Runs in family
Vet, 101, sees descendant join Navy
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Runs in family
Roosevelt warns peril ahead for all
President helps to launch Canada’s second victory loan
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Five brothers all shipmates
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Ship victims reach port
39 torpedo survivors are landed in Canada
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Would extend draft system
Registration of women urged by Mrs. Roosevelt
First Lady says they will be used in many ways if war lasts
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The Pittsburgh Press (February 16, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
SAN FRANCISCO – Well, what do you know about this! Here we are in San Francisco again. If I’m not careful I’ll get to calling San Francisco home instead of Albuquerque or Indiana or Washington, D.C. Maybe I just better ask for bids.
In addition to torrents of rain and the keys to the city, I was welcomed here by a large batch of mail. On the whole the mail was nice and the writers wished me much health, happiness and wealth. I go for that wealth stuff.
However, there were a few letters which made me feel bad. It seems some people are being wracked by an indignant concern over the apparent disintegration of this noted author’s moral fiber. So perhaps a futile explanation is due them.
You know that cooking column I wrote from Albuquerque a few months ago. The one in which we took up a collection from the guests to buy flowers for the delivery boy who broke his leg (although there wasn’t any delivery boy and he didn’t break his leg). And I said that instead of buying flowers I took the money and bought whisky with it.
Well, that seems to have upset several people. That I could be such a rat as to buy whisky with that money! One woman even consigned me not too gently to Purgatory.
What astounds me is that people apparently have taken to believing everything they see in this column. Why, I’ve been writing fantasies like that for seven years, and nobody ever got so serious about it before. Older readers know quite well that occasionally I get my tongue caught in my cheek and can’t get it out.
Humor backfires in wartime
So I’ll draw those disgruntled readers a picture of that nasty whisky-buying episode. No such incident ever happened. I made it all up. I thought everybody would know that when they read it.
No collection was ever taken to buy flowers for the delivery boy who didn’t exist. And I did not buy whisky with the money that wasn’t collected. All the world knows that I don’t buy whisky. What I actually bought was a trainload of burros, all named Pete.
Now, everybody happy?
It does seem to me, as a man with his finger on the nation’s pulse as they say, that there has been an altering of public reception to humor-attempts since the war started.
Take me. I’m a humorist, as everybody knows. I’ve been laughing hysterically at my own stuff for years. I have no proof that anybody else ever did. but at least my occasional efforts at wit never brought the firing squad to my door.
Yet since Pearl Harbor it seems to me that some folks have deliberately set out to misunderstand what they read. I’ve actually had the recent experience of being raised by one reader to the status of a traitor because of a line I thought was harmlessly funny. Light-heartedness is ticklish business these days.
The New Yorker magazine recently had a little essay on this subject. They are worried, too. They likened wit to the hand grenades of the last war, where you pulled the fuse, counted four, and let fly at the enemy.
Gloom will live for a day
A dozen little things could happen to cause you to blow yourself to smithereens, instead of your audience, the Germans. That’s what is happening now to humorists and cartoonists. The New Yorker says:
It is too tough a job for the average humorist to determine which of his writings are likely to bolster the national morale and which are likely to give comfort to the enemy (and, I might add, discomfort to himself).
The old-fashioned idea that laughter is always a healthy catharsis is too firmly imbedded in him, and his estimate of the public’s ability to disentangle irony is, generally speaking, much too optimistic.”
So, as far as I am concerned, a gay touch isn’t worth the struggle any longer. Down with humor for the duration, I say. Long live gloom, if that’s the way it has to be. Hereafter when something funny pops into my head. I’ll just lock the door and laugh traitorously to myself.
Maybe I’ll change my mind tomorrow, though.
I have a friend here who went to enlist in the Air Corps. He passed the physical and mental tests easily, but they wouldn’t take him – because he bit his nails! Guess they figured it indicated he was too nervous.
However, they did say that if he’d come back in a week with unbitten nails, they’d take him. So my friend summoned up all his will power, went for a week without biting a nail, returned to the recruiting office, and was accepted.
Gleefully he rushed back to the office where the worked, and started telling the boys that he had been taken. The boys gathered around and congratulated him, and then one of them said: “But what’s the matter with your fingernails?”
Everybody looked, including my friend. And discovered that he had bitten all his nails clear down to the quick on his way back from the recruiting office!
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
CHICAGO – The rivalries of the Chicago Tribune on one hand and the Daily News and Marshall Field’s new morning paper, the Sun, on the other, are an interesting public disturbance, in the heart of the Middle West.
Chicago papers seem unable to stick to the newspaper business. They always try to control the mayor, the state’s attorney, or county prosecutor and the governor and even the senators and some representatives. They promote amateur prize fights and all sorts of public spectacles and their political and other extracurricular activities inevitably create obligations which newspapers are freer without.
The Tribune, under R. R. McCormick, has been fiercely anti-New Deal ever since the NRA, and was just as angrily isolationist down to Pearl Harbor. It is still anti-New Deal, but has accepted the war with grace and vigor, but without shirking its duty to criticize incompetence, venality, mistakes or misrepresentations by officials of the government.
McCormick is obdurate and patriotic
This is a very difficult situation to be in, but McCormick is not embarrassed or deferred. He is a strong, obdurate man, who takes very little counsel of anyone and, although he has actually been accused of treason by his opponents, it is ridiculous to think that a man so independent and self-sufficient could be tempted to sabotage the American war in a hope that out of defeat he might arise like a Quisling, a Darlan or a Petain.
He is a very patriotic man and he held the view that this country should arm mightily and not scatter its weapons as fast as they were made along the battle lines of Britain and Russia. The sincerely patriotic isolationist formula, before Pearl Harbor rejected the contention that if Britain had fallen for the lack of this help, the Axis would have won last year and then would have attacked a still inadequately armed and complacent United States.
Frank Knox, who operates the Daily News, an evening paper, is a Chicagoan by adoption and his paper, too, was vigorously anti-New Deal until Pearl Harbor or not long before. But on the subject of war, he shared President Roosevelt’s view of inevitability and so left his paper, where his investment is, to join up as Secretary of the Navy. So naturally during the America First campaign, the party got very rough and McCormick was called an appeaser and Knox and his co-believers were called warmongers.
Sun loses its interventionism issue
Marshall Field had bad luck. He is a kiver-to-kiver New Dealer, but a new personality and without much force. When he started his Sun he had a beautiful issue, for he was invading the Tribune’s monopoly of the morning field as a supporter of the President’s war policy, or, as the Tribune called it, interventionism. Then the Japanese blasted his issue out of existence, for McCormick immediately bowed to the fact of war and there was no question of isolationism vs. interventionism any more.
The Sun is still new and should improve, but to date it is real. Silliman Evans, a Texas politician and reporter who opportunized himself into some very good spots under the New Deal, was given the task of whipping up a full-size, first-class paper with character out of ingredients. He followed the standard American pattern, which calls for a certain number of comics, columns and so forth, but newspapers develop character, good or bad, by growth, as people do, and here was the Sun attempting to be adult the day it was born.
As a straight New Deal paper the Sun probably will get some political favors from the administration, and it obviously is trying to needle McCormick into recognizing it as a rival or critic. But McCormick just ignores it and keeps blasting away at frivolities, mistakes and some of the policies of the government and the Sun keeps yelling “Hey, I called you a louse. Why don’t you call me something?”
This fuss is altogether too noisy and nasty and the people might some day tell themselves that, after all, newspapers are for news and have no right to make or break governments or whip them unnecessarily into lathers and dissension just because they are competing for business. But it has always been that way in Chicago. It is the darndest town.
Clapper: Clashing prides
By Raymond Clapper
WASHINGTON – The Government can’t deal properly with creation of an adequate supply of industrial labor tor war work until it can appease those whose personal pride and prestige are involved.
That mainly is what is holding up this most necessary move.
Nobody in the whole show doubts for an instant that the Government must steer our labor supply if war production is to have enough hands to do the work.
Sidney Hillman, labor director of the War Production Board, says that to provide the manpower for the President’s production program this year, we must add 10 million workers to the five million already in war production. Probably another five million will have to be added next year. To do that while at the same time supplying men for the Army and Navy will put the heaviest kind of a strain on our manpower. It can’t be done if left to haphazard supply and demand.
Union rules stymie die-making
Because of new mass-production methods in plane building, an almost unbearable burden will be placed on die-making. But when you try to get die-makers, you bump into the union rules which forbid the using of additional apprentice helpers unless the Government guarantees that they will not be allowed to continue at that trade after the war. That’s one illustration of many.
Hundreds of thousands of men and women must be trained and placed in special kinds of war work. Workers must be trained up to do work of a higher grade than before.
The dislocations and shifting of workers from one locality to another will be tremendous. President Roosevelt says that the Ford Willow Run bomber plant will require 75,000 to 100,000 workers. Imagine the shifting of labor supply that one plant alone will involve. Free supply and demand breaks down under such dislocations.
Labor supply and Army and Navy drafting and recruiting are all tangled up into one complicated problem of manpower, as the British found when they took men out of industry for the army and had to return some of them to their former jobs later when production fell down. They placed labor supply and military manpower under one management in Bevin’s Labor Ministry. They call it the Ministry of Labor and National Service.
Here several agencies have a finger in the pie in addition to the Army. Navy and the Selective Service system. There are the War Production Boards labor division, the U.S. Employment Service, vocational education, the Department of Labor’s activities, and CCC.
All agree that some centralized administration is necessary. But everybody wants to run it. Paul McNutt, head of the Social Security Agency, feels he has prior claim because the unemployment service, which would be the core of the labor supply machinery, is in his agency. He has developed a basic plan which, whoever gets it, will probably be adopted.
President to attempt another agreement
But Sidney Hillman balks. His friends say that his former co-head of OPM, William S. Knudsen, was recognized by being made a lieutenant general in charge of Army procurement. They think labors representative on the old OPM should have recognition. Labor representatives generally feel that manpower is their dish and that labor should be recognized by placing one of its own in charge as the British did in giving that job to Bevin.
This inside battle has been going on for weeks, with the Army, Navy and Selective Service objecting to having their manpower supply included in the industrial labor supply scheme.
This week President Roosevelt is expected to try further to get an agreement with his new “War Labor Council” composed of AFL and CIO representatives who meet with him from time to time.
As soon as everybody can be pacified the President can go ahead with this most urgent step.
Maj. Williams: Give us planes!
By Maj. Al Williams
“Japan must be bombed to defeat.”
What are we waiting for? We know in our hearts, and in common sense, that it’s real American airpower for us or defeat.
On last December 7 the Jap war broke upon us at Pearl Harbor. The Malayan sweep of the Jap forces, land and sea, began on December 8, paced and spear-headed by Jap air forces. Simultaneously, the Japs swarmed over the sides of a hundred or more transports lined up against the beaches of the Philippines, under the protection of said transports assured by Jap warships and insured by Jap air fleets overhead.
This massing of Jap transports and warships off the Luzon beaches was just the type of juicy target that seapower has been doting upon for centuries. But nothing of consequence was done about it. Whether we had enough left of our Pacific Fleet to attempt the destruction of that sea-borne invasion force is beside the point because the Japs saw to it that they dominated the air over that particular sea combat zone.
One month later, the President asked for 185,000 planes during 1942-43, and the country roared its approval. One month after that – two months in all – Gen. Marshall asked for two million men to man these 185,000 planes. And the country roared again.
But the planes and manpower appropriations have merely been asked for and approved, and this was enough to beguile some people into believing that America “tops the world” in airpower.
The ancient Chinese used to fight wars by trying to frighten their enemy with firecrackers and by waving banners and making noise. There is too much of this today.
You can’t win wars with appropriations. It takes first-class tanks, guns, thousands of first-class aircraft, and the right kind of sea fleets – sailing, marching, and flying. In all the hubbub there was not one word about the reorganization of the national defense system to accommodate an air force totaling two-thirds of the land army of this country and several times the seamen of our Navy.
Who is going to handle this huge force of 185,000 planes manned by two million men? The Army? The Navy? Neither reported on the firing line with the right kind of equipment or training when the war broke.
The basic law of American efficiency and business is to refuse greater responsibilities to men or organizations that have failed to discharge in a competent fashion those originally assigned.
What are we waiting for? Years ago airmen said plainly and concisely that we had no adequate or modern plan for the air defense of the United States and its territories. Look at the record!
It’s the preservation of the status quo or victory by airpower for the American people. What are we waiting for?
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (February 17, 1942)
Closer and closer!
Refineries targets, tankers torpedoed
Sub believed sunk off Venezuela after destroying three oil vessels
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Army pool is increased by millions
Less than one-seventh of last registration to go this year
By Raymond Z. Henle, Post-Gazette Washington correspondent
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Numbers will be assigned March 9
115,000 or more register here in smooth-running R-Day
5,000 men and women, many of them teachers, function as registrars; city-county building busiest
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Dutch battling to delay setup of bomber base
$200,000,000 oil properties left in ruins at Palembang as Jap hordes move in on river barges
By John R. Morris, United Press Far Eastern manager
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New Jap blitz is expected in Philippines
Fall of Singapore releases air and other foe forces
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BULLETINS!
Batavia, Feb. 17 (AP) –
The Japanese seizure of bicycles in their successful march down Malaya to overpower Singapore caused Dutch authorities here to issue instructions to all civilians that their bicycles must be destroyed at once in case of a Japanese invasion of this island.
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U.S. plane, crew of three missing
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Indian Ocean is penetrated by invaders
Report to Parliament reveals broadened program planned
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High court upholds ship profits
Rules Bethlehem World War gains OK – says labor can be drafted
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Dreadnaught built, another started
Alabama launched in driving storm
Thousands cheer as 35,000-ton battleship slides down ways
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Kimmel, Short trial asked
Ohio Congressman urges court-martial
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No U.S. goods reach Axis
None of supplies for French Africa taken
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The Pittsburgh Press (February 17, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
SAN FRANCISCO – Except for our little side trip to the House of Mystery, I drove straight through from Portland to San Francisco – two and a half days.
On this trip I had a traveling companion, and a very pleasant one. There’s a slight difference in our ages, but he’s one of the best friends I have. A few of you with elephant-like memories may remember a column I wrote about him one summer from Alaska.
His name is Johnnie Palm. He has lived in Alaska for 45 years. For most of that time he has carried the mails – by dog team, by nurse sled, on snowshoes, on skis, and by truck. He has lived the toughest, hardest life of anyone in my acquaintance.
Yet today he is so tiny, and so timid and so courteous, and the dresses so meticulously and conducts himself so quietly, that you’d never know he’d ever seen a malamute dog in his life. He is 76.
During most of his years in Alaska he seldom came “outside,” as Alaskans say of coming to the U.S. But three or four years ago he came out to get a set of teeth, and he liked it so well he’s been coming out every winter since.
He and Mrs. Palm are spending the winter at a hotel in Seattle. I ran onto them there, and coaxed Johnnie into riding down with me. He came to Portland by bus, and we started out.
Johnnie is the perfect traveling companion. He talks just enough to break the monotony, but doesn’t keep you talking. He enjoys a moderate speed, as I do. He likes to stop early, as I do. And in two and a half days he can remember an awful lot of good Alaskan stories to tell.
At 76, his health is perfect
Johnnie was up every morning at 5. He’d just sit around in the hotel lobby waiting till I showed up around 7 (which practically killed me). In those two hours he had found out from the night clerk, in his quiet way, everything about the town.
We had a lot of fun. One morning Johnnie was in such a hurry to get down to the lobby to sit that he shaved only one side of his face.
Johnnie is really a phenomenon. Although he is 76, he doesn’t look or act much older than I do. His health is perfect. He has no aches nor pains. He doesn’t wear glasses. He is young in mind and big in soul.
Like most Alaskans, Johnnie was practically raised on the bottle – the whisky bottle, I mean. In all those years behind the dog teams he never went on trail without a quart of whisky on his sled. A quart a day, that’s what he used. Of course he can’t go that strong nowadays, but. as he says, he sure keeps trying.
Seattle is filled with Alaskans down for the winter. Hundreds of oldtime sourdoughs, just loafing the winter away. They have nothing to do all day but slap each other on the back and have a drink for old times’ sake.
And since Johnnie knows everybody in Alaska, that makes it tough. Mrs. Palm laughs and says, “It’s just ‘Johnnie, here have a drink,’ ‘Johnnie, come have a drink,’ from morning till night.” Johnnie just grins when she tells about it.
Johnnie’s home in Fairbanks is rented out for the winter. He was already in the States when Pearl Harbor happened, and he’s been fretting ever since about getting back to see about his business.
Planes substitute for dogs
He runs a small trucking line, and holds several mail contracts. Things are pretty modem now in Alaska. Hardly anybody ever takes a long winter trip by dog team any more. They go by airplane. Most of the winter mail is now carried by air.
Johnnie made his last winter mail trip six years ago – and he was 70 then. It was a run of 180 miles, and his schedule was six days – 30 miles a day.
Johnnie has had a lot of close shaves in his 45 years in the Arctic, but he had his closest one that winter. He was breaking trail and somehow he got himself caught. He worked all day through the snow; finally was so weak he could barely keep going; when at last he reached a trailside cabin they said he could not have lasted another 15 minutes. As it was his hands were frozen and he lost his finger nails. But his hands are all right now.
Johnnie doesn’t like to travel away from the West Coast, because he considers himself so “green” in city ways. He eats nothing but meat and potatoes.
Ordinarily you would visualize an old sourdough who ran behind dog teams for 30 years, who drank a quart of whisky a day, who at 76 can still do a day’s work and drink a day’s share, as a pretty hard egg.
If there has ever been a kinder, nicer-minded man than Johnnie Palm, I have never met him. I admire him so much that I almost have a notion to get me a team of huskies and a quart of whisky for developing my own character. (Note to belligerent readers: Now, don’t write me dirty letters about that. You know I’m joking. Why, what would I do with a team of huskies?)
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
CHICAGO – Edmund Scott, a reporter for PM, the strange journalistic whatizzit, which Marshall Field runs in New York, has written a shocking account of conditions aboard the Normandie and along the New York waterfront, generally, under the domination of the Longshoremen’s Union of the A. F. of L., which is an unconscionable racket with a long underworld history.
For authentic background on this union read “Dock-Walloper,” the memoirs of Dick Butler, an old underworld character, who formerly was an official of the racket along the Chelsea piers and as a side job delivered Harry Thaw from Matteawan, a historic jailbreak. It was ghosted by Joseph Driscoll, I believe, and not only reads well but checks well against the known facts of life on the West Side waterfront.
Scott recently was assigned to obtain work as a longie aboard the Normandie. He joined the union at a cost of $26, marked down from the standard price of $100, without the slightest inquiry and was put to work on the Normandie notwithstanding his own intimation to the business agent of the longshoremen that he had been “in trouble” and might be using a false name.
Anti-sabotage head scoffs at news
Incidentally, the percentage of criminals working along the North River docks is high. Common alley criminals, of course, may be loyal Americans but the disposition to permit men to change identity and ask no questions obviously opens the door to the enemy agents.
Scott was picked for the Normandie job by the union and when he had written his story his editors spiked it because, they report, it was “a blueprint for sabotage.” However, PM says the gist of the piece was communicated to Capt. Charles H. Zeerfoss, the chief of the anti-sabotage division of the Maritime Commission, and that Zeerfoss scoffed and warned the paper to get Scott out of there “before he gets shot.”
Scott reported loafing by the men and himself, stalled a total of one and one-half hours in one day, locking himself in staterooms aboard the liner to smoke. He saw 20 open barrels of excelsior into which a saboteur could have tossed a match and learned that there were no precautions against sabotage by fire through any of the simple chemical devices which the Germans used freely to ignite cargoes in the last war.
The character of the Longshoremen’s Union cannot be unknown to the FBI. Or any other government agency. It is a job monopoly extending to the vital shores of Staten Island and Jersey where racketeers rule with despotic power and prey on the men not only for fees and dues but for various shakedowns.
Several weeks ago, these dispatches described the racket in general terms and a copious file of squeals and leads, including a copy of a report by a policeman who got nowhere against the political power of the criminals, was submitted to our desk. However, our best digger was otherwise engaged so along comes Scott to tilt the lid.
Fees comparable to exclusive clubs
I am rather glad PM did it because when I explode such stories they are instantly denounced as “labor baiting” by such journals which have played up to these rackets along with Mayor LaGuardia whose sympathy generally runs with pickets and unioneers and against his own cops whose loss of morale is largely attributable to that.
The Longshoreman’s Union not only certifies the longies but actually qualifies the guards who are supposed to protect property on the piers and its fees for various classifications are comparable to those of some of the most exclusive clubs in the country.
This union was responsible for the rise of Harry Bridges because its acquiescence in the pitiless robbery and exploitation of the workers put them in a mood to adopt any leader who would pretend to be their friend even though he should exploit them, himself, in the interests of the Communist conspiracy. Bridges is the only alternative they know now although one small Catholic labor school is making a little progress along the docks as a middle choice between the most vicious corruption so common to the complacent AFL and the Soviet way.
The attention of Sen. Wagner and Mrs. Roosevelt is invited to the story of Edmund Scott in last Tuesday’s issue of PM which certainly will not be accused of union-booting, having started life with a large Communist cell on the editorial side and buttered the union fakers consistently down to now.
Clapper: Just hold on!
By Raymond Clapper
WASHINGTON – This frantic scramble to find scapegoats upon whom to blame our wave of disasters probably is inspired more by panic than by common sense.
There is reason for alarm. But we are likely to do better for ourselves by trying to find out what needs to be done than by wasting too much energy in chasing scapegoats.
I find myself fixing on two points.
First, the United Nations simply will have to arm themselves more strongly before we can hope to stand up to the enemy at every point. There has been blundering, but if no one had blundered at all during the last year we still would have had hard going. Japan might not have had it so easy if Pearl Harbor had not been so disastrous to us. Still, even when we had our whole Navy in operating condition, our military people were begging for more time because they did not feel strong enough to go to war against Japan.
Future of war to be decided here
Our side is short of planes, tanks, navy, shipping and all the accessories. We cannot have enough force on hand standing ready at every point at which the enemy might attack. Until our Navy has recovered its strength we cannot hope to take the offensive, because in the fighting off our own shores shipping and a Navy that can protect it are necessary. You can’t get fighter planes across the ocean without ships.
American production and training of American manpower, both military and industrial, are necessary before the balance can be turned. If not another single blunder is made, the United Nations cannot go definitely on the offensive until American force comes more fully into play. So the future of the war is to be decided here in this country, in the factories and the training camps.
Second, the United Nations are indispensable to each other. We cannot win without the help of the British, the Russians and perhaps the Chinese. They cannot win without our help. The Dutch may be knocked out as a factor. The others must stick it out together, or each will risk defeat separately. If they were knocked out one by one, it would be a question how long we could keep the war out of this country.
At Singapore, Japan is 3000 miles from home. It is another thousand miles on to Java, where Japan is aiming now. San Francisco is 4500 miles from Japan. The Atlantic is 3000 miles across, and less than 2000 in the South Atlantic jump from Africa to Brazil. Great distances can be overcome if you control the sea and the air, as is being demonstrated against us with savage definiteness now.
Everybody must hold to the limit
Japan controls now the whole other side of the Pacific. Only Hawaii remains as a cushion. In the Atlantic we still have Britain as an outpost. Last week the Germans shook that outpost by running their fleet through the Channel. If they add the French fleet to their own strength now about to be released for action on the Atlantic, we may expect to be hard pressed to hold open the North Atlantic. The Germans have cut through it with submarines. They are working up and down our coasts and have now shelled the vital oil refinery on the Dutch island of Aruba, inside the Caribbean ring which guards Panama.
If the British are having their Pearl Harbors, we have to remember that we need the help of every nation that will stay in the war. No matter how far the British are pushed back, whatever is left is that much help. Whatever is left of the Russians and the Chinese is a help. Resistance at any point, even the feeblest, helps to give us time.
We have to get some planes and some navy and some ships built. Germany and Japan are in a desperate race to knock out the other United Nations before we have time to produce. Before the fires died down in Singapore, the Japanese had taken the chief Sumatra oil center. They are heading for Java. Germany is preparing to resume the offensive in Russia and on the Atlantic. Everybody has to hold as much as possible while we get up speed.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (February 18, 1942)
Ickes maps gas rationing
Eastern plants to be asked to use coal
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Wild talk irks Roosevelt
Roosevelt denounces war rumor mongers
Stresses evil results of fake yarns; admits peril even to interior areas
By W. H. Mylander, Post-Gazette staff writer
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Japs bomb refugees in Bataan camp
23 Filipino women and children die; fighting increases
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