New sea chief may put Navy on offensive
Lightning blows at Japs seen as Dutch admiral takes charge
Washington (UP) –
Lightning blows by sea and air aimed at seizing the initiative from Japan in the Southwest Pacific were anticipated today under the new Dutch leadership of the combined United Nations naval forces in the Far East.
Vice Adm. Conrad E. I. Helfrich, named commander of U.S., British, Dutch and Australian naval strength in place of U.S. Adm. Thomas C. Hart, is known to naval men as a veteran seadog who relies on the strategy of attack.
He may strike without delay in an effort to regain some of the East Indies springboards already seized by the Japanese, it was speculated, and thereby seek to slow down the enemy’s lashing drive toward Java and Australia.
Attacks predicted
Many observers found it significant that, simultaneous with announcement of the replacement of Adm. Hart by the 54-year-old Adm. Helfrich, a spokesman of the Dutch naval forces in Batavia predicted sharp offensive thrusts similar to the recent U.S. naval attack on the Marshall and Gilbert Islands.
These thrusts, it was said, would be designed to regain such important points as Balangnipa on the Celebes Gulf or Bone, Amboina naval base, the eastern shore of Makassar Strait and the western shore of Borneo.
Adm. Helfrich’s theory that the best defense is an offense was converted into action within 24 hours after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor when he sent a Dutch submarine into the treacherous waters along the Malayan coast and sank four Japanese transports. For 54 days after that, his naval and air forces sank or damaged Japanese ships at the rate of one a day.
Born in East Indies
Born in the East Indies, Adm. Helfrich knows those tricky, crowded waters like the back of his hand and since early 1938, he has been perfecting plans of defense with a tiny but ideal fleet last reported to number about five cruisers, eight destroyers, a small fleet of torpedo boats and 20 submarines.
To the jovial Adm. Helfrich – the first Dutch war chieftain given a directing voice in the vital battle of the Southwest Pacific – falls not only the task of defending his own East Indies with their riches of oil, tin, spices and rubber, but of perhaps determining the entire course of the war.
For if the Japanese, having overwhelmed Singapore, can overturn Sumatra and Java and drive the United Nations back upon Australia, they may turn westward toward India and the Near East toward the European and African war theaters.
Aided by Glassford
The only official reason given for Adm. Hart’s retirement from the United Far Eastern Naval Command – only four days after normal announcement of his assumption of the post – was that the move was at his own request, because of ill health.
Second in command under Adm. Helfrich is U.S. Vice Adm. William Glassford Jr., who will be the “seagoing admiral” while Adm. Helfrich will probably direct major strategy from ashore.
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
PORTLAND, Ore. – The skiing is over, and I’m sorry. For now I’m nuts about it. The whole “feeling” of the thing came all of a sudden, just as they said it would.
You stumble along for days, getting more and more discouraged, and sensing no harmony whatever with those encumbering boards on your feet. And then all n at once, like a flash, comes that marvelous feeling of release.
The skis, instead of being shackles, suddenly become something to help you and speed you along. As Olaf said, “It’s a wonderful sensation when you finally can make them do what you want them to.”
I think this week has taught me a few things more than just how to stand up on skis.
I’ve discovered, for one thing, what a completely exerciseless life I ordinarily lead. Why, after the agonies, of sore muscles had finally worn off, I felt better than I’d felt in years. I even gained weight up there at Timberline.
I learned also that you can do things when you’re face to face with the necessity for doing them. For instance, the instructors said I undoubtedly learned more about skiing in that one try down the mountain yesterday than I would have in two months of practicing on our safe little one. That’s because you can do things when you have to.
Theory might not work
But I’m not sure that should be set up as a standard theory of life. Here I go again, always thinking up exceptions to the perfect rules. For instance, if you couldn’t play the piano, yet had to sit down and play the piano in order to save your life, could you do it! Of course you couldn’t. Well, it was a good theory while it lasted, anyway.
But most important of all the things I learned is something which I suppose better sportsmen than myself know by instinct – and that is that a person works hardest, fights best, plays more gaily, even is braver, when he has companionship.
In the last two years – due to the urgencies of war living and the illness of That Girl and some other things – I have learned what it is to be alone. I have at last come to know the terror of being afraid by yourself – either in the vain little torture of embarrassment, or in the gigantic fright of thinking you are about to die.
Today, at last, I know that no man except a freak is able to stand absolutely alone. I know that if I am to be bombed to death, I want somebody with me. If I am by events placed in a dramatic position, it comes to nothing unless there is someone I love on hand to appreciate it. If I am rollicking in the snow, it is no fun at all unless some friend is beside me, to fall down with me grotesquely so that the two of us can laugh together.
Old friends save the day
And it was thus that my odd skiing interlude was saved in the end. It was saved by the arrival of two people I knew and could be natural with – E. J. Griffith, who is administrator of WPA for Oregon, and Mrs. Dexter Keezer, whom I have known for half my lifetime.
I must tell you about Anne Keezer, for she is quite a fellow. Her husband is president of Reed College out here and has just been given an important job in Washington. Her stepfather is Lowell Mellett, of Mr. Roosevelt’s “inner circle.” And she herself is the mother of two lovely and incorrigible little girls.
Annie Keezer is a whirlwind of animation, exaggeration and headlongism. She sews and knits and skates and skis and rides and reads and entertains and takes charge of things all over the place, because she has to let her spirit out into something. She boils and effervesces and gesticulates. She is probably the most enthusiastic conversationalist I’ve ever heard. The best yarn that ever happened isn’t half as good as when Anne finishes telling it.
All of which is just a build-up to what happened on our final afternoon of skiing. We were plunging down Timberline’s famous “Magic Mile.” Anne was skiing ahead of us, turning and exploring the white mist of falling snow.
And suddenly Annie disappeared. This second she was here, the next second she was gone. It was as though a magician had gone “poof” – and she vanished into thin air.
What happened was that Annie had simply skied right over a 20-foot precipice. She flew a vast distance through the air, lit on her head, and wasn’t hurt at all. She said she had no sensation of falling, and when she got her head out of the snowdrift she couldn’t think where she was.
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
CHICAGO – Having recently acknowledged the huge ability of the American man of big business and his value to the community in time of war or peace, I might add that he is, in his moments of social relaxation, the most poisonous and vulgar bore on earth, with a penchant for incoherent oratory larded with the catchwords of the hour, stupidly dirty and aged locker-room jokes and timeworn songs, drunkenly done.
A genius in his line, which is big machinery and the development of markets to absorb wares produced in the mass, he ought always to remain in character for the sake of his prestige instead of which he rather fancies himself as a combination of the late Will Rogers and all the personality wags in dinner jackets whom he has heard in the night clubs and cannot resist the temptation to be droll in his clumsy, witless way.
The result is appalling and the unfortunate waiters, sulking behind the pillars, go out and blab to the chauffeurs, who tell the cops and service station men what paltry oafs these masters are and the word thus gets around.
Suffer from delusion they are wits
Even at little luncheon parties or dinner within their own circle, men who have been seeing one another in business day after day for years arrive at a point when one of their number who is, by some intuition, toastmaster of the occasion, presently will tinkle on his glass with a butter knife, clear his throat and, after one joke in Swedish dialect and one in Italian or Irish, each inevitably arriving at an unclean climax in a bedroom or toilet, begin to introduce as speakers of the occasion all the others clockwise around the board.
All these men may be tremendous doers in the manufacture of motor cars, vacuum cleaners or vital articles unknown to the public which go into the great machines that make machines but, with the exceptions only of old Henry Ford and one other whom you may personally nominate to prove the rule, they all suffer from a delusion that they are wits, raconteurs and even humorists and not too bad in close-harmony, either, given a low ceiling and three or four rounds of what it takes to loosen them up.
Dialect is a tricky medium even for the best professional entertainers, but your business genius at his fun recklessly deals in such subtle tongues as Negro, German, Scots, Spigoty, Chinese, Japanese and the two versions of the English which are the cockney or gorblimey and the drawing-room or, as he thinks, bloody-blighter.
The scenarios are not more than three in number, all incredibly nasty and so dully familiar to every man that the boresome narrative never is relieved by the climax. Politeness, however, calls for roars of mirth during which the speaker prepares to explain how this light digression illustrates a point in his argument which has no conceivable relation to the tale just told.
Use current cliches when speaking
They are at their incredible worst when relaxing from their cares in Palm Beach or Miami Beach and strangers in their midst, who have heard big names or seen them in the national ads for years, find it very hard to reconcile such personalities, observed under such conditions, with the achievements which these dull people undoubtedly have wrought. Great men, giants among the American people they undoubtedly are, when working at their jobs, but taken at play they propagate that very low opinion which has had so much to do with the sullenness of the men at the machines in the plant.
Oratory is an art, though a low and insincere one, but men with no gift of expression may be seen twitching in their chairs and penciling little notes on the cloth, awaiting their turns to rise and stammer meaningless nothings about nothing. And it may be noted in any given round of such gassing that they all use the current cliches which at the present, include “directive,” “channeled,” “the pattern” and “the picture,” with the verb “to contact” and the noun “setup” still going strong.
For plain filth, inexcusable and stupid, nor Hemingway, nor Farrell, nor Steinbeck can excel the cleanest of them when they are making merry and yet, in their normal moods, at work or in casual conversation with no circle for an audience, they are interesting men whose achievements prove their stature.
Perhaps these social faults are immaterial, but it must be remembered that they made a very unfavorable expression on the hot-eyed world-shakers of the New Deal who knew nothing of business or its mighty men and undoubtedly were responsible for the belief in Washington that such funless clowns must be impostors gelling by on advertising alone.
Clapper: Babes in woods
By Raymond Clapper
WASHINGTON – This is a great country, and we don’t want to run it down because the war is going badly.
Why have we made such a poor start in the war? Isn’t it because, at heart, the United States always has been a decent country? Our very failure now is a credit to our instincts and standards as a people.
We are not caught in this predicament because we are a weak people, or because we don’t know how to make war weapons, or because we have been indifferent to the security of America. Not at all.
We are a strong people. No nation has shown more vitality than the American people have in settling this continent.
We are not stupid and sluggish. Our ingenuity and energy have developed a peacetime standard of living that all other nations have envied.
We were unaware of viciousness
We know how to make war weapons. There is nothing the matter with our battleships, our cruisers, our destroyers, our planes and tanks – except that we have not improved the designs as fast as the experience of war in other countries has made desirable. But we know now to make them, and you won’t find anything better than our heavy bombers and our new fighter with its 2000-horsepower engine, now in production.
Neither have we been indifferent to the security of America. We have spent a good deal of effort on Panama, on Hawaii, on Pacific stepping-stones for trans-ocean flying, on a Navy that was abreast of Britain’s as one of the two largest in the world. As we saw our problem, we did make an effort to protect ourselves.
No, I don’t think the reasons lie in any weakness, or lack of vitality, or indifference to our security.
The reason we have done so badly is that we had no appreciation at all of what a vicious world we were living in. We were babes in the woods and we didn’t know what a wolf was really like.
Haven’t we generally operated on the belief that all other countries felt some sense of restraint about plunging into the horrors of war? We thought that if we went halfway, peaceful elements in Japan would come the other half. Only a short time before Pearl Harbor, Sen. Wheeler was insisting that Japan didn’t want to attack us, that nobody was interested in attacking us. Long after the Government became disillusioned, a large section of the American people still believed in the good instincts of other nations. They believed there were things other nations wouldn’t do. None of us had any idea of how extensively Germany and Japan had prepared for war. We never believed a nation would so completely devote itself to the coldblooded business of getting ready to set out on a course of savage conquest.
U.S. underestimated the enemy
The invasion of Norway, the attack on Holland, the attack on Pearl Harbor were all acts of savage force which most Americans did not think any nation would commit. When the more bloodthirsty leaders in Germany and Japan voiced their threats of war, we usually shrugged them off as the expressions of extremists and not representative of the whole people of the country.
We underestimated the thoroughness with which those nations developed the savage instinct and equipped it to fight.
That was our failure. Our mistake was in believing the world was better than it was. So we were caught poorly prepared. If we had been able to comprehend the viciousness that was ruling in Berlin and Tokyo, we would have been doing years ago what we are now doing in building the largest war industry ever undertaken.
Our failure to believe the extent of the evil which was abroad in the world must be a cause of regret. It has jeopardized all that we stand for. It is adding heavily to the cost of victory. But in that very failure is found the spirit which must return to the earth after we have outdone our enemies at their own game.
Maj. Williams: Vital frontier
By Maj. Al Williams
Veritably we people of this age are standing on one of the most vital frontiers of unexplored territory called “Time.” All around us are vast quantities and types of mechanical tools possessed of untold potentialities for war or commerce.
France, England and the United States lacked men of vision in the high places to plan for the use of these tools, especially those which go to make up airpower. Germany did plan to develop and use such tools. But it wasn’t so much vision on the part of the German leaders as it was the necessity for new weapons, because they had neither the time nor the wealth to build the old in sufficient quantities. And if failing to see only a few yards into the future as far as the use of winged vehicles was concerned was disastrous, our failure to fully apply the use of winged vehicles to air express and airmail, in addition to the carriage of humans by air, is equally confounding.
The airlines, as they stand today, represent the use of about 350 transport planes, with schedules touching at about only one or two spots (cities) in each state. This we have been pleased to boast of as air service to a nation of about 130 million people. But it’s merely the skeleton of what’s coming.
Airline service? Certainly, the transportation of humans and airmail and some air freight. But while the volume of airline passenger business has increased 38 percent between 1936 and 1939, the air express increase was only 16 percent. What’s the matter with the air express business? Well, the answer to that is short and crisp. While actually transported by airlines, the air express business is actually under control of the railroads.
As long ago as 1928, seventy of the most powerful railroads formed the Railway Express Agency which conducts a monopoly business in the express field as the exclusive agency for all the principal railroads of the U.S. The Railway Express Agency takes a commission of 12½ percent from the airline for all the express it delivers, after pickup, to the airlines. The railroads, therefore, control the volume of air freight and express flown by the airlines. This is unhealthy for the airline express business.
In 1938, the total air express volume handled by our domestic airlines amounted to 7,300,000 pounds, while a little airline in Central America, using about six old tri-motored Fords, carried about 15 million pounds. In 1939, two European airlines carried 3739 tons of air express while flying a total of about 13 million schedule miles, yet two of the greatest airlines in this country carried only about 657 tons while flying about 18½ million scheduled miles.
Pick-up loses time
This failure of flying freight and express in the U.S. is not wholly due to railroad control, but the association of airlines and railroads in this country is a makeshift affair whereby the airlines are forced to avail themselves of the Railway Express pickup truck service. In this connection, it is well to understand that such pickup system is obsolete, because of the 20-mile-per-hour traffic through congested cities. The average pickup auto carries about 1000 pounds and is forced to run clear through a city to get to the main airline airport. This pickup service of one such auto truck could really be done by one Putt-Putt airplane carrying about 300 pounds and making 90 miles an hour.
Then, too, we are trying to carry air express in passenger transports. This is expensive. Every passenger carried in an air transport represents not only his own weight as a pay load, but an equal poundage in plane equipment for his comfort, such as sound insulation, heating, steward or hostess, food, seats, racks, etc. Air Express costs about 75 to 95 cents per ton mile; railroad express costs about 11 to 18 cents per mile. Railroad express shipments total about 150 million packages per year, averaging 40-45 pounds per package. There are air express and air freight planes now on drafting boards capable of carrying 16,000 pounds of cargo at 150 miles per hour. Conservative cost estimates indicate that such planes could be operated at about 15-16 cents per ton-mile or about 415,000-420,000 air express packages per day. Such things can and will be done.
This will put all the fast, urgent delivery freight and express in the air, the heavy, bulky freight on the trains, and the rest on trucks. We have the machinery, and one natural apportionment of types of freight and express between trucks, railroads, and airplanes is waiting upon men of vision – pioneers in the true sense – who will formulate the necessary plans and make sensible use of existing machinery.
The helicopter
A quick survey readily indicates that in the not-too-distant future there must be a maze of transfer and auxiliary short-flight airlines feeding into the main line air operations. Specially designed or modified airplanes already existent for such service are available. What of the helicopter that Igor Sikorsky and the Germans have developed where air freight and express pickups will be effected from and on the tops of big buildings – thus eliminating time-wasting city traffic transportation in trucks?
You know, as well as I, that these wings we use today are a make-shift which we manage to fly by brute force and awkwardness. The slow-landing planes are coming. After this war and as a result of this war we will have all the airports needed for any expansion of commercial aviation in any and all its foreseeable developments.
