Court hears Pelley’s aims
Hoped to extend work of Silver Shirts to outside U.S.
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Japanese cruiser reported probably hit
General MacArthur’s Headquarters, Australia (AP) –
A probable hit on a Japanese cruiser and a stick of bombs laid squarely on a big Japanese cargo ship were credited today to Allied airmen who carried out missions over a wide area of the Southwest Pacific.
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Michigan prisoners set out to prove that convicts also play role in U.S. war effort
By Esther Tufty
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland (By Wireless) – Here are three little sketches to suggest what life can be in Northern Ireland for those Americans who are over here for a long, long time.
There is a place called Rising Sun a few miles outside of Derry. Mother O’Conner wouldn’t change the name of the place even if it occurred to her. She probably figures that Rising Sun was her idea long before the Japs thought of it.
Rising Sun is a public house – a country public house, not a city one. It is a long, low, white building with a thick thatched roof, the kind you so often see in pictures of Ireland. It sits off the road a little, more like a farmhouse than a public house. There is a small bar when you go in, but if you like you can go right on back to the kitchen.
There Mother O’Conner sits beside the kitchen stove. She is an immense woman, in a black dress. You have the feeling that she hasn’t risen from her chair in many years. Her face is motherly, and full of quiet good nature.
A couple of naval officers are already there when I arrive. The snappiness of the naval uniforms seems queer, out on this Irish farm where you can almost feel the “little people.” The officers are deeply fond of Mother O’Conner. They liked to kid her.
Susan O’Conner is the barmaid. She brings the drinks to the kitchen, and guests use the dining table and sewing machine to set them on. You sit on an old-fashioned sofa tilted at one end. The rain is coming down outside.
The naval officers are telling Mother O’Conner about their recent trip to London. She laughs at some of their expressions that are strange to her. The officers play a matching game to see who pays. The two have a well-framed trick so they never have to pay. Mother O’Conner laughs at her recently found boys from so far away. She drinks lemonade with us. It is only half-light in the old kitchen.
“Now sing, Susan,” she says. Susan is a pretty Irish girl.
Looking down on us from the kitchen wall is an old picture of Christ, Susan sits on the kitchen table and, timidly at first, like a child, sings that grand song, “Bless ‘Em All.” Then she goes off into Irish songs we have never known. Her voice is good. It is thrilling to sit there and listen.
The rain is coming down, and a deep dusk has come prematurely. It is only 10:30, but the night is heavy all around. It is time to go. We can barely see in the old kitchen. Mother O’Conner sits immobile in her great chair, looking gently at her new boys. Under that old thatched roof in the country we have found something of the goodness of life.
The Rev. Richard G. S. King is dean of the great Londonderry Cathedral. He wears knee breeches, and black cloth leggings buttoned to the knees. He has invited you to tea. He is fond of Americans. Perhaps Dean King is fond of all peoples, but I don’t know how he could be.
He served through the last war. He has a son in Madagascar in Ceylon with the RAF.
“Have you ever been to America?” I ask.
He laughs, says, “Oh, no, no, no, I’ve always been too poor to get that far away.”
We sit in a small dining room and a maid serves our tea. It is cruelly hot and bitterly strong. With it we eat pancakes sprinkled with sugar. That’s something new to the naval officer and myself who are the dean’s guests.
The dean leads us to a huge study upstairs. It is a study mellow with age. There are deep chairs, polished brass, and old books. Dean King is the historian of Londonderry. He is a historian merely because he loves books. The entire room is walled with books on Ireland.
The dean lights the cigar the naval officer brought him. “You’re too good to me,” he says. “You’ll spoil me. I mustn’t get used to such luxuries.”
And then he says, “You don’t have to be anywhere, do you? I like to talk when there’s plenty of time. I can’t talk to somebody who has to be somewhere else in a half hour.”
I did have to be somewhere else in a half hour, but I didn’t mention it. And it was two hours later when I got there. It isn’t every day you can sit in the great study of the dean of Londonderry Cathedral and listen to his endlessly captivating talk.
A gay party is in progress in a Londonderry apartment. The young people are having a good time. It’s just like parties at home, except that it’s full of British and Irish accents. There are officers and civilians and WRENs and American Army nurses. They’re grand people.
All international dislikes have broken down because everybody is having fun. The military girls are in civilian dresses. They changed in a bedroom. They’re glad to get out of their strict uniforms for a brief evening.
A phonograph starts up, and people take off their shoes and dance in their stocking feet – all except me, of course, who couldn’t dance if Arthur Murray was propping me up. But I take off my shoes anyhow. Me in my white socks!
Then there are songs and shouts of gaiety. The place is thick with cigarette smoke. There is a bedlam of British and American and Irish, an international chaos of sound.
As a climax, a door bursts open and a man whom I could name but shan’t comes riding into the living room on a bicycle, fully dressed in a WREN’s uniform – skirt, coat and three-cornered hat.
There you have, not what our American officers over here do during the day when work is done, but what they can do, and do do, when work is over and a strange country holds out its arms.
ODT takes over bus allocations
Quick shift of equipment is planned
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Navy nurse one of last to leave Corregidor
Ensign Ann Agnes Bernatitus (left), 30, Navy nurse from Exeter, Pa., one of the last persons to leave Corregidor, in the Philippines, is greeted with a shower of confetti as she visits a war plant in Philadelphia. The blue-eyed young woman made her escape – a jump ahead of the Japanese – from the island fortress in a submarine and arrived in Australia 17 days later. (AP Photo)
New York responds to first surprise blackout
New York (AP) –
Shrieking air-raid sirens signaled the city’s first surprise blackout test last night and New York responded instantly – and calmly.
For 23 minutes, beginning with the “red” warning at 9:50 p.m. civilian activities halted, and air wardens, police and firemen rushed about dark streets to respond to theoretical emergency calls.
Mayor F. H. La Guardia ordered the first “yellow” – warning at 9:15, and followed it up at 9:38 with the second – “blue” warning. Each call activated different units of the city’s vast civilian defense organization.
The mayor called the test a success and commented that:
Vehicular traffic behaved beautifully.
For the first time, the Associated Press used its underground emergency office, in which a staff operated during the test.
The test was the third citywide blackout, but it was the first without advance notice.
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Reading Eagle (August 2, 1942)
18 Navy men survive ‘nightmare’ voyage
Flee Corregidor in 36-foot launch and sail 2,000 miles over enemy-infested seas to safety
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NEW TAX PAY IDEA GREETED WITH FAVOR
‘Daylight savings’ plan introduced by NY store executive
Intriguing aspects
Proposal would advance collections on incomes to current basis
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‘DANGEROUS’ ALIENS SEIZED IN FBI RAIDS
87 Japanese, Italians, Germans detained at Ellis Island
Possessed charts
Axis nationals refused to serve in U.S. Armed Forces
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U.S. torpedo planes sink German sub
San Jose, Costa Rica (AP) – (Aug. 1)
The TACA Airline announced today that United States torpedo-planes had sunk a German submarine between Curaçao and Trinidad after a TACA pilot informed American Caribbean military headquarters of sighting the U-boat.
The airline said Sherman Wilson, an American pilot, saw the submarine on a regular commercial flight and immediately gave its position.
The announcement added that a group of American patrol bombers and four torpedo planes immediately flew to the place named by Wilson, and sank the raider with several torpedoes after it had surfaced.
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