowed to determine their maximum prices by taking the highest price charged in the corresponding season of 1941 and adding an amount arrived at by multiplying that price by the percentage increase in the cost of living between last season and March 1942.
Provision is made for prompt adjustment upward of the March ceiling prices of any seller who can prove he is suffering substantial hardship because his top prices do not reflect the cost increases between Feb. 1 and April 27, 1942, and that continuance of his service is threatened.
Mr. Henderson said:
The new regulation does not change in any way the main objective of the Office of Price Administration, which is to stabilize the cost of living under wartime conditions at levels reflected in the highest prices charged for commodities and services during March 1942.
But experts pointed out that the potential effect of the order is to relax the March price restriction for at least some of the consumer services. In enforcing the March level in other regulations, the OPA has rolled back increased costs to wholesalers and manufacturers. This cannot be done, for example, in the case of the shoe shiner, the piano tuner or the mortician, so the consumer will have to bear the higher charges.
Services covered include:
Exempt are advertising agencies, accountants, detective agencies and other establishments performing consumer services not associated with commodities.
Henderson explains
In explaining why the services were given special price treatment, Mr. Henderson said an investigation by the OPA revealed it would be necessary either to amend the general price regulation order to assure equitable treatment or to issue a separate regulation. The latter course was decided upon.
Mr. Henderson also believes it will be impossible to hold price ceilings at March levels during the coming winter unless government subsidies totaling $500 million are made available to hard-hit industries, his associates revealed.
He was said to feel that eventually it would be imperative to have funds to back up the price levels if the cost of living to Americans was to remain stable.
Congress is expected to revive the subsidy proposal shortly. How much money will be needed is still a matter of speculation, although OPA officials generally agreed that $500 million should be enough for the first year. The British are spending about $1 billion a year to keep prices down.
Washington (UP) –
The Senate prepared today for quick action on two huge war bills – the $43-billion appropriation bill for the Army and an authorization to expand the Navy by 1,900,000 tons of warships at a cost of $8,500,000,000.
Chairman Elmer Thomas (D-OK) of the Senate Military Appropriations Subcommittee predicted that the Army supply bill – the biggest in history for a 4,500,000-man Army within the next 12 months – would be enacted into law by July 1. It was approved, 325–0, yesterday by the House.
The fleet expansion bill, already approved by the House, was also approved unanimously by the Senate Naval Affairs Committee yesterday. Senate action will come before the end of this week. The bill will put the emphasis on aircraft carriers. It ignores battleships.
Roosevelt signs bill for aid to dependents
Washington (UP) –
President Roosevelt today signed a precedent-making bill authorizing deferment of family men until the reservoir of single men is exhausted and providing financial aid for dependents of servicemen in the four lowest ranks.
The allowances to dependents vary with the degree of family relationship, providing $50 a month for a wife with no children, $62 for a wife with one child, and $72 for a wife and two children. Of this, $22 comes out of the serviceman’s paycheck. The government contributes the balance.
Thus, for the first time in Army history, the policy of preserving established families in connection with military service is authorized by law. Previously, deferment of men with dependents was based solely on financial grounds.
Can order deferments
The President will have authority to defer any or all men with wives or children, or wives and children, living in a “home” relationship. He has power to order such deferments without regard to financial dependency, and despite family allowances provided in the measure.
While the allowances will be considered in cases of financial dependency, they are not deemed conclusively to be large enough to furnish sufficient support to warrant upsetting established families.
The act authorizes the drafting of married men without children ahead of those who have children – when the supply of single men is exhausted.
Payments begin Nov. 1
The benefit payments to dependents will be payable as of June 1 – when the new $50 minimum scale for servicemen went into effect – but because of administrative difficulties, payments will actually not begin until Nov. 1. In some cases, payment may then be for five months.
There are also allowances payable to dependent parents and sisters of men in the four lowest grades of enlisted men in the Army, Navy, Coast Guard and Marine Corps. If the serviceman has no Class-A dependent (wife and/or children), one parent would receive $15 from the government; two parents would receive $25; one parent and a sister, $20; one parents and two sisters, $25. In each event, the soldier would pay $22.
If a soldier had a Class-A dependent as well as Class-B, he would pay an additional $5 monthly. The government’s contribution would be the same as in the case of a serviceman with no Class-A dependents, but the Class-B dependents would receive less because they would receive less from the soldier’s pay – $5 instead of $22.
Washington (UP) –
The Senate Appropriations Committee today voted 15–9 to end the Civilian Conservation Corps, but decided to continue the National Youth Administration.
The committee thus upheld the actions previously taken by the House. Unless the Senate votes otherwise, the CCC will end on July 1.
A motion to eliminate NYA was defeated, but the committee recommended that $1 million be slashed from the $58 million the House approved for the agency, it was said.
By Florence Fisher Parry
It is hard for us to hold to an impartial view in wartime, especially as regards our enemies. We must go back very far and dig deep into our memories of that far away peacetime (even before the First World War), before we are able to adopt the detached view.
We have only to remember our own history within our own boundaries to realize this. I think we would have to go back a hundred years before we would be able to recapture that unity, that oneness, that existed once among the peoples of the United States. For presage of the division between the North and the South darkened the skies long before the actual outbreak of the Civil War; and to this day, among the older ones steeped in the awful legends of the war, the bitterness still rankles.
And I dare say, in our army of today, there are those sons of the Deep South and its remote mountains who harbor the belief that the enemy of today is but a modern brother of the damn Yankee!
Now that we are at war again with Germany, those of us who were through the last war realize that the breach was never closed, the hatred never healed. And as this war progresses, we are more and more of the mind that there is indeed an incurable quality of arrogance and inflexibility which marks the Teuton breed, dooming it as though by Nature’s own edict, to the eternal role of agitator and oppressor.
The fixed mold
When my own hate fans fiercest, in order to cool it some degree of detachment, I place myself back in Germany as I remember it before the last war, when we were completely innocent and unsuspicious of their design.
I find that even then I thoroughly disliked my sojourn there, for of all the countries of Europe, Germany was the one that bristled with inherent arrogance. From the steward on the ship to the guide in the Black Forest; from the shopkeeper in the little stores of Baden-Baden to the Hohenzollern Guard, in every single German who was invested with the slightest authority, was revealed the tendency to abuse that authority. A native overbearingness was manifest almost everywhere I turned; and in practically all those whom tourists are apt to encounter, there was to be discerned an intrinsic inflexibility; an inability to approach any transaction in a spirit of mutual responsiveness and rapport.
Nowhere on earth was the old saw, “order is Nature’s first law,” so overplayed as within Germany! Their thoroughness was exhaustively infinitesimal and dogged.
Above everything else, there was to be noted in them a complete lack of humor.
Another quality I remember is that they were never by any chance unsure of anything. They knew all the answers; or rather, there was only one answer – theirs. All in all, a graceless, inelastic and congested people – the very breed to go overboard for a fanatic like Hitler, who could feed their need of officiousness. The smartest thing that Hitler ever did was to establish his graduating scale of authority, endowing each German, however high or humble, with some authority over someone else.
For the German people must either give orders or take orders; oppress or be oppressed. Bully or fear. That middle ground, that give and take, that fluid merging which is the very essence of normal human relationships, this particular breed of men simply is not capable of understanding.
Foredoomed
Now the reason I find myself so fascinated by this study of the Teutonic temperament is that I am of the firm conviction that it is this fixed, jelled, petrified-wood quality of spirit which in the end will be the undoing of Germany and bring about her ultimate collapse. To put it crudely, she knows only how to dish it out. She can’t take it. She knows only how to be the aggressor, never the defender; and her aggressiveness being built as it is upon a firm conviction of superiority – when this is taken away from under her, she will fall apart.
She is not equipped by Nature to take defeat; for defeat, psychologically speaking, is but another word for frustration and when frustration sets in, the plight of every German will be very much like that of the famous rat whose picture we remember so vividly in life; the rat which was literally set crazy because it was confronted with an impasse out of which its conditioning offered no escape.
You remember this rat. It had been carefully, systematically and perfectly conditioned for a certain set performance. So long as this performance clicked, the rat functioned magnificently. It became, one might say, a super-rat.
Then, when all its familiar props of behavior were suddenly removed from it, it went quite thoroughly and promptly mad, a crazed and impotent victim of its own behavior processes.
I believe the German people will collapse just like that rat, for they have been conditioned only to arrogance, superiority and victory.
When the war is over and the causes for Germany’s defeat are set down by the military authorities, it will make interesting enough reading; but the real reason will not be found in military manuals but rather on the shelves of those psychiatrists whose findings on the collapse of German morale will afford the most conclusive evidence of all, that Germany died by her own hand, the victim of her own basic congestion of the soul.
Two-way communication between fans and planes to be added feature demonstration by Signal Corps
The Army is going to give spectators a chance to talk with pilots flying over Pitt Stadium when the War Show comes here July 3-6, inclusive.
But you’ll have to get your seat early – preferably before 8 p.m. – if you want to take advantage of the opportunity.
The feature, offered before the actual evening performances begin at 8:30, will be an Army Signal Corps demonstration of its super communication system.
Small two-way set
Called the “walkie-talkie,” the device is actually a 28-pound short-range radio receiving and transmitting set which can be packed so compactly that the average soldier can carry it on his back and talk with isolated units miles away while he’s marching.
As part of the demonstration, soldiers will circulate through the stands with “walkie-talkies” and permit spectators to talk with Air Force pilots overhead, with Signal Corps men in trucks below and with other spectators sitting across the Stadium.
Plane detector demonstration
The conversations will be amplified over a loudspeaker system so that the entire crowd may participate.
A far cry from the old semaphore system of earlier wars, the “walkie-talkie” is one of the Signal Corps’ most modern developments and enables a commander to direct isolated units toward a common objective with comparative ease.
The Signal Corps will demonstrate how it can wire emergency telephone and telegraph systems for battlefield use.
In conjunction with the Coast Artillery, the Signal Corps will also man aircraft detectors and amplify for the crowd the noise of unseen planes many miles away.
Because of high buildings in cities, the Army has run into trouble in both Baltimore and Philadelphia and has been unable to reproduce the sounds well.
Washington –
The Office of Price Administration ruled today that filling stations whose supplies of gasoline are not sufficient to meet all demands may give preference to cars of defense workers, trucks and ambulances.
New York –
The confab going on between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill in Washington is just a family party among cousins, Conklin Mann, of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, said today.
The two men are eighth cousins once-removed, Mr. Mann discovered after spending four months mulling through musty family histories involving 250 of Mr. Churchill’s American ancestors and an equal number of Mr. Roosevelt’s forebears.
The cousinship involves the Jerome and Delano families.
Winston Churchill is a son of Jennie Jerome of Brooklyn, and Lord Randolph Churchill. Cousin Franklin’s mother, Sarah Delano, was the seventh cousin once-removed of Jennie Jerome.
London (UP) –
Minister of State Capt. Oliver Lyttelton, in charge of war production, said today that the United States’ shipbuilding program is a dominant factor in the war and soon will offset Allied losses at sea.
He said U.S. shipbuilding was beginning to flow at an enormous rate which would attain the aims set for 1942 and 1943.
Earlier in the House of Commons, Capt. Lyttelton said that in the future, British and U.S. forces in any war theater would share American-produced armaments, according to an agreement he reached in a trip to Washington.
Washington –
President Roosevelt today called a special meeting of the Pacific War Council for tomorrow at the White House. Prime Minister Winston Churchill will attend, as will Prime Minister W. L. Mackenzie King of Canada, now en route to Washington.
Tomorrow’s meeting will be the first since last Wednesday when the council received President Manuel Quezon of the Philippines into the group and studied reports of the Midway battle and of Japanese landings in the Aleutians.
11,500 construction projects underway in gigantic defense program
By Harold Guard, United Press staff writer
Melbourne –
At least 100 military airdromes have been built in Australia, thousands of miles of strategic roads have been built or improved and 11,500 separate projects are underway in a program of construction by the Allied Works Council and the United States Army Engineer Corps.
Negro troops of the Engineer Corps have proved stars in an urgent task which requires doing much with little.
One giant airdrome, costing nearly $10 million, was built in 71 days.
Announced by Gen. Casey
Brig. Gen. Hugh Casey of the Engineer Corps revealed the vast program today.
Gen. Casey said that the work was well in hand despite shortage of labor, plants and machinery because the defense organization was using such bare essentials as it had to deal with the immediate situation.
The face of Australia is being changed in the work, which entails overcoming the difficulty caused by variations in the width of railroad gauges and the lack of roads through the interior.
Important loop roads have been built in the unpopulated northern territories, so that men and supplies can be moved rapidly to any part of the long coastline where the enemy might land.
Road building important
Road building ranks second only to airdrome construction, Gen. Casey said, and road commissions of the Australian states are cooperating.
Authoritative sources said that a 10% increase would be necessary in civilian labor productivity to ensure success of the defense program as shipping difficulties made it impossible to import the minimum of 100,000 laborers needed for maximum efficiency.
A high authority said he favored an increase in working hours to overcome difficulties.