America at war! (1941– ) (Part 1)

NormanStewart · December 23, 2020, 12:27pm

Editorial: A plea for intolerance

The Rev. Francis X. Talbot, editor of the Jesuit weekly, America, gave intolerance a sound verbal lashing recently when he spoke before an audience commemorating the Bill of Rights Day in New York City. But Father Talbot was only assailing the false notion of tolerance as an adequate replication to oppression and aggression. He found the word “ambiguous and rather obnoxious… a kind of Santa Claus word in which whiskers are hiding reality.”

The point is timely and interesting because until recently many people have prided themselves on their “tolerance,” a passive attitude at best, in the face of evil forces. As the Jesuit speaker observed, it is impossible for Americans to be tolerant of the Japanese who plotted the treacherous Pacific attack; of Hitlerism and its plan to enslave the non-Germanic world.

No tolerance as a loosely-used word has lost its function in our speech and thought. When people adopt it as a protective label for their fear or apathy, they end by being tolerant of utter intolerance, by surrendering all initiative to defend that which they hold dear because secretly they are uncertain of its worth. They have lost the standards which create values in their lives.

“Tolerance” as a prime characteristic of the French people in the months before the republic fell. “Ah,” they would say, “Hitler – he is a barbarian. What else can one expect from such a man”? We French are tolerant of the Nazis because they are beneath ys.” Tolerance had accustomed them to shrug off the fate of the Poles, the Czechoslovaks, and the Jews, as no concern of theirs. It was a mask for spiritual impotence and inertia.

The same condition was noticeable in Americans at late as two weeks ago. Many of them inhabited a sort of mental bomb shelter where uncertainty was concealed under pat slogans of “This isn’t our war” and “Hitler may be wrong in some respects but what about the Versailles Treaty?”

They were not consciously justifying the crimes of Nazism. Rather, they felt a satisfied glow that they of all peoples on this planet could afford to be tolerant and see both sides of the question. But when you see both sides and one is hideously ugly you reject it. That is what happened in the hours and days after Japan’s attack. People became intolerant of treachery, aggression, brutal murder. They broke the shell of their delusions and concentrated their vision on the one side, the evil side, to eradicate it.

Editorial: War with Albania

This country took the declarations of war by Germany and Italy without batting an eyelash. How will it take the news that Albania has now declared war on the United States? Probably it would require a great poet – or else a new word in the dictionary – to do justice to such a degree of indifference.

But Albania is not to blame. Hers is an old story by now – Roumania, Hungary, Finland, Bulgaria, all jerk paralytically when their Hitler-appointed rulers pull the strings. Their people are gagged, unable to participate in these arbitrary acts which rope them to the creaking chariot of the New Order.

It behooves the Allies, then, to do what these peoples cannot do – denounce such war declarations as farcical and forgive the nations while working for a day of reckoning with their Quislings and Nazi rulers. For no loathing Americans feel toward Hitler can equal that felt by the people who have been engulfed by his war machine and forced to exist on a starvation level while their lands are despoiled.

These conquered populations know humiliation, hardship, and death. Their real declaration of war – on Nazism – burns in the heart of every peasant victimized by the impotent role of small nations in a struggle of giants, Albania’s immediate conqueror is Italy, and there is an added irony, for the sentiments of the common Italian must be one with his theoretical victim. All are Allies, in the community of spirit imposed by war, because all hate Hitler.

Editorial: Christmas cards again

Christmas cards, unaffected in this country by the war, are going strong as in peacetime years. The genial custom of filling your friends’ and acquaintances’ mail boxes with Yuletide greetings is not one to be surrendered lightly. It provides a handy index of who remembered and who forgot – past associates to be dropped as “inactive,” new names to be added to the list.

It was an English artist, J. C. Horsley, who designed the first bona fide Christmas card 96 years ago. In the Victorian era, salutations of the season were elaborate creations, with fancy given a free rein and elves, fairies, flowers, children, and household pets making the average card a rococo but satisfying expression of sentiment. Who doesn’t recall those elegant greetings today with nostalgia?

The modern Christmas card is apt to be as impish as it is imaginative. The same old sentiments are there, of course – what would the season be without them? – but the verses often are terse or slyly humorous. In becoming the products of a sizeable industry Christmas cards have, in a degree, ceased to reflect individual feeling and personalized handicraft. Some are tiny, offering civil best wishes of the season; others are valentine-like in their multicolored frills and gold-dusted reindeer. Occasionally too one receives the super-special kind, weighted down with ingenious little ornaments and saying Merry Xmas (when it should say Christmas) in a whole canto of jingles – the straw that broke the postman’s back.

EXECUTIVE ORDER 8987
Establishing Honolulu Defensive Sea Area

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
December 20, 1941

By virtue of the authority vested in me by section 44 of the Criminal Code as amended (U.S.C. Title 18, Sec. 96), the following-described area is hereby established and reserved, for purposes of national defense, as a naval defensive sea area, to be known as “Honolulu Defensive Sea Area”:

All United States territorial waters of Honolulu Harbor, Oahu, Territory of Hawaii’ its approaches and tributaries from the contour line of extreme high water as shown on the latest U.S.C. and G.S. charts to:

A line running south true from the shore at Koko Head, Oahu, along the meridian of Longitude 157 °42’ West, to the seaward limit of United States territorial waters;

A line running south true from Ahua Point Lighthouse to the seaward limit of United States territorial waters; and,

A line running along the seaward limit of United States territorial waters between the above-described bearing lines.

A vessel not proceeding under United States Naval or other United States authorized supervision shall not enter or navigate the waters of the Honolulu Defensive Sea Area except during daylight, when good visibility conditions prevail, and then only after specific permission has been obtained. Advance arrangements for entry into or navigation through or within the Honolulu Defensive Sea Area must be made, preferably at a United States Naval District Headquarters in advance of sailing, or by radio or visual communication on approaching the seaward limit of the area. If radio telegraph is used, the call “NQO” shall be made on a frequency of 500 kcs, and permission to enter the port shall be requested. The name of the vessel, purpose of entry, and name of the master must be given in the request. If visual communications are used, the procedure shall be essentially the same.

A vessel entering or navigating the waters of the Honolulu Defensive Sea Area does so at its own risk.

Even though permission has been obtained, it is incumbent upon a vessel entering the Honolulu Defensive Sea Area to obey any further instructions received from the United States Navy, or other United States authority.

A vessel may expect supervision of its movements within the Honolulu Defensive Sea Area, either through surface craft or aircraft. Such controlling surface craft or aircraft will be identified by a prominent display of the Union Jack. The loading or unloading by vessels of oil fuel or other inflammable or explosive materials shall be under the control of the local Naval authority, who shall require such loading or unloading to be accomplished in such manner and at such times as will safeguard the other activities within the Honolulu Defensive Sea Area essential to the national defense.

These regulations are subject to amplification by the local United States Naval authority as necessary to meet local circumstances and conditions.

When a United States Maritime Control Area is established adjacent to or abutting upon the above-established defensive sea area, it shall be assumed that permission to enter, and other instructions issued by proper authority, shall apply to any one continuous passage through or within both areas.

Any master of a vessel or other person within the Honolulu Defensive Sea Area who disregards these regulations, or fails to obey an order of United States Naval authority to stop or heave to, or performs any act threatening the efficiency of mines or other defenses or the safety of navigation, or takes any action inimical to the interests of the United States, may be detained therein by force of arms and shall be liable to attack by United States armed forces, and liable to prosecution as provided for in section 44 of the Criminal Code as amended (U.S.C., title 18, sec. 96).

All United States Government authorities shall place at the disposal of the Naval authorities their facilities for aiding in the enforcement of these regulations. The Governor of the Territory of Hawaii, the local municipal authorities, and the local civilian defense agencies are called upon to render the local Naval authorities all possible assistance in the enforcement of these regulations.

This order shall not be construed as modifying in any way the proclamation of the Governor of the Territory of Hawaii placing the Territory of Hawaii under martial law.

The Secretary of the Navy is charged with the publication and enforcement of these regulations.

FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT
THE WHITE HOUSE,
December 20, 1941.

NormanStewart · December 24, 2020, 2:30am

Völkischer Beobachter (December 21, 1941)

Hongkong in japanischer Hand:
Erfolgreiche Landung auf Mindanao

Eigener Bericht des „Völkischer Beobachters“

Weltbild Gliese

vb. Wien, 20. Dezember
Nachdem die Japaner am Freitagabend den Fall des Chinabollwerks Hongkong durch die Einnahme von Stadt und Hafen Victoria melden konnten, berichteten die Armee- und die Marineabteilung des Kaiserlichen Hauptquartiers am Samstag um 17,30 Uhr (10‚30 Uhr deutscher Zeit), daß Einheiten der japanischen Armee und Marine bei Tagesanbruch auf Mindanao, der zweitgrößten Insel der Philippinen, landeten, nachdem der Widerstand der USA-Streitkräfte gebrochen war. Das Kaiserliche Hauptquartier macht keine näheren Angaben, wo die Landungsoperationen erfolgten, fügt aber hinzu, daß auch auf Mindanao die Lage sich rasch zugunsten der Japaner entwickle.

Bereits am Freitag meldete das USA-Kriegsministerium in Washington, daß die Japaner neue große Landungen auf den Philippinen vorgenommen hätten. Um welche der Philippineninseln es sich dabei handelt, geht aus der amerikanischen Meldung nicht hervor. Sie spricht ferner von schweren Luftangriffen auf die Hauptstadt Manila und auf die Hafenstadt Ilo-Ilo auf Panay.

Der Rest der USA-Luftflotte

Die Marineabteilung des Kaiserlichen Hauptquartiers gab weiter bekannt, daß bei einem Angriff von Jägern der japanischen Marineluftwaffe gegen die feindlichen Luftstützpunkte Nicholsfield‚ Camp Murphy und Saburan auf den Philippinen am 19. Dezember sechs große feindliche Flugzeuge abgeschossen fünf weitere durch MG-Feuer in Brand gesetzt und acht auf der Startbahn stehende schwere Bombenflugzeuge am Boden zerstört wurden.

Außerdem wird gemeldet, daß bei dem Luftangriff am 18. Dezember auf einen feindlichen Stützpunkt auf der Panayineel, in der Mitte der Philippinen gelegen, zwei große Flugzeuge vernichtet, Flugzeughallen in die Luft gesprengt und ein Öllager in Brand gesetzt wurden. Ein feindliches Flugboot wurde abgeschossen und ein Schiff schwer beschädigt.

Der Fall Hongkongs

Der japanische Sturmangriff auf die Insel Hongkong und auf die Hauptstadt Victoria begann nach zwölfstündiger Artillerievorbereitung. Die Streitkräfte lagen währenddessen in der Umgebung des Flugplatzes Haital, der Zementfabrik in Kaulun und am Ufer von Kaulun in Bereitschaft, um sich von dort aus im gegebenen Augenblick überraschend auf die gegenüberliegende Insel zu stürzen. Die ersten Abteilungen gingen im Schutze der Dunkelheit und unter dem Feuerwechsel beider Seiten in die Boote. Sie steuerten drei verschiedene Punkte im Nordosten der Insel Hongkong an und hielten sich dabei im Schatten des Jardinehügels, um sich nicht dem Widerschein der Brände auf der Insel auszusetzen.

Schnell war der Wasserarm zwischen Hongkong und Kaulun überquert und das Ufer der Insel erreicht, wo sie unbemerkt vom Feind vor den britischen Befestigungen und Schützengräben landeten. Als die englischen Truppen die Angreifer endlich bemerkten, war es zu spät, denn schon gingen die Japaner mit aufgepflanztem Bajonett zum Sturmangriff über und besetzten im Nahkampf Mann gegen Mann nacheinander die feindlichen Stellungen. Nachdem sie eine beherrschende Bunkerstellung eingenommen hatten, gaben sie den in Kaulun zurückgelassenen Reserven durch ein großes Feuer das Signal für weitere Landungen. In kürzester Zeit trafen die Verstärkungen ein, die den japanischen Angriff nun gemeinsam mit den ersten Landungstruppen mit größter Wucht weiter auf die Insel vortrugen.

Stadt und Hafen gefallen

Nach zweistündigem Kampf bemächtigten sich die japanischen Truppen um Mitternacht des Jardine-Hill, der eine Höhe von 470 Meter hat. Die Haupteinheiten der japanischen Armee landeten am 19. Dezember um 7,30 Uhr und setzten zum erfolgreichen Angriff auf. die Forts und Batterien der britischen Seefestung von allen Seiten an. Schon nach kurzer Zeit fiel der größte Teil der Inseln und bald darauf auch Stadt und Hafen.

Auf den Verlust Hongkongs hat die Londoner „Times“ bereits am Freitagmorgen, als ihr kaum die Landung der japanischen Truppen auf der Insel Hongkong selbst bekannt war, die erst in der Nacht zum Freitag erfolgte, schonend vorbereitet:

„Der Verlust der Insel nach so kurzem, wenn auch tapferem Widerstand, muß notgedrungen erweise der nur zu berechtigten Forderung der Dominions, daß man ihnen einen angemesseneren Anteil an der Bestimmung der Politik und der strategischen Maßnahmen gibt, vor allem in jenen Teilen der Welt, in denen ihre lebenswichtigen Interessen auf dem Spiel stehen oder wo ihre Truppen am Kampf beteiligt sind, frischen Nachdruck verleihen.“ Damit wickelt das Blatt der City den schweren britischen Verlust, den es ankündigt, in einen Phrasenschwall von Vorschlägen ein, wie die Dominions noch intensiver vor den englischen Karren gespannt werden können.

Es versucht, der Kritik des mit verlogenen Meldungen über die Stärke Englands überschwemmten englischen Volkes vorzubeugen mit der Bemerkung, daß „dies nicht der Augenblick ist, eine Untersuchung über die Gründe des Verlustes der Insel anzustellen, da man so wenig über die tatsächlichen Kampfbedingungen weiß“. Die „Times“ deutet an, was der Fall Hongkongs für die Weiterführung der japanischen Operationen bedeutet: „Der Verlust Hongkongs muß die Stärke der japanischen Streitkräfte in anderen Kampfzonen, wie zum Beispiel Malaien, die Philippinen, die Burmastraße, Burma selbst und Niederländisch-Indien erhöhen.

Der Verlust Penangs ist, wenn er auch nicht so schlimm wie der von Hongkong ist, dennoch ernst genug. Er bietet den Japanern einen Stützpunkt am Indischen Ozean und vermehrt die Gefahr für Singapur. Man muß auch weiterhin ernste Befürchtungen über die gesamte Lage im Fernen Osten hegen, bis dieser Welle der japanischen Erfolge endgültig Einhalt geboten werden kann.“

Penang nicht mehr wichtig

Wie wir bereits in einem Teil der Auflage berichteten, ist Duff Cooper aus der Versenkung hervorgeholt und zum Minister für ostasiatische Angelegenheiten ernannt worden, was zweifellos eine nicht gerade sehr dankbare Aufgabe sein dürfte. Er trat sein Amt in Singapur, seinem, wie es so schön heißt, „ständigen“ Amtssitz — über dessen Dauer nicht die Briten, sondern die Japaner entscheiden werden — an, mit der Erklärung, daß die britischen Streitkräfte im Nordwesten Malayas den Rückzug angetreten und Penang geräumt hätten. Nach altem britischem Muster ist Penang jetzt auf einmal nach Ansicht des Reuter-Büros nicht mehr wichtig. „Infolge neuer Aufstellung der britischen Front südlich des Flusses Krian hat die militärische Bedeutung der Insel Penang abgenommen. Alle Streitkräfte sind mit ihrer Ausrüstung nun erfolgreich von der Insel zurückgezogen worden.“ Zwischen der „Times“ und dem Reuter-Sachverständigen müssen aber erhebliche Meinungsverschiedenheiten bestehen.

Der Grund für diese Reuter-Meldung ist aus dem Bericht der Domei Agentur zu entnehmen, in dem es heißt, daß die japanischen Streitkräfte, die am nordwestlichen Strand von Malaya operieren, sich nach Durchquerung des der Insel Penang gegenüberliegenden Ufers weiter nach Süden bewegen.

Riesige Beute in Kaulun

dnb. Tokio, 20. Dezember
Der Korrespondent der „Nitschi Nitschi Schimbun“ berichtet aus Kaulun: Große Mengen Kriegsmaterial, darunter 22 riesige Ölbehälter sowie viele Tonnen Waren, die in den Lagern von Kaulun noch aufgestapelt waren, fielen in die Hände der Japaner, als der Hafen erobert wurde.

Bei den Öltanks handelt es sich um acht unterirdische Ölbehälter der Texao-Ölgesellschaft und um vierzehn Benzintanks der Standard Oil Company. Mehr als 5000 Lastkraftwagen, Personenwagen und Lazarettwagen wurden in den Straßen der Stadt zurückgelassen. Wie der Korrespondent schreibt, sind große Vorratslager mit Reis, Mehl, Salz, Wollwaren, Medikamenten usw. in die Hände der Japaner gefallen. Ebenso gelangten auch der bekannte Chiteh-Flugplatz sowie die Frampao-Werft am äußersten Ende der Halbinsel von Kaulun unbeschädigt in den Besitz der Japaner.

„VB.“-Karte vom Pazifik-Kriegsschauplatz

pazifik.gleise.dec20.vb1674×1155 356 KB

Die Judengefahr in USA

Eine warnende Stimme aus dem Grabe an Roosevelt

Vor 150 Jahren, als Benjamin Franklin lebte, auf den die Amerikaner immer stolz gewesen sind, da war es noch nicht so schlimm bestellt um die jüdische Pest in Amerika, das sich unter dem großen Washington anschickte, die britischen Fesseln abzustreifen, wobei übrigens deutsche Männer vom Range eines Steuben tatkräftige Hilfe geleistet haben. Der kluge, weitblickende Franklin, Schriftsteller und Staatsmann von hohen Graden, hatte Gelegenheit, auf seinen diplomatischen Posten in London und Paris das Spiel hinter den Kulissen mit wachen Sinnen zu beobachten und die Ränke und Schliche kennenzulernen, die in den Hochburgen des Freimaurertums an der Themse und Seine unter Assistenz hochmögender Finanzjuden und Presselords gepflegt und mit dem Schleier geheimnisvoller Zeremonien und Symbole überdeckt wurden.

Benjamin Franklin muß sie gründlich gekannt haben, die Blutsauger der Wirtschaft, des Handels, der Länder und Völker. Das Urteil dieses lauteren, unbestechlichen Amerikaners fällt schwer in die Waagschale zuungunsten der heutigen amerikanischen „Staatsmänner“ vom Range eines Roosevelt und seiner Schleppenträger. Durch das Urteil des großen Franklin schwingt der gewaltige Ton einer Prophezeiung, die nicht beachtet wurde und unter dem kleinen, krankhaft-ehrgeizigen Franklin Delano der Erfüllung entgegenstellt. Benjamin Franklin forderte kurz vor seinem Tode im Jahre 1789, daß die neue amerikanische Bundesrepublik die Juden durch Verfassungsgesetze ein für allemal aus dem Lande ausschließen solle. Er erklärte damals vor dem amerikanischen Kongreß:

„Es gibt große Gefahren für die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika. Aber die größte Gefahr sind die Juden. In welchem Lande sich die Juden auch in größerer Anzahl niedergelassen haben, sie haben überall das moralische Niveau herabgedrückt, sie haben die Redlichkeit im Handel geschmälert und dem verheerenden, volksschädigenden Egoismus gehuldigt. Sie haben sich abgesondert und dem Ganzen nicht angeglichen. Wo man sich ihnen aber widersetzte, da versuchten sie das Land finanziell abzuwürgen, wie im Falle Portugal und Spanien. Mehr als 1700 Jahre haben die Juden über ihr Schicksal der Heimatlosigkeit Wehklagen erhoben, hätte aber die zivilisierte Welt ihnen Palästina als Eigentum anvertraut, so würden sie sofort einen zwingenden Grund gefunden haben, nicht dorthin zurückzukehren.

Und warum? Weil sie Vampire sind, und Vampire leben nicht von Vampiren. Sie können und wollen nicht unter sich selbst leben. Sie müssen von Christen oder anderen Völkern leben, die nicht ihrer Rasse angehören. Wenn man sie nicht durch Gesetze aus den Vereinigten Staaten ausschließt, werden sie in weniger als 200 Jahren mit solchen Massen in unser Land hineingeströmt sein, daß sie uns völlig beherrschen, aussaugen und auffressen. Sie sind wie die Sintflut. Ich warne die Männer dieses Kongresses, denn wenn wir die Juden nicht ausschließen, werden noch nicht 200 Jahre vergangen sein, daß unsere Nachkommen auf den Feldern mühselig arbeiten, um die fremdstämmigen Juden zu ernähren und zu erhalten. Sie aber werden in den Kontoren, auf den Banken und Börsen sitzen und sich fröhlich die Hände reiben.“

Das sind die Worte des großen Benjamin Franklin, der ein Freund George Washingtons war und dem das Wohl seines Volkes über alles ging. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, dessen Vorfahren als „Rossacampos“ in den ältesten spanischen Ghettos zu suchen sind, um später — nach den Feststellungen amerikanischer Forscher — als „Roosenvelds“ oder „Rosenfelds“ in Holland und Deutschland aufzutauchen, der geistesschwache USA-Präsident mit dem Vornamen Franklin wird sich hüten, auf die warnende Stimme aus dem Grabe zu horchen, denn die nasalen Laute seiner Juden klingen ihm lieblicher ins Ohr, und sein eigenes Wohl ist ihm und seiner geifernden Gattin viel wichtiger als das der Millionen von Amerikanern, die Benjamin Franklin vor 150 Jahren vor dem Unglück bewahren wollte.

K. Langenbach

NormanStewart · December 24, 2020, 3:54am

Führer-Hauptquartier (December 21, 1941)

Wehrmachtbericht

Die Kämpfe im mittleren Abschnitt der Ostfront halten mit unverminderter Härte an. Mehrere starke Angriffe des Gegners wurden abgeschlagen. Im Abschnitt eines Armeekorps wurden hierbei 20 sowjetische Panzer Vernichtet. Auch an der Einschließungsfront von Leningrad wurden heftige, von Panzern unterstützte Ausbruchsversuche unter erheblichen Verlusten für den Gegner abgewiesen. Hierbei wurden 19 feindliche Panzer abgeschossen.

Die Luftwaffe bekämpfte mit starker Wirkung feindliche Truppen- und Fahrzeugkolonnen, Panzeransammlungen, Batterie- und Bunkerstellungen. Im nördlichen und im finnischen Abschnitt der Ostfront wurden Transportbewegungen des Feindes durch Vernichtung von Nachschubmaterial, Eisenbahnzügen und Gleisanlagen erfolgreich gestört.

An der englischen Ostküste erzielte die Luftwaffe in der letzten Nacht Bombenvolltreffer in einem-großen Industriewerk. Aufklärungsflugzeuge beschädigten im Seegebiet um England zwei feindliche Schiffe durch Bombentreffer.

In Nordafrika dauern die Kämpfe unter heldenhaftem Einsatz aller Erd- und Luftstreitkräfte der Verbündeten an. Ein deutscher Kampffliegerverband vernichtete beim Angriff auf einen britischen Flugplatz und auf Fahrzeugansammlungen des Feindes mehrere Flugzeuge und zahlreiche Lastkraftwagen.

In der Zeit vom 13. bis 19. Dezember 1941 verlor die sowjetische Luftwaffe 81 Flugzeuge, davon wurden 45 in Luftkämpfen und 30 durch Flakartillerie abgeschossen, der Rest am Boden zerstört. Während der gleichen Zeit gingen an der Ostfront 18 eigene Flugzeuge verloren.

Comando Supremo (December 21, 1941)

Bollettino n. 567

Il Quartier Generale delle Forze Armate comunica in data 21 dicembre 1941:

Ad ovest di Derna, rioccupata dalle forze nemiche, continua la pressione contro le nostre divisioni.

Intorno a Sollum e a Bardia si sono svolti combattimenti di carattere locale.

Reparti aerei tedeschi hanno attuato, nella notte sul 20, poderose azioni di bombardamento degli obiettivi militari di Tobruk con evidenti effetti; una batteria contraerea è stata distrutta. Altre formazioni germaniche si sono portate, il mattino del 20, sul porto di La Valletta (Malta), bombardandolo efficacemente.

Un nostro ricognitore marittimo, attaccato da tre Spitfire, ne ha abbattuto uno, colpito un secondo ed è rientrato incolume. Due dei velivoli, di cui era stato comunicato il mancato ritorno nel bollettino n. 565, hanno successivamente atterrato, in una nostra base, dopo aver abbattuto due caccia avversari.

Da ulteriori notizie pervenute è confermato l’affondamento dell’incrociatore nemico il cui siluramento nel Mediterraneo orientale, da parte di un nostro sommergibile, venne annunciato nel bollettino numero 561.

U.S. War Department (December 21, 1941)

Communique No. 21

During the past 24 hours, there were enemy air raids over the islands of Luzon, Cebu and Mindanao.

Land fighting continues at Davao on the island of Mindanao. There was increased activity of enemy patrols in northern Luzon. Aggressive attempts at enemy infiltration are being made both in northern and southern Luzon. Indications point to Japanese efforts toward progressive augmentation of forces which have landed in the Philippines.

There is nothing to report from other areas.

U.S. Navy Department (December 21, 1941)

Communique No. 14

ATLANTIC THEATER – There are indications of enemy submarine activity off the East Coast of the United States.

EASTERN PACIFIC – Enemy submarines have been active along the west coast of the United States. The SS AGWIWORLD was shelled by an enemy submarine.

The SS EMIDIO was also shelled and then torpedoed. The crew abandoned ship and took to the lifeboats. Three lifeboats were destroyed by submarine gunfire. Thirty-two survivors have been rescued. There were 54 in the crew.

CENTRAL PACIFIC – Wake Island has sustained two additional attacks by enemy aircraft.

FAR EAST – The enemy made a light air attack on Cavite. Only slight damage resulted.

NormanStewart · December 24, 2020, 5:11am

The Pittsburgh Press (December 21, 1941)

U.S. sinks Jap transport, blasts planes, troops

American fliers win big victory for Chinese; Dutch in action
By Joe Alex Morris, United Press war editor

American fighting men are leading furious assaults against the Japanese in the Far East.

An American submarine sank the second Japanese transport within a week.

American volunteer pilots with the Chinese army shot down four of 10 Japanese bombers near the Burma Road and chased six others away.

American-built planes, flown by Dutch pilots, scored direct hits on three Japanese cruisers and two transports off Borneo Saturday. The Dutch also announced that they had scored a direct hit on another Jap cruiser Friday.

The enemy struck back off the coast of California as submarines, apparently Japanese, attacked two American ships, disabling one with a torpedo.

Presence of enemy submarines off the Atlantic Coast of North America also was revealed by the Navy Department.

Hongkong heroes sparks allies

The heroism of a small British-Canadian-Indian garrison on the Island of Hongkong sparked the Pacific stand against Japan.

The British defenders with no hope of relief, no hope of evacuation, were putting up a last man stand on the mountain peaks of the small island which has amassed uncounted millions in the rich China trade since the British standard first rose over Victoria Peak 100 years ago.

Saturday night the British defenders still held out. They had fallen back, foot by foot up the precipitous peaks that stud Hongkong to their rock-hewn fortresses on the heights. From their fortresses their guns pounded away in ceaseless bombardment at the Japanese below.

Last word from Hongkong came shortly before noon, London Time (6 a.m. Saturday, ET). But the Japanese advices broadcast throughout the day made evident that the battle was not yet ended.

Summary of war fronts

On the chief war fronts this was the situation:

MALAYA: British forces rush defenses in Singapore area for last ditch stand in event Japanese burst the strong defense lines of the northeast and northwest; Japanese admit their advance impeded by heavy rains.

BURMA ROAD: U.S. “volunteer” air corps blasts into action for first time in defense of vital China supply line; shoots down four Japanese bombers and puts six more to rout for first Chinese air victory in two years.

PHILIPPINES: American forces battle stubbornly against major Japanese landing effected at Davao, Southern Mindanao port, in heart of Japanese-settled area; U.S. mines in Paracale area, 125 miles southwest of Manila evacuated and destroyed as precaution against Japanese occupation; another Japanese transport reported sunk.

DUTCH EAST INDIES: Dutch forces, using American Martin bombers, blast two more Japanese cruisers and two transports, one of them believed an airplane transport. Japanese planes sink Russian freighter.

TOKYO: Japanese radio claims report occupation of Penang, successful landing at Davao, new air attacks on U.S. air bases in Philippines; admits British holding out in strong mountain defense positions in Hongkong; reveal important “diplomatic” pronouncement to be made Sunday.

CHINA: Chungking’s armies slash at Japanese rear in Canton-Kowloon area; Japanese launch operations in Shantung Province, apparently against increasing pressure from powerful Chinese forces.

Anti-Axis forces on top

With almost the whole world now a fighting front, it appeared that the anti-Axis forces clearly held the upper hand so far as the total war was considered although they were clearly fighting a defensive battle for the time being in the Pacific.

How long Hongkong can hold out was uncertain. But the British there apparently have determined to sell their lives as dearly as possible and fight to the last man.

The reports of Allied plane and submarine successes against Japanese transports and naval forces in the island-strewn waters of the South Pacific made evident that Japan is paying a heavy price in men and ships in order to maintain her land operations in half a dozen sectors separated by hundreds of miles of water.

Dutch score heavily

Dutch pilots appear to have scored particularly telling blows in their fight against Japanese forces operating in Sarawak, the North Borneo principality where a Japanese landing was made this week.

American land forces in the Philippines appeared to be matching the Japanese on the ground almost blow for blow but it was obvious, due to the thousands of miles of shoreline of the scattered Philippine Islands that they could not expect to prevent Japanese landings at all points.

Use of the word “fighting” in Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s communique on the Davao operations was the first time this word has appeared in a Manila communique. This was taken as an indication that the Japanese are in force at Davao and that the heaviest land engagements of the war may now be in progress.

The British at Singapore were grim and determined. Loss of Penang, the secondary naval base off Northwest Malaya, brought home to Imperial forces the seriousness of their task in defending this keystone of Far Eastern Allied positions.

Expect Singapore assault

The British authorities mobilized all able-bodied man power to stand off an expected “grand assault” on the big Singapore naval base. The Japanese, having occupied Penang Island, pushed southward from the Thailand (Siam) border to the Kriang River area, some 300 miles north of Singapore, where they forced another “slight” withdrawal of British lines. British guerrilla units were reported striking at the enemy’s rear lines in this sector.

Chungking reported that American aviators who volunteered to serve with the Chinese air force shot down four Japanese medium bombers south of Kunming. The Americans flying 31 miles south of Burma Road encountered a flight of 10 Japanese bombers. After four of the Jap planes had been shot down, the rest fled.

There were no American losses.

Only last week Japanese bombers raided Kunming in force. At that time they encountered no opposition.

The exact location of the sinking of the Jap transport by an American submarine was not revealed by the Navy which merely said the action occurred in Far Eastern waters. It was the sixth Jap troopship sunk by U.S. forces since the start of the war with Japan.

Hewlett: Filipinos flood gold mines to keep them from Japs

American field forces attempt to smash major Nipponese landing on Mindanao Island
By Frank Hewlett, United Press staff writer

MANILA, Sunday (UP) – American and Philippines field forces fought back hard today, attempting to smash a major Japanese landing force that has won a foothold at Davao, the Japanese-populated capital of rich Mindanao Island 600 miles south of Manila.

Scant reports from Mindanao indicated that American troops, commanded by Lt. Col. Rogers Hilsman, are still holding Davao, key point on the south coast.

Closer to Manila, on the island of Luzon itself, the rich Paracale goldmining district – 125 miles southeast by air line – was evacuated and the mines which have been producing $1,200,000 gold a month were flooded or blasted with dynamite to prevent their falling into the hands of the Japanese.

Foothold at Legaspi

There was no indication that the Japanese are approaching Paracale but the move was ordered as a precaution. Japanese forces have a foothold at Legaspi, about 100 miles south of Paracale.

Significance was attached here to the use of the word “fighting” by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Far Eastern commander-in-chief, in his communique on the Davao action. It was the first time this word had been employed in a U.S. communique and this was thought to indicate the seriousness of the attempted Japanese operation.

The Japanese blow at Davao followed air attacks in the first hours of the war and stringent military action by U.S. forces to round up dangerous Japanese elements. There are thousands of Japanese colonists in Mindanao and the region has long been regarded as a danger spot in the Philippines because of the high Japanese concentration.

18,000 in detention

Some 18,000 Japanese in Davao Province were rounded up and placed in detention with the outbreak of war.

Japanese planes appeared over the Manila area early Saturday afternoon and the capital, but the U.S. communique said that the raid, directed against Nichols Field, was “light.”

The Japanese planes staved well above the range of U. S. anti-aircraft guns but some puffs of smoke from anti-aircraft shells were noted near them when they crossed over the area of the Cavite Naval Base.

200 civilian casualties

The Manila Bulletin reported that civilian casualties in the Japanese air attack on Iloilo Thursday numbered 200, including numerous dead.

The evacuation of the Paracale gold area was carefully carried out in accordance with advance plans. At the outbreak of the war mining executives were instructed to make all arrangements to abandon their mines. The area is only a few feet above sea level and as soon as the mine pumps stopped the mines were flooded.

Mining executives said that it will require years of work and millions of dollars to put the mines back into production. The region turned out more than one-fourth of Philippines total minerals production.

About 150 American men, women and children were evacuated from the Paracale area. The group made its way here on foot, hitch-hiking and in some instances using carts and wagons.

Large explosive stores

Most mines had large explosives stores. The dynamite was placed in the mines, some being destroyed by flooding and some being touched off to destroy the workings.

President Manuel Quezon made a Philippines-wide radio broadcast directed against Japanese propaganda which seeks to persuade the Filipinos that Japan’s war is against the United States rather than the Philippines.

“Our will to resist the aggression of the enemy is unshakable,” Mr. Quezon said. “We are fully determined to defend this distant outpost of liberty and democracy to the last drop of our blood.”

“I trust that enemy propaganda will not succeed in convincing the American people that because of the advantage gained by the enemy as a result of the suddenness of their initial attack the Philippines are no longer accessible to military forces or supply ships,” he said.

Invaders of Luzon learn what U.S. knew all along

Yankees found out long ago that ‘bolo men’ can fight and this war bears out past history
By Willis Thornton

So here’s to you, Filipino, with your skin of natural tan,
You’re award of Uncle Sam’l, and a first-class fightin’ man,
And here’s to you, Filipino, and we do not mean perhaps,
You’re already shown us what it takes to slap it to the Japs.

— KIPLING JR.

The little, silent, serious men, best known to Americans on Pullman club cars in white coats and blue uniform caps, are doing all right in khaki, too.

That’s no surprise to the American army of nearly 100,000 men who from 1900 to 1902 spent months of the most arduous campaigning to subdue Aguinaldo’s guerrilla forces. The little tan-skinned men whose military equipment was largely restricted to “a shirt-tail and a bolo,” fought desperately against the American Army of Occupation, as they had against that of Spain. Gen. Arthur MacArthur, the father of Lt. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, was only one of many who could testify to the fighting quality of the Filipino. He was with the “Army of Pacification” which finally subdued them.

The Yankee soldiers, plunged into a campaign in pathless tropical jungles, with languages and health problems of which they knew nothing, had to enlist native help. A hundred Macabees, descendants of Aztec Indians brought to the Philippines from Mexico by the Spaniards, were hired as “Quartermaster Scouts.” This force grew, and gradually assumed more and more military characteristics.

Bolo men don uniforms

Tagalogs, Visayas, Ilocanos, Cagayanos, Bicols, Moros and Igorotes were incorporated into the Scouts. As the prestige of the service increased after the final collapse of Philippine resistance in 1902, many of the former Insurrectos joined up, and were received without prejudice.

American uniforms, methods and training gradually replaced the scanty uniforms of the tribesmen; education went with their military training, and the force gradually became an exemplary small army. Gradually members moved up through non-commissioned into commissioned rank, and, though U.S. supervision remained, it became, to all intents and purposes, a Philippine army.

There were about 8,000 Philippine Scouts when the present crisis broke on the world in 1931. Proud of their khaki, neat, eager, agile, strong and healthily acclimated to the tropic service, the Scouts won the praise of officers and observers.

Aided by constabulary

Native officers moved into commissioned positions as high as major, and the whole military force was supplemented by a Philippine Constabulary, a semi-military, “colonial police force,” charged with maintaining police order in the remote and scattered islands.

In 1935, it was decided that the Philippines, if they were ever to have a chance of maintaining their own independence in a troubled world, must have a modern army of their own. Gen. MacArthur was sent out to take charge of building it, under auspices of the new Commonwealth government headed by Manual Quezon. Gen. MacArthur was also charged with developing master plans for defense of the islands.

The plan called for 10 years to develop the new Philippine Army, only half of which time was realized before attack came.

Force of 200,000

Nevertheless, Gen. MacArthur is believed to have at his disposal pretty close to 12 divisions of men in various stages of training and equipment – roughly 125,000. With American reinforcements, Gen. MacArthur may have a force of 200,000 at his disposal to fight off the Japanese invaders. The whole force has been incorporated during the emergency into the United States Army.

The miniature West Point at Baguio has been turning out officers trained by the same methods by the U.S., and not less than 150 skilled pilots have been graduated from the “Philippine Randolph Field.”

Today the Filipino air pilots trained by Kelly and Randolph Field veterans, since the 1935 program, went into effect, are flying wing to wing with the Americans. Several of them are already reported to have shot down Japanese planes. Philippine infantry is fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Americans on the ground, and Filipino sailors jointly man the few coastal vessels of the tiny Philippine Navy. A Filipino-American soldier named Castillo is credited with saving Davao, the Japanese center of the islands, by quick personal action.

Courage already proved

Their courage has already been amply shown, and their loyalty and resentment against invading forces is as keen as it was in the days when U.S. troops were dodging their wicked bolos instead of fighting side by side with them. Most of the Filipino soldiers are Christians, converts of the teachers and missionaries who have so long worked in the islands. Today these years of work are bearing fruit.

Their courage has already won a direct message from the President commending “the magnificent defense against wanton invasion which is being conducted by the government and the people of the Islands.”

Pushing ahead, Tokyo reports

Admit rain slows operation in Malaya

TOKYO, Sunday (UP, Official Tokyo broadcasts) – Japanese Imperial Headquarters reported today that Japanese forces have landed on Mindanao, large southerly Philippines island, and have launched heavy operations in Southern Shantung Province against strong Chinese forces.

Radio Vichy quoted Japanese reports that the Japanese encountered strong resistance from U.S. forces at Davao where the Mindanao landing was effected. Vichy also claimed that two more Japanese air attacks were made on Wake Island this morning.

Imperial Headquarters said that Penang, the strategic island off Northwest Malaya, was occupied by Japanese troops Friday night and that Japanese forces continued to advance southward toward Singapore.

Claim resistance broken

The landing at Mindanao was accomplished at dawn, Imperial Headquarters said, and “enemy resistance was broken.”

The navy spokesman reported that 16 American planes have been shot down or destroyed on the ground in Philippine air operation and that an American ship of unstated size was heavily damaged.

The navy said four Japanese fighters attacked the air base at Belmonte in the Philippines, shooting down six large American planes and setting fire to five others. At Iloilo, two large American planes were said to have been destroyed and several hangars blown up. A seaplane was downed at an unstated location and another seaplane and a U.S. bomber were said to have been brought down Wednesday.

Manila attacked again

Manila was said to have been attacked by air again. A Tokyo army spokesman claimed eight U.S. heavy bombers were destroyed in attacks on Nichols Field, Camp Murphy and Saburen.

Imperial Headquarters said that Japanese troops have launched operations against the 27th Chinese Army, described the strongest military unit in the Chungking forces, in Southern Shantung. It was claimed that 1,300 Chinese were killed.

The report would indicate that Gen. Chiang Kai-Shek’s forces have launched operations against weakened Japanese forces in China. The scene of operations is northwest of Shanghai.

A Domei News Agency report from Yokohama claims that “increasing numbers of British and Americans” in Japan are inquiring concerning the possibility of obtaining Japanese citizenship.

Important statement

It was announced that an “important statement” of diplomatic nature will be made later today.

There was no hint of the nature of this statement in Tokyo reports.

British forces are holding a fortified series of strong defense positions on the mountain peaks of Hong Kong Island and continue to resist Japanese attackers, official dispatches admitted today.

The Japanese reports said that the British garrison withdrew to mountain fortresses after opposing the Japanese landing on Hong Kong Island. The strong fort atop Victoria Peak, it was reported, replied to Japanese batteries on Kowloon Peninsula on the mainland adjacent to Hong Kong. In several parts of Victoria City, it was said, large fires are raging.

U.S. pilots give Chinese first big victory in 2 years

By Francis M. Fisher, United Press staff writer

CHUNGKING (UP) – American airmen blazed into action in defense of the vital Burma Road today and downed four Japanese bombers, giving China her first big air victory in more than two years.

China, striving valiantly to strike a blow against Japan when it would count most heavily in behalf of her British and American allies, sent her forces into the offensive, particularly in the Kowloon-Canton area where operations were pressed in an attempt to relieve the hard-pressed British garrison at Hongkong.

The Burma Road air blow was struck swiftly and by surprise. It was hammered home by the United States “volunteer” air corps, organized in past months to protect the Burma supply line now endangered by Japanese operations in Malaya and Burma.

Champing at the bit

Since start of the Pacific war the 500 U.S. airmen, most of them former pilots in the American Army Air Force, have been champing to put the powerful fleet of attack planes into battle.

Not until today, however, was the order to go into action issued.

The elaborate Chinese air raid in action warning system – which invariably gives word of an attack an hour or

two before the Japanese planes are overhead – flashed a warning that a flight of Japanese bombers was en route for an attack.

The planes, a flight of 10 medium bombers, apparently were headed for Kunming, Chinese terminus of the road which was heavily bombed earlier this week.

They never got there

This time, however, the Japanese planes never reached their goal. When the raiders arrived about 30 miles south of Kunming, the American squadron pounced on them. After a few minutes of blasting combat, four Japanese bombers crashed in flames and the rest turned tail and fled.

There were no American casualties. One United States plane made a forced landing, presumably because of fuel shortage.

While the American planes were on the Burma Road, Chinese forces in the rear of the Japanese at Kowloon drove into the city of Shumchun, just north of Kowloon, the Central News Agency reported.

Reinforcements rushed

The Japanese rushed reinforcements to the spot and the Chinese, carrying out their guerrilla-like tactics, quickly withdrew to the outskirts of the city where fighting was said to be in progress along the important Japanese supply railroad from Kowloon to Canton. Japanese warehouses in Shumchun and the railroad station were burned.

Other Chinese forces were said to have penetrated to within 10 miles of the north gate of Canton.

The Japanese were said to be carrying out only small bombing attacks in China since the start of the Pacific war. A few small bombs were dropped on Loyang two days ago. Chungking has not been attacked for 110 days since this is the foggy season in which Japanese bombers leave the capital alone.

The mayor of Chungking broadcast a message of courage and greeting to Hongkong.

He applauded “the spirit which contemptuously resisted once, twice and three times the enemy’s offer of surrender.”

WAR BULLETINS!

Nazi commander-in-chief reported ousted

NEW YORK, Dec. 20 – Field Marshal Gen. Fedor von Bock and Field Marshal Gen. Walther von Brauchitsch have been relieved of their commands in the German Army, a British broadcast said today. Gen. von Brauchitsch has been the commander-in-chief of the German armies. Gen. von Bock was one of the chief figures in direction of the invasion of Russia.

Nazi engineers reported in Tunisia

NEW YORK, Dec. 20 – The British radio, heard by CBS, today broadcast reports that “a number of German engineers have arrived in the port of Bizerte,” in French Tunisia, some of them transported in Italian submarines.

Break with U.S. urged by Paris papers

NEW YORK, Dec. 20 – Gen. Auguste Nogues, governor-general of Morocco, was en route to Vichy tonight for conferences with government leaders as the German-controlled Paris newspapers again criticized the United States, urging a break in diplomatic relations.

No holiday letdown at Mitchel Field

NEW YORK, Dec. 20 – There will be no letdown in vigilance at Mitchel Field during the holiday season, Brig. Gen. John C. McDonnell, commanding general of the First Interceptor Command, said today. In a memorandum, he said: “Experience in war has taught that advantage is taken of relaxation in vigilance to strike when and where the blow is least expected. Posts will remain constantly on alert, manned with full crews, day and night.”

Won’t quit Timor now, Allies say

LONDON, Dec. 20 – Great Britain and the Netherlands government-in-exile were understood tonight to have advised Portugal that troops occupying the Portuguese island of Timor will be withdrawn if the crisis subsides or if Portugal provides a garrison strong enough to resist any Japanese invasion attempt.

Yugoslav asks aid against ‘murderers’

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 – Yugoslav Minister Constantin Fotitch appealed today to President Roosevelt for aid for his people who, he said, were being persecuted and murdered by Germans and Italians. It was said that the minister presented documentary material, upon instructions for his government, regarding the murders.

British airmen down two raiders

LONDON, Dec. 20 – British naval planes operating from ships provided to defend convoys have shot down two German raiders at sea and severely damaged another, an Admiralty communique said tonight. There were no British casualties in the action, which occurred yesterday when German planes attacked a convoy.

U.S. university in China reported closed

CHUNGKING, Dec. 20 – Chinese educational quarters heard today that the American Yenching University outside Peiping, North China, had been closed and that Dr. J. Leighton Stuart, president of the university, was under Japanese surveillance.

Colombians arrest Nazi newsman

BOGOTA, Colombia. Dec. 20 – Willy Meyer, manager in Colombia of the German Transocean News Agency, was arrested today charged with distributing totalitarian propaganda in violation of a presidential decree restricting activities of aliens.

Vichy plans to stay neutral

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 – The French government has announced its intention of “maintaining an attitude of neutrality in the present conflict,” the State Department said today. It based its announcement on a report from the American ambassador in Vichy, Adm. William D. Leahy.

777 Japs arrested in Cuba

HAVANA, Dec. 20 – The arrest of 777 Japanese was ordered by the government today. They will be placed in an internment camp.

Newspapermen held in Paris hotel

VICHY, Dec. 20 – American newspapermen under arrest in Paris today were reported transferred to a hotel where they are given the freedom of the building but barred from going outside. It was understood they will be repatriated along with those in Germany if an exchange for Axis newspapermen in Allied lands is arranged.

U.S. crew safe after bomb attack

MANILA, Dec. 20 – Thirty officers and members of the crew of a small Philippines inter-island steamer which was bombed and shelled by the Japanese at Aparri arrived here today after a nine-day trip through mountains. The sailors said that during the journey to Baguio, tribesmen in the wild, mountainous country stripped them of most of their food.

Pictures for Tokyo fly ‘round globe

TOKYO, Dec. 20 (Official Domei broadcast) – The first American news photos of the Japanese air attack on Hawaii December 7 arrived here today after almost encircling the globe. The pictures were taken by news cameramen in Honolulu, flown to San Francisco, wirelessed to New York, telephoned to Buenos Aires, and finally reached Tokyo by way of Berlin.

NormanStewart · December 24, 2020, 5:49am

King appointed chief of fleet

New commander succeeded by Ingersoll in Atlantic

Adm. Ernest J. King elevated by President.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – Adm. Ernest J. King late today was appointed commander in chief of the United States Fleet, with “supreme command” over all this nation’s naval forces.

Adm. King’s promotion from commander of the Atlantic Fleet was the latest move in President Roosevelt’s shakeup of the high commands of the nation’s armed forces for all-out war.

Rear Adm. Royal E. Ingersoll succeeds Adm. King as commander of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet.

Adm. King was named commander in chief under provisions of an executive order issued by President Roosevelt Thursday.

The order gives the commander in chief “supreme command of the operating forces comprising the several fleets of the United States Navy and the operating forces of the naval coastal frontier commands,” and makes him “directly responsible” to the president.

The order was interpreted to mean that Adm. King outranks in power and authority Adm. Harold R. Stark, chief of Naval Operations, who has been the No. 1 officer in the Navy.

Adm. King succeeded Adm. Husband E. Kimmel, who was relieved as commander in chief of both the U.S. and Pacific Fleets after Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox reported that naval forces at Pearl Harbor were “not on the alert” December 7 when Japanese bombers began a surprise attack.

Adm. King’s headquarters will be in the Navy Department in Washington, but he will not be a “desk commander.” His duties as commander-in-chief leaves him free to exercise personal command at sea, “as in his judgment circumstances make advisable.”

The four officers commanding U.S. naval forces at sea are now Adm. King, Adm. Ingersoll, Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, new chief of the Pacific Fleet, and Adm. Thomas Hart, commander-in-chief of the Asiatic Fleet.

The executive order defining the authority of the Commander-in-Chief stated that the “duties and responsibilities of the Chief of Naval Operations under the Secretary of the Navy will remain unchanged” and that he “shall continue to be responsible for preparation of war plans from the long-range point of view.”

Won Navy Cross

Adm. King, now 63, served on the cruiser San Francisco in the Spanish-American War. He was assistant chief of staff under Adm. Henry T. Mayo, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Fleet during World War I. He was awarded the Navy Cross for service in the First World War.

Adm. King was commander of the submarine base at New London, Connecticut, in 1925 and was in charge of salvage operations of the submarine S-51, which sank off Block Island.

After qualifying as a naval aviator at Pensacola, Florida, in 1927, he successively became commander of the Scouting Fleet’s aircraft squadrons, assistant chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, commander of the aircraft carrier Lexington and chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics.

Full admiral since February 1

Adm. King was made commander of the patrol forces of the U.S. Fleet December 17, 1940, and last February 1, he was promoted to commander of the Atlantic Fleet with the rank of admiral.

Adm. Ingersoll, 58, has been executive officer of the battleships Connecticut and Arizona, and assistant chief of staff of the Pacific Fleet.

He was named commander of Cruiser Division 6 in 1938, and assistant to the chief of Naval Operations in June, 1940.

‘Dolly’ King, fleet’s new chief, is stern but fair

Commander in chief is known as a triple-threat man; at home on surface, underseas and in air

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – The new commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, Adm. Ernest Joseph King, is one of the few “triple threat” men in the Navy.

He is equally at home on the bridge of a battleship, the controls of a submarine or at the stick of a fighting plane. He is one of the few top-flight naval officers qualified as an airplane pilot.

A stubborn perfectionist, the man who now ranks No. 1 in the Navy’s High Command, graduated from Annapolis the No. 1 man in his class. He is tough; but he is understanding. This brief biographical note of “Dolly” King, as his Annapolis classmates called him, appeared in his class yearbook:

“A man so various as he, seems to be not one, but all mankind’s epitome.”

He’s a ‘sundowner’

Tall, slender, blue-eyed and handsome enough to be designated “Class Beauty No. 2” in his Academy days, Adm. King is one of the strictest disciplinarians in the Navy. He growls at avoidable mistakes; loses all patience with alibis.

He is what old salts in the days of the iron-clad navy called a “sundowner” – one who never relaxes discipline from sundown to sundown.

This is what one officer who served under him has to say about Adm. King:

“Plenty of officers and men may not like Ernie King. But like him or not, he has seldom had a command that wasn’t rated ‘E’ (excellent). He’s just as hard on himself as he is on anyone else.”

Reputation for fairness

But with all his iron-fisted discipline, his unrelenting insistence on meticulousness, Adm. King has the reputation for unfaltering fairness. And even those who find it hard to warm up to “Dolly” King as a personality respect him for that.

Adm. King is one of the few naval officers awarded the Distinguished Service Medal twice. In each case it was for his command of salvage operations, the first time after the submarine S-51 sank off Block Island and the second, after the submarine S-4 plunged to the bottom off Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Ever fearful of becoming an armchair officer, Adm. King sought experience in all branches of naval service.

After commanding destroyers and battleships, he asked for transfer to a submarine division. And at the age of 49, he was permitted as his request to take flying instructions at Pensacola. He came out a qualified combat pilot.

Adm. King is due to retire in November 1942. The chances are that he’ll still be on the bridge when that day passes.

NormanStewart · December 24, 2020, 7:44am

ENEMY SUBS ATTACK AMERICAN SHIPS OFF CALIFORNIA, ALSO PROWL ATLANTIC
Freighter hit, SOS heard on Pacific Coast

Tanker also fired on but escapes damage; Navy issues warning

BULLETIN

SEATTLE, Dec. 20 – Thirteenth Naval District Headquarters tonight had “no comment” on unverified but persistent reports that an American freighter had fled into the mouth of the Columbia River under attack from an enemy submarine. The Navy, it was learned, was attempting to obtain the facts on the reported attack.

Enemy submarines attacked two American ships off the California coast Saturday. Other subs have been lurking off the Atlantic coast.

A tanker and a freighter were attacked off California and the freighter was damaged. Earlier, the Navy commandant at San Francisco said enemy subs are “destroying American shipping” off the West Coast.

The presence of hostile submarines off the Atlantic coast was revealed in a Navy announcement at Washington that a radio weather report had aided the undersea craft.

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 20 (UP) – Enemy submarines, presumably Japanese, attacked two U.S. ships off the California coast today, torpedoing and disabling one of them.

The disabled craft was the freighter Emidio which flashed an SOS call off Cape Mendocino, 200 miles north of San Francisco, saying it had “sustained a torpedo attack by a submarine.”

The Coast Guard reported the Emidio later was sighted proceeding past Table Bluff, nine miles north of Cape Mendocino, riding “low in the water.”

Shortly afterward, the tanker Agwiworld (6771 tons) arrived at Santa Cruz, 75 miles south of San Francisco, with a report that a submarine attacked it with gunfire 20 miles off Cypress Point, Monterey.

The Agwiworld’s crew said the undersea craft was 300 feet long, came to the surface half a mile away and began firing with a five-inch deck gun. The attack was without warning. It started at 2 p.m. (11 a.m. Saturday EST).

The submarines fired eight shots. None hit the tanker.

After the attack, the submersible disappeared beneath the waves.

“If I had had a slingshot,” a crewman said, “I could have hit the damned thing.”

Also off Atlantic coast

The two attacks came after presence of enemy submarines off the Atlantic Coast was disclosed by the Navy Department.

Earlier in the day, Rear Adm. John W. Greenslade, commandant of the 12th Naval District, headquarters San Francisco, had announced “it has been confirmed that there are enemy submarines off the California Coast, destroying American shipping.”

Informed of the attacks, Adm. Greenslade said the Navy would not deny they had occurred. He authorized newspapers to use any information obtained from sources other than the Navy.

Last Wednesday, Maj. Gen. Millard F. Harmon, commander of the Second Air Force Command, headquarters Spokane, disclosed that U.S. planes engaged in sea work reconnaissance had “attacked an enemy submarine.”

Believed near Puget Sound

Gen. Harmon did not disclose location of the attack but it was believed to have been off the entrance of Puget Sound.

The Agwiworld was en route from San Francisco to Los Angeles when it encountered the submarine. Under heavy fire, the tanker turned around and fled full speed toward Santa Cruz, 40 miles to the northeast.

“I would have given anything for a gun,” the tanker’s captain was quoted as saying. “The submarine would have made a good target.”

The tanker’s crew put on their lifebelts during the attack and still were wearing them when their ship reached Santa Cruz. The vessel anchored offshore. Only Coast Guardsmen were allowed aboard.

Freighter’s SOS heard

The Emidio’s SOS was picked up at 3:30 p.m. (1:30 p.m. EST) by the Coast Guard and relayed to the Navy station at Eureka. A Coast Guardsman at Table Bluff, who reported that the freighter was riding low in the water, said he was unable to determine whether it had been struck by the torpedo. Indications, however, were that the craft was disabled.

Lloyd’s Register lists the Emidio as a 6900-ton vessel. The ship is registered out of New York and its owner is listed as the Socony-Vacuum Oil Company. She was built in 1921 by the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation. The tanker Agwiworld, owned by the Richfield Oil Corp., was built in 1921 by the Sun Shipbuilding Company of Chester, Pennsylvania.

The attacks brought shooting warfare closer to the continental coast of the United States than at any time since the declaration of war upon the Axis powers.

The 2140-ton freighter Cynthia Olson was torpedoed and sunk by a submarine 700 miles out of San Francisco within 24 hours after Japan opened hostilities against the United States with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor December 7. No report was ever made whether the ship’s crew was saved or lost.

Statement of admiral

Adm. Greenslade’s statement on the presence of submarines, issued before the attack became known, said:

“It has been confirmed that there are enemy submarines operating off the California Coast, destroying American shipping.

“This shipping will have to be replaced if the United States is to prosecute the war successfully.

“In view of these circumstances, the Navy is gratified by the evidence of patriotism displayed today in refusal of shipyard welders in the bay area to go on strike.

“Reports available at 2 p.m. indicate only a small fraction of the total number of welders left their jobs.

“To my mind, no greater proof could be offered of the basic integrity, patriotism and common sense of American workmen…”

Enemy subs prowl along Atlantic Coast

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – The presence of enemy submarines off the Atlantic coast was disclosed by the Navy today in a statement relating how an American radio weather report inadvertently “aided” the underseas craft in their operations.

The Navy did not specify whether the submarines were detected off the United States or Canadian coast, or whether there had been any action between the enemy and American warcraft.

The weather broadcast had mentioned subfreezing weather in the Dakotas and a temperature reading of nine degrees below zero.

A commanding officer of a U.S. naval base in the Atlantic concluded from the broadcast that within a few days the weather would be clear and visibility high in his area – ideal conditions for submarine activity.

In an official statement, the Navy said: “Special precautions were taken in patrol work on the calculated day, which turned out as predicted, and in the course of operations it became apparent that enemy submarines had also picked up the same information and made the same deduction.”

Most civilians, it was pointed out, would not have considered weather reports from points in the middle of the continent, such as the Dakotas and Minnesota, to be of any value to naval forces in the Atlantic.

The Navy added that this weather broadcast also would “have been of benefit to an enemy air attack along any point of the ‘weather route’ in the North American continent.”

Berlin boasts despite losses

Jap drive offset by defeats in Russia
By David M. Nichol

BERN, Switzerland, Dec. 20 – At the end of this second week since the outbreak of the Pacific war Europe’s war interest returned again today to the savage battles raging on its own continent and the possible repercussions of the Far Eastern fighting on the few remaining neutrals.

Axis-controlled newspapers continue their efforts to make capital of early Japanese successes which have been offset by growing public apprehension about the Russian advances. For example, the Berliner Roersen-Zeitung, often reflecting Foreign Office views, yesterday used the banner headline in large type: “USA Pacific Fleet Destroyed.”

One paragraph for Reds

The only mention of Russia in the entire issue was limited to one paragraph from the previous day’s High Command communique.

Berlin and Rome newspapers plainly indicate the interest with which they are following Portugal’s reaction to the occupation of that country’s East Indies island possession, Timor, by Australian and Dutch forces and the fact that both countries apparently had hoped this occupation would move Portugal away from its strictly-maintained neutrality toward closer cooperation in the “New Europe.”

Official pronouncements are withheld but inspired accounts describe Portugal as a “victim of Anglo-Saxon aggression.”

Die Tat of Zurich quotes Rome circles to the effect that Portugal is facing the necessity of reaching a decision.

Sweden, Turkey watched

Berlin’s National Zeitung reports the new interest of Germany in Sweden and Turkey. Sweden, the account says, recently was “sharply criticized” several times because of Swedish newspaper reports of Russian advances. Similar references to unfriendly Sweden were made by the Wilhelmstrasse spokesman as a result of the activity of the British consul in Stockholm.

Foreign circles, the Berlin newspaper suggests, are following the relationships of Turkey closely after the publication of a long article in the Koelnisch Zeitung (of Cologne) debating whether the terms “neutral” or “non-belligerent” should be applied to that country.

Lend-lease ridiculed

Further evidence of German interest in Turkey is provided by the publication in today’s Das Reich, weekly sponsored by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, of an article entitled: “Turkey’s Neutrality and Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease Gesture.”

Das Reich says that Ankara is convinced that the Lend-Lease Act is “dead” so far as its application to Turkey is concerned as a result of American armaments requirements in the Pacific and declares that lend-lease aid is likely to do more harm than good.

It further suggests that realization of this fact accounts for Turkish “reserve.” It accuses President Roosevelt of using lend-lease aid to undertake disruption of the “friendly relationships” between Germany and Turkey.

People warned

This week has been marked by warnings by both Berlin and Rome to their people that the war will be long and difficult.

Almost parallel with candid German accounts of the difficulties of the Russian campaign, Premier Mussolini in Rome told a delegation of women, on the anniversary of Italy’s Ring Day (when Italian women sacrificed their wedding bands for the war effort) that there was no easy path ahead.

Il Duce said the “weight of suffering” felt throughout Italy, added to the sacrifices required on the home front, is less than those facing Italian forces on the Russian steppes and African deserts.

‘Ups and downs’ stressed

Goebbels’ Das Reich, discussing the “changed world picture,” told the Germans today that they must be prepared for a long, bitter battle and cannot avoid “eternal ups and downs and certain reverses,” but insisted that the “best chances” are still with the Axis.

It admitted the impossibility of “breaking down the colossal extent of the English and American world empires in days, weeks or even months.”

Post-war Japan faces loss of much territory

Manchuria, Korea, Formosa probably will return to China; Nippon to be demilitarized

The map shows territory Japan probably will lost at conclusion of the war.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – A post-war Orient, with Manchuria, Korea and Formosa restored to China and a Japan stripped of her Army and Navy, was envisioned today in unofficial discussions of the probable results of the war in the Pacific.

Also, in event of an Allied victory, it was believed that the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, north of Japan – which Japan acquired by the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the Russo-Japanese War – would go back to Russia. This section is now known to the Japanese as Karafuto.

There is no tendency at this stage to set out hard and fast decisions regarding Japan’s future. She probably will be only one phase of a gigantic world readjustment. And diplomats are not talking about peace, except informally – they talk now only of winning the war.

Lays down plank

But President Roosevelt has laid down one plank in the American peace plan. In his message asking Congress to recognize a state of war against Japan he pledged the United States to “make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again.” That was interpreted as a determination to demilitarize Japan.

The boast of a Japanese admiral that he wanted to dictate peace from the White House received only passing attention here as another example of an irresponsible aggressiveness. However, it gave rise to discussions in a more serious vein of the difficult war ahead and the vast changes that a smashing Japanese defeat will bring in the Pacific.

Ceded to Japan

Formosa was ceded to Japan by China after the first Sino-Japanese war of 1895. The Japanese have renamed it Taiwan. It was an area of some 14,000 miles and has been developed by the Japanese as a naval base and the center of bombing operations first against China and now against Hong Kong and the Philippines.

Korea also was an issue in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895. Its “independence” was recognized after the war but it later became a Russian leasehold and was an immediate cause of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05. Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and renamed it Chosen.

Leased by Russia

Kwantung is the southernmost point of Manchuria. The Russians leased it for 25 years from China when in control of Manchuria and the Japanese in turn took over Kwantung, where Dairen and Port Arthur are located at conclusion of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905.

Manchuria was wrested from the Chinese in the coup of 1931 when Japan started the cycle of undeclared wars and territorial seizures which has culminated in the present world situation. Manchuria is now known by the Japanese as the “independent” empire of Manchukuo, but in reality it is a puppet state of Japan’s.

All those fruits of Japanese conquest probably will go back to their former sovereignties.

Argentine vessel to ‘trade’ diplomats

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 20 (UP) – Radio Saigon said today in a broadcast heard by a United Press listening post that an Argentine vessel would transport Japanese and American diplomats to their respective home countries.

The broadcast said the vessel would pick up Japanese diplomats from the Americas in San Francisco and carry them to Japan where the diplomats of American nations which have declared war on Japan will embark for the return trip.

Jap liner eludes hostile submarine

SANTIAGO, Chile, Dec. 20 (UP) --The Japanese liner Tatuta Maru, 17,000-ton flagship of the Nippon Yusan Kaisha fleet, was pursued by a hostile submarine after it turned back from a voyage to the United States when Pacific hostilities broke out, Chilean newspapermen aboard the ship reported today.

Chilean newspapermen, who were returning by way of the United States from a goodwill journey to Japan, reported that the Tatuta Maru, at sea between Yokohama and Honolulu, eluded a hostile submarine only because of a severe storm which raged for three days.

American and British passengers aboard were arrested and jailed when the ship arrived back at Yokohama on December 14, the Chilean newspapermen reported. They said that when the ship turned back, they were the only persons aboard who were informed of the outbreak of hostilities.

The Chilean reports said the Tatuta Maru was only 610 miles from Honolulu when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

Report on fifth column seen as exaggerated

MEXICO CITY, Dec. 20 (UP) – Mexican official sources said today the U.S. congressional committee report on Axis activities in Latin America was exaggerated so far as Mexico is concerned.

Rep. Jack Nichols, D-Oklahoma, made public the report yesterday.

Registration of manpower is expected to begin soon

Selective Service headquarters starts to set up machinery to list men who were not included in previous R-Days

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – Mobilization of this nation’s manpower for an all-out war effort was expected tonight to begin soon after President Roosevelt signs the bill which makes an estimated seven million men from 20 to 44 years old, inclusive, available for compulsory military service.

Selective Service headquarters already has started setting up the machinery to begin registration of men from 18 to 64, inclusive, who were not included in the first draft of last year.

Selective Service officials indicated those between 36 and 44, inclusive, would be registered first in this draft.

Check registration

Registrations of the 21-35 group included in the 1940 draft are being checked to determine if classifications should be changed in light of the outbreak of war and the need of a greater Army.

An estimated 40 million men from 18 to 64 ultimately will be registered, but those below 20 and above 44 are not subject to compulsory military service.

The rate of induction of selectees into the draft Army – now more than 750,000 – is expected to continue at the rate of 200,000 a month for the present. The Army must postpone a faster growth of its personnel until additional camps and equipment can be provided.

Ten more camps are expected to be established in the South to house this enlarged army.

Await equipment

The Army is planning to relax some of its equipment requirements, but is “not going to take men in before we have adequate equipment for their training and health.”

Officials calculated that the 20-44 age bracket would provide seven million fit for military service. This potential army was apportioned: Three million from the 21-28 group; two million from the 28-36 bracket, and one million from those 20 years old and in the 36-44 group.

Draft officials intend to establish exemptions for workers essential to war industries to prevent any slackening in the expanded armament program. One official said all war industry workers might be made ineligible for enlistment.

Complicates plan

Refusal of the House to make 19-year-old youths subject to compulsory military service complicated the Army’s plan to stop all enlistments shortly. Some congressman said recruiting probably would have to be continued because the Army needs the “type of men” in the 19-year age group, which was estimated to comprise 600,000.

To increase the personnel strength of the Navy, Chairman Dawid I. Walsh, D-Massachusetts, of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, has introduced a bill increasing maximum enlistments to 500,000 for the Navy and 104,000 for the Marine Corps – double the present size of each.

The new draft bill provides for $5,000 being paid to men totally disabled in action or to survivors of those killed on active duty. The compensation provision applies to fatalities in the attack on Pearl Harbor and the torpedoing of the destroyers Kearny and Reuben James.

Editorial: The great registration

Registration of America’s manpower under the bill which Congress has sent the President will be a tremendous job.

All men from 18 through 64 will be required to register, those from 20 through 44 being liable for military service. The President and the War Department asked, and the Senate voted, a lower military age limit of 19, but the House insisted on a compromise. We regret that, believing it would have been better for this country to make it plain at the beginning of our war effort that we are willing to do more than may be necessary rather than risk doing too little.

However, from the 20-44 bracket under prevailing standards of selection a force of seven million men can be drafted and for some time to come the Army and Navy will hardly be able to train, equip and use anything like that many.

And of course the registration is not immediately likely to mean changes of any kind for more than a fraction of the tens of millions of other men who will register – the 18-year-olds, those between 45 and 64, and those between 20 and 44 who don’t go into military service.

The purpose of the great registration is to provide a comprehensive inventory of the reservoir from which workers as well as fighters can be drawn as they are needed and placed where they are needed. Men displaced from jobs by priorities may have to be transferred to other localities for war production; employed men may have to be changed from less essential jobs to war industries; many others may be told to stay where they are for the duration.

This involves possibilities of personal regimentation to a degree never before known in this country. Most of us will accept it willingly, asking only that the plans be carried out in an intelligent, orderly way. The public employment services certainly ought to be highly useful in this effort and the full control of these services by the federal government, as asked by the President in his message to the governors of states and territories yesterday, seems a necessary war step.

Sen. Bridges and others consider it “another dangerous consolidation of power.” But the greatest danger now is not in temporary surrender of power by the states, or of freedom by individuals. A much greater danger is that states and individuals will become so dependent upon the central government that they will lack the stamina to reclaim and use their powers and freedoms when peace comes again.

So we’re glad the President reminded the governors that there is plenty of need for state and local governments to use their own strength – especially by postponing non-defense public works, improving their administrative machinery, decreasing their debts, accumulating cash reserves and preparing plans to meet economic problems after the war.

13 defensive sea areas set

President’s order affects East, West Coasts

President sets sea defense areas

map.usdefenseareas.up840×581 112 KB

The 13 defense sea areas designated by President Roosevelt are shown on the map above.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – The Navy Hydrographic Office announced late today that President Roosevelt has issued executive orders, designating 13 defensive sea areas along the East and West Coasts of the United States.

All vessels other than naval or government-supervised ships are barred from entering the defensive sea areas except during daylight when good visibility prevails. Then they may enter only after specific permission has been obtained.

Areas listed

The defensive areas have been set up in the following localities:

Portland, Maine; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Boston, Massachusetts; Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island; New London, Connecticut; New York Harbor; Delaware Bay and River; Chesapeake Bay and Norfolk, Virginia; Charleston Harbor, South Carolina; San Diego, California; San Francisco; Columbia River entrance, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca-Puget Sound.

Advance arrangements for entry into or navigation within a defensive sea area must be made, preferably by application at a naval district headquarters in advance of sailing or by radio or visual communication on approaching the seaward limits of the area, the Hydrographic Office said.

Enter at own risk

Vessels entering into or navigating the waters of a defensive sea area do so at their own risk, it added.

It said the loading o unloading by vessels of oil fuel or other inflammable or explosive materials must be done under control of the local naval authority in such a manner as to safeguard the other activities essential to national defense within the defensive area.

Any master of a vessel or any other person within a defensive sea area who disregards the regulations or fails to obey an order of naval authority may be detained by force of arms and “renders himself liable to attack by United States armed forces,” it said.

Hawaii plans raid shelters

New censorship controls ordered by Navy

HONOLULU, Dec. 20 (UP) – Hawaii stepped up its civilian defense measures today as authorities moved to improve the food situation and submitted plans to military authorities for 81 air raid shelters in Honolulu.

Lt. Col. Thomas Green, executive officer in the Military Government, approved plans for downtown “splinter shelters.” The shelters were not expected to provide protection against direct bomb hits, but against shrapnel fragments and flying debris.

Censorship tightened

The Navy issued new censorship regulations governing use of the trans-Pacific radiotelephone. Only English may be used and no reference may be made to the movements of any war vessel, merchant vessel or military or civilian aircraft.

Reference to the identity of any American or Allied vessel protecting itself against attack was forbidden, as was reference to the assembly, movement or embarkation of public officials, troops or war material.

The Navy forbade reference to the strength of United States or Allied armed forces, either on land or sea or in the air. It also prohibited discussion of political, social or economic conditions which might give aid or comfort to the enemy or prejudice the foreign relations of the United States or its allies.

Weather talk banned

Users of the radiotelephone were forbidden to discuss weather conditions, the existence of blackouts, the occurrence of any air raid or other military activity.

The military governor issued a general order applying to all enemy aliens, including Germans, Italians, Japanese, Bulgarians, and Croatians. Previously anti-alien restrictions had been applied only to Japanese.

Five Marines killed in Virginia crash

RICHMOND, Virginia, Dec. 20 (UP) – Five U.S. Marines were killed and a sixth was injured in a crash of their car and a truck about 14 miles south of Fredericksburg, Virginia, today.

The Marines, stationed at Parris Island, South Carolina, were travelling north.

Virginia State Police listed the dead as: Cpl. Charles R. Hise of New York; Pvt. William W. Lantelme of New York; Pvt. Calvin Gabay, address unknown; Pvt. Bruce B. Cummings of Buffalo, New York, and Pvt. Anibal C. Gouveia of Brooklyn.

Pvt. Samuel Hinsley, 18, of Pascoag, Rhode Island, was treated at a Richmond Hospital for minor injuries.

The Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, said the bodies of the dead were being held there.

NormanStewart · December 24, 2020, 4:58pm

Stab at Tokyo…
U.S. sub sinks Jap transport

Steps toward unified Allied command confirmed
By Mack Johnson, United Press staff writer

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – U.S. submarines, operating in Far Eastern waters, have sent another Japanese transport to the bottom in that vital area where an Allied high command may be created under Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur, chief of American forces in the Philippines.

Meanwhile, extension of the American-British “unity of action” program to the Soviet Union, China and the Netherlands is planned at an early date, the White House disclosed tonight, as discussion of an inter-Allied war council went forward here and in London.

The sinking of the Nipponese transport, the second to be disclosed in naval communiques here this week, was accomplished by a single submarine. But the exact location of the action was not revealed.

Heavy raid at Cavite

Navy Communique No. 13, which told of the incident, also reported that the American naval base at Cavite, near Manila, had “sustained a heavy bombing raid” Friday noon (10 p.m. Thursday EST). The raid caused “some damage to property, but only slight casualties to our own forces and civilian personnel,” the communique said.

It was considered unlikely that the assault had caught any American vessels in the harbor. The nature of the property damage was not disclosed.

The success scored by the American submarine against the Japanese transport followed by two days’ disclosure that a death blow had been dealt to another transport by a U.S. underseas boat.

Seen as real threat

The Japanese consider American submarine operations in Western Pacific waters a real menace to their supply lines and the two successful actions announced by the Navy indicated that those lines are being harried increasingly by the deadly craft.

The situation in the Western Pacific, including the pressure being exerted by the Japanese at Malaya and Northern Borneo, has been of primary concern in current conversations looking towards formation of an inter-Allied high command to map broad strategy for winning the war.

Speculation is that Gen. MacArthur, this nation’s newest general, may be placed in supreme command of all Allied forces in the Far East – to exercise in that capacity the brilliant direction he has displayed in American defense of the Philippines against unfavorable odds.

Only one phase

Such a move would represent only one phase of the general worldwide strategy now under study, but perhaps the most important for the time being.

A White House statement said that steps toward the objective of bringing all anti-Axis nations into a body to devise cooperative strategy for destruction of the war might of Germany, Japan and Italy, “are under way.”

The brief White House announcement did not go into any detail, but identified some of the British and American officials now participating in the talks in London and this capital.

The announcement said:

“For some time, as has been hitherto intimated by the President, the United States Military Mission in London and the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington have been in close contact with their opposite numbers in both places.

“This liaison will continue for a short time until the joint planning for unity of action can be extended to Russia, China, the Netherlands and other governments engaged in the common cause of defeating the Axis.

“Steps toward this objective are under way.

“Maj. Gen. James E. Chaney and Vice Adm. Robert L. Ghormley have been representing the United States in London for some time. Adm. Sir Charles Little, Lt. Gen. Sir Colville Wemyss and Air Marshal A. T. Harris have been representing Great Britain in Washington.”

Lend official stature

President Roosevelt’s action yesterday in nominating Gen. MacArthur to the rank of full general – a title previously held only by the chief of staff – was believed to have been promoted by a desire to give the Philippines commander the necessary official stature to assume Allied generalship of the crucial Far Eastern battle.

The Army, meantime, issued its 20th war communique, describing operations as of 9:30 a.m. today. It stated that no details were available here on the Japanese landing operations at the port of Davao, in Mindanao, southernmost extremity of the Philippine archipelago.

News dispatched from the Philippines reported heavy fighting at Davao, with American forces still holding the city.

Dutch batter 5 more ships

Toll now 4 Jap cruisers in 3 days

BATAVIA, NEI, Sunday (UP) – Dutch navy and army airmen, using American bombers, blasted three Japanese cruisers and two transports with direct bomb hits yesterday in an aerial attack on enemy invasion forces off Sarawak, the High Command announced today.

This brought to four the number of Japanese cruisers smashed by Dutch bombers in three days.

One Japanese cruiser was hit directly amidships by a bomb dropped from a Royal Dutch Navy plane in yesterday’s attack. The other two cruisers were blasted by bombs from Royal Dutch Army planes.

Transports left blazing

Both the transports were left blazing heavily after the attack.

One of the transports was known to have been a seaplane tender vessel. It was believed the second transport also may have been a tender.

It was reported the Japanese have landed “in some force” at an unspecified point on Borneo. If the cruisers attacked yesterday were convoying troops, the landing of troops may be being attempted on a big scale.

The Netherland pilots, flying Glenn Martin bombers, roared down on the Japanese fleet off Miri, the oil center of Sarawak in Borneo.

Japs sink Soviet ship

The official news agency said that Japanese bombers bombed and sank the 4,200-ton Russian freighter Perekop in Dutch Indies waters, on a run between Vladivostok and Surabaya, Java.

At least 17 Japanese planes took part in the attack on the Perekop. Eight members of the crew were killed and 32 others were saved, the agency said.

Speculation arose over possible Russian reaction to the violation of neutrality. The registration mark and Russian flag on the Perekop were clearly visible from the air, the agency said.

Raid toll 146 dead

Casualties from recent Japanese bombings of Terempa, in the Anambas Islands and Pontianak on the coast of West Dutch Borneo were placed at 146 dead.

Terempa was attacked first, December 14, and bombers returned, raising the number of persons killed there to 65.

In a raid yesterday on Pontianak, 81 persons were killed, 140 were wounded seriously and 150 suffered minor injuries. The attack was said to have lasted about 45 minutes, with a Dutch patrol of three planes finally driving off enemy formations of nine fighters and bombers.

‘Black Dragon’ tops Japan’s spy system

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 – Treachery and violence are the weapons of Japan’s Fifth Column which operates through the notorious Black Dragon Society.

The society’s watchword is “Asia for the Asiatics.”

The Black Dragon has a record of political assassinations in Japan and instigations of political uprisings there whenever the government becomes too moderate for the intensely nationalistic creed of this ultra-patriotic, secret, international ring.

The head of Black Dragon is frail old Mitsuru Toyama, 87, but still a master craftsman in international intrigue. One of Toyama’s most trusted lieutenants is Koki Hirota, former premier.

The requisites for membership in the Black Dragon are a fanatical belief in the destiny of the Japanese as rulers of the world, a record of absolute obedience to the commands of the leaders, complete submergence of self, and a willingness to die for the cause.

Supreme U.S. war council may be formed

Willkie, Murray, Wallace and Adm. Leahy possible members
By Joseph L. Myler, United Press staff writer

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – President Roosevelt is considering establishment of a supreme war council or cabinet of from three to five members to help make and carry out major decisions regarding all phases of the American war effort, informed sources said tonight.

The council members would be given broad policy-making powers and authority over all segments of the nation’s wartime life – from civilian activities to actual naval and military operations. They would be responsible only to Mr. Roosevelt.

It was understood that the plan, still in a formative state, might call for a single coordinator of military-naval operations and that a likely candidate for such a post would be Adm. William D. Leahy, now U.S. ambassador to Vichy.

Willkie mentioned

The name of Wendell L. Willkie, Mr. Roosevelt’s unsuccessful Republican rival in 1940, also has been mentioned prominently in connection with possible creation of the cabinet. Informed sources believe Mr. Willkie might be named overall production and supply chief in such a council.

It was emphasized that the new body which the president may set up is not to be confused with the existing cabinet or the so-called war cabinet which consists of the present secretaries of War, Navy, State and Treasury.

However, it was said that Vice President Henry A. Wallace, in whose economic and social ideas the president is known to place great faith, might be placed on the Supreme War Council, He now sits with the regular cabinet at all meetings.

Would draft plans

The new group of administrators would be superimposed on the existing cabinet, and their functions would be to draft broad plans which the various departments would be charged with carrying out.

How and when – and if – the council is to be established could not be determined, because of the preliminary stage of the president’s plans at this time. But there was some belief that Mr. Roosevelt also would consider seriously the inclusion of a representative of labor on the council.

For that post, it was believed, Mr. Roosevelt might consider President Philip Murray of the Congress of Industrial Organizations; George Meany, who is secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Labor, or Edward F. McGrady, former undersecretary of labor and now labor consultant to the War Department.

Speculation on that score takes into account the fact that the British government has found it advisable to have a strong labor leader on Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s war cabinet.

Adm. Leahy respected

Speculation on the choice of Adm. Leahy for the all-important post of war council chief of the Army and Navy is based in part on the known fact that he is well-liked and respected by high officers of both branches of the service. There have been frequent reports that he might be brought home to “coordinate” operations of the armed forces.

Mr. Willkie’s possible place on the council has been talked about ever since last Monday when he had lunch with Mr. Roosevelt. It had been expected that he would be named moderator for the labor-industry conference, at that time, but he emerged from the luncheon to tell reporters he had not been offered the post.

Many quarters drew the inference that Mr. Roosevelt was reserving a more important job for him. And at yesterday’s press conference the president refused to deny that he had a major war role in mind for his one-time political enemy.

Mr. Willkie’s skill and deep interest in production are well known. His political motto during the 1940 campaign, which he still reiterates, was: “Only the productive can be strong and only the strong can be free.”

Italians hear plea to help U.S. win war

By helping America, you help Italy, ex-former minister says

NEW YORK, Dec. 20 – Count Carlo Sforza, former foreign minister of Italy, tonight called on Italians in the United States to help America win “The Battle of Freedom.”

“In helping America you’ll help Italy,” he told a mass meeting of Americans of Italian descent and Free Italians. The meeting was sponsored by the Mazzini Society.

“Those rare Italians who, still deceived by a vulgar and corrupt press which is Italian only in language, would continue to adhere to now silent but still dangerous Fifth Column movements, must know that their sons will brand them for what they are: Not only as traitors of America but traitors of Italy,” he said.

“Instead of a new Roman Empire, Italy has lost all her colonies. There is actual starvation. Pellagra again kills thousands of peasants in the valley of the Po. Instead of domination of the Mediterranean we see the almost complete loss of our once valiant Italian Fleet. The people of Italy are under the double yoke of the Fascist Ovra and of the Nazi Gestapo.

“The Italians cannot revolt because the Fascist gang in power has sold out Italy to Germany and the Italians fear today that if they revolt, that will provoke complete and official German military invasion of Italy.”

Portland leading in Navy recruits

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – The Portland, Oregon, Navy recruiting station, with a ratio of 66.59 enlistments for each 100,000 of population in its area, had the best enlistment record in the nation for the first five months of the present fiscal year, the Navy said today.

San Francisco, with a ratio of 62.60, was second, followed by Los Angeles, 62.14; Birmingham, 61.58, and Des Moines, 60.44.

The Macon, Georgia, station, with 2929 enlistments, led the nation in the greatest number of enlistments during the five months’ period, followed by New York, 2635; Chicago, 2251; Raleigh, North Carolina, 2233, and Detroit, 2231.

Two new destroyers launched by Navy

CHARLESTON, South Carolina, Dec. 20 (UP) – Completed far ahead of schedule, two 1700-ton destroyers, the Italian and the Beatty, were launched here today.

Adm. William H. Allen, commander of the 6th Naval District, commended the Charleston Navy Yard workers for their spirit and quality of work in completing the ships “far ahead of schedule.”

Also speaking at the launching was Josephus Daniels, secretary of the Navy under President Wilson and former ambassador to Mexico.

He said that “given only one type of fighting ship in a Navy, the fast land quick firing destroyer had demonstrated its primacy in every war since its development.”

Earle expected back by way of Istanbul

ISTANBUL, Dec. 19 (Delayed) – George H. Earle, U.S. minister to Bulgaria, and nine members of the staff of the Sofia legation were expected today to arrive in Istanbul on December 27. Other members of the American colony in Sofia probably will be detained in Bulgaria pending outcome of exchange negotiations.

Franklin Mott Gunther, U.S. minister to Rumania, was reported seriously ill in Bucharest. It was expected that American diplomats in Rumania would return to the United States by way of Lisbon. How soon Mr. Gunther would be able to travel was not known.

Minnesota governor to speak at session of music teachers

Varied program to feature recital of works by new American composers
By Ralph Lewando, Press music editor

With “American Unity Through Music” as keynote and Gov. Harold Stassen of Minnesota as principal speaker at the annual banquet, the 65th annual convention of the Music Teachers National Association, Glen Haydon, North Carolina University, president, will meet at Minneapolis December 26-31, with headquarters at Hotel Nicollet.

As in past years the conclave will be held in conjunction with the National Association of Schools of Music headed by Howard Hanson (Eastman School of Music), and the American Musicological Society led by Otto Kinkeldey (Cornell U.).

Non-profit MTNA has long served the best interests of our national musical life and contributed immeasurably to development of every phase of music activity. Membership is drawn from all parts of the United States and Canada, and every aspect of musical art is represented by nationally famous men and women.

Membership is open to musicians and laymen, amateurs and professionals, teachers and students. The $4.00 annual dues admits to all convention events and entitles one to the book of proceedings, a valuable compilation of papers read to the delegates. Hundreds of libraries throughout the country subscribe yearly for this book.

Prospective members should apply to Oscar Demmler, MTNA treasurer, Board of Education Building, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Several days of general meetings, forums, musical and social events of this year’s convention are expected to draw the largest attendance in years. Pre-convention activity on December 26 features a reception, the opening of exhibits by nationally known music houses, and an All-American program piano recital by John Kirkpatrick that brings to performance works by Roger Sessions, Robert Palmer, Hunter Johnson, Ross Lee Finney, Theodore Chanler, Carl Ruggles and Arthur Farwell.

Regular sessions start on December 27, with Rev. John Powell pronouncing the invocation and Minneapolis Mayor Marvin L. Kline delivering the welcoming address. MTNA Vice President Carlyle Scott (University of Minnesota) will respond. Fowler Smith, president of Music Educators National Conference, Minnie A. Boyd, founder of Canadian Federation of Music Teachers Association, and Luiz Heitor Correa de Azevedo, of Brazil University’s music department, will extend greetings.

Talk by Pittsburgher

A two-plano recital by Evelyn Eby and Reginald Bedford of Saskatoon, Canada, will be followed by a talk by Max Schoen of Carnegie Tech on Music Education and the Philosophy of Value. Inter-American Music Relations will be stressed by Charles Seeger, Music Division Chief of Pan-American Union, and Capt. Howard C. Brown of the War Department’s Morale Division will talk on Musical Activities in the Morale Branch.

Edwin Hughes (New York City) will sum up the 1941 accomplishments of his National Music Council and Fred Clausen of the National Association of Manufacturers’ Educational Cooperation Committee will discuss Industry’s Relation to Education in the Emergency.

Concurrent section meetings will deal with Secular Keyboard Music of the 17th-18th Centuries, Warren D. Allen (Stanford), presiding; College and University Music, directed by Leland A. Coon (Univ. of Wisconsin); and Utilization of Folk Music, led by Charles Seeger. Preceded by luncheon meetings of Phi Mu Gamma and Pi Kappa Lambda, the afternoon meetings will be devoted to ways and means for furthering MTNA activity through state organizations of teachers, with Lucille Robbins leading the talks; Musicology and Education, with Philip G. Clapp (Iowa State U.) presiding; a panel on Psychology of Music headed by Dr. Schoen, and a round table on Catholic Church Music presided over by Sister M. Anna Gaulet (St. Catherine’s College, St. Paul).

The night of December 27 will feature a program of orchestral works of young American composers by the Minnesota WPA Orchestra and University of Minnesota Symphony, led by Abe Pepinsky.

At the December 28 general session aspects of Music and Society will be revealed by Augustus D. Zanzig (National Recreation Society), Willem Van de Wall (Louisiana State U.), Peter Dykema (Columbia U.), Otto Miessner (U. of Kansas), and Philip G. Clapp (Iowa). A short vocal recital by Maria Montana, soprano, and Constance Lane Anderson, pianist, will intersperse the talks.

Church services and tour of the Minneapolis Art Institute will keep the conventioneers busy until the afternoon complimentary concert of American music to be played by the Minneapolis Orchestra conducted by Dr. Howard Hanson. The interesting program consists of Spencer Norton’s Prologue to Dance Suite; Robert Braine’s Habanera, “Lazy Cigarette;” “Saturday Night,” by Robert Sanders; Hanson’s 3rd Symphony, and two songs for contralto by Donald Ferguson, sung by Agnes Rast Snyder.

To hear church music

An evening program of church-choral music at Northrop Auditorium will enlist the participation of Walter C. Coffey, president of University of Minnesota; the Catholic Choral Society of St. Paul, Rev. Francis Missia, choirmaster; Ruth Dinsdorf, organist; Organist Joseph W. Clokey (Miami U.); Apollo Club of Minneapolis led by William MacPhail, Theodore Bergman and James Allen, pianists.

The December 29 section meetings will be replete with interest. A symposium on teacher training will be led by David Mattern (U. of Michigan). A violin forum with Karl O. Kuersteiner (U. of Kansas) presiding will deal with Principles of Violin Playing, Contrasting Realms in Music: Entertainment and Education and their Artist-Exponents, and a general survey of violin and chamber music and its interpretation. Edwin Hughes (New York) will conduct a piano panel, and phases of voice pedagogy will be discussed by John C. Wilson (American Conservatory), Richard B. De Young (Chicago), Leon Carson (New York City), and Leona Scheuneman (Hamline U.) will sing a set of songs by Russell G. Harris (Baylor U.).

Then follows a joint general session of MTNA and AMS with Otto Kinkeldey (Cornell U.) presiding. Among the papers to be read will be Harpsichordist Yella Pessl’s on French patterns in Bach’s music; What is a Musical Idea, presented by Donald Ferguson; Political and Ideological Censorship of Operas, by Walter H. Rubsamen (UCLA).

A business meeting, luncheon get-together of the National Federation of Music Clubs and section meetings in voice, church-choral and chamber music will provide salient points for discussion. A highlight will be performance of a sonata for piano and violin by Herbert Elwell, Cleveland music critic, by Karl Andrist and the composer.

The famous Pro Arte String Quartet, now connected with the University of Wisconsin will give an hour-recital, and MTNA festivities will be climaxed by the joint banquet with NASM, and AMS.

Light shed on Hitler’s inner life

Psychoanalysis of Fuehrer written
By Ed Werkman

The psychiatrist who served as Hitler’s personal physician for 15 years sees the Fuehrer as a “terribly lonely, frustrated man, followed wherever he goes by his fear and distrust of women, his loathing of a people he has good reason to believe are his own flesh and blood.”

“Inside Hitler” (Avalon Press) by Dr. Kurt Krueger, is an amazing revelation of Hitler’s mind. In 1919, Hitler came to Dr. Krueger for treatment of a grave private illness and was submitted to a series of penetrating interviews that bared his strange childhood, his dreams and his love affairs. Having this intimate information made it dangerous for Dr. Krueger to remain in Germany and since 1934 he has been a refugee in this country. By crossing the Polish border, Hitler forfeited all claims to privacy and Dr. Krueger decided to reveal his privileged information.

And a strange story is makes. Despite his Jewish pogroms, “deep down inside of him, Hitler has a strong liking for the Jews, a tenderness very close to love,” Dr. Krueger claims. “Hitler’s anti-Semitism is an obsessional neurosis which compels him to think and act against his will. He is very fond of Jews, especially Jewesses, because they possess what he so patently lacks – virility and creativeness.”

In fact, a suspicion that he may be of non-Aryan origin is undermining Hitler’s reason, Dr. Krueger writes. Once Hitler said with ferocity, “Whenever you can find anyone who can successfully prove to me that I have as much as a drop of Jewish blood in my veins, I promise I will, without a quiver of hesitation, cut my throat.”

“Most of Hitler’s dreams had some direct or indirect relation to his mother-fixation and his Oedipus complex, his infantile desire to ‘liquidate’ his father and take the latter’s place in his mother’s affections,” Dr. Krueger believes. “Others dealt with homosexual tendencies resulting from his inability to escape from the mother-image. Still others were nightmares caused by his fear of assassination.”

There are startling stories related by Dr. Krueger, including the suicide of Hitler’s niece after an affair with the Fuehrer; Hitler’s desire to take a bath promptly at 2 p.m. daily; Rudolf Hess’ downfall being caused by one of Hitler’s dreams and the tragic affair with beautiful Renate Mueller.

“I cannot see Hitler as anything but a sick man and Germany as a very sick country. It seems quite certain now that Hitler will never recover. And it seems questionable whether Germany herself can survive the Hitler era,” Dr. Krueger concludes. “I do not begin to see him in the role of the invincible world-conqueror… It appears to me that brute conquests such as Hitler’s must eventually bow before the power of reason, the rational universe itself.”

Below the Rio Grande…
Argentina policy accords U.S. important privileges

‘Diplomatic dodge’ gives Navy basing rights unhoped of few months ago; Daniels still draws pay
By Leon Pearson

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 – It sounded like nothing more than a diplomatic dodge when Argentina declared a fortnight ago that she would accord to the United States the rights of a non-belligerent. To most Americans, who wanted a simple answer to the question: “Are you with us, or are you against us?” the Argentine statement was meaningless.

It now appears, however, that the Argentine position will have a favorable and far-reaching effect upon our conduct of the war. It will make possible the operation of the United States Navy in South Atlantic waters, based upon Argentine ports – a privilege which is not accorded the British. And thus it will make possible the transfer of the South Atlantic patron from the British Navy to the United States Navy.

If a British cruiser puts in today at the great Argentine naval base of Bahia Blanca, it must be clear again within 24 hours. But if an American cruiser puts in at that port, it is privileged to stay indefinitely.

In short, the United States Navy has been accorded a privilege which had not been hoped for a few months ago. The question was so touchy that the State Department had a standing order not to use the word “bases” in discussion of Latin American matters. But today, such delicacy can be swept aside. We have actually got naval bases from Argentina.

This is a far cry from the Argentine position of the last year, a position of strict neutrality.

Daniels paid

Josephus Daniels, who now is writing newspaper pieces from North Carolina, is still on the federal payroll as ambassador to Mexico. The newly appointed ambassador, George Messersmith, will not assume his duties until Daniels has used up his accumulated annual leave.

Chavez ‘influence’

Guillermo Lombardo Toledano, brother of the famous Mexican labor leader, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, is promising big things to Mexican businessmen because of his “influence” in Washington. To illustrate that “influence,” he cites his personal relationship with Dennis Chavez Jr., son of the senator from New Mexico.

Italian ship used

A ship which was once the S.S. Monte Santo, but is now the S.S. Rio Colorado, is due any day in the port of Philadelphia. She is a symbol of what Argentina has done with Italian vessels laid up in her ports. This is one of the 16 vessels, totaling 88,000 tons, which Argentina acquired from the Italian government.

Aluminum plant set

Plans are being laid for establishment of an aluminum plant in Brazil. This, on top of a steel plant, is the second big industrial development recently undertaken by that country. The plant will be located at Ouro Preto, in the state of Minas Geraes (which means “general mines”).

‘Digest’ popular

The Spanish edition of Reader’s Digest, “Selecciones,” now sells 400,000 copies. Beginning with the February issue, there will be a Portuguese edition for Brazil. The publication anticipates an eventual sale of at least a million copies in Latin America. “Selecciones” has been losing money heavily, but is expected to show a profit beginning with the March issue. All profits will be converted into travel funds to bring Latin American authors and newsmen to the United States.

‘Plain speaking’ seen

When the Inter-American conference of foreign ministers opens in Rio a fortnight hence, a formal agenda will state in polite and proper terms what business shall come before the meeting. But behind such terms as “solidarity” and “mutual well-being,” there will be more undisguised plain speaking than any Pan American conference has ever known.

The plain speaking, coming from the U.S. delegation, will take this form: If we win, you win; and if we lose, you lose. An Axis victory would make you colonies of the Greater Reich. There is no such thing as victory outside of an Allied victory.

Therefore, we must stand together. And in war, there can be no halfway measures. We must stand together with a degree of cooperation which you have not thought possible before.

The expected cooperation will take two forms – military and economic. The American representative will make no bones about the fact that defense of the Hemisphere cannot be assured without permission to send U.S. troops and equipment to Latin American soil. This has long been the untouchable question, but it will have to be touched in Rio.

Less spectacular, but no less essential, is the need for “all-out” cooperation on the economic front, which means drastic measures against Axis trade -and Axis banking, up and down and across the entire continent.

The stage is set for such plain speaking, for Latin American governments already have displayed their support in a manner which caused President Roosevelt to describe it, in a recent press conference, as “excellent, and highly satisfactory.”

Rockefellers spend

The Rockefeller Office (Inter-American Affairs) started the present fiscal year with 10 million dollars, spent it, and is getting 12 million more to finish.

NormanStewart · December 24, 2020, 5:04pm

Labor affairs taking a turn for the worse

Industry, union parley deadlocked over closed shop
By Fred W. Perkins, Press Washington correspondent

WASHINGTON – The war labor situation has taken a turn for the worse, following a period that promised no further strike interruptions to military and naval production.

The President’s war labor conference of 12 management representatives and six each from the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations suddenly veered from a course indicating an agreement and is in a deadlock over the week-end, with that old bone of contention, the closed shop, responsible.

The AFL sextet which earlier indicated it would not object to a freezing of the closed shop issue for the duration of the war – in the pattern of World War I days – is found to have lined up on the issue with John L. Lewis, Philip Murray and the other CIO representatives.

Hit industry stand

Both labor groups were willing to accept a formula of arbitration, if mediation and conciliation fail to settle disputes, but they have refused to accept the management platform that extension of closed shops should not be a legitimate grievance during the emergency.

The management spokesmen shied away from further arbitration of the closed shop question, and have cited the recent action of John R. Steelman, who was acting as public representative while on leave from his official post as chief of the U.S. Conciliation Service, in giving a complete union shop to the United Mine Workers in the captive coal mines.

The outcome of that controversy, a victory for Mr. Lewis after three captive mine strikes which produced nation-wide concern and passage of the Smith union-restrictive bill in the House, has caused the management men to express fears that the precedent will be followed if the closed shop issue is again submitted to arbitration.

Strikes on upsurge

In addition to the deadlock in the war labor conference, strikes and threats of strikes are showing an upsurge, creating the fear that again national production will be seriously affected in a time of the most extreme danger.

The imminence of a closed shop drive in steel manufacturing is discussed in management circles, and statements are made that it would be followed by establishment of the principle throughout American industry – despite President Roosevelt’s recent statement. that the government would never force such a move against the desires of individuals who prefer not to belong to unions.

President holds key

With anti-union congressmen raising the alarm in the House, and with the Smith bill in position to be called up for Senate action, President Roosevelt with his augmented war powers holds the only key to the situation.

If the conference deadlock persists much beyond the next session, scheduled for Monday, he is expected to act – perhaps through another appeal to the negotiators, possibly through setting up a definite labor procedure by executive orders, and less likely through giving the “go” sign to legislators in the Senate.

The Weekly Washington Merry-Go-Round

By Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen

WASHINGTON – The change in the draft law to require the registration of all men between 18 and 65 touched off some furious fireworks when it was considered behind the closed doors of the Senate Military Affairs Committee.

Two members of the committee – pro-labor Sen. James Murray of Montana and anti-laborite Sen. Rufus Holman of Oregon – clashed hotly on the question of registering men over 44, the maximum age for military service under the proposed revision.

Sen. Holman, who had a 100 percent America First record before the Japanese attack, argued that industrial workers between 44 and 65 would “work a lot harder” if the threat of being drafted was held over their heads.

“I’m for putting them in a uniform at $21 a month if they don’t produce,” Sen. Holman rumbled. “That way we would be able to deal with malcontents who are not giving their best.”

“I wonder if the gentleman realizes the import of what he is suggesting,” challenged Sen. Murray, a militant anti-isolationist. “That’s Hitler stuff. You might as well put workers in jail. Who is to judge whether a defense laborer is giving his best or is stalling? American workers are patriotic. They want to produce all they can, to give their last ounce of energy to help win this war. It would be wrong to hold such a threat over them.”

“They did it in France,” shot back Sen. Holman.

“That would be the best argument against resorting to such tactics here,” retorted Sen. Murray. “Look what happened to France.” Turning to Brig. Gen. Leonard P. Ayres, chief of the War Department’s Statistic Bureau, Sen. Murray added:

“Understand me clearly. I am not opposed to registering men over 44 if it helps morale. However, now that this ugly matter has been dragged into the open. I would like to inquire if the War Department is contemplating drafting older men if their work isn’t considered satisfactory.”

“Absolutely not,” replied Gen. Ayres. “We are thinking only of morale in requesting that the draft age limits be extended. We want every able-bodied man in the country to feel that he has a stake in the war whether he happens to be fighting in an armed force or working in a factory.”

Wartime Washington

Sights and sounds of wartime Washington: A soldier doing guard duty, between the White House and State Department; over one shoulder a rifle, over the other shoulder, the antenna of radio. He listens while he walks… A mail truck approaches the White House. A police officer stops it, steps up beside the driver, and inspects the inside of the truck before letting it pass… Visiting out-of-town newsmen are excluded from the President’s press conference… Gen. “Pa” Watson, military aide to the President, now wears a uniform… A policeman is posted on the new Rock Creek Bridge, to guard against sabotage… Soldiers have the same duty on Memorial Bridge… The public used to pass freely through the White House grounds, as if they were a park. Those days are past.

‘Talky-talky’

American soldiers who have arrived in Dutch Guiana are confronted with the strangest mixture of tongues ever heard this side of the Tower of Babel. Kipling says that east is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet – and yet, in a lingual sense, east and west have met in Surinam.

The east of Java and India and the west of Africa and Holland are thrown together in one melting pot. Result is that everybody in Dutch Guiana speaks two languages – his native tongue and talky-talky.

The official language of Paramaribo, the capital, is Dutch, but the language of the streets, shops and jungle is talky-talky. The town Negroes speak it, the Javanese speak it, the East Indians speak it, and the Djukas speak it. Consequently, the shopkeepers and bankers follow suit.

Tomorrow morning, an American soldier will be greeted on the streets of Paramaribo with “Odi, Masra!” (Howdy, Master!) And the soldier should respond, “Fa joe Tan?” which means “How are you?” If the native doesn’t feel too well, he will reply, “Hafoe hafoe so!” which means half-way so, or “comme ci, comme ca.”

Here are some colorful phrases from talky-talky: Think is “membre” … rain is “spitie” … nice is “switi” … girl is “oemanpikien” … let me see is “meki mi si” … sick man is “siki man” … headache is “mi hede de hati mi” tmy head hates me) … and stomach ache is “mi bele de hati mi” (my belly hates me).

NOTE: Washington’s best talky-talky expert is that veteran explorer who now heads the Commerce Department’s American Republics Unit – William LaVarre.

‘Political truce??’

Democratic chiefs may be reading a lot more into the wartime “political truce” with the GOP than actually is warranted.

If the Democrats figure that the exchange of cordial telegrams between Democratic National Chairman Ed Flynn and Republican National Chairman Joe Martin means the GOP will abandon plans for a vigorous 1942 campaign, they’ve got another think coming.

Mr. Martin has no thought of laying off campaign activity. He considers that his reply to Mr. Flynn means only cessation of partisanship in congressional consideration of administration measures to wage the war. That is the sole extent of the “political truce.”

In fact, behind the scenes, Mr. Martin already is busy putting both the National Committee and the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee in shape for a knock-down fight against the Democrats next year.

Mr. Martin’s objective is to capture the House and strengthen the GOP in the Senate as the foundation stone for a Republican presidential victory in 1944.

Until recently, Mr. Martin’s ambitious plans were sorely handicapped by lack of funds. But this problem has been solved by two angels who have come to his financial rescue – the Pennsylvania oil millionaire, Joseph Pew, and the Pennsylvania steel millionaire, Ernest T. Weir. They have agreed to fork over personally and also to obtain other contributions.

New GOP generals

Armed with this big-money backing. Mr. Martin has quietly begun to revitalize his comatose campaign committees.

He has appointed Nebraska State Chairman Don Wherry as his western field general. One of the ablest and most energetic leaders in the party, Mr. Wherry’s job will be to pep up state and local organizations, lay the groundwork for a slashing campaign in the mid-west. Mr. Martin will name a similar lieutenant for the East.

Also Mr. Martin will bring into National Committee headquarters still a third assistant to fill the role of executive director. This aide will be a Pew man – Wheeler McMillen, editor of the Farm Journal, a Pennsylvania publication owned by the Pews. Mr. McMillen has been connected with farm magazines since 1922, is a lifelong Republican, took an active part in the Willkie campaign, will direct GOP publicity.

Among party insiders Mr. McMillen’s appointment is viewed as meaning Mr. Pew’s ascendancy in the inner GOP command. Also it means a slashing anti-Roosevelt campaign. Mr. Pew is a bite ter Roosevelt hater, entered Pennsylvania politics five years ago because of his hot antipathy to the New Deal and his desire to unseat it.

Capital chaff

Remember the ruckus about Ellison D. Smith Jr., son of Sen. Cotton Ed Smith, in connection with draft deferment? He is still serving as clerk of the Senate Agriculture Committee, of which his father is chairman… The night before the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor, popular Adm. John Towers, chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, was expounding at a Capital dinner table on the “three weeks” theory of heating the Japs… Three days later, Adm. Towers was asking the Senate Appropriations Committee for half a billion dollars for more airplanes… Efficient Sen. Burton of Ohio read and signed mail through all three votes on declaration of war … Hard-working Sen. Warren Austin of Vermont, assistant Republican floor leader, is the only member of that august body who brings his lunch from home in a paper bag… West Executive Ave. has long been a favorite parking space for workers in the State Department and the White House. But the avenue passes within 100 feet of the President’s desk in the Executive Office and Secret Service now plans to do away with all parking there.

Money control

Money – capital – is headed for early, far-reaching controls by the U.S. government. Those controls will be much different from those employed in World War I.

So far, practically every other phase of U.S. economy has been marshalled to the defense of the nation. But because there has been no immediate shortage of money as such, capital has been left alone. This will be changed in the near future.

A significant hint of what is in the offing was contained in a recent little-noticed speech in Detroit by Ganson Purcell, crack young member of the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is the outline of the control program under consideration in inner defense circles:

There will be no private capital issues committees in various cities as in the last war. Instead, there will be a single interdepartmental committee composed of Treasury, SEC. RFC, Federal Reserve and other U.S. financial officials.

Object of this committee will be not to prevent the investment of capital in stocks and bonds of non-defense projects (because priorities lists make such investments useless), but to “patrol” the financial practices of corporations so as to direct as much of their earnings as possible into the defense program.

For example: A ceiling may be put on corporation salaries in order to compel firms to build up reserves and prevent officers from offsetting personal income taxes by boosting their pay checks.

Ceilings also may be put on dividends so that defense profits above a “reasonable” limit would be available for additional defense plant expansion or the purchase of government bonds to finance the war. Also, such reserves may be needed after the war to enable corporations to readjust their affairs to peace-time productions.

Problems of capital control are great and complex, but defense authorities consider them vitally essential. Prior to the sudden outbreak of the Japanese conflict, the subject had been under quiet consideration for some time and tentative plans had been mapped out. With the nation engaged in war and confronted with the necessity of at least tripling previous defense appropriations, the regulation of capital becomes an ungently immediate requirement.

Every businessman, banker and broker may expect early government action.

Ship welding strike begun in California

Independent union walkout may spread to other defense plants

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 20 (UP) – The United Brotherhood of Welders (independent) announced today that its members are “starting to walk out” at the Todd-California shipyard at Richmond, California, in a move that may spread to defense plants throughout the nation.

The action came as the result of a jurisdictional dispute between the welders’ union and the AFL.

Todd-California officials said, however, that the yard was operating at full strength and that “if there is a walk out in progress it is not discernible to us.”

Remain on job

A checkup showed welders were remaining on the job at all other Bay Area yards, plants and iron works. The government’s Office of Emergency Management set the number of strikers at only 70 in the whole state.

The independent union said that walkouts would occur at any or all of 50 shipyards in the nation if its members are refused permission to continue working after breaking away from the AFL.

The United Brotherhood claimed to speak for 200,000 welders. The AFL disputed this claim.

Ordered to work

W. F. McConnell, president of the AFL Boilermakers Local 681, with jurisdiction at Todd-California, said his local had 1700 welder members at the plant. He said they had been instructed to remain at work and any who did not do so “will be replaced, even if it is necessary to call in reserves from other districts.”

“Everybody should show that he iis an American and stay on the job,” Mr. McConnell said.

The Todd-California dispute apparently centered around status of 19 welders who, the United Brotherhood said, had been told not to report for work unless they had boilermakers’ clearances.

Strike at Los Angeles

At Los Angeles, welders began walking out of shipyards at noon. A spokesman for the Independent Welders, Cutters and Helpers Union said between 250 and 300 welders had left and that more were coming out. At the California Shipbuilding Corp., where an AFL master contract is in force, approximately 1,700 welders are employed.

California Shipbuilding announced that “any employee who lays down his tools will be immediately discharged for insubordination no matter to what craft he may belong and his place will be filled immediately.”

The company said 35 men were discharged today.

OPM Official Calls Strike Unjustified

WASHINGTON. Dec. 20 (UP) – Spokesmen for the OPM’s labor division said today that a threatened strike of welders in the nation’s shipyards is “unjustified.”

They said no welder is required to carry a membership card in more than one union and there have been no lockouts at Richmond, California, shipyards.

Lloyd Payne, national secretary of the Brotherhood of Welders, Cutters and Helpers, said a nationwide strike involving 200,000 welders would be called today if their grievance demands against the Richmond yards of the Todd-California and Richmond Shipbuilding companies were not satisfied.

OPM labor officials, who have investigated working conditions at the two yards, said the trouble began when the 24 members of the independent union refused to remain in good standing with the AFL Metal Trades Council.

The division said a recent meeting of independent welders at Los Angeles was attended by 35 men and only six voted to strike and that a strike call in Seattle affected only 10 men.

Auto industry asked to give plants to U.S.

Union official urges full production for U.S., war needs

DETROIT, Dec. 20 (UP) – A defense employment conference of the United Auto Workers (CIO), fearing a layoff of 350,000 Michigan auto workers by February 1, tonight demanded immediate conversion of the motor-car industry to “full military production.”

“Let the companies give the government their plant facilities,” said Walter P. Reuther, director of the union’s General Motors division, “and let the workers give it their sweat and blood. Together we’ll give Hitler hell.”

The plea for all-out production to whip the Axis powers and ease the impending burden of widespread unemployment, capped a day-long conference during which UAW-CIO leaders accused the industry of “waste, inefficiency and needless duplication” under the defense program.

Life, death matter

“If the industry is unwilling to make its resources available,” Mr. Reuther said, “we should be prepared to go to President Roosevelt, tell him how the defense job should be done and ask to take over these plants for the duration of the war. This is a life-and-death matter.”

Previously, President R. J. Thomas of the UAW-CIO, pleading the union’s “100 percent support of all-out effort to beat the Axis powers,” told the conference that the CIO and AFL are agreed there shall be no strikes during the war emergency provided proper machinery is created for mediation and arbitration of disputes.

“Labor is prepared to make the supreme sacrifice,” said Mr. Thomas, whose union claims a membership of more than 500,000. “Management should be willing to forget its attitude of ‘business and profits’ as usual.”

Comes from parley

Mr. Thomas came from a Washington meeting of President Roosevelt’s new 26-man labor-management council to promote all-out war production. The CIO-AFL accord, he announced, apparently stemmed from that session.

Before adjourning delegates were informed by Eli Oliver, OPM chief of labor relations, that the War Department already had placed orders for 76,000 military trucks and that orders for an additional 140,000, would be let soon to relieve part of the unemployment problem anticipated by complete suspension of auto production.

UAW-CIO officials said the military truck orders would provide employment for only about 3,000 workers.

Assured by Hillman

Mr. Oliver also gave the conference the “direct assurance” of OPM Associate Director Sidney Hillman that a conference of industry and labor representatives would be called “very soon” to plan for placing the industry on full war footing.

The UAW-CIO conference also demanded establishment of a central body to coordinate and regulate policies of all procurement agencies of the armed forces; a “coordinated” program to utilize “idle” machine tools; government appropriations to supplement present unemployment compensation payments, and establishments of a seven-day week without sacrifice of extra pay for overtime.

Smith blames labor men for conference deadlock

Congressman charges open shop demand caused impasse; declares union heads can’t control wildcat strikes

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – Rep. Howard W. Smith, D-Virginia, charged in the House today that President Roosevelt’s labor-industry relations conference is deadlocked because labor participants insist that “you shall not have peace in the labor field unless we have the closed shop.

Mr. Smith, an opponent of administration labor policies and author of drastic anti-strike legislation passed by the House two weeks ago, charged that the House measure has been “chloroformed” in the Senate.

He asserted that John L. Lewis, United Mine Workers president, and Daniel Tobin, head of the Teamsters’ Union, insisted on the closed shop in active controversies at the present time or recent past.

He asserted that union leaders “can’t control” labor shutdowns, particularly “wildcat” strikes.

Fears for Army men

“If they are permitted to carry out the closed shop,” Mr. Smith asked, “what will happen to the millions of men who are being taken into the Army?

“When they want a job after the war, they’ll have to join the union. And the union can say, ‘We can’t take you because all our members down the line aren’t employed’.”

Mr. Smith said teamsters in Chicago and other cities are refusing to unload perishable fruits from the Yakima Valley, Washington, because farmers in that area would not agree to a closed shop with the migratory fruit pickers union.

Bus lines hit

In the eastern part of the country, Mr. Smith asserted, lines of the Greyhound Bus Co. are being “tied up” because a union – which he did not name – has “refused” to submit a controversy to arbitration in accordance with a labor contract now in operation.

Rep. E. E. Cox, D-Georgia, charged that the conference was being held “to circumvent the Congress in enacting legislation dealing with labor.” He termed it “candy-pulling at the White House” and said it was going on while “labor is promoting a conspiracy against the people.”

Rep. Henry Dworshak, R-Idaho, asked “who is responsible for our labor situation and who calls the labor-industry conference?”

Mr. Cox refused to answer directly but reiterated his contention that the administration’s labor record would be “a disgrace to any country of the civilized world.”

Meanwhile, the executive council of the CIO today gave its representatives to the industry-labor conference blanket authority to “work out the best possible agreement,” for a program of war production. uninterrupted by work stoppages.

The council adopted a resolution endorsing a plea that union demands for additional closed shops be considered by any board set up to adjudicate disputes.

Parley futile in bus strike

Officials of union present counter proposals

WASHINGTON (UP) – Labor Department officials said today, after a lengthy conference with officials of the Greyhound Bus Co. and representatives of 500 striking AFL bus drivers and maintenance employees, that the strike which tied up bus schedules in New England, New York and the Middle West remained unsettled.

Following the conference, company officials departed for Chicago where union representatives drew up counter-proposals which will be discussed at another meeting to be called next week by the Labor Department.

The drivers struck December 3, charging that the company hired women as bus cleaners at a lower wage than was provided in the union’s contract. The bus line contends the contract does not mention employment of women and therefore was not violated.

Stokes: Action by U.S. against Axis airlines urged

Investigators ask ouster of firms operating in South America
By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer

WASHINGTON. Dec. 20 – Diplomatic steps to drive Italian and German airlines out of Latin America were urged today in a report to the House by its “Select Committee to Investigate Air Accidents.”

Members of the committee made a trip to Central and South America. Their report discloses widespread Nazi activities and Japanese threats in some localities.

Commenting that “the International Italian Airline, known as Lati, has been repeatedly carrying shipments of barium, platinum and adrenalin from South America to Europe,” the committee recommends:

That it is “absolutely imperative that our State Department, together with others in authority, be directed to complete negotiations without further delay, to the end that the Italian-operated Lati be supplanted with United States operation and equipment, and that the Condor (Nazi) operation be scrupulously de-Germanized, and, furthermore, that negotiations be completed for the use of United States capital and equipment to replace German and Italian capital and equipment on all South America airlines.”

Nazis ‘self-sustaining’

The committee says “it is believed that the German ambassador in Mexico City is the head of the Gestapo for the North American continent,” and reports that in South America, German propaganda and organizational activities are on “a self-sustaining basis.”

“The Gestapo agents fix quotas and levy contributions on every Nazi and every German in South America on the basis of ability to pay,” the report asserts.

War machine admired

Highlights on individual countries follow:

ARGENTINA: 2,200 Gestapo agents operating in Buenos Aires. Large storm-troop contingent believed drilling secretly. German population over 250,000, Italian population even larger.

BRAZIL: Considerable admiration for German war machine in military circles, but a real determination not to become a puppet state of any power. Many suitable landing spots for airplanes in northern rim of Amazon Basin, 550 miles from Panama Canal. Former airline “Air France” has extensive airport and radio facilities in bulge of Brazil as has German line Lufthansa.

PERU: 22,000 registered Japanese in Lima’s “Little Tokyo.” Nazis very active. Peru’s coastline long and exposed.

Guatemala ‘Little Reich’

CHILE: Germans built up southern portion, settled there many years ago for agriculture. Storm troopers believed drilling.

MEXICO: Widespread admiration among army officers for Nazi system. Shortwave radio stations abound in jungles for direct communication with Berlin.

COLOMBIA: Former German pilots of Scadta Airline, now American-Colombian-operated, believed to have taken back to Germany photographs of terrain. At least 100 German military pilots familiar with every part of the country.

GUATEMALA: Affectionately referred to by Hitler as “Little Reich.” Contains approximately 70,000 Nazis. Sixty percent of all coffee plantations owned by Nazis, committee told. Five of 18 airports belong to Nazis.

Red Cross receives all but ‘fare home’

*WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – A youth in his late teens stopped at the information desk of American Red Cross national headquarters here today and said he wanted to “give something” to the organization’s war fund.

He drew a roll of bills from his pocket, kept two of small denomination “for carefare home,” and laid the rest on the deck. Then he departed in haste without giving his name or address.

The boy’s gift was $272.

General contributions to the Red Cross $50 million war fund, meanwhile, rose to $3,710,106 tonight. Among the large contributions were:


City of New Orleans	$15,000
New Orleans Clearing House	$10,000
New Orleans Public Service, Inc.	$10,000
Lynchburg, Virginia	$17,000
Allentown, Pennsylvania (from the Trexler Estate)	$10,000

Red Cross Chairman Norman H. Davis received a check for $1,000 from Mr. and Mrs. Ferdinand Gruenwald of New York. Their attorney wrote that the couple “recently came to the United States to escape oppression and persecution.”

30 refugees tell of escaping Japs

MANILA, Dec. 20 (UP) – The war today cast up 30 footsore, exhausted men who trudged across the trackless mountains and dared death at the hands of Philippine tribesmen after they were bombed and shelled from their small inter-islands ship at Aparri.

Their trek began December 10. That morning, a Japanese seaplane bombed their ship twice and sprayed the decks with machine gun bullets. Escaping unhurt, the sailors later encountered a Japanese warship, which began shelling their vessel.

The men took to a launch of lifeboats and fled up the Cagayan River, which flows into the sea at Aparri, on the northern coast of Luzon.

Looking back, they saw their abandoned ship smoking – apparently hit by a shell.

Entering the Cagayan, they saw soldiers waving from the shore, but drawing closer spotted a Japanese flag and kept going.

Then followed nine days of gravel over the mountains of Luzon. They ran into tribesmen who stripped them of nearly all their food before they were permitted to continue to Manila.

‘Christmas war dinner’ suggested by experts

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – A “Christmas war dinner” designed to be healthful and still follow tradition has been suggested by Dr. Helen S. Mitchell, principal nutritionist of the Office of Defense Health and Welfare Services. The menu:

Tomato juice with whole wheat crackers.
Celery, radishes and green pepper strips.
Roast turkey and dressing with cranberry sauce.
Mashed sweet potatoes; buttered broccoli.
English plum pudding with wine sauce.
Coffee or milk.

Denver attorney gets vacant Senate post

DENVER, Colorado, Dec. 20 (UP) – Gov. Ralph Carr tonight appointed Eugene D. Millikin, 51-year-old Republican attorney of Denver, to the U.S. Senate.

Mr. Millikin will fill the vacancy caused by the death of Sen. Alva A. Adams, a Democrat, December 1. He has never held public office before. In the First World War he went in a private and came out a colonel. He will hold office until the 1942 elections.

Gov. Carr also appointed William S. Jackson of Colorado Springs, stepson of famed Helen Hunt Jackson, to the State Supreme Court. Mr. Jackson also is a Republican.

NormanStewart · December 24, 2020, 5:17pm

Simms: Power balance vital to peace, Benes believes

Post-war accord depends on European lineup, Czech leader says
By William Philip Simms, Scripps-Howard foreign editor

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 – Some form of a world “commonwealth” composed of regional “federal blocs” is indispensable to post-war peace, according to Dr. Eduard Benes, former president of Czechoslovakia and now head of the refugee provisional Czechoslovak government at London.

But even then, warns Dr. Benes, much will depend on the organization of post-war Europe. For, he declares in “Foreign Affairs,” out this week, lasting peace will be impossible unless something is done to prevent the rise of future Hitlers. To guard against that he says:

Germany should be decentralized. Prussia’s domination over the other elements in the German nation should be broken. Prussia herself should be divided into three or four separate state units. Germany as a whole must return to her pre-1938 borders.
Italy will emerge weakened, certainly in Africa and in the Mediterranean.
Western Europe, especially France and Great Britain, must regulate their relations and there must be an understanding between Belgium and Holland.
A Czechoslovak-Police confederation – already assured – must be the core of a reorganized Central Europe. Austria must be freed from Germany’s grip. She and Hungary, and perhaps, Rumania, might join the Czechoslovak-Polish nucleus.
The Balkan confederation should consist of Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania and possibly Rumania. Turkey must decide for herself. Bulgaria, however, should be compelled to join the Balkan bloc. For the third time in 30 years, she had been made the instrument of great powers against her neighbors.
Soviet Russia must not remain isolated this time as she did after the last war; geographically she belongs to Europe as much as Britain does. The disequilibrium caused by Russia’s isolation was one of the reasons for the second World War. If the error were repeated it probably would lead to a third.
A larger Scandinavian political unit should be created in agreement with Great Britain and Russia. Spain and Portugal will decide for themselves.

Revenge motive denied

Dr. Benes denies he is motivated by Germanophobia or by sentiments of revenge in proposing the dismemberment of the Third Reich. It is simply a matter of creating some kind of balance of power in Europe which will give peace a reasonable chance. He does not contend “that all Germans are bad.” Nevertheless they are responsible for Hitler and Himmler just as certainly as “Americans are responsible for Lincoln and Roosevelt, the British for Churchill, the Italians for Mussolini, the Czechoslovaks for Masaryk and the Russians for Lenin and Stalin.”

France and Germany are destined to pass through some serious inner changes after the war, Dr. Benes thinks, but “over the years France will recover.” Nazi Germany will fall militarily and politically, whereupon “the regime which has committed such hideous mistakes and crimes will disappear like snow in the sun.”

‘Gendarme’ necessary

The whole post-war world will face terrific financial, economic and social problems, says the Czech statesman, but the creation of federal blocs in Europe will facilitate their solution. Not the least of the problems will be the transfer and protection of minorities.

“But,” Dr Benes concludes, “however perfect the future European political and social structure may be theoretically and technically, it will not guarantee either its own existence or the preservation of peace if the desire for these two things is not real and alive. Institutions maintain themselves only insofar as people are willing to make sacrifices for them… no regime is possible without a gendarme.

The League of Nations, he asserts, signified a great improvement over pre-1914 conditions. But it failed because even the states that had the greatest interest in maintaining it “did not wish to be the ‘gendarmes of Europe’.” Future peace, he suggests, must be actively safeguarded if it is to endure.

Navy to start college student training plan

Program permits enlistment now, service after graduation

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox tonight announced plans for training thousands of college graduates and undergraduates for deck, engineering and flying duties in the Naval Reserve.

The program will permit undergraduates who enlist now to stay in college until graduation before entering upon active duty.

Details of the plan have been forwarded to deans of 2,000 colleges throughout the country.

The Navy needs 14,000 seniors, juniors and college graduates between the ages of 19 and 28 as prospective officers for deck and engineering duties. They must be single. Seniors enlisting now for training will not be called to active duty before next June. Juniors may continue in college until 1943, but may be summoned to active duty for the summer of 1942.

After completing their college education, accepted applicants will begin four months’ course of instruction as apprentice seamen and reserve midshipmen. This will lead to appointment as ensign in the Naval Reserve.

College students enlisting now to become naval aviation officers will not be required to start training until they complete the current college year.

The quota of men to be recruited for flying officers under this program is unrestricted, because the Navy proposes to step up pilot training in the Naval Reserve to a monthly induction rate of 2,500. Applicants must be between 20 and 27 years of age with two or more years of college credits. After eight months of flying instruction, they will receive ensigns’ commissions.

OPM speeds up conversion of civilian plants

Red tape cut as Knudsen, Hillman dictate to industrial units

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – The OPM slashed through red-tape today to speed conversion of civilian industries to war production.

Henceforth, all OPM industrial branches will be under the immediate control of Director-General William S. Knudsen and Associate Director Sidney Hillman. They have been reporting to the Civilian Supply and Purchases Divisions headed respectively by Leon Henderson and Douglas C. Mackeachie.

The old arrangement, officials said, was conducive to long delays which were not regarded as particularly harmful while the nation was at peace but which cannot be tolerated now.

It is no secret that industries anxious to cooperate in the defense drive have complained bitterly about the seemingly endless red-tape complicating the shift from civilian production.

Action was swift when concrete proposals reached Knudsen and Hillman.

The reorganization short circuits delays inherent in the old setup. When industry branches representing manufacturers of autos, refrigerators, plumbing, farm equipment and other products make a decision, it will be submitted directly to Knudsen and Hillman and the branches will be empowered to carry out programs agreed to.

The Division of Civilian Supply and the Purchases Division henceforth will function in an advisory capacity.

Officials said the transfer of power direct to the branches will necessitate complete cooperation and consultation of the industry and labor advisory committees. Knudsen and Hillman said in a joint statement:

“To achieve an all-out war effort, it is imperative to obtain the fullest possible cooperation from all groups in the nation.”

Fugitive Japs disturb sleep as lighthouse

Keeper kept awake after raid on Hawaii

HONOLULU, Dec. 20 (UP) – What with two Japanese pilots prowling about in the trees and coast artillerymen blasting at them with machine guns and rifles, it was two nights after the Japanese attack on Hawaii that John M. Sweeney, keeper of the Barber’s Point light station, got any sleep.

The Japanese were forced to bail out during their attack on December 7, it can be revealed today. This is Mr. Sweeney’s account:

“They got confused in the trees and prowled around the station all Sunday night, the boys from the coast artillery firing at them with rifles and machine guns.

“One was wounded and later was found on the beach, buried by his mate, with his toes sticking out of the sand. The other also was shot in a battle with the soldiers.

“Monday night was bad. The boys were nervous and had me go with them to the top of the tower. It proved to be only the reflection of the moon on the glass.

“The next time they thought parachutists were on top of the tower. It proved to be nothing. They escorted me to the house and warned me not to go outside, as they would shoot at anything. When we got word that those two Japs had been located we felt easter and Tuesday night was the first night that anybody slept.”

Convicts seek roles in ‘suicide squadron’

SAN QUENTIN PRISON, California, Dec. 20 (UP) – Thirteen San Quentin prisoners, 10 of them serving life terms, offered themselves to President Roosevelt today as a “suicide squadron” to serve as human torpedoes to help crush the Japanese.

“It is far better to sacrifice one life than to lose thousands,” the 13 said in a memorial to the President.

“There is no way we can show our loyalty other than by giving our lives freely to our country,” the memorial said.

Decks cleared, Congress ‘out’ for holidays

President’s requests filled; ‘rear guard’ keeps session alive

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – Congress virtually closed down for the holidays tonight – although technically it will remain in session – after the House completed action on all emergency war legislation requested by President Roosevelt.

About the only items on the Senate’s schedule was an anticipated report next week from the Byrd Committee investigating possible reductions in non-defense expenditures. The committee is expected to recommend cuts totaling between a billion and 1½ billion dollars.

The Senate Naval Affairs Committee plans hearings Monday on a bill by its chairman, Sen. David I. Walsh, D-Massachusetts, to authorize an increase in Navy personnel to 500,000 from the present 300,000, and to increase the strength of the Marines from 60,000 to 104,000 men.

‘Safe to leave’

Speaker Sam Rayburn told House members that it was now “safe” to leave the capital. Senators and representatives left Washington by rail, plane and auto, leaving only a handful to meet at least once every three days until the new session convenes January 3.

Mr. Rayburn, himself, left tonight to enjoy the Christinas holidays at his ranch home in Monham, Texas.

Before he left the speaker’s chair, Mr. Rayburn assured House members that Mr. Roosevelt had no immediate requests for additional war legislation. and that if an emergency arose, members would be summoned to the Capitol by telegraph.

President’s wishes filled

“If the President has any further communications the chair has not been informed of them, and is of the very definite opinion that there are not any more for the present,” Mr. Rayburn said.

“It is safe for each and every member to stay away from Washington until January 3 or until further notice.”

He said that in view of the war, a sine die adjournment would be “impracticable.”

After the announcement the House elected Rep. William P. Cole, D-Maryland, a resident of nearby Towson, Maryland, to act as speaker pro tempore, during Mr. Rayburn’s absence.

New censor chief plans clear rules

Control of wire facilities will be restricted, Fly says

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – Chairman James L. Fly of the Federal Communications Commission said today that federal control of the nation’s radio and wire communications, authorized in a bill approved yesterday by the House, will be restricted to “specific” facilities in “danger zones.”

Pointing out that “this war is closer to U.S. territory than was World War I,” Mr. Fly said, the Army might have “specific and urgent needs” to control such facilities in “theaters of war.”

But his views on the legislation were not shared by Chairman Burton K. Wheeler, D-Montana, of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee which starts hearings on the proposals next week.

Broad action seen

Mr. Wheeler predicted that all communications – telephone, telegraph and radio – will be taken over for federal operation soon. Administration leaders, by requesting the legislation, “apparently feel that government operation is essential to waging war,” he added.

Mr. Fly said that government control of facilities may be necessary eventually but is not being considered at this time.

“There is a vast and important area between the extremes of complete government control and just putting the powers to be granted in a cooler to be held as a threat,” he said. “Here and there the Army and Navy may need certain specific facilities, owned either by private concerns or common carriers and perhaps running across national boundary lines.”

Provisions of bill

The House legislation provides that the President may:

Suspend or amend existing regulations applicable to wire facilities.
Order the closing of any wire communication facility or station and removal of its equipment.
Authorize the use or control of any such facility by any government department.

Presidential exercise of the powers would be granted until six months after the end of the war.

Newspapers and radios will continue on voluntary basis

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – Byron Price, veteran newspaperman and press service executive who was named by President Roosevelt to head the new Office of Censorship, plans first to clear up the “muddle” over voluntary censorship of the press and radio.

Mr. Roosevelt created the office, to operate “for the duration,” by executive order following a one-hour conference with Mr. Price yesterday.

Emerging from the White House, Mr. Price made it clear to newspapermen that censorship of the press and radio will continue on a purely voluntary basis. He said the system would be based on a “patriotic response” of responsible executives of official pleas that nothing be printed which might “give aid or comfort to the enemy.”

Clarification sought

But he emphasized that he will try, as one of his first tasks, to organize the various requests of governmental agencies to avoid dissemination of certain types of information.

“I have had hundreds of letters from publishers and radio officials,” he said. “They are doing a marvelous job but all they want is for somebody in the government to tell them what to do.

“Probably one of my first jobs will be to clarify the requests made by the various departments. Many of them have not been clear and in some cases they have been contradictory.”

FBI outlines plan

The censor of World War II will find an organization partly set up.

J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has outlined a plan for a censorship office and has surveyed employees in other branches of the government to find fit material for the responsibilities of the job. It admittedly is one of the toughest on the domestic front.

Immediately on the outbreak of war with Japan, the Navy Department set up a censorship of overseas cable and radio dispatches. It had not functioned yet at full efficiency, according to some diplomats whose official dispatches have been held up for days. But this is expected to be ironed out quickly.

Details of order

Mr. Roosevelt’s executive order setting up the censorship under the War Powers Act provides:

The censorship of “communications by mail, cable, radio, or other means of transmission” passing between the United States or its territories and possessions and any foreign country. The way was left open to clear mail to some countries, presumably the Allies, by executive order naming exceptions later.
Creation of a Censorship Policy Board to advise the director of censorship on matters of policy and on coordination and integration of censorship. It is composed of Vice President Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of the Treasury Henry A. Morgenthau Jr., Attorney General Francis Biddle, Postmaster General Frank Walker, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Lowell Mellett (director of the Office of Government Reports) and Archibald MacLeish (director of the Office of Facts and Figures).
Provides for the establishment by Mr. Price of a Censorship Operating Board, consisting of representatives of such agencies as he selects.

The Operating Board is expected to control news at the source, the only form of direct censorship planned.

Latin ship to carry Japs back home

BUENOS AIRES, Dec. 20 (UP) – The Foreign Office announced today that the steamer Rio de la Plata (formerly the Italian liner Principessa Giovanna) will leave here January 3 to carry Japanese diplomats now in the United States to Japan.

The vessel will also carry Dr. Alberto Candiotti, the new Argentine ambassador to Japan, who is now in Los Angeles, California.

Foreign Minister Enrique Ruiz Guinazu said several days ago that his government was negotiating with the United States, Great Britain and Japan to permit an Argentine merchant vessel to carry the diplomats.

Appropriations for war now total $74 billion

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – Passage of the 10-billion-dollar War Appropriations Bill brings total U.S. authorizations for war purposes to $74,440,000,000, the OPM’s Bureau of Research and Statistics reported today.

The estimate includes RFC commitments, as well as congressional appropriations, contract and tonnage authorizations.

New requirements for various construction projects are expected to increase from the original 1942 estimate of $10,400,000,000 to approximately $11,250,000,000 next year, the bureau said.

Navy set to ask troops in strike

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 20 (UP) – The Navy tonight announced it was prepared to ask for U.S. Army troops, if necessary, to keep full production going at two Richmond, California, shipyards where the United Brotherhood of Welders, Cutters and Helpers called a walkout.

The announcement said Rear Adm. John W. Greenslade, commandant of the 12th Naval District, personally went to Richmond tonight to investigate the welders’ strike situation at the Todd-California and Richmond Shipbuilding Corp. plants.

“In the event he finds it necessary the admiral is prepared to call upon the Army to furnish troops to clear the way for welders who desire to work to enter the plant,” the Navy said.

Proposal to Rosemary still on artist’s mind

NEW YORK, Dec. 20 (UP) – Hamilton “Bud” Westmore, Hollywood makeup artist, will make up his mind this weekend whether he will propose to motion picture star Rosemary Lane.

“I will know definitely Sunday or Monday,” he said. “You know, we’ve been going together for three years.”

He is in New York to spend the holidays with Miss Lane.

Irish willing to aid U.S., letter hints

LONDON, Dec. 20 (UP) – Both the British and Americans have been wondering what the reaction of the Irish to the United States’ declarations of war would be. A letter received by the military attache’s office of the American Embassy here gives a hint.

One Irishman, who shall be anonymous, wrote asking if he could be of service to the United States in any capacity. He explained that he was a skilled engineer working in a British tank factory. If he remains in England for two years or more, he will be subject to the draft here. That he intends to avoid by returning to Eire before these two years expire.

“I am not anxious to fight for Britain but I will fight with or on the same side as the British – but for America,” he wrote.

Don’t buy old gas masks, defense office warns

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – Don’t buy gas masks of World War I type which “are now worthless due to deterioration,” the Office of Civilian Defense warned tonight.

The OCD said they had received reports that some manufacturers have been selling old World War I masks which do not carry the approval of the Chemical Warfare Service.

“Gas masks of the First World War type are now worthless, due to deterioration of the filling, stiffness and age of the face-piece and other components,” the OCD said.

“The public is warned to carefully examine any protective material or devices offered for sale at this time.”

Holder of glider record is killed in Philippines

HONOLULU, Dec. 20 (UP) – Friends today reported the death in an air battle at Manila of Lt. William C. Cooke Jr., holder of the world’s glider endurance record.

He was a graduate of Boston Tech and Brooks Field Flying School in Texas. His wife and two children live at Albuquerque, New Mexico.

NormanStewart · December 24, 2020, 5:21pm

The outlook for 1942…
Wickard sees hard work, fair reward for farmers

Labor, machinery scarcity due, but country will meet war goals
By Claude R. Wickard, Secretary of Agriculture

To help Americans plan their lives to give their utmost to the ultimate goal – victory – in the coming year, outstanding leaders in industry and government have written a six-part series. The first article, by Secretary of Agriculture Claude R. Wickard, appears below.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 – Harder work, more difficulties, but fair rewards for abundant production. That, in my opinion, is the outlook in 1942 for my fellow farmers.

We have before us the biggest and hardest job we farmers ever have tackled; it is only our fair share of the biggest and hardest job the nation ever has undertaken.

Our nation needs an abundance of rich, nourishing food; it is our job to produce it. Other nations, joined with us in our struggle, need American food; we must produce more to supply their needs. We cannot fail.

We have head start

We have a head start on the job. We began last summer to plan for production in 1942, to meet the food and fiber needs of the nation as nearly as they could be anticipated.

Last summer when we set up the goals, we found that we needed to make some adjustments in our 1942 production to meet rapidly changing conditions. British food needs and the desirability of building up some reserves for post-war use entered into the calculations, on top of increasing requirements at home.

All things considered, we found we needed to produce less cotton, wheat, and tobacco, and produce more milk for cheese, evaporated and dried milk; more hogs for meat and lard; more chickens for meat and eggs; more vegetables for canning.

Goals still hold good

We expected that our imports of vegetable oils would be greatly reduced by the war, and so we planned for big increases in the acreage of soybeans and peanuts for oil.

The total production then planned for 1942 represented a net increase of about 2 percent over the record high production of 1941, but the job could be done without plowing up any more land. In general, the 1942 production goals as planned still hold good. We may have to revise them upward in some lines, and as this is written, we are going over them. We shall notify farmers of the revisions well in advance of planting time.

Difficulties forecast

You farmers were asked to plan your individual production to have a proportionate part in the adjusted production for 1942. The reports submitted by your neighbors who did the farm-to-farm canvass show that your total production plans meet the 1942 goals with margins to spare.

You know there are difficulties ahead before the plans on paper become food on the table. We’re not going to be able to hire as much skilled farm labor next year as we’d like. It may be that we can train teen-age boys, and young women from the cities to help in farm work. But regardless of the kind of help we get, I can’t see any sure substitute for longer hours and harder work on the part of every member of the farm family.

Machinery scarce

You’re not going to be able to buy much new farm machinery as you’d like, because the metals have to go into war production. We hope there will be plenty for repair parts, but you should certainly get as many spare parts as possible ordered early in the year.

You’re not being asked to step up production of the vital farm products and take a risk on the price. The basic crops, cotton, wheat, corn, rice, and tobacco have a floor under them at 85 percent of parity, established by the loan rate. Cheese, dried skim milk, evaporated milk, hogs, eggs and chickens, are supported at 85 percent of parity by purchases.

Parity prices sought

There is reason to believe that the demand for most farm commodities will hold prices well above the supporting level. Supplies of feed are adequate and the ratio of feed cost to the price of livestock products is favorable to increased production.

I don’t think farmers want to see farm prices skyrocket, as they did in World War I. Too many of us lost our shirts and our farms in the crash that followed the last war. We are anxious to avoid it again. We want parity prices, but we’ll not push for more than parity. That is my interpretation of the sentiment of most farmers, and it is the basis on which the policies of the Department of Agriculture are founded.

Abundant production to meet urgent needs is the request the nation makes of you; the reward, parity prices for farm products.

Nation faces Spartan living, Willkie warns

Negligence will cause many deaths, ex-GOP candidate says

NEW YORK, Dec. 20 (UP) – Wendell Willkie tonight called on Americans to “dedicate ourselves to Spartan simplicity and hard work,” warning that “our negligence will cause many American boys to die needlessly.”

“We should have been prepared, we had ample warning,” he said in a radio speech over the CBS network. “We spent our substance in public expenditures which could have been devoted to employing our people in building airplanes and ships and tanks. Our negligence will cause many American boys to die needlessly.”

Mr. Willkie said “we do not have to starve… but we must learn to get along on the least that we need, not on the most.”

Calls on labor

He called on labor to be prepared to work a 60-hour week, if necessary, “and the sooner we commence this total program, the fewer will be the American boys who must die for victory’s sake.”

Mr. Willkie insisted that the government conduct itself in this war on the same basis as “that which it has conducted itself since the Hawaiian incident – a basis of honesty and the facing of facts.”

He asked that Congress cut non-defense expenditures to the bone. Nothing, he said, can be spared for political spoils. Above all, he said, “we must have a united will, and I join those who have pledged such unity.”

Enough cause for war

“The bombing of Honolulu and the murder of our citizens are in themselves sufficient cause for war,” Mr. Willkie said. “Yet we should be unjust to ourselves, unworthy of our forefathers, and completely unrealistic about the world in which we live did we suppose that that is the sole reason for our being at war.

“We go to war because, if we do not, freedom will die with us and with all men. If freedom is to live here in the United States, it must live elsewhere. And if we are to save it in the United States, we must save it elsewhere.”

Mr. Willkie admitted the Japanese attack on Hawaii found the Navy and Army unprepared, “asleep and exposed. And it found Japan attacking us with instruments of destruction made from materials and propelled by the oil which our years of appeasement had given her.”

All responsible

“Responsibility for this general unpreparedness rests upon all of us. In saying this, I do not mean to cast blame on any particular persons. We have only time to unite – and to act.”

He said modern applied science has caught up with geography and even overtaken it.

“Instead of living on a continent flanked by mighty oceans, we are living today, in effect, upon an island,” he said. “That is the revolution that had come upon us. And that is the fact for which Americans are unprepared.”

Mr. Willkie said the United States no longer possesses any special immunity from mechanized and deliberate evil and “we shall not be safe from it until the bloody gang that practices it has been exterminated.”

Japs wreck ship to spy on Guam defenses

Survivors view strength of island, report – then it is taken
By H. O. Thompson, United Press staff writer

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – The United States may have been blandly trustful of Japan before the treacherous attack on Hawaii, but the wily Japanese didn’t trust America.

A series of events which occurred in the months before the war establish those conclusions – now that Pearl Harbor has been caught “not on the alert,” and American lives, planes and ships have been lost and American property destroyed or damaged.

Wrecked ship at Guam

It now can be revealed that the Japanese wrecked a ship on the island of Guam several months ago so that the survivors could see and report on American defense positions there.

This may have been at least a contributing factor in Gua’s apparent fall to the Japanese while the other two American Pacific outposts, Midway and Wake Islands, continue their heroic resistance.

The alertness of the American garrison at Guam is said to have prevented the Japanese from collecting all of the material they undoubtedly would like to have had, but they nevertheless were able to escape with some valuable information.

Rescue ships offered

As soon as the wreck at Guam was reported, the Japanese politely offered to send another ship to pick up the stranded sailors. U.S. authorities rejected that proposal and countered with a plan to deliver the sailors in an American ship to the nearest Japanese mandated island.

Japanese authorities were indignant. Permit an American ship to enter one of their strategic island outposts? Never.

The matter was negotiated for some time before it was decided to transfer the sailors from an American to a Japanese ship on the high seas.

May delay exchanges

That incident illustrates the lengths to which Japan went before the war to get detailed information on American facilities. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox said the Japanese had developed in Hawaii the most efficient Fifth Column movement of any in this entire war, except that of Germany’s in Norway.

The present mutual distrust of Japan and the United States is expected to lead in greater difficulties than usual in exchanging diplomats.

The American government, for its part, does not intend to release Japanese diplomats and news correspondents until the safety of American diplomats and correspondents in Japan has been made certain.

Argentina may send boat

Radio Saigon reported yesterday that arrangements were being made for an Argentine ship to return Japanese diplomats and pick up Americans in Japan. In Buenos Aires, it was learned that the Argentine government has started negotiations for sending a ship to Japan.

The American embassy staff has been reported safe and comfortable in the embassy compound in Tokyo. The Japanese embassy staff is confined to the embassy grounds here.

It was reported from Chile that the Japanese liner Tatsuta Maru, said to have been 600 miles from Honolulu when the Japanese attack was made, had arrived back in Japan and that its American and British passengers had been placed in jail.

10 answer as U.S. calls first heroes roll

By Robert Crabb, United Press staff writer

MANILA, Dec. 20 (UP) – Gen. Douglas MacArthur called the heroes roll of the first desperate hours of fighting against the Japanese invasion today to announce the award of Distinguished Service Crosses for extraordinary heroism under fire.

There were 13 names of men who dared to die.

Three of them did not answer the roll call, and one of these was the first hero of World War II, Capt. Colin P. Kelly Jr., whose bombing plane sank the Japanese battleship Haruna, and who died in saving the lives of his crew of six.

Capt. Kelly’s crew answered for him.

“En route to his home air field upon completion of his mission, his airplane was set afire by an attack by two enemy fighters,” the citation said. “This officer ordered his crew to bail out. Six men saved themselves by that order, but Capt. Kelly, the last to leave the burning plane, was killed in the resulting crash.”

But Capt. Kelly had achieved his goal and knew it before his plane went down. (In New York, when Mrs. Kelly was informed of her husband’s death she prayed: “Please, Lord, I hope that Colin knew that he got that battleship before he died.”)

Pfc. Graley B. Williams of Iowa City was another who didn’t answer the glory roll. He didn’t command an airplane, but he had left the farm to fight on one and he went down trying.

“While Pvt. Williams was on duty in the vicinity of his airplane a severe aerial bombardment occurred,” the citation said. “Not waiting for orders, he ran to his airplane and opened fire on the attacking dive bombers which were bombing and strafing.

“He courageously maintained fire until killed by a burst of fire from a hostile machine gun. His last act was in defense of the aircraft of which he was a crew member and was a vivid example of courage and devotion to duty.”

The third who died was First Lt. Samuel H. Marett of Atlanta, Georgia, who apparently wanted to make sure that his bombs would not miss a Japanese transport off Vigan, on the west coast of Luzon Island.

“Although warned that enemy landing forces at Vigan were well equipped with protective fire, Lt. Marett courageously led his squadron with markedly inferior armament in a concentrated attack on enemy transport ships.

“Against the fury of protective firing, he and his comrades strafed and re-strafed the invaders causing great panic and destruction on a troop-packed ship. Two transports burst into flames.

“In a final successful dive against a third transport, his airplane caught the resulting blast of the exploding transport and the intrepid pilot was destroyed.”

Editors pick year’s 10 best stories

NEW YORK, Dec. 20 (UP) – The destruction of the legend that the Germans are invincible in land fighting was placed high today on the list of the 10 biggest news stories of 1941 selected by editors of The United Press.

In making the selection, the editors took into consideration the military significance of the successful Russian counteroffensive and its heartening effect on the peoples of Occupied Europe.

All of the 10 stories dealt with some phase of the war.

The attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entrance into the war.
Destruction of the legend that the Germans are invincible on land as shown by the Russian successes after the Nazi drive to the gate of Moscow.
The United States’ “all-aid-short-of-war” program, including the Lend-Lease Act, the Selective Service Law, repeal of the Neutrality Act, and defense production with attendant strikes and labor troubles.
Rudolf Hess’ flight to England.
The meeting at sea between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill to draft the Atlantic Charter.
American occupation of Iceland and the loss of U.S. warships that were attempting to keep the sea lanes open to that outpost.
The Battle of Libya.
The Battle of Crete, involving the first use of airborne troops and climaxing the Nazi invasion of the Balkans.
The “V for Victory” campaign and the rising tide of unrest in Occupied Europe.
The Hood-Bismarck battle.

In announcing the list, United Press news executives recalled that the 1940 selection included one unwritten story – “The Enigma of Russia.” At that time, United Press editors believed Russia was destined to play a vital part in the world conflict – a judgment that has been borne out by events.

‘Human torpedo’ volunteer writes to chief of Navy

Indian fighter, 69, wants to help again

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – A retired sergeant-major of the Marine Corps, who served in the Indian War of 1890 and the Spanish-American and World Wars, today offered himself to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox as a “human torpedo.”

The offer was made by 69-year-old Charles J. Buerger of Ventnor City, New Jersey, in the following letter addressed to Mr. Knox:

“It is with pleasure that I take this opportunity, at this critical period, to offer myself as a ‘human torpedo’ to serve the cause.

“I have had 31 years’ experience in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving in the Indian War, 1890; Spanish-American War aboard the U.S. Flagship New York under Admiral Sampson on the staff as a signal officer, and also the World War.

“I an now 69 years young, a tough leather-neck, humble but courageous, in the spirit of the U.S. Marine Corps ‘Semper Fidelis’ is embedded within me.

“Let us rally now and unite as one, deal a final knockout blow quickly on the gangster nations, so we can dedicate that noble temple of liberty and freedom of justice.

“Our great President once said, ‘There is nothing to fear except fear itself,’ so let us march forward courageously under the banner of God and justice so we may enjoy the fruits of our labor that was given us by our forefathers at the birth of our nation.

“My only regret is that I have but one life to offer my country, for the happiness of our future generations and great democracy.”

Mr. Buerger retired from the Marine Corps September 15, 1934.

Jap islands match U.S. coast

U.S. bombers raiding the Japanese islands would find them as long, similar shaped and on the same latitude as our Atlantic coast. Japan’s concentration of population and industries is in the south, however, while the largest U.S. cities are in the north.

France denies pact reached

Vichy terms Martinique’s status unchanged
By Paul Ghali

VICHY, Dec. 20 – The Vichy government today clarified two questions connected with operations in the Atlantic and Pacific. Regarding the former it was denied that any accord had been signed relative to the French West Indies possession, Martinique, between Adm. Georges Robert, its French high commissioner, and Rear Adm. Frederick J. Horne of the U.S. Navy.

It was explained that after the Franco-German armistice France and the United States had agreed tacitly upon a modus vivendi, which continues in force unchanged. The view here is that the report of a new accord arose from misinterpretation of the American State Department’s statement that entry of the United States into the war and France’s declaration of neutrality left the status quo unchanged.

Regarding the Pacific, it was announced that the Japanese in Indo-China had taken certain precautionary measures concerning the consuls of belligerent powers, namely Great Britain, the United States and the Dutch Indies, which include enforced residence in their respective consulates. So long as this lasts the French authorities in Indo-China will exercise control over the possessions of nationals of the countries in question. These measures were applied on Thursday, December 18.

Post offices’ role in raids sanctioned

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – Use of post office buildings as air raid shelters by the general public, provided the buildings are adequate to withstand severe bombing, was authorized tonight by Postmaster General Frank C. Walker.

The authorization was contained in a comprehensive list of wartime instructions to be followed by all postal employees. The decision as to the adequacy of individual post office buildings as shelters was left to local defense councils. The postmasters were instructed to consult such councils and to be guided by their decisions.

Such use of post office buildings, it was said, would necessitate, in some cases, admittance of the public to the space where mail is handled, a procedure never before permitted by the department.

War cancels fiesta

NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 20 – The war today caused cancellation of the Pan-American Fiesta planned to commemorate the 450th anniversary of the discovery of America and promote better relations in this hemisphere. It was originally scheduled to open here October 12, 1942 – Columbus Day.

Mother of 6 in forces to sponsor Navy ship

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – Mrs. Alice Posey Hatcher of Warrenville, South Carolina, whose six sons are all serving in the nation’s armed forces, was honored tonight by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox who selected her to sponsor the fleet auxiliary ship Arapaho.

Five of Mrs. Hatcher’s sons are serving with the Navy; the sixth in the Army. Secretary Knox sent her a telegram expressing his personal appreciation for her family’s patriotism. The Arapaho will be launched next April 15 at Charlestown, South Carolina.

Roosevelt lauds Scouts

NEW YORK, Dec. 20 – President Roosevelt, in his annual Christmas message to the Boy Scouts of America, today praised scouting’s contribution to national defense “by helping to keep alive the manly virtues of truthfulness, loyalty, courage and helpfulness.”

Shipyards to work on New Year’s Day

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – Navy shipyards and other naval plants must work on New Year’s Day but Christmas will be treated as a holiday, the Navy said today.

Instructions to this effect were telegraphed by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox to commandants of all naval districts, naval supervisors of shipbuilding and inspectors in all plants. He also requested that in the case of urgently-needed items of equipment that work be continued as usual even on Christmas.

Overtime will be paid employees working New Year’s Day or Christmas.

Sub chasers launched

NEW YORK, Dec. 20 – Three new submarine chasers were launched here today.

NormanStewart · December 24, 2020, 6:22pm

Monahan: Aw, give the dials a rest and seek a few laughs!

By Kaspar Monahan

If we win this war (if, my eye – we’re going to!) will we win it by blistering our thumbs and forefingers twirling the radio knobs and getting ear aches from listening to the communiques, the same old communiques we’ve been hearing all day and evening?

I’ll admit I’ve done my share of dial-twirling, but twisting a knob. I’ve discovered ruefully has brought down no Jap bombers, smashed no Nazi tanks, torpedoed none of Benny the Bum’s Libyan-bound troop transports. For all the good I’ve done toward crushing the Axis. I might as well have wasted my time reading one of the far-behind-the-times editorials of the nickel weekly mags.

Point is that following December 7, the show marts here and elsewhere have been hit hard, Radioitis has smote the ranks of showgoers like a plague of Biblical times. Showmen are optimistic. They are sure that the epidemic won’t last long. Nor should it last long. It’s not that I’m drumming up trade for the stage and screen that inspires this observation. But the theaters. no matter how trivial and unimportant their wares may seem in contrast to world-shaking events involving this nation at this time, have a vital part to play in keeping the vast civilian population in a robust state of mind. Destroy that robust state of mind and we’re licked before we start.

I’m trying my best to avoid the use of the overworked word “morale.” But, overworked or not, it is imperative that we have it. And if guffawing, for instance, at the nonsense of “Hellzapoppin’” or the horseplay of Oakie, Durante and other buffoons on the screen, helps you to relax for a blessed hour or two and sends you forth from the theater better able to do your particular job – then nonsense and horseplay become important items in national defense.

And not just the lighter, gayer things of the theater are important exclusively. Maybe a serious play or nerve-tingling melodrama will suit your mood better. Effect’s the same. You’ve gained surcease for a while, the tension has left your face and you’ve got a better grip on yourself.

In the last World War, the theater served its major purpose of bolstering the country’s courage, of providing heartening recreation. Blood and sweat and tears – yes, but a chuckle now and then is needed, too. Or the rapt attention for a stage or screen character and caring what happens to him in a serious play, have a tonic effect.

In general, however, the trend is definitely toward the gayer, lighter plays and movies. Locally the trend is emphatic with the holiday season at hand. Seems the Pittsburgh showmen have formed an amiable conspiracy to lure you away from your dials. Take a look at the holiday list:

In the matter of gay, “live” entertainment this wee is unusually generous. On Christmas night the Nixon will start the wild, roaring, looney “Hellzapoppin’” on a 10-day spree. The same company headed by Billy House and Eddie Garr, which packed the Nixon for two weeks last season, will furiously strive to drive war jitters out of Allegheny County.

The same night, “Ice Follies,” with a host of glittering stars and with brand new lighting effects, will open its carnival at The Gardens. The “Ice Follies” is always a sure-fire hit. And on Saturday evening the Pittsburgh Playhouse not to be outdone in the matter of rip-roaring divertissement, will open a three-week run of “Charley’s Aunt,” perennial favorite of comedy-loving showgoers.

The movie houses, also, have steered clear of somber, heavy stuff. Yesterday the Fulton opened “Rise and Shine,” a topsy-turvy musical comedy concerned with football heroics and campus shenanigans – with Jack Oakie, despite his near-40 years galloping about as an All-American halfback.

Wednesday the Penn will have “H. M. Pulham, Esq.”. While this is not a comedy, it presents a number of absorbing characters – characters that you can “care about.” Anyway, it has Hedy Lamarr. And she, the boys tell me, can easily make a man forget for a while all thought of war. Currently the Penn has “Chocolate Soldier” – definitely on the lighter side.

A mystery-drama, boasting of two glamor girls, Betty Grable and Carole Landis, opens Christmas Eve at the Senator. Action of the film, “I Wake Up Screaming,” revolves around a murder, with Victor Mature the suspect. Currently a pair of screen comedies is showing at the Senator. One of the best tune films in years, “Birth of the Blues” is holding forth at the Ritz, while the Warner is presenting the comedy, “Two-Faced Woman,” with Greta Garbo in the title role.

The Stanley is whooping things up merrily with Jan Savitt and his band, Martha Raye and assorted gagsters, warblers and hoofers providing the stage show. Shirley Temple plays “Kathleen” on the screen. Next Friday the Stanley will offer an all-fun holiday bill: “You’re in the Army Now,” with Jimmy Durante and Jane Wyman, plus for its stage bill, Ted Weems’ orchestra.

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Nelson Eddy and Rise Stevens, warbling duo, in the Penn’s “The Chocolate Soldier.”

I DARE SAY —
Listing plays to see on Broadway

By Florence Fisher Parry

I just have sent off to New York the list of plays which I book myself to see at this season every year, and it occurs to me that it might be well to set the list down here, amplifying the reasons which lie behind my choice of these 10 New York attractions. I Dare Say by the time I arrive in Manhattan (after Christmas) some new titles will be blinking on the marquees of the West Forties, but as it looks from here, this is what I shall see, with reasons attached:

ANGEL STREET – Devotees of the Pittsburgh Playhouse will remember that last year its valiant band offered to us an original play called “Gas Light,” a Victorian melodrama of questionable merit. I recall its first act as containing some elements of chilling suspense, but after that the play seemed to fall apart. It is interesting to note this same play, under the title “Angel Street,” is the new smash hit in New York today. It has taken the thrill-mongers by storm. One critic goes so far as to call it “the best written, best cast, best directed and best acted play of the season.” Just what legerdemain was brought to bear upon this extraordinary alchemy, I can hardly wait to ascertain, but being a chronic of the Macabre, “Angel Street” heads my list of prospective treats.

BANJO EYES – For no particular reason, except that Eddie Cantor has always been one of my favorite persons, although decidedly not my favorite comedian. Besides, any de luxe musical must be seen, if possible, in New York during its first weeks.

BLITHE SPIRIT – This jubilant inspiration of Noel Coward, being the perfect theater piece that it is, must be seen twice or thrice over, if only to hear the lovely ghost, Leonora Corvett, tell her husband in the flesh what fun Joan of Arc is as a bridge partner.

JUNIOR MISS – Of course I’ll see this one. What normal parent wouldn’t? Any mother who remembers her daughter’s first party dress cannot afford to omit this one and wouldn’t it just take cynical New York to adore it?

MACBETH – My conscience makes me go to see MACBETH again, as I slept through portions of it at its first seeing, rousing myself at every entrance of Judith Anderson and relapsing into slumber at her every exit. This, I realize, is not the way to see MACBETH, especially when Margaret Webster contributes the settings. Although I must say that I am getting just a little bit weary of the dreary organ notes which flow from beneath the stage’s apron like mournful notes of the reluctant dragon at every Webster production.

MY SISTER EILEEN – I have resolved to see this comedy for no reason but that it continues to keep its alphabetical listing on the theater page. Let a play remain on Broadway long enough and it wears down your resistance.

SONS O’ FUN – I guess I am in for this one, Olsen & Johnson’s brandest newest, if only to find out what’s the matter with me that I didn’t like their HELLZAPOPPIN’, compared with which they do say SONS O’ FUN is as a flying fortress to a summer mosquito.

SPRING AGAIN – I am going to see his comedy for two reasons: 1. Grace George. 2. C. Aubrey Smith. Probably these two are the nicest old lady and gentleman on the stage today. And I don’t think either of them will mind being called old, when age such as theirs crowns them with such true gentility and grace.

SUNNY RIVER – I always make a practice of going to any of Max Gordon’s shows. His musicals are always opulent and orchestral; his plays always contain the quintessence of quality. Max Gordon in the theater is like Samuel Goldwyn in the movies they manage to make anything they touch appear distinctive and rare, even though it may not be.

THE LAND IS BRIGHT – Of course, one is a fool not to see anything that George S. Kaufman writes for the theater. His worst is good and his best is something to dream about. Besides, this play is one of these “generation” plays – each act a different era. I like Magnificent Amberson stories, and this seems to be one of them.

THE WOOKIE – Here’s another play I will see again if only to hear the bombing of London as actually recorded and produced in this incomparable tribute to the British spirit.

Now the plays I am NOT going to see are “Cuckoos on the Hearth” – an all too obvious melodrama; George Jessel and Sophie Tucker’s vulgar burlesque show “High Kickers;” “Hope for a Harvest” (which seems from reports not to have improved very much over its original production here in Pittsburgh); “Theater” – in which Cornelia Otis Skinner tries to convince us that she is NOT a lady, a wholly impossible feat and one which should not have been asked of this impeccable daughter of dear Otis.

Of course, though, I’ll see “Clash by Night,” in which Tallulah opens the night after Christmas. There was no way for us here in Pittsburgh to make this usually smart gal believe that she hadn’t another “Little Foxes” on her hands. She really believed this was one of Odets’ best. But stars always believe fanatically in their newest plays. They practically have to be hit on the head with an ax to be delivered of their fond delusions. However, we’ll see. Maybe “Clash by Night” won’t seem like the same play in Manhattan!

Worries of war multiplying on Hollywood’s tense front

Movie extras hard hit by restrictions, but Chinese expect to profit
By Paul Harrison

HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 20 – Behind the screen: On the late-working set of Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be,” timeout was called for the company to listen to a presidential broadcast. The intent listeners included 300 men in Nazi uniform – extras working in a story of the fall of Poland.

The Chinese colony here seems assured of prosperity for the duration of the war. There’ll be plenty of films dealing with the Orient, and besides their own nationality they’ll be called on to play most of the Japanese roles… Hardest hit thus far by military control of Southern California have been movie extras, most of whose outdoor mob scenes have been canceled.

For whatever movie business it loses in the Far East, Hollywood will gain a great deal more from South America. Right up until the Japanese declaration, German films were doing a big business in several republics, especially Argentina.

Amusing to almost everyone except the uneasy studios is the determination of the local women’s press club to make formal awards to the Least Cooperative Actor and Actress of the year. Nominees are Jean Arthur, Ginger Rogers, Marlene Dietrich, Fred Astaire, Ronald Colman and Bing Crosby. The most cooperative prizewinners will be chosen from among Bette Davis, Rita Hayworth, Ann Sheridan, Clark Gable, Bob Hope and Robert Taylor.

Mickey Rooney, who plans to marry Ava Gardner sometime next year, will be in the next draft registration but almost certainly will be rejected because he’s too short. Metro is gnashing its teeth because Mickey’s engagement wasn’t discovered a little sooner. He’s working in “The Courtship of Andy Hardy,” and with an earlier week’s notice it would have been a simple matter to cast Miss Gardner, a stock actress, opposite him.

Authorities cracked down on a well-organized racket here in which studio tours were being sold to tourists for $750 per person. Promises were made that visitors actually would be taken on the sets and introduced to players. The money was represented as a contribution to screen charities. All the salesmen did, of course, was take the money and skip.

The censorship scare has got to such a point that producer Boris Morros, glimpsing a plaster Venus in the background on one of his sets, ordered a plaster sarong modeled on it… Madeleine Carroll declares she’s quitting Hollywood and will be London-bound in January… Arline Judge, after a two-picture comeback, says she’s quitting movies for good.

Hopper: That film folks are alert in war crisis

By Hedda Hopper

HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 20 – Just ran into that fine comedian Benny Rubin, who’s air raid warden of Encino where he lives. He’s on the death watch, from midnight until 6 a.m., so it won’t interrupt his work during daytime. He has 300 men under him, and said his boys are being so well fed that if this continues, they’ll be as fat as butter, because at the homes of Fibber McGee and Molly, Don Quinn, and the Phil Harrises, they keep luscious sandwiches and hot coffee going all night long for the boys on watch. Of course, the wardens aren’t allowed to carry firearms, but in several instances they’ve had to use their fists when they’ve ordered “Lights Out,” and the head of the house said, “You know where you can go.” One farmer in the vicinity who owned a shotgun, seeing the lights still on at the monkey farm ordered them out. Owner said, “My monkeys are afraid in the dark.” Well, in one second flat, the monkey were afraid all right – but the light was out!

After watching Cary Grant kiss Priscilla Lane through three rooms, across a yard, and over a cemetery, I recommend he be appointed tooter for our air raid sirens if the power ever fails. The guy’s got more wind than a Kansas cyclone. It all happens when cops come to arrest Cary’s aunts in “Arsenic and Old Lace.” Cary, fearful Priscilla will spill the works, starts kissing her and backing her out of the house, keeps his lips glued to hers till they get safely out of range of the law. “That,” said he, after the scene was over, “is not a bad way to keep a gal quiet during a blackout.” Why, Cary! You wouldn’t suggest keeping our morale up by lowering our defenses? … Harold Lloyd is thinking of returning to the screen in a domestic comedy. … Buck Jones, Tim McCoy, and Raymond Hatton will be featured in “Below the Border.” … Living up to her name, Veronica Lake bought acreage near a flood control lake and will build there. … A barber in our building has been here since 1926, shearing the locks of such celebrities as the Cagneys, the Beerys, Irving Berlin, Will Hays, etc., and entertains his customers while he works, with film gossip. Says his customers are now scattered all over the globe. Six of ‘em are in prison, and he relays news to them. What a pal!

A fan writes in to tell me of the many friendless dogs at the City Pound, doomed to the gas chamber, and asks why children couldn’t be made happy at Christmas with a real live pal instead of a stuffed toy. A dog’s faithfulness isn’t measured by its pedigree, and the boy who learns to love and care for animals grows up a better man. … Eddie Albert, who’s done some comic acts here free, is now getting paid to play a clown in a circus at Calexico. … On first day of shooting “Yankee Doodle,” Mike Curtiz was disturbed by sound on roof, cut scene, yelled to assistant to get rid of that sound. “But it’s rain on the roof,” explained assistant. “O.K.,” said Mike, “get rid of it!” … Harry Carey goes into “The Spoilers.” … When “Ten Gentlemen from West Point” failed to start on schedule, wag cracked production was being held up because they couldn’t find ten gentlemen in Hollywood! … No wonder we call Paulette Goddard lucky. With all this fuss going on, she’s hobnobbing down in Mexico City with King Carol, Madame Lupescu, and A. C. Blumenthal. … We’re looking ahead and building our bomb shelters so they can be turned into public swimming pools after the war is over.

And, presto! 5 long years have passed!

Kitten becomes cat, plant becomes a bush right before your eyes
By Duncan Underhill

HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 20 – All of Hollywood’s hackneyed devices for denoting the passage of time take a neat pasting from Preston Sturges in “The Palm Beach Story,” which will star Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea and Rudy Vallee.

The picture opens on Claudette and McCrea being married. Then a kitten dissolves into a tomcat, a tiny rose plant grows into a luxuriant bush, a calendar sheds a ream of pages and a shiny 1937 auto fades into a jalopy.

Then comes a title: “In other words, five years have passed. Get it?”

William Dieterle has finished the movie “Syncopation,” featuring Bonita Granville, Jackie Cooper, Adolph Menjou and Robert Benchley. Benchley hasn’t yet gone to work in the thing but he hopes to catch up before release time.

The slightly reformed humorist now turned full-time actor will function as a one-man Greek chorus named Joel Doakes, who suffers from the Original Dixieland Jazz Band era up to and through Tommy Dorsey.

The burden of his complaints, which will be stitched in at the appropriate mileposts in the history of jazz, is that he doesn’t like it.

Mr. Benchley and his associate bon vivants pause to shed a tear at RKO’s reconstruction of a Basin St. barrel house, which serves as background for an early sequence.

The postage prices (1907) were:

Beer, 1 cent a mug; gin, 2 cents for two ounces; whisky, 5 cents for two ounces; rum, 4 cents for two ounces; brandy, 5 cents, and champagne, 10 cents.

One secret of the low prices, according to Dieterle’s research department, was the cafeteria style of service. Patrons entered from the street. At the right, in the narrow, hall-like room, were the barrels on double racks. At the left, glasses and mugs. At the end of the line of barrels and mugs was a two-footed mug who made change and watched out for monkey business.

George Tobias learned Rule Number One of the Stunt Men’s Fraternity the hard way.

The rule is: Get rid of your hat with the first punch. If the hat is permitted to stay on the noggin after that first blow everybody takes a lot of unnecessary roughing round. The script girl sees to that.

In George’s fight with Howard da Silva in “Juke Girl,” he lost his derby with the fifth slug thrown at him. This was in the establishing shot. It thereupon became necessary that the hat soar through the air at the precise juncture in all subsequent takes: medium, semi, closeup and both reverse angles.

The hat refused to take direction, skimming off in unpredictable directions at any old time but the right time, much to the delight of the professional stunt guys applauding on the sidelines.

‘Strip tease’ is old stuff, and Goldwyn has proof

HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 20 (UP) – There’s nothing new about a strip-tease in the movies, said Samuel Goldwyn, although many people seem to think it comes only from burlesque and night clubs.

This comment was made in a discussion of Barbara Stanwyck’s unveiling in the film “Ball of Fire,” now being readied for general distribution.

“One of the first films I ever saw,” said Goldwyn, “was the 500-footer of ‘Little Egypt’ taken at the Chicago World’s Fair years ago.

“There wasn’t much of a plot. Egypt simply took off some veils and in the few that remained gave a snake-hips routine that had audiences gasping.

“Most of them, I’m sure, thought the gyrations were the result of trick photography but it was really Little Egypt in action. The picture was played all through the country. And was one of the ace laugh-getters in the late J. Stuart Blackton’s exhibit of old-time movies.”

Goldwyn recalled that some of the early Cecil B. DeMille “bathroom scenes” certainly should be included in the strip-tease classification.

While it was not exactly strip-tease, Claudette Colbert achieved much the same effect with her mountain waterfall bath in “Four Frightened People” and her milk bath in “Cleopatra.”

Marlene Dietrich, in “The Blue Angel” and “Song of Songs,” had scenes designed to display as much of her figure as the censors would allow.

Strictly strip-tease was Elaine Barrie’s “How to Undress Before Your Husband.”

Miss Stanwyck has her barest role yet in “Ball of Fire.”

Conquered lands and democracies join in battle cry on radio

Hour-long broadcast on Christmas night will present spokesmen for many nations
By Si Steinhauser

The nations conquered by the Axis powers, and the United States and its allies now pledged to their resurrection, will join in a great Battle Cry for Victory in a Free World on an hour-long special Christmas program to be presented by the Council for Democracy Christmas Day, Thursday, December 25, from 1 to 2 p.m. EST, over KQV.

Frederic March, Charles Boyer, Robert Montgomery, Dr. Lin Yutang and Raymond Massey, speaking for the Democratic powers, head the list of prominent personages who will appear on the program. Music will be supplied by Dr. Frank Black and the NBC Concert Orchestra of 50 in addition to other instrumental and vocal groups.

The program will be sent to all quarters of the globe by shortwave through NBC’s international stations.

The roll call of the Axis-conquered nations and the Democratic allies will bring to the microphones representatives of China, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, France, Greece, Belgium, Luxembourg, Great Britain, The Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Russia, Latin-America and the United States.

The master of ceremonies duties will be divided between March and Montgomery, the latter now a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy on active duty.

Dr. Lin, philosopher and author, will speak for China; Boyer for Free France, and Massey for Canada and the other British dominions. Prominent speakers yet to be selected will represent the United States, Russia and Latin America.

England will be represented by the Commander of a British battleship now in an American port and Australia by a Flight Sergeant chosen from one of the groups constantly arriving in the United States en route to England for duty with the RAF.

Belgium’s spokesman will be Kamiel Lefevre, carillonneur of the Riverside Church. The carillon of the church will be heard by remote pickup at the opening and close of the program.

Greece will be spoken for by Nicola Moscona, a basso with the Metropolitan Opera.

The English choir of the Zion Norwegian Lutheran Church in Brooklyn, singing a number specially composed for the program by Henri Pensis, the former musical director of Radio Luxembourg, will represent Norway and Luxembourg.

Poland’s hope for eventual restoration will be voiced in the music of the Dan Choir. The unquenchable spirit of the Czechs will be epitomized in the songs of the children’s choir of the Jan Huss Church of Manhattan.

The special music continuity and songs are being written by Vaclav Moravan, a well-known Czech composer.

One of the most auspicious programs of the holiday season will be a show staged for the Red Cross to aid in the drive for fifty million dollars. The Wednesday night (December 24) hour from 9 to 10 p.m. on KDKA has been donated by the sponsors.

Eddie Cantor and his troupe, including Dinah Shore; Bert “The Mad Russian” Gordon; Harry von Zell, announcer, and Edgar Fairchild, orchestra leader, will appear with Cantor as master of ceremonies.

The program will have a cut-in from Hollywood with Fibber McGee and Molly scheduled for one of their famous laugh routines.

Back in New York “The Aldrich Family” will offer a sketch for this Red Cross broadcast by Clifford Goldsmith.

More names are to be added and the hour promises to be one of the most scintillating of the season.

WOR and WEAF, New York’s most powerful stations, have been chosen to broadcast blackout signals with a “Whoo-oo-who.” That means “lights out.”

The Giants-Bears professional football championship will be aired by WCAE starting at 1:45 this afternoon.

Felix Mills, maestro for the Silver Theater, says it’s much easier to write music for a tragedy than for comedy. He finds all kinds of musical tricks to pant a musical picture of forlorn places and people. But he can’t “make ‘em laugh.”

Jack Benny is, and apparently always will be, “Buck” to his entire radio cast.

Arnold Korff, an immigrant mechanical engineer, lived in a Chicago rooming house. The landlady believed she knew the future and once looked in a crystal and told Arnold “You will become an actor.” Now, he is the doctor on radio’s “Young Dr. Malone” broadcasts. And he had laughed at the landlady and her “queer” ideas.

Soon after his future was predicted he bought a bargain rate ticket to visit his folks in Austria. He got into amateur theatricals and from there stepped to movies and radio.

Lynn Stambaugh, national commander of the American Legion, and Gen. Frank Hines, veterans’ administrator, will broadcast Christmas greetings to veterans in hospitals, via the Columbia network, Tuesday at 3:30.

Ninety-five weeks ago, Maxine Sullivan left Pittsburgh where she was singing in a night spot and went to New York. She has been a topnotch artist without a day off since.

Uncle Sam has borrowed Pittsburgh’s Charley Horn from NBC. Charley is director of research and development for the network. He is now associated with Col. William Donovan, coordinator of information. The Navy has just given Charley a full commander’s rank. Many years ago, he was a Navy radio operator. Pittsburgh recalls him best for his association with Dr. Frank Conrad and Dr. Harry P. Davis in radio development for Westinghouse.

Alton Cook, radio editor of the New York World-Telegram, recalls a visit made to New York by Dr. Conrad who passed away just a week ago.

Alton interviewed Dr. Conrad about founding KDKA and gives the following to his readers:

“That was a sideline,” Dr. Conrad recalled. “Our idea of radio was a new communication medium that might compete with the telegraph or telephone companies. It was weeks after KDKA opened before we realized where the real future of radio was. Then we scrapped our plans and began making receivers.

“My main feeling that November 2, 1920, night was resentment over the bother of staying up late to run that election show.”

Concludes Mr. Cook: “Next time you hear an announcer conclude a program, mutter after him ‘Thanks to Dr. Conrad’ and there will be the most appropriate recognition of a man who achievement is so great it is felt in the daily routine of the lives of almost all of us.”

Brig. Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, Selective Service director, will take part in today’s Chicago University Roundtable discussion of “Manpower: The Key to Victory.”

Time was when studio janitors wept up empty bullet shells tossed on the floor by sound effects men. Now the sound engineers save the brass jackets for reuse.

Almost every time a Spotlight Band program is broadcast Andre Kostelanetz might take a bow. Three of his graduates to hit the program to date are Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey and Glenn Miller.

Joe Howard, veteran mc of “Gay Nineties,” has composed a song titled “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Way back when most of us were tots, Mr. Howard wrote: “What’s The Use of Dreaming?” “Goodbye, My Lady Love,” “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now,” “When You First Kiss The Best Girl You Love” and many other best sellers.

NormanStewart · December 24, 2020, 6:23pm

Rev. Fulton J. Sheen of Catholic University will launch his twelfth annual series of talks on tonight’s (KDKA at 6) Catholic Hour.

Ruth Gilbert who plays Marie-Agnes on the Bess Johnson broadcasts plays under her own name on the Easy Ace programs.

Next edition of Who’s Who will list Bess Johnson and Wyllis Cooper, the latter, one of radio’s best known writers of famous scripts.

Carroll D. Alcott, long a news commentator from Shanghai and other Far East posts, has joined the staff of WLW, Cincinnati. The Japs marked Alcott for death because they didn’t like the “manner of his talks.”

Dr. Martin L. Reymert, director of the Mooseheart (Illinois) Laboratories for Child Research, checks radio programs for their suitability for the networks. His standard requirements for a program are:

It should be objective in its presentation and feasible in plot.
It should foster a constructive social attitude.
It should promote a respect for fine personal qualities.
It should develop an attitude of self-reliance.
Its plot should rely on wholesome excitement.

“The trouble with the average children’s radio program,” says Dr. Reymert, “is that it is written down to the children. All sense of proportion has been lost trying to make the programs exciting.”

Dr. Reymert requires that scripts make children think and teach them something.

Youth slays 5, goes to party

Parents, brother, sister shot, burned in home

LITTLE FALLS, Minnesota, Dec. 20 (UP) – Raymond Dahlier, 16, calmly confessed today that he shot and killed his father, mother, sister and brother, set fire to their farm home, and then went to a Christmas party.

“I was tired of doing all the work around the farm,” he explained to Sheriff William Butcher.

The father’s neck was broken in an auto accident a few years ago, Sheriff Butcher said, and he depended upon his son to do the heavy farm work.

“I’m glad I did it, and I would do it again,” Raymond said, “only next time I wouldn’t make any mistakes.”

Found in basement

The bodies of his father, August, 50, his mother, Regina, his sister, Anna Mae, 10, and his brother, Kenneth, 5, were found Friday night in the basement where he had left them.

The boy said he had planned the slayings for a long time.

Friday afternoon he siphoned gasoline from fuel tanks on the farm into a three-gallon can. After dinner he milked the cows and returned home to tell his father he had seen a rabbit and was going to shoot it.

Kills mother first

He took his father’s .12-gauge shotgun, walked around to the side of the house and fired through a window at his mother, who was washing dishes. When his sister ran to the window, he shot her. Then he shot his father, who was lying on a couch, and finally he turned the gun on his terrified small brother.

After dragging the bodies to the basement, he sprinkled the gas on the floor, changed into his best suit, threw a match on the gas-soaked floor, and left the house.

He drove his father’s auto to the Christmas party in the country schoolhouse from which he graduated two years ago.

Denies crime at first

Neighbors extinguished the flames and found the bodies. Raymond at first denied any knowledge of the slayings when he was called home from the party.

But he admitted later that he set fire to the house to destroy evidence of the killings. He said he had hoped to “get my share” of the farm through its sale.

Authorities said he would be charged with first degree murder and arson.

“He always seemed like a bright lad,” Butcher said, “and the neighbors all liked him.”

Poll: Longer week is favored by war workers

Public found ready to do more than it has been asked for victory
By George Gallup, director, American Institute of Public Opinion

PRINCETON, New Jersey, Dec. 20 – Evidence that workers in the defense industry are ready to work an extra eight hours a week to speed production of warplanes, tanks, guns, ships and other essentials of wartime is revealed in a nationwide survey just completed by the American Institute of Public Opinion.

This fact is one more link in the chain of evidence to show that, ever since the European war began in 1939, the American people have been ready to do far more for the defense of their country than anyone has yet asked them to do.

The public has never been satisfied with the rate of American arms production, surveys show.

It is significant that whereas only in recent weeks have major industries been running 24 hours a day, the public in general – and the rank and file of defense workers in particular – favored production around the clock as long ago as the end of December 1940.

Moreover, the rank and file of defense workers, in a survey in December 1940 indicated their willingness to work longer hours at the same rate of pay per hour.

Two phases studied

The latest Institute surveys on the problem of war production dealt with two phases. First, all employed persons who said their work was connected with war production were asked whether they would be willing to put in extra hours of work each week. Second, the public as a whole was asked whether it was satisfied with the present production of arms, airplanes and war materials.

Following are the results:

DEFENSE WORKERS

“Would you be willing to work eight hours more a week at your present job?”


Yes	88%
No	12%

GENERAL PUBLIC

“Do you think our country’s production of arms, airplanes and other war materials is going ahead fast enough?”

	SATISFIED	DISSATISFIED	NO OPINION
March 1941	30%	53%	17%
August 1941	39%	43%	18%
Today	45%	45%	10%

The willingness of defense workers to increase their work week is not something that has come since the dramatic Japanese attack of December 7 and our entrance into the war.

Actually this spirit existed nearly a year ago. When the Institute conducted a survey in December 1940 on the work week, it found that 75 percent of all employed persons, and 76 percent of all workers in defense industries, were willing to work additional hours per week at the same rate of pay if this would help speed up defense production.

Editorial: Make it stiff – and quick

With the war now in full swing, the Senate belatedly has stirred itself over the problem of price-control.

A subcommittee of the Senate Banking Committee has restored some of the teeth extracted from the administration’s bill by the House. Final action in the Senate is predicted soon after the new year begins.

The bill still is not a real, overall price-control measure. It does not touch wages, an essential factor in any economy, wartime or peacetime. The ceiling for the prices of agricultural products still is in a questionable state.

The Senate subcommittee restored, in a modified way, the controversial licensing system rejected by the House, advocated by Price Administrator Leon Henderson and opposed by Herbert Hoover. Mr. Hoover’s advice is worthwhile because in the last war he was the administrator of a licensing system covering food and similar commodities. He now says such a system is “useless and vicious.”

Prices continue to go up. Nationally-known authorities in business, academic and government circles are agreed that inflation is here, that it will get worse if it is not stopped.

Five months ago, President Roosevelt warned, “We face inflation unless we act decisively and without delay.” His admonition for action, complete and all-embracing action at once, is doubly imperative now.

More than three weeks ago, the House, under the thumb of farm and labor lobbies, ignominiously rejected the Gore Bill, which proposed real price-control, covering food, wages, rents, all prices. This bill incorporated the sound ideas of Bernard M. Baruch, than whom nobody has had more wartime experience in stabilizing our economy.

The war has imposed on the country the necessity for complete, centralized control of every factor which has even the slightest bearing on national defense – or offense.

Enactment of an equitable, drastic, all-embracing price-control measure will help win the war.

It will help win the war because it will stabilize our economy, which otherwise will be dangerously disrupted.

It will keep prices, wages and profits at an even keel, enabling our people to pay their taxes more promptly and to buy more defense bonds.

It is important to keep prices at an even keel not only for the benefit of the public but for the benefit of the government, now by far the biggest buyer of commodities in all history.

An effective price-control law will bring us out of the war with our economic feet on the ground. It will save us from the ruinous deflation which followed the last war. It will help us pay off the war debt more speedily. It will get us started on peacetime reconstruction on a sound basis.

In the name of victory – victory in the war and victory in the peace – it is up to Congress to scrap its timidity and its shirking and produce a prompt and adequate law.

Editorial: Japan’s larger fleet

When Secretary Knox told graduating midshipmen Friday that Japan has “by far the largest naval force in the Western Pacific, where most of the sea fighting will be done,” he added the qualification “at present.”

For many years it has been axiomatic that even under the old treaty ratio of 5-to-3 American superiority, or Anglo-American 10-to-3 edge over Japan, in a world war Japan would be superior in her own waters – that is, the Western Pacific. The reason is twofold. American fleets must be divided between two oceans and British ships must be scattered over the seven seas. Moreover, the great distance from the far Pacific of our fleet’s main base at Hawaii reduces its effectiveness by almost two-thirds compared with close-based enemy ships.

According to estimates widely published before the attack on us, the overall Anglo-American-vs.-Japanese ratio was less than 3-to-1, due to faster Japanese building in the non-treaty period and to British war losses. So, making allowance for the diminishing ratio of distance and the wide dispersal of Anglo-American forces in other seas, the Knox statement would be an obvious one – even apart from Pearl Harbor losses.

Our ability to shift this unfavorable balance of naval power in the Western Pacific depends on:

Destruction of more enemy ships and planes than we lose;
Faster production and delivery of reserves;
Speedy reinforcements from other fronts;
More bases.

Probably we have better than an even chance on all but the bases. For the moment at least we are losing, rather than gaining, bases. The enemy has taken Guam, injured Pearl Harbor, and he threatens Midway, Wake, Manila; British Penang is lost, Hong Kong almost gone, and Singapore in danger.

Next to holding Singapore, the biggest job in winning the Western Pacific is the capture of key enemy bases and the opening of Russian-American bases against Japan proper.

Editorial: Christmas and the war

Christmas will be grim for all Americans this year – old and young – with our country in a death struggle with those who would stamp freedom and liberty from the earth.

There are even those who say Christmas should not be celebrated at all – that to observe the birthday of the Prince of Peace when the world is torn asunder by war is but mockery.

Those people forget that in such a world there is more need than ever for a solemn and true observance of the day. It must stand as a beacon for the type of world Americans must fight for – where peace will one day reign among men of goodwill.

To forget that would mean that man has lost hope for a better world. Loss of that hope would mean abandonment of man’s chance to ever rise above the causes of wars.

Japs show fanatical patriotism

Columbia psychologist analyzes enemy war spirit

NEW YORK (SS) – Japanese fanatical super-patriotism may make them harder to defeat than might be anticipated from a mere count of their man power or battleships and airplanes.

This is the view of the psychologist, Dr. Otto Klineberg of Columbia University, specialist on racial differences and the relation between culture and psychology.

“Even the Chinese, with all the hatred and opposition which they felt toward the Japanese imperialists and their followers, still expressed their admiration of the unbounded love which the Japanese felt toward their own country,” Dr. Klineberg said in reply to a query about the Japanese habits of mind. “I think that this will mean that a very great many Japanese will be willing to sacrifice themselves in order to win a victory. This is obviously not an exclusively Japanese characteristic.

“In this respect, as in others, the difference is entirely one of degree, but I do feel that the Japanese have a sense of solidarity and identity with their country which is relatively rare in other national groups.”

Discounts one idea

Dr. Klineberg discounts the idea, however, that the attack on Hawaii was one of “hara-kiri” – the suicidal act of desperate people committed in super-patriotic fervor. He sees in it nothing he regards as characteristically Japanese, any more than it is characteristically German or Italian.

“The sudden attack by the Japanese, and their continued all-out offensive at the present time, argues in favor of a definite plan to win, rather than to go down fighting,” Dr. Klineberg said. “The attack in itself, treacherous as it was, seems to be not at all related to anything specific to the Japanese personality. It is, of course, cut after the same pattern as the customary Nazi procedure, and I am definitely inclined to ascribe it to Japan’s relation to the Axis rather than to any peculiar Japanese tradition. My own limited knowledge of Japanese history does not suggest to me that such a pattern of treacherous attack is any more typical of the Japanese than it is of many other peoples with a long tradition of warfare.”

But in another respect, Dr. Klineberg believes that the Japanese overgrown sense of national honor may have had a part in the outbreak of hostilities. He said: “The Japanese have committed themselves to a policy of expansion in Asia; they had enunciated this policy on many occasions, and felt in many cases an idealistic attachment toward it. By this I mean that they had persuaded themselves that it was a moral obligation rather than just a program of imperialistic expansion.

Couldn’t lose face

“As so many people have pointed out, ‘face’ has the greatest significance for the Japanese. The loss of face which would have resulted from bowing to American requests for abandonment of the expansionist policy, was something that the Japanese people simply could not accept.

“Since they probably felt that war was inevitable as a consequence, they took a leaf out of the Nazi notebook and struck first without warning.

“Once again it is important to point out that ‘face saving’ is not a peculiarly Oriental phenomenon, and that we and other Western nations have it as well; there is again a difference of degree, however, and its importance is undoubtedly greater for the Japanese.

“I do not believe it possible that Nomura and Kurusu could have had knowledge of the Japanese attack when they went to see Mr. Hull. It may be that they knew the attack was coming some time, but I feel that they could not have known that it was already in progress.

Navy opens conflict

“In the light of what is known of the relation between the Japanese government and the military leaders, it seems to me much more plausible that the Navy began its campaign without getting definite instructions from the Japanese government to proceed. Once it had happened, however, the Japanese, with the hypertrophied sense of national honor to which I have referred, would undoubtedly go to the support of the military leaders and present a unified national front.

“I think, too, that this will mean that the ‘liberal’ elements in Japan cannot be counted upon for any real opposition to the Japanese war effort because for the most part (although there will be exceptions) their feeling of national identity will be stronger than their former political affiliations.”

Bears rate 2-touchdown edge over Giants in pro title game

By Steve Snider, United Press writer

CHICAGO, Dec. 20 (UP) – Equipped with the deadliest offense in football, the Chicago Bears were two-touchdown favorites tonight to crack the secret defense of the New York Giants tomorrow and carry off their second consecutive National Football League championship.

Professional oddsmakers went overboard for the T-Formation of the Bears, although no champion ever has repeated since the playoff system went into effect in 1933. In most cases, the Western champions were held a 15-point favorite. Others called it 15½.

This is the third playoff meeting of the master strategists – George Halas of the Bears and Steve Owen of the Giants. In 1933, the Bears began the playoff system with a 23-21 victory, followed by a crushing defeat by the Giants in the famous “tennis shoe” game of 1934. Wearing tennis shoes on an icy field, the Giants turned the game into a 30-13 rout.

Bears set eight records

In 11 regular-season games, the Bears rolled up eight new all-time records and excel in every department of play except defense. There the Giants shine – as usual.

Since the T-formation became a matter of concern among rival coaches early last season, the Bears have riddled all manner of defenses – five-man lines, sixes, sevens and trick secondaries. Their greatest successes, including last year’s 73-0 victory over Washington in the playoffs and last week’s 33-14 victory over Green Bay, came on return meetings.

WCAE will broadcast the Bears-Giants professional football championship game beginning at 1:35 p.m.

The Giants, leading 8-7 until the final minutes, eventually lost an exhibition to the Bears early this year, 14-8. A five-man line checked the developing Bears that day but the same five-man line of the Giants permitted 30 points in a single quarter last season.

In winning 10 of 11 regular games, the Bears totaled 4,265 yards to 2,378 for the Giants in winning eight of 11. The Bears rushed 2,156 to 1,296 and passed 2,002 to New York’s 1,088.

New York opponents gained an average of 3.80 yards per play, best defensive record in the league. Chicago foes gained 3.98 per play.

Lineups are star-studded

The Bears will entrust the offense chiefly to Quarterback Sid Luckman, Halfbacks Ray Nolting, Hugh Gallarneau and George McAfee and Fullback Norm Standlee. Tuffy Leemans, Len Eshmont and Ward Cuff, New York’s three best ball carriers on an average-try basis, will be in at the kickoff.

Neither squad has injuries serious enough to keep players on the sidelines, although veteran Center Mel Hein of the Giants will give way much of the time to Lou DeFilippo, his rookie understudy.

$100,000 in defense bonds

baberuth.defensebond.up687×773 173 KB

Babe Ruth, one of baseball’s fabulous figures, still has plenty of the money he earned from the diamond sport. He took $100,000 of that money and purchased defense bonds and proudly displays them here.

Tim writes ‘finis’ to playing careers of trio of Yawkey’s famous ‘Gold Sox’

Grove, Foxx, Cronin fail to bring pennant
By Jack Guenther, United Press writer

NEW YORK, Dec. 20 (UP) – In a little less than 10 days the old guy with the scythe who is known as Father Time put an end to $500,000 worth of the boldest, gaudiest and most expensive attempt to buy a pennant that baseball ever has known – and probably ever will know.

That is the $4,000,000 noble experiment carried out by Tom Yawkey with the Boston Red Sox as the guinea pig. It lasted for six years and, technically speaking, it failed because not even millions of dollars and dozens of great stars could boost the Sox to the top rung of the American League ladder where Yawkey wanted them. And now it’s all over.

It’s over because in just a few days more than a week the Three Musketeers of the Yawkey experiment have passed out of baseball as active players. One of them is gone for good, another may find a temporary place with some other club and the third will stay in Boston – but as a bench strategist rather than an active player.

They’ll be missing

For when the Sox take the field for their 1942 opener there will be a new man at first base in place of Jimmy Foxx. Another new player will have been assigned to the short-stop slot where the fans have long been accustomed to watching Joe Cronin. And although he hasn’t been officially designated as yet, there’ll be a third new man in the pitcher’s box to take over the chores of old Mose Grove.

Boston obviously will regret the passing of these men who are recognized as stars as bright as any the game has produced, but most of the fans have seen it coming because they know that the old guy with the scythe can be evaded only so long. In the end he always gets his man – maybe in the eyes, maybe in the legs, but always somewhere.

Foxx was the first to go and the only one of the three who didn’t make the decision voluntarily. He came to Boston six years ago, almost at the same time as Grove and Cronin. He arrived at the end of the 1935 season after Connie Mack had decided to cash in on the last of his Philadelphia wonder teams. Foxx cost Yawkey $150,000 and two players.

Foxx sets records

In return Old Double-X brought his boss several American League records. He led the circuit in runs batted in at the end of the 1938 season and was acknowledged as the league’s most valuable player. And he pounded home runs – my, how he pounded home runs – 41 in 1936, 36 in 1937, 50 in 1938, 35 in 1939 when he led the league, 36 in 1940 and 19 this past year. But 19 wasn’t enough so now the Sox have asked waivers.

Robert Moses Grove, whose temper was as fiery as his pitches were fast, preceded Foxx to Boston from the City of Brotherly Love by two years. He cost around $125,000 – if you exclude the four players who figured in the deal, but he never paid off like Old Double-X. In his last six years with the Athletics, Mose won 152 games while losing only 41 for one of the most remarkable averages ever run up, but he couldn’t carry on for the Sox.

Arm trouble prevented him from ever again reaching his peak. He tried and tried hard and substituted guile for speed but the best he could do in Boston was the record of 14 wins and four losses in 1938 when he still retained enough stuff to finish with the highest percentage in the league. This season Mose won only seven games while losing the same number and he went to Yawkey and told him he was all through.

Cronin close – never wins

Cronin was bought by Yawkey in between Foxx and Grove and he came from Washington instead of Philadelphia. His price tag was $150,000 and Lyn Lary, and he was a great enough player in Boston to make the all-star team six or seven times and a good enough manager to twice boost his team to second place – but never on top. Cronin has announced he has benched himself and won’t be seen on a field again unless the Sox break apart.

It’s a little hard to tell which of the three the Boston fans will miss the most for a Boston without even one of them will seem pretty much like a Boston sans Bunker Hill. But neither millions nor great stars can buck the old guy with the scythe and Yawkey’s bold bid is all over. Maybe it was worth $4,000,000 and maybe it wasn’t, but it was great fun to watch while it lasted.

Bear coaches go overboard on McAfee, calling him greatest back in football

By James A. Burchard

CHICAGO, Dec. 20 – George Halas, owner of the Chicago Bears, made an astonishing statement.

“If I played George McAfee his full time of 30 minutes a game instead of just a few minutes, he’d set so many professional football records on yards gained, touchdowns, and pass interceptions nobody would ever catch him. He’s the best back in pro football.”

At the moment we were sitting about a table quaffing beer with Halas, Hunk Anderson and other Chicago Bear coaches, who were preparing for the playoff Sunday with New York. Also in the party was Pete Bausch, great center, who met with an injury and wound up assisting Greasy Neale on the master-mind board of the Philly Eagles.

Somebody turned to Anderson, former Notre Dame coach, and asked for his opinion.

“McAfee is greater than George Gipp in my opinion,” said Hunk. “Speed gives him the edge.”

Hunk and Paddy agree

Anderson ought to know. He played with Gipp at Calumet (Michigan) High School and then at Notre Dame. But even though it wasn’t necessary, came a word of corroboration from Bausch.

“McAfee is head and shoulders above any back today in professional football. He’s the perfectly conditioned athlete, which is the secret of any football star.”

Paddy Driscoll, Bear backfield coach who played pro ball up to 1928 and is a member of Halas’ all-time team, put in another plug for the former Duke balltoter.

“Best timing and coordination I’ve ever seen. In fact, he’s got such tremendous speed he can play safety and still cross the line of scrimmage to make a tackle. Never saw it done before. Yes. McAfee can run the hundred in 9.8 in football togs.”

Halas took over the floor again.

“Speed, elusiveness and drive are McAfee’s main assets. He’s more dangerous than George Franck, and harder to bring down. You’ll find that out Sunday.”

Asked for the secret of his success, McAfee grinned and blushed like any freshman.

“I guess I owe all to a newspaper article that told me about Ace Parker breaking an ankle playing baseball. I was trying my hand at baseball, but I quit right on the spot. No broken ankles for me!”

Runs in Oxfords

Still McAfee exposes his ankles every game he plays. He brought the style of wearing track shoes from Duke. Most of the Bear backs now wear the same type of footgear. They strap their ankles heavily with tape and hope for the best. The shoes don’t weigh much less than the regular brogans, but the psychological advantage is tremendous.

McAfee, with his low shoes and great sprinting ability, specializes in long runs. Who in Brooklyn will forget the opening exhibition game this year that saw McAfee grab a punt in the last minute and win the game? He’s at his best taking a kickoff or punt, and generally other Bears will pass up a low kick to give McAlee the ball. Incidentally, this has backfired several times.

“Just wait until we really need him,” says Halas. “You’ll see something then.”

O.K. George, how about breaking McAfee loose against the Giants tomorrow? If he runs wild in that one, we’ll take off the ear muffs and listen. If not – well, maybe Anderson will edit that Gipp statement.

Week’s market summary:
Jap attacks, rumors drive stocks down

Prices break to new lows, then recover some of losses
By Elmer C. Walzer, United Press financial editor

NEW YORK, Dec. 20 (UP) – Stocks turned down again this week on Japanese threats against British positions and on many unconfirmed rumors.

Prices fell off more than they had rallied in the preceding week after the first shock of war decline. The industrial average made a new low since June 1938, but the railroad average held well. Before the lows were penetrated with vigor, prices rallied and, as the week closed, the whole list had been carried above its lows. In many instances there were gains.

Numerous domestic items worked against the market but the principal influence continued to be the war. Among domestic developments unfavorable to the market were another cut in auto production, and the further trend to a war economy which was resulting in many dislocations of employment.

Carloadings best since ‘29

On the favorable side were steel production just under 98 percent of capacity, best carloadings for the week since 1929, and a resumption of heavy demand for Christmas gift articles in the nation’s stores where trade showed gains of 6 to 12 percent over last year.

Auto shares were heavily sold with the leading issues making new lows for the year. Auto equipment stocks dropped. Tire shares made new lows on wide losses on the government’s extension of its ban on tire sales.

There was a tendency to sell the non-war stocks and to favor the “war babies.” In the latter, the best performers were the coppers, which are benefitting by use of the, seven-day week in the mines, oils, steels, aircrafts and chemicals. Not all of these gained but their relative position in the market was seen as strong.

Some rails advance

Some of the rails had gains on the week. Santa Fe rose 2 points, while Norfolk & Western lost that amount. Tax selling continued the principal depressant in the utilities where the average made a record low on Thursday. Selling was pressed in the mall order issues where new lows were made by Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. Amusements held well on the theory this group would not be a heavy loser as a result of the war.

As the week ended, the nation’s steel industry announced it would operate in nearly all departments on Christmas Day. Workers will receive time and a half for the day.

Industry continued to move toward a war economy, while employment and payrolls continued to set records. Money in circulation crossed 11 billion dollars for the first time in history, reflecting the demand for funds at the holiday.

Gift items in demand

Dun & Bradstreet reported a return of demand for the usual gift items after a lull in this type of buying in the first week of our participation in the war. Demand for items for civilian defense was a factor in some coast cities and many stores reported shortages of such items as flashlights and blackout cloth.

Wholesale trade lightened with spring buying held up because of price and supply uncertainties. Textile, metal and a few other lines turned away non-defense orders.

Since the war started for this country, the stock market has had a sharp break and only a moderate recovery. In the first three days after the Japanese incident, the industrial average lost 7.59 points. Then in the next four sessions it regained 2.14 points. It lost that gain this week. But as the week ended a better tone was noted and some market experts said the list had been oversold.

NormanStewart · December 24, 2020, 7:47pm

Japan’s attack staggers Santa Claus but he accomplishes quick comeback

Stores again packed with shoppers as war’s impact wears off

NEW YORK, Dec. 20 – The Jap bombs which rained out of the sky over Hawaii on December 7 nearly blew the bulging Christmas pack right off Santa’s back here in America’s biggest shopping center – almost 6,000 miles away.

But Santa, like the American people, can take it. Momentarily stunned, he quickly recovered his bearings, picked up his pack, and went determinedly back to his work, with renewed Yule spirit.

The beginning of the second week before Christmas would normally be the height of the gift shopping season. Yet wandering through many of Manhattan’s expectantly stocked department stores after the Yellow attack, you’d have thought an air raid was actually in progress here – judging by the conspicuous absence of customers in the usually jammed aisles.

Recover from shock

The next few days were little better. Merchants’ associations squeamishly sidestepped pointed how’s-business? questions, declined to guess whether it would pick up. It looked as though Jap machine-guns in the Pacific were shooting full of holes the widespread prediction that this would be America’s biggest Christmas – ever.

But by the week’s end, in those same stores where you could have shot moose on Monday, you couldn’t have packed a sardine on Saturday. Recovering from their initial shock, Americans have apparently decided to make this the merriest Christmas of all, figuring that it may be some time before they are able to celebrate another one with all the trimmings.

This determination to make it a happy Yule was by no means eye-closed shoulder-shrugging at the realities of a still-distant war. That fact was written in deficits at all the amusement houses on and off the Gay White Way. Japan’s stab-in-the-back attack was at first too shocking for Americans to desire to escape its significances through entertainment. Tuesday night perhaps provided all-time attendance lows at almost every amusement and recreation house, as Americans hugged their home radios to hear President Roosevelt’s address – which drew an estimated record listening public of 80,000,000 people in the U.S.

The more candid amusement impresarios were quick to admit that their box office bust was more than the usual pre-Christmas slump – which always sets in when people are spending their money on Yule shopping instead of entertainments.

Theater-going was off from 25-40 percent, according to James Riley, secretary of the League of New York Theaters. Normally during this period (which even Actors Equity has sanctioned as slump-season by allowing producers to lay off casts for two weeks just before Christmas) theatrical tills dive only about 20 percent.

Crowds jam night clubs

But by the week’s end, a trend towards escape-seeking had begun. Hit shows were, in some cases, doing SRO business, but there was a marked shift in which shows were hits. The serious, heavy dramas, especially war plays, which had been well patronized. suddenly suffered severe slumps. The “turkeys,” hanging on in an effort to catch the Christmas week cranberry, gave up and closed their doors. No show, however, had reported canceling any of its previously scheduled extra Christmas week matinees.

Night clubs followed the general pattern. Some New Yorkers did jingle night spot tills early in the week by trying to drown their anger in the flowing cup. But they remained sullenly sober, snuffed out the gayety which is the life blood of the cafes. Even the entertainers were apologizing for trying to be funny “at a time like this.”

But the night clubs, too, were coming back to their seasonal-slump norms as the week wore on. New Yorkers’ determination to do their share in the job which America calls on them to do had not lessened. It was just that they could not see that it would help their country’s case in any way to wear long faces while tackling, with all their energy, the tremendous tasks before them.

U.S. war brings important changes in oil industry

Government already tightens control over petroleum production; reduction in civilian use of gasoline held possible

TULSA, Oklahoma, Dec. 20 (UP) – Important changes had been worked in the American oil industry today less than two weeks after outbreak of the Pacific conflict and even greater developments were expected before petroleum production can be fully adjusted to wartime conditions.

A combination of many factors, it was believed may bring about drastic revisions both in the structure of the oil business itself and in its relations with the government. Some of these factors included:

Increased coordination, between the federal government, the oil-producing states and the industry.
Enlargement and strengthening of conservation practices.
A possible decrease in civilian consumption of gasoline, motor oil and identical products.
A reduced supply of motor cars and tires directly affecting fuel purchases by the public.

Wartime plan outlined

A tightening of government control over America’s great oil output already had become apparent in the first 12 days of the Pacific war. There were indication that it would be increased.

The Office of Petroleum Coordination has announced a plan for control of California oil production; outlined a wartime program for the nation’s producers and laid the groundwork for a more thorough observance of petroleum conservation.

A decisive showdown over whether the government and other conservation agencies, such as those of the individual states, would work in cooperation on the task of conserving America’s petroleum supply appeared near. Newspaper oil editors in the Southwest suggested that if state agencies failed to tighten their supervision of conservation, the federal government would shove them into the background.

Future program discussed

The Interstate Oil Compact Commission began a two-day session in Oklahoma City yesterday. Its representatives from 11 member states were expected to decide on the organization’s future program, including expanded activities and closer cooperation with the OPC.

Meanwhile, the OPC also had taken control of blending products used in the production of octane aviation gasoline and other high-test fuels. This means, it was said, that motorists must depend on a lower standard of gasoline than necessary.

An outright curtailment of civilian gasoline consumption was not expected immediately. If such a possibility should occur, big producing companies probably would face certain problems of adjustment. But it would hit hardest at wholesalers and small filling station owners in the marketing side of the industry.

Increase in output ordered

Along with their other problems, oil producers were confronted with this dictum from Petroleum Coordinator Harold L. Ickes: Step up oil output to 1,500,000,000 barrels a year; increase their drilling program to meet that requirement; operate that program on an efficient basis to avoid waste, and conduct explorations for new reserves – all of this to be done on limited supplies of equipment.

Meeting the quota of a billion and a half barrels for 1942 probably will prove the easiest to fulfill of those requirements.

Bond selling lightens but prices drop

Issues of Axis-occupied countries rally; domestic rails slump

NEW YORK, Dec. 20 (UP) – Selling in bonds lightened this week, but prices gave ground irregularly as investors watched with increasing concern the progress of Japan’s drive on Singapore.

Domestic business news had little effect on the bond list and traders appeared to be basing their operations almost exclusively on the day-to-day war developments. There was little of the nervous selling that unsettled the market last week, however, and at the close of the week the general undertone was fairly steady.

The foreign dollar bond list was pared further by the suspension of trading and listing in Hungarian and Bulgarian issues.

Latin bonds decline

Bonds of the Axis-occupied countries, a weak feature on last week’s shakeout, rallied briskly to show gains extending to about 7 points in the Danish group and to more than 9 points in the Norwegians. British Empire loans also tended moderately higher, excepting the New South Wales 5s and Queensland 6s, which broke 8 points and showed little rallying power.

Latin-American issues ran into mild selling and registered losses extending to more than 4 points in the Argentine and Brazilian sections.

Continued tax selling accelerates the decline in domestic corporation bonds. Medium-priced carrier liens were hardest-hit by this liquidation, losses running to around 2 points in New York Central, Cleveland Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis, Kansas City Southern, Missouri Pacific, Lehigh Valley & Pere Marquette. Speculative and highest-grade rails generally showed little change on the week, although they were depressed slightly early in the period.

Erie issues rise

A few issues gained against the trend, notably the Erie bonds which moved up 3 points and more on news that the Interstate Commerce Commission had authorized issuance of new securities provided for in the road’s reorganization plan.

A few oil company loans firmed in the industrial list, reflecting the current stability of the oils on the stock list. Phillips Petroleum 1¾s gained nearly 2 points. Other industrial leaders, however, moved through a narrow arc.

Commercial Mackay 4s with warrants were a weak feature in the utility list, reaching a new low on a loss of more than 6 points, reflecting curtailment of the company’s cable and radio business as a result of the war.

U.S. government bonds drifted in a narrowly irregular range in featureless trading as investors awaited details of the next Treasury financing.

Defense trains net 11,000 new plants

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 (UP) – Director Floyd B. Odlum of the OPM’s Contract Distribution Division estimated today that three “Red, White and Blue” trains which toured the nation with sample parts needed by the Army and Navy uncovered more than 11,000 new factories which can be used to further the war effort.

Mr. Odlum disclosed that the 20,000-mile tour showed that pretzel-bending machines can produce gun mount parts; a shower-bath manufacturer can make cowlings for airplanes; a Pennsylvania flytrap producer can make adapter units for the Signal Corps, and a toymaker can make heavy aerial bombs.

Ten days after one of the trains visited Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, more than 64 Harrisburg manufacturers reported they already were negotiating for Army, Navy or other governmental orders.

NormanStewart · December 24, 2020, 11:34pm

Völkischer Beobachter (December 22, 1941)

Neun Unterseeboote von den Japanern versenkt

Über 100 Britenschiffe in Hongkong eingeschlossen

Tokio, 21. Dezember
Die Angriffsoperationen der japanischen Wehrmacht gegen die britischen und USA-Stützpunkte im Stillen Ozean gehen mit unverminderter Heftigkeit weiter. Am Sonntag konnte das Kaiserliche Hauptquartier der japanischen Marine bekanntgeben, daß seit Kriegsbeginn neun feindliche U-Boote versenkt wurden. Das Schicksal zahlreicher weiterer feindlicher U-Boote, die angegriffen wurden, ist ungewiß, da keine zuverlässigen Beobachtungen möglich waren. Die Mitteilung fügt hinzu, daß ein japanischer Zerstörer am Samstag 32 Besatzungsmitglieder eines versenkten feindlichen U-Bootes aufgenommen hat. Unter den Geretteten befinden sich fünf Offiziere.

Roosevelt hat auch diese neue, verlustreiche Einbuße indirekt bestätigt. In seiner Wut über die schweren Verluste der USA-Flotte hat er nun auch den Flottenchef Richardson abgesetzt und an seiner Stelle den Admiral Ernest King zum Befehlshaber der USA-Flotte ernannt. Ernest King war bisher Befehlshaber der Atlantikflotte. Zum Befehlshaber der Atlantikflotte wurde Konteradmiral Ingersoll ernannt. Admiral King werde, wie Marineminister Knox bei Bekanntgabe der Ernennung am Samstag mitteilte, lediglich ihm und dem Präsidenten Roosevelt verantwortlich sein.

Der Endkampf auf Hongkong

japanischetruppen.dec21.vb1101×1570 528 KB

Siegreiche japanische Truppen, die zum Zeichen des Erfolges die Fahne der aufgehenden Sonne aufpflanzen (Aufnahme Blaha)

Die Marineabteilung des Kaiserlichen Hauptquartiers gab ferner am Sonntag um 11,40 Uhr japanischer Zeit (7,40 Uhr deutscher Zeit) bekannt, daß japanische Seestreitkräfte in engem Zusammenwirken mit Einheiten der Armee die noch vom Feind verteidigten befestigten Punkte auf der Insel Hongkong angreifen und gleichzeitig die Gewässer um Hongkong völlig beherrschen.

Die Morgenblätter berichten ausführlich über den Kampf um die letzten Stützpunkte der Briten auf der Insel. Trotz verzweifelter Gegenwehr der feindlichen Truppen werde ein befestigter Punkt nach dem anderen nach schwerem Bombardement im Zusammenwirken aller drei Wehrmachtteile besetzt. „Nitschi Nitschi Schimbun“ meldet ergänzend, daß japanische Flugzeuge am Samstag ein britisches Kanonenboot zerstörten und die Selbstversenkung zweier anderer Kanonenboote herbeiführten, die entfliehen wollten.

„Asahi Schimbun“ unterstreicht, daß das ganze Gebiet um Hongkong in einem Umkreis von 900 Seemeilen von japanischen Kriegsschiffen vollständig eingeschlossen sei. Den zahlreichen britischen Kanonenbooten, Zerstörern und Minenlegern sowie den anderen Schiffen — die Gesamtzahl wird auf etwa 100 geschätzt — sei es dadurch praktisch unmöglich gemacht worden, der Vernichtung oder der Aufbringung zu entgehen. Bereits sei jetzt mehr als die Hälfte dieser Fahrzeuge versenkt worden.

Die Hauptstadt der britischen Kronkolonie Hongkong, Victoria, sowie der Hafen, befinden sich bekanntlich seit Freitag in japanischer Hand. Die von den Briten zur Verteidigung dieses für das gesamte Empire außerordentlich wichtigen Gebietes eingesetzten Truppen, in der Hauptsache indische und kanadische Einheiten, zogen sich nach dem Verlust der wichtigsten Positionen in den gebirgigen Teil der Insel zurück, der teilweise stark befestigte Stützpunkte aufweist, so den sogenannten Victoria-Hügel. Um diese befestigten Punkte sind nunmehr die letzten Kämpfe im Gange.

Malaya-Provinz Wellesley besetzt

Die Japaner haben die Malaya-Provinz Wellesley, wie „Asahi Schimbun“ in einem Sonderbericht meldet, nunmehr völlig besetzt. Die Provinz Wellesley liegt südlich des noch vor kurzem hart umkämpften Kedah-Gebietes. Die Provinz hat eine Größe von 747 Quadratkilometer und ist verhältnismäßig dichtbesiedelt.

„Keine Verbindung mit Davao“

Nach einer Reuter-Meldung aus Manila hat das USA-Hauptquartier auf den Philippinen keine Verbindung mehr mit dem Stützpunkt Davao auf der Insel Mindanao.

In dem letzten Bericht des Washingtoner Kriegsdepartements wird bestätigt, daß Cavite einen äußerst heftigen Luftangriff der Japaner auch am Freitagmittag durchzumachen hatte, bei dem starker Materialschaden und beträchtliche Menschenopfer entstanden seien.

Domei meldet aus Saigon: Nach einem Funkbericht aus Manila, der hier am Sonntagmorgen aufgefangen wurde, haben Verbände japanischer Bombenflugzeuge am 20. Dezember mittags einen Massenangriff auf Tarlac, 70 Meilen nördlich von Manila, den Marinestützpunkt Cavite und den Flugplatz Nichols ausgeführt, wobei an militärischen Anlagen schwerer Schaden entstand.

Luftkämpfe um die Burmastraße

dnb. Schanghai, 21. Dezember
Nach einem Frontbericht der Agentur Domei aus Indochina kam es am Samstag über Kunming zum erstenmal zu Luftkämpfen mit USA- und britischen Flugzeugen vom Muster „Curtiss P 40“ und „Spitfire“.

Japanische Kampfflugzeuge, die den Endpunkt der Burmastraße angriffen, trafen auf zwanzig feindliche Jagdmaschinen, von denen fünf abgeschossen wurden.

Abtreten, Herren des 19. Jahrhunderts!

Von Karl Neuscheler

Die englische Weltherrschaft ist der wesentlichste politische Ausdruck des 19. Jahrhunderts. Sie ist ein Triumph des Manchestertums. Die frühzeitige Industrialisierung mit den ersten mechanischen Webstühlen der Welt in England gab dem händlerischen britischen Bürgertum eine Gewinnchance und einen gegenüber der anderen Welt brutal ausgenützten Vorsprung im Geldverdienen und im Geldverleihen, der Englands Weltherrschaft eigentlich begründete. Diese Herrschaft war also von Anbeginn an eine Vorherrschaft der Technik im Dienste des händlerischen Kapitals. Darauf gründete England das ganze weit verästelte Spiel seiner Weltpolitik. London wurde im 19. Jahrhundert zur großen Weltbörse, mit deren Hilfe sich das Foreign-Office die Bundesgenossen kaufte, die Riesensummen von Bestechungsgeldern für den Secret-Service bestritt und großzügigste Anleihen gab, um seine Schuldknechtschaftsfesseln auf allen Erdteilen immer straffer zu spannen und immer weiter greifen zu lassen.

Der ungeahnte wirtschaftliche Aufschwung und weltumspannende Erfolg der westlichen Zivilisation durch den Siegeszug der Technik und der Industrialisierung erzeugte einen Optimismus der materialistischen Gesinnung, der heute noch das Kennzeichen des westlichen Bürgertums ist. Das Pacht- und Leihgesetz. des Herrn Roosevelt ist so gleichsam der letzte Schrei jener unverwüstlichen bürgerlichen Optimisten des 19. Jahrhunderts, die an den seligmachenden Fortschritt der Technik und der stets steigenden Ausbeute der Weltmärkte wie an einen Gott glaubten.

Nur so war es möglich, daß aus nackten Konkurrenzgründen auf diesem Weltmarkt das Verwöhnte und herrschsüchtige England damals schon im Dienste der jüdisch kontrollierten Hochfinanz den Weltkrieg entfesselte. Es war der Geist des 19. Jahrhunderts, der Geist des Materialismus, der zur Katastrophe trieb. Es ist wichtig, an diese unbestreitbaren Tatsachen in einem Augenblick zu erinnern, wo dieselben Herren des 19. Jahrhunderts, die Plutokraten des Westens, mit dem Anspruch auftreten, daß sie allein berufen seien, auch in der Zukunft wieder die Weltordnung zu bestimmen. Sie haben sich erkühnt, ein neues Jahrhundert gegen sich in die Schranken zu rufen mit ihren alten, schäbigen Waffen und Idealen.

Auch die „Neue Welt“, die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, hat sich zum Schildträger der Herren des 19. Jahrhunderts gemacht und damit eine Zukunft verscherzt, für die sie vielleicht als Trabant und Exponent des Materialismus nicht die innere Kraft und Substanz besitzt Diese Entscheidung ist eine schicksalshafte und unwiderrufliche. Die Weltgeschichte als das Weltgericht wird diese Geister des 19. Jahrhunderts, die nicht sterben wollen, obwohl sie längst überlebt sind, so hart hinwegfegen, wie sie sich aufzudrängen suchten, und die Nordamerikaner und Engländer werden diesen mammonbesessenen Geistern ihrer Führung noch fluchen in vielen Generationen.

Vorurteile und Privilegien stürzen

Was haben doch diese Herren für komische Vorurteile und was für einen Dünkel, mit dem sie sich gottähnliche Vorrechte einbilden! Europa ist für sie bestenfalls ein angenehmes und abwechslungsreiches Reisegebiet, besonders natürlich, wenn es der hohen Politik gelungen ist, die Dollarwährung hoch in Kurs zu setzen. Die europäischen Völker sind diesen plutokratischen Kosmopoliten bestenfalls gute, oft amüsante, aber auch schrullige und im ganzen doch bemitleidenswerte kleine Leute, die das eigentliche großzügige „make money“ (Geldmachen) doch nie lernen werden. Man darf sie nicht zu groß werden lassen und am besten spielt man sie gegeneinander aus. Von der Freiheit des Seeräubertums haben diese armen Würmer doch nur eine blasse Ahnung. Sie hängen und verausgaben sich an ihrer viele Jahrhunderte alten sogenannten Kultur, über die der westliche Plutokrat mit einem Lächeln zur Tagesordnung übergeht als einem Steckenpferd für Kinder, Liebhaber und Träumer. Er sieht das alles nur als Belastung und Enge. All diese Bindungen geistiger und seelischer Art sind ihm lächerlich, ja verhaßt, er rühmt sich seiner völligen Bindungslosigkeit als der Menschheit höchstes Gut. So fühlt er sich verwandt mit jeder Art Anarchie und verbindet sich ohne Hemmungen mit der bolschewistischen Blutdiktatur, wenn es nur seinem Geldsack dient. Es ist für ihn ein feststehender Glaubenssatz, daß die Welt mit ihren Gütern für ihn bestimmt ist, und seinen Reichtum erklärt er als ein besonderes Gnadenzeichen seines Gottes. Das Ich ist für ihn das Maß aller Dinge, und er nennt seine alleinseligmachende Staatsform Demokratie, obwohl er das überindividuelle Wesen eines Volkes und einer Rasse als Baustein der Schöpfung leugnet und bekämpft. Schon das um seine Tarnung besorgte Judentum fordert dies.

Die Vorurteile und selbstgerechten Ansprüche auf Privilegien dieser Plutokraten ragen als die versteinerten Überbleibsel eines vergangenen Jahrhunderts in unsere Zeit des Aufbruchs gewaltiger Blut- und Lebensströme der Völker hinein und suchen sie abzudämmen. Vergebens! Die Vorurteile und Privilegien der Plutokraten des 19. Jahrhunderts stürzen unwiderruflich eines nach dem anderen zusammen und sie hinterlassen nur die Trümmer der von ihnen verursachten Katastrophe und bei den von ihnen betroffenen Menschen ein trostloses Nichts.

Strategie der Stahlkolosse und Zwingburgen

Wie sie den Krieg in materialistischer Verbohrtheit und Besessenheit heraufbeschworen haben, so führen sie ihn auch. Man sagt, die Engländer und Amerikaner seien „hart im Nehmen“. Hier ist aus der Not eine Tugend gemacht. Sie sind bestimmt nicht härter im Nehmen als wir, sie sind nur primitiver, rückständiger und sturer im Denken. Als eingefleischte Materialisten strotzen sie vor Selbstgerechtigkeit. Sie sind von der Allgewalt ihres Reichtums so verwöhnt geworden im Lauf der Zeit, daß sie sich gar nicht vorstellen können, daß es einmal anders sein könnte. Erst jetzt beginnen sie zum erstenmal die Grenzen ihres materiellen Reichtums zu ahnen, nachdem auf wichtigsten Gebieten immer mehr der Mangel sich einschleicht.

So war auch ihre Kriegsplanung und Strategie durch und durch materialistisch. Der Ausspruch vom „reizenden Kieg“ ist nicht etwa ein Witz, sondern eine ehrliche Äußerung des alten plutokratischen Optimismus, wonach im Grunde ihrem Herrentum nichts Böses widerfahren könne. Andere würden für sie kämpfen. Die Zeit würde für sie arbeiten; denn über allem steht der unerschöpfliche Reichtum des eigenen Besitzes.

Mit dem Besitz der Monopole glaubte man den Gegner langsam abwürgen zu können. Im Herzenswinkel jeden Engländers und Amerikaners ruht noch bis zum heutigen Tage der unerschütterliche Glaube an die Allmacht des Reichtums, an Geld und Waren, zu denen bei ihnen auch die Menschen gehören. Dieser Reichtum verteilt sich über die ganze Welt, die durch die Stahlkolosse der Kriegsflotte und durch die Zwingburgen an den Schlüsselstellungen der Kontinente für die Habenichtse abgesperrt und gegen sie verteidigt wird. Ebenso wie der Reichtum sind so für den Durchschnittsengländer und auch nordamerikaner die Schlachtschiffe und die Seefestungen und Stützpunkte in aller Welt oberste Werte ihres Machtbewußtseins und ihres Herrenturns. Solange sie noch bestehen, fühlen sie sich noch uneingeschränkt als die Herren dieser Welt. Und dieses Denken ist keineswegs nur auf die breiten Volksmassen beschränkt, sondern es beherrscht offensichtlich auch die Strategie der Führung.

Konnte es also für die plutokratische Welt einen schwereren Schlag und eine größere Ernüchterung geben, als die Taten der kühnen japanischen Marine und Luftwaffe?! Mit den versunkenen Schlachtschiffen im Stillen Ozean sank auch ein gutes Stück jenes vermessenen bürgerlichen Optimismus des 19. Jahrhunderts mit seinem materialistischen Irrwahn. Als ob man mit Stahlkolossen, Zwingburgen und Geldsäcken, den Lauf der Geschichte aufhalten könnte! Als ob die Geschichte sich zu einem Dime der Materie erniedrigen ließe und nicht höheren Schicksalsmächten geistiger, seelischer und blutsmäßiger Herkunft gehorchte!

Nicht nur ein neues Jahrhundert, sondern im Zeichen einer großen Wende ist ein neues Jahrtausend auf dem Wege und schafft sich Raum. Sein Sieg steht heute gar nicht mehr zur Debatte, er ist ein Element des Lebens und ein Gesetz der Geschichte. Zur Debatte steht nur noch, warm die alten Herren des 19. Jahrhunderts mit ihrem materialistischen Mammonsspuk endlich begreifen, daß ihre Zeit längst um ist. Der Urteilsspruch der Geschichte ist schon über sie gesprochen, er lautet: Abtreten, Herren des 19. Jahrhunderts! Endlich abtreten!

Querschnitt durch Niederländisch-Indien:
Das Inselreich der Rohstoffe

Die Einreihung Niederländisch-Indiens in die Front gegen Japan und die Teilnahme niederländisch-ostindischer Flotteneinheiten am englisch-amerikanischen Kriege haben die Japaner mit Landungsoperationen in Britisch-Borneo beantwortet, die nicht nur den drei britischen Protektoraten Britisch-Nordborneo, Brunei und Sarawak gelten. sondern den Kampf gegen Niederländisch-Indien eröffnen und damit gegen eines der wichtigsten Rohstoffgebiete der Erde.

Wir geben im folgenden einen Überblick über die geographischen, geschichtlich-politischen und wirtschaftlichen Verhältnisse Niederländisch- Indiens, das sich von Westen nach Osten über mehr als 5000 km, von Norden nach Süden über mehr als 2000 km erstreckt.

Die Bevölkerung

Niederländisch-Indien umfaßt den weitaus größten Teil des Malaiischen Archipels, und zwar: Sumatra, Java, Borneo (mit Ausnahme der drei nordwestlichen britischen Protektorate Britisch-Nordborneo, Brunei und Sarawak), Celebes, die Molukken, die Kleinen Sundainseln, von denen nur der größere, östliche Teil Timors den Portugiesen gehört, Neuguinea, dessen Osthälfte britisch ist, und. eine große Anzahl von kleineren Inseln.

Das Gesamtgebiet Niederländisch-Indiens umfaßt eine Fläche von 1,9 Million en Quadratkilometer mit über 60 Millionen Einwohnern, ist also 56mal so groß und etwa siebenmal so volkreich wie das holländische Mutterland. Unter den über 60 Millionen Bewohnern der Inseln sind nur eine Viertelmillion Europäer, ferner nahezu 1 Million Chinesen.

Die malaiische Inselwelt ist übersät mit zahlreichen; zum Teil noch tätigen Vulkanen, deren Ausschüttungen die ungeheure Fruchtbarkeit, vor allem Javas, wesentlich mitbedingt haben. Der ganze Archipel hat tropisches, feuchtes Klima mit einer mittleren Jahrestemperatur von etwa 25 Grad Celsius. Während die Kleinen Sundainseln durch den Einfluß des australischen Klimas eine mehrmonatige Trockenheit aufweisen, sind die großen, wirtschaftlich wichtigen Inseln dank des feuchtwarmen Klimas bis auf die riesigen Plantagengebiete von ungeheuren Urwäldern bedeckt, die. wertvollste Holzarten enthalten.

Geschichtliche Entwicklung

Holland verdankt seinen unschätzbar reichen ostindischen Kolonialbesitz der Arbeit der „Generale Oost-Indische Compagnie“, die 1602 gegründet wurde unter Mitwirkung der holländischen Generalstaaten und die Handelsprivilegien für alle Gebiete östlich des Kaps der Guten Hoffnung erhielt. Die Erwerbung des ostindischen Besitzes durch diese Handelsgesellschaft ist in der gleichen Weise erfolgt wie der allmähliche Erwerb Indiens durch die englische „East India Company“.

Das rasche Anwachsen des holländischen Ostindienbesitzes führte zu unausweichlichen Auseinandersetzungen mit England, bei denen Holland zunächst aus Indien verdrängt wurde, dann auf die Malaienhalbinsel verzichten mußte, aber durch vorsichtiges Zurückweichen Niederländisch-Ostindien sonst fast ungeschmälert behalten konnte.

Die Rohstoffe

Niederländisch- Indien ist formell kein Kolonialgebiet, da es verfassungsmäßig gleichberechtigter Bestandteil des holländischen Staates ist. Es untersteht einem Generalgouverneur, dessen Sitz Batavia, die Hauptstadt Niederländisch-Indiens, ist. Verwaltungsmäßig besteht das Inselreich aus Java und den „Außenbesitzungen“ (alle übrigen Inseln).

Die an pflanzlichen und mineralischen Produkten ungeheuer reichen Inseln, unter denen Java mit Abstand die wichtigste ist, werfen riesige Gewinne ab. Mengenmäßig steht die jährliche Gewinnung von Erdöl weit an der Spitze mit 6 Millionen Tonnen. In großem Abstand folgen Zucker mit 1,1 Millionen Tonnen, Kokospalmprodukte mit über einer halben Million Tonnen. Wertmäßig übersteigt der Ertrag der Kautschukgewinnung mit etwa 300 Millionen Gulden den der Erdölerzeugnisse, die mengenmäßig das Zwölffache des Kautschuks ausmachen, um fast genau das Doppelte. Niederländisch-Indien ist neben Britisch-Malaya der bedeutendste Kautschuk erzeugende Land der Erde! Unter den übrigen wichtigen Produkten Niederländisch-Indiens seien Kaffee, Tabak, Tee, Sisal, Chinarinde (niederländisches Weltmonopol), Palmöl, Gewürze und unter den Mineralien Zinn genannt. (Zahlen aus dem Jahre 1937.)

Wir lassen eine Übersicht über die einzelnen Großen Sundainseln folgen:

Java

Das Kernstück Niederländisch-Indiens ist Java, das zwar mit 122.000 Quadratkilometer die kleinste der Großen Sundainseln ist, aber mit über 40 Millionen Einwohnern zwei Drittel der Gesamtbevölkerung Niederländisch-Indiens umfaßt und sein politisches und wirtschaftliches Zentrum ist. Im Nordwesten Javas liegt die Hauptstadt des ganzen Inselreiches, Batavia, mit über einer halben Million Einwohnern, 1619 bereits von den Holländern gegründet. 10 Kilometer von Batavia entfernt liegt der neue Hafen Tandjong Priok, der wichtigste Hafen des Archipels. Surabaja mit 340.000 Einwohnern ist der Hauptkriegshafen, im Nordosten Javas gelegen. Bandong, im Innern, ist Sitz des niederländisch-ostindischen Oberkommandos.

Java, im Westen von Urwald, in der Mitte von Monsunwald bedeckt, stark gebirgig, eines der vulkanreichsten Gebiete der Erde, ist wegen seiner großen Fruchtbarkeit das am dichtesten bevölkertes Agrarland der Erde! In der Bevölkerungsdichte übertrifft es mit 300 Menschen auf einen Quadratkilometer das hochindustrialisierte Belgien, das am dichtesten bevölkerte Land Europas, in dem „nur“ 287 Menschen auf einem Quadratkilometer wohnen! Die Insel wird von neun großen internationalen Schiffahrtslinien angelaufen, besitzt ein gut ausgebautes Eisenbahn- und Straßenverkehrsnetz. An der Spitze ihrer agrarischen Produkte steht der Reis, bis vor wenigen Jahren war es der Zucker. Bedeutend ist die Gewinnung von Kautschuk, Tee, Tabak, Kapok und Chinarinde. Erdöl und Kohle kommen auf Java nur in geringen Mengen vor.

Sumatra

Sumatra, mit 474.000 qkm fast viermal so groß wie Java, ist die zweitgrößte Insel Niederländisch-Indiens, zählt aber nur 9 Millionen Einwohner. In der wirtschaftlichen Erschließung steht es hinter Java weit zurück, unter den „Außenbesitzungen“ aber nimmt es die erste Stelle ein, vor allem seit der Entdeckung großer Erdölvorkommen im Gebiet von Palembang im Osten Sumatras. Palembang, die Hauptstadt der Insel, zählt über 100.000 Einwohner. Mittelpunkt des Plantagengebietes ist Medan im Westen (etwa 80.000 Einwohner), dessen Hafen Belawan stark an Bedeutung zugenommen hat. Sumatras wichtigstes Ausfuhrprodukt war Tabak, der in riesigen Kulturen gewonnen wurde. Im ersten Jahrzehnt dieses Jahrhunderts wurde der Tabakexport weit überflügelt vom Kautschuk, der heute Von den Erträgnissen der Erdölgewinnung wiederum weit übertroffen worden ist.

Borneo

Das Erdöl hat der größten, wirtschaftlich aber hinter Java und Sumatra noch stark zurückstehenden Insel Borneo neue Bedeutung gegeben. Borneo ist 742.000 Quadratkilometer groß, also fast siebenmal so groß wie Java, zählt aber nur drei Millionen Einwohner, wird also selbst von Sumatra an Bevölkerungszahl dreimal übertroffen. Da der nordwestliche Teil britisch ist, gelten für Niederländisch-Borneo die Zahlen: 550.000 Quadratkilometer und 2,2 Millionen Einwohner, Hauptstadt ist mit 65.000 Einwohnern Bandjermasin, in deren Umgebung Kautschuk gewonnen wird. Die Erdölgebiete liegen in der Nähe der Ostküste. Die Erdölausfuhr betrug bereits 1936 etwa zwei Drittel derjenigen von Sumatra (Sumatra für 50 Millionen Gulden, Borneo für 34 Millionen).

Celebes

Celebes ist mit 180.000 qkm die drittgrößte der Großen Sundainseln und hat etwas über 3 Millionen Einwohner. Sie gehört zu den wenigen Reis ausführenden Inseln des Archipels. Java, Sumatra und Borneo sind auf Reiseinfuhr angewiesen. Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung von Celebes, der gebirgigsten unter den vier großen Inseln, liegt außer der Reisproduktion in der Gewinnung von Kokospalmprodukten und Kaffee.

Die Bergbauprodukte

Unter den Erzen Niederländisch-Indiens nimmt das Zinn die erste Stelle ein. Es wird vor allem gewonnen auf den Inseln Banka und Billiton, nordöstlich von Sumatra. In Arnheim auf Billiton besitzt Holland eine der modernsten Zinnschmelzereien der Welt, die einen Weiterversand der Zinnerze nach Singapur und nach England zur Verhüttung überflüssig gemacht hat. Manganerze werden im mittleren und östlichen Java abgebaut. Steinkohle wurde nur auf Sumatra gefördert. In zunehmendem Maße ist die Bauxitgewinnung wichtig geworden.

Neue umfangreiche Verlustliste des britischen Generalpostmeisters. Nach der neuesten Verlustliste des englischen Generalpostmeisters in der „Times“ sind von der gegen Ende Oktober in London aufgegebenen Briefpost die Sendungen für Hawai, Samoa, eine Anzahl Inselgruppen im Pazifik und für Süd- und Mittelamerika durch „feindliche Einwirkung“ verlorengegangen. Das gleiche gilt von Briefen und Drucksachen aus dem gleichen Zeitraum nach der Sowjetunion und der ganzen Inselwelt des Karibischen Meeres. Verlorengegangen ist für den größten Teil der letzten Oktoberwoche auch die Luftpost nach den USA und Kanada. (dnb.)

Japanische U-Boole vor Aden?

Eigener Bericht des „VB.“

rd. Vichy, 21. Dezember
Große Überraschung hat in Vichy die über Istanbul eingetroffene Meldung ausgelöst, der zufolge japanische U-Boote in den Gewässern von Aden operieren.

Der „Figaro“ weist auf die Tatsache hin, wie schwierig die Aufrechterhaltung der angelsächsischen Seeverbindungen bis jetzt schon geworden ist. Wenn es den Dreierpaktmächten gelänge, das System der angelsächsischen Seeverbindungen auch nur zur Hälfte zu zerstören, dann wäre ein entscheidender Schritt auf dem Wege des Sieges erreicht.

Führer-Hauptquartier (December 22, 1941)

Wehrmachtbericht

Im mittleren Abschnitt der Ostfront scheiterten zahlreiche sowjetische Angriffe am zähen Widerstand unserer Truppen. Die Luftwaffe unterstützte die harten Kämpfe des Heeres durch starken Einsatz gegen Feldstellungen, Panzeransammlungen, Fahrzeugkolonnen und Eisenbahnverbindungen des Feindes.

An der englischen Südostküste warfen Kampfflugzeuge in der vergangenen Nacht Bomben auf Hafenanlagen.

In Nordafrika fanden keine größeren Kampfhandlungen statt. In Luftkämpfen wurden sieben britische Jagdflugzeuge abgeschossen.

Auf der Insel Malta belegten Verbände der deutschen Luftwaffe bei Tage und bei Nacht Schiffsziele sowie Betriebsstoff- und Munitionslager im Haien La Valetta mit Bomben schweren und schwersten Kalibers. Vier feindliche Jagdflugzeuge wurden ohne eigene Verluste abgeschossen.

Bei wirkungslosen Angriffsversuchen einzelner britischer Kampfflugzeuge im Kanalgebiet und in der Deutschen Bucht verlor der Feind zwei Bomber.

Comando Supremo (December 22, 1941)

Bollettino n. 568

Il Quartier Generale delle Forze Armate comunica in data 22 dicembre 1941:

Scontri di carattere locale sul Gebel cirenaico, mentre prosegue il movimento ordinato delle nostre truppe verso il nuovo schieramento. Il nemico ha battuto con intenso fuoco di artiglieria le posizioni di Bardia ed ha attaccato senza risultato i capisaldi di Sollum; un posto avanzato, occupato dall’avversario in un primo tempo, è stato successivamente da noi riconquistato. Gli aerei nostri e alleati hanno spiegato infaticabile attività bombardando le retrovie nemiche e mitragliando, da bassa quota, truppe in marcia e concentramenti di mezzi meccanizzati.

Sono stati abbattuti in combattimento 11 apparecchi, dei quali 10 dalla caccia tedesca.

Incursioni avversarie su Tripoli, Bengasi e Barce hanno causato alcuni feriti e qualche danno di non grave entità; un velivolo, colpito dall’artiglieria contraerea di Bengasi, è precipitato in fiamme. Importanti formazioni dell’aviazione germanica hanno attaccato, di giorno e di notte, con buoni risultati, navi alla fonda, attrezzature e depositi nell’isola di Malta.

NormanStewart · December 25, 2020, 12:11am

TIME (December 22, 1941)

THE U.S. AT WAR

Full Blast

The U.S., having declared war on three nations in five days, looked to the White House last week for leadership, and for action.

The action came in a steady series of powerful moves. The U.S. discovered that in some ways the nation was much better prepared for World War II than it had dreamed. There was no need to slam on brakes, twist the wheel sharply, set off in another direction. The U.S. needed only to step on the gas.

Planes, tanks, guns, ships were in production. Plans to handle enemy aliens were long ready. Under Lend-Lease a working alliance had long since been effected with Great Britain, Russia, China, the Dutch. The seizure of foreign shipping, the increase in the size of the Army, Navy, air forces, armored force – all these things had been anticipated. More might have been done, but a great deal had been done.

Speech. During World War I Woodrow Wilson canceled all press conferences. Mr. Roosevelt met the press, lectured them on what they might and might not print. He looked calm, rested, cheery, buoyant.

That night he spoke for 27 minutes from the partly blacked-out diplomatic cloakroom in the White House basement.

He conceded that the U.S. had suffered a serious defeat in the Pacific. He called on the people to prepare for a long war which “we are going to win.” He outlined a program for “doubled and quadrupled” war production by increasing the working week to the maximum of seven 24-hour days; by building new plants, increasing those already built and converting unused factories; by giving more of all available materials to the military, less to civilians.

He warned against rumors and “fantastic claims,” promised to make public all information he had that would not give aid & comfort to the enemy. Said the President:

“We are now in this war. We are all in it – all the way. Every single man, woman and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history. We must share together the bad news and the good news….

“So far the news has all been bad….

“This Government will put its trust in the stamina of the American people…. We must be set to face a long war against crafty and powerful bandits…. It will not only be a long war, it will be a hard war….

“…We must begin the great task that is before us by abandoning once and for all the illusion that we can ever again isolate ourselves from the rest of humanity. In these past few years – and, most violently, in the past few days – we have learned a terrible lesson.

“It is our obligation to our dead – it is our sacred, obligation to their children and to our children – that we must never forget what we have learned.

“We are now in the midst of a war, not for conquest, not for vengeance, but for a world in which this nation, and all that this nation represents, will be safe for our children.

“…We are going to win the war and we are going to win the peace that follows.”

Action. Next day the moves began: exchanges of pledges and information with the British, the Russians, the Chinese, the Dutch, all the American nations. Navy Secretary Frank Knox was dispatched to Honolulu in a Navy bomber. Congress was asked to kill the ban on sending out an A.E.F. – and did, without debate. The Senate added a couple of billions to an $8,000,000,000 war appropriation. Industrial and labor leaders were called to meet this week to agree on a basic war labor policy. OPMite William Knudsen ordered the 168-hour week into effect in basic arms industries; ordered the expenditure of $1,000,000,000 a week (present spending rate: more than $500,000,000 weekly).

All arms schedules were upped enormously. The Navy asked Congress to increase the size of the coming two-ocean fleet. The French liner Normandie, the Swedish liner Kungsholm, and 13 lesser vessels were seized. Censorship of all outgoing radio, telephone, wireless and cable communication was established. (Next: plain mail.) Congress got down to brass tacks on price control, on tax legislation.

The President established eight defense sea areas off the East and West Coasts – into which non-U.S. Navy vessels might enter only with Navy permission and only on clear days. Petroleum Coordinator Harold Ickes took over absolute control of aviation gasoline.

The President held repeated strategy discussions with his War Council. He opened a $50,000,000 Red Cross drive, sent to Congress a message asking a declaration of war on Germany and Italy; signed the declaration two hours, 45 minutes later. He signed an order giving the Defense Communications Board power to use, control, inspect or shut down all radio stations. He ordered Thailand funds frozen in the U.S. He conferred with Soviet Ambassador Maxim Litvinoff, with Adviser Harry Hopkins, and with his ex-Vatican envoy, Myron C. Taylor.

With British permission the U.S. made plans to make Eritrea, the sun-cursed, camel-smelling little country (670 miles by 200 miles) on the barren, fever-stricken Red Sea coast, 1,000 miles from Suez on the Canal, into an assembly plant, an African substation of the Democracies’ Arsenal. Thousands of U.S. technicians and skilled workmen will be poured into the onetime Italian colony to assemble war materials, well out of Axis bomb range.

The President sent Congress a chronology of U.S.-Japanese relations (88 years of peace smashed in one day’s treachery) as “the record, for all history to read in amazement, in sorrow, in horror and disgust!”

This was a heavy week – but not much heavier than some other White House weeks. The difference was mainly in spirit. The U.S. had been reacting to “other peoples’” wars. It was now in its own war.

To the Last Ounce

The star boarder at Washington’s famed Walter Reed Hospital, a tall, spare, silvered man with a back straight as a poplar, wrote to the President of the U.S.:

“All Americans today are united in one ambition – to take whatever share they can in the defense of their country.

“As one among these millions, I hasten to offer my services, in any way in which my experience and my strength, to the last ounce, will be of help in the fight.

“With supreme confidence that, under your calm and determined leadership, we will retain our balance, despite foul blows, I am

“Faithfully yours,
“John J. Pershing.”

The President replied:

“Dear General:

“You are magnificent. You always have been – and you always will be. I am deeply grateful to you for your letter of Dec. 10.

“Under a wise law, you have never been placed on the retired list. You are very much on the active list, and your services will be of great value.

“Always sincerely,
“Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

The 81-year-old war horse ached to do something. On Nov. 11, 1918, he had been in command of 2,057,675 U.S. soldiers. Last week one of his boys, General Douglas MacArthur, was beating off Japanese attacks in the Philippines. Another of his boys was Chief of Staff General George Catlett Marshall, who had been at his side the day Pershing sent the First Division into action near Picardy in 1918, with the words, still good in 1941: “You are going to meet a savage enemy. Meet them like Americans.”

Great Change

Excerpts from the reports of TIME’S correspondents throughout the U.S. and its territories:

Manila: Manila this evening was very tense, the city faintly outlined from the shadows of smoldering fires started in the noontime raid…. Civilians are assuming wartime posts of censorship, patrols, supplies, guarding, nursing, doctoring, evacuating, bandage-making…. I watched half a dozen dogfights and saw at least two enemies downed…. The Filipinos were good and spirited…. Talking to already stubble-bearded, grimy Yank soldiers at undisclosed posts: “I’d like another crack at those low-flying bastards. Write my mother I’m a hero. I’ll stay here. I’ll stick it out.” …Night sounds: howling dogs, shouts from sentries, douse that cigaret, turn off those lights, shrill police whistles, automobile backfires, the babble of Filipino and American voices….

Seattle: The atmosphere is getting grim…. Portland, Grays Harbor, Seattle and other centers blacked out tonight….There is none of that wild hysteria, such as was produced by Mr. Orson Welles, but people are worried. A woman called the city desk and said she heard sounds of bombings: “I’m not a bit excited,” she said, “I just wondered if you heard bombs. …” On Seattle blackout nights gangs of high-school boys and girls run the streets, yelling “Put out your lights” and having a wonderful time. In the early morning on the way to work no lights are on, automobile headlights are dimmed in blue paint and cellophane.

Portland: Blacked out. Portlanders have worked into the routine smoothly except that they turn lights on dangerously early in the mornings…. Night fogs, common at this season, are now welcomed as Portlanders watch for the grey haze rolling up the Columbia and Willamette Rivers at dusk. They like to compare Portland fogs to London fogs – previously treasonable.

Los Angeles: War came first like the unexpected lifting of the curtain before the stage is set. Now, in the pitch dark, it is here in earnest…. Volunteers for every service in sight – Army, Navy, Marines, State Guard, Auxiliary Police and Firemen, Air-Raid Warning, Ambulance Service…. Days of uncertainty, rumors, and a widespread sense of frustration…. Telephone lines clogged with a rush of calls…. More than 100 Japanese produce firms closed….

But the first blackout has made the great difference. Darkness fell impartially upon all, the Shirley Temples and the Sadie Smiths, Dietrichs and Doakeses…. Groups gathered at street corners to reprimand motorists who drove with lights. In the quiet of almost absolute night, this city of klieg lights and neon signs found a new beauty in starlight….

Chicago: London, when war was declared in 1939, was nothing like this. Recruiting centers are jammed, 400,000 Chicago women have applied for defense work, 100,000 have enlisted at the Red Cross. Flags broke out all over the Loop and outskirts…defense-bond sales up 75%…. Unity came here with the roar of a bombing plane…. The rush of volunteers 13 times greater than at any time since World War I…. Enrollment for civilian defense duty 100,000; goal set for 250,000 to cover the city’s 10,000 blocks….

St. Louis: Excitement is mounting to a fever pitch here…. At first people hugged their radios, half-confused, half-scared, but elated at the epochal portent of the struggle – elated in the sense that a fighter, once in the ring, feels exhilarated…. Theater audiences sing The Star-Spangled Banner lustily, applause drowning out the last strains…. Recruits swarming the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard offices – Missouri draft boards announced they can supply immediately 8,000 more draftees in Class 1-A.

Topeka: One thing the Kansas press hasn’t said and the people are saying is: “What the hell was the Navy doing out there?” Kansans can get over the unpleasant fact that we were given a good pasting, but they want to hit back. The Chew & Spit Club, which assembles daily on the sunny side of Topeka’s Sixth and Kansas Avenues, wants to know when we will…. The people are calm but determined…. A bit of a fifth-column scare, bridges, railroads, public utilities, radio stations guarded…. Enlistments up several hundred percent. Outwardly, everything is calm, but underneath there is a vein of anxiety and determination, a sag in optimism – but a feeling that the attack precipitated a fight that was inevitable and that out of it will come eventually victory, peace and a better world.

Boston: A cold wind needled down from the north, dispelling the fog…. Power-plant guards were doubled, as they were at factories, shipyards, reservoirs. Air-raid warden posts manned 24 hours a day. All recruiting stations jammed…. Governor Saltonstall and Mayor Tobin spoke at a mass preparedness meeting at Faneuil Hall – and when they finished were greeted by the report that enemy planes had been sighted 200 miles from the city…. Bellboys on the roof of the Hotel Statler dumped buckets of paint over the arrow on its roof pointing to the airport. Workers at the Navy Yard were released from work. Autos were frozen in parking lots and immobilized on the streets, and children were excused from schools. The sound of an automobile backfiring, truck wheels rumbling, of ambulance and fire-engine sirens moaning, of the hum of the regular commercial plane bound for New York – all this took on an ominous note…. Office windows measured for blackout curtains. The realization that it could happen here has dawned on the city.

First Jitters

The scare started at dusk on Monday evening, a few hours after the U.S. declared war. It started in San Francisco.

A Japanese pilot, coasting down out of the sky, would have seen the billboards shining brightly on the roads leading into San Francisco. He would have seen the lights of Alcatraz, gleaming like an ocean liner on the black waters of the Bay. Over the downtown streets he would have seen the soft, red glow of neon signs.

For five days the Pacific Coast had its jitters. In Seattle, during the first blackout on Monday night, a mob of about 3,000 excited citizens gathered on a downtown corner, milled along the street, smashing 26 lighted shop fronts.

A shipyard worker, driving with shrouded headlights through the fog in Portland’s blackout, ran down a pedestrian and killed him. A fisherman, serving as a defense guard in the town of Depoe Bay, stepped out to flag a car, was killed. Portland’s City Council passed an ordinance providing fines up to $500, jail terms up to six months for blackout violations.
Patrolmen stamped out brush fires on the Olympic Peninsula, said they were set in the shape of arrows pointing toward Seattle and the Bremerton Navy Yard.
Soldiers at Santa Cruz, Monterey and Carmel evacuated 1,000 householders along a 40-mile stretch of coast, sent them inland for safety.
In San Francisco Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. sandbagged the front of its building.
Radio stations were off the air as long as 23 hours at a time. One man was killed, more than 100 injured in blackouts around Los Angeles.
By Army suggestion, the New Year’s Day Rose Bowl game (Oregon State v. Duke) was moved from Pasadena, Calif., will be played instead at the Duke Stadium at Durham, N.C. Also canceled in California was the big winter racing season at Santa Anita.

Early Tuesday afternoon the Atlantic Seaboard had its own air-raid scare. Planes from Mitchel Field, L.I., took the air. Improvised sirens sounded in the streets of Manhattan. Civilian planes were grounded. Schoolchildren were sent home.

New Yorkers mostly took the alarm with skepticism or indifference although there was enough tension in the air so that a few grew hysterical. Yet office workers craned out of windows for a glimpse of enemy bombers. Shopping crowds on Fifth Avenue ignored the sirens. In Times Square spectators reading the news bulletins paid no attention when police ordered them off the street. On a street corner a couple of volunteer wardens got into an argument over whose corner it was. An angry passerby said to a policeman: “What the hell’s the reason for scaring people to death?”

A woman in Pelham, on her way to the beauty parlor, heard the Boston plane roar overhead as the sirens shrilled. She jammed on her brakes, was rammed by a truck, staggered into the beauty parlor, shrieked: “Hitler’s coming!” and fainted.
In East Providence, R.I., frightened children ran through the streets, crying.
A Manhattan firm (Defense Blackout & Camouflage Co., Inc.) rushed into print, advertising a “blackout consultant service.”
In Scarsdale, N.Y. mothers took up their vigil in parked cars outside the Scarsdale High School, to carry their children home if bombers appeared.
Some misguided Washington patriot, unable to get at the Japs, emulated the Father of his Country and chopped down four of the lovely Japanese cherry trees along Washington’s Tidal Basin.

English eyebrows were raised at the reports of these U.S. jitters. They knew that nuisance raids by German planes across the Atlantic are possible but improbable. Even when Britain, in her darkest hour, was evacuating her shattered troops from Dunkirk, there was no great hysteria in London. But a large part of the U.S., including even some of its interventionists, had convinced itself that the U.S. was immune to direct attack, a handicap from which Britain did not suffer.

Actually U.S. behavior did not compare unfavorably with Britain’s behavior at war’s outset (London and Berlin both had false air-raid alarms in September 1939).

By week’s end, the first alarm was over. The jitters had subsided on the East Coast. The West Coast, which in World War I had had between it and war the vast bulwarks of the continent and the Atlantic, now found itself facing war on the frontier – war in the Pacific, war with the Japs, the war that Western boys had heard of all their lives. In more senses than one, it was the Far West’s first war.

Routine Declaration

President Roosevelt sent to Congress a 136-word message that took less than two minutes to read….” The long-known and the long-expected has thus taken place….” This was his only I-told-you-so to all the isolationists who had so long insisted that nothing of the sort would ever take place.

That morning (Dec. 11, 1941) Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini had done some routine ranting, had roared some routine lies, had returned to their routine aggression – after declaring war on the U.S.

With a single speech, without one wasted word, the Senate voted war with Germany, 88-to-0, war with Italy, 90-to-0. The House voted war with Germany, 393-to-0. (In both House votes, Republican Pacifist Jeannette Rankin cinched her footnote place in history piping “Present” – a refusal to vote.) After the declaration of war with Germany was passed, the House galleries held up the second roll call by noisily tromping out. War with Italy (399-to-0) wasn’t worth sitting for.

The President’s message had been read at about 12:30 p.m.; by 3:06 p.m. he had the two declarations.

(Carter Glass, 83-year-old Virginia Senator, watched the signing. He told the President that some Senators had wanted to phrase the declaration so as not to hurt the feelings of the Axis nations. Snarled the aged fireball: “I said: ‘Hell, we don’t want to hurt their feelings, we want to kill them.’”)

The years-long Great Debate was over. The U.S. was of one mind at last. The dreaded thing came almost as an anticlimax – not step by step and through-the-back-door, but with the simple routine gesture of a postman handing in the mail. Thus, as it must to all good peoples, war with the Nazis came to the U.S.

ENEMY ALIENS: Ex-Diplomats

Axis diplomats in Washington were a downcast crew. The U.S. could not let them leave until U.S. diplomats in Axis lands could leave too. Likelihood was that Ambassador Grew and his staff would get out of Japan by way of Russia and Alaska. But meantime Ambassadors were a drug on the market. In Washington the German diplomats bought trunks; the Japanese sent out for food, were no longer trusted by their grocer, and had to pass the hat to pay for it. They sat around the Embassy drinking whiskey gloomily. Their American chauffeur, driving out for the last time, was jailed for drunkenness.

It was 8 a.m. when German Chargé d’Affaires Hans Thomsen slipped out of his embassy to deliver Germany’s declaration to Secretary Hull. When the Secretary did come, Dr. Thomsen was told that he was “engaged.” Finally Dr. Thomsen delivered his note to the Chief of the European Division, went glumly back to the ramshackle old red-brick Embassy.

Equally stony-eyed was Italian Ambassador Prince Ascanio Colonna. When he stepped out of Political Adviser James Dunn’s office, and into the elevator, photographers backed him against the wall, flashed closeups. Said Colonna: “I have delivered nothing. I came to inquire.” (Commented the gum-chewing, irrepressible New York Daily News: “Okay, Prince, goombye please.”)

The last time the U.S. fought Germany, it took eleven days to complete the transfer of nearly 300 diplomats and other German and American nationals. This time it is likely to take longer. The exiles waited, as uncomfortable as duelists who are driven into the same room by a rainstorm just as they are ready to shoot.

Roundup

The zealous authorities in Norfolk, Va., did not even wait to hear from the FBI. They rounded up every Japanese they could find, clapped them in jail.

From coast to coast, FBI men swooped on Axis nationals. In the Canal Zone hundreds of Japanese aliens were interned. By week’s end 1,370 Japs, 1,002 Germans and 169 Italians had been arrested. In almost every case, the FBI had been watching the arrested aliens for at least a year.

Potential Column. The 1,124,000 citizens of Germany, Italy and Japan who live in the U.S. are potentially the biggest fifth column in the world. Said Attorney General Francis Biddle: “So long as the aliens in this country conduct themselves in accordance with law, they need fear no interference by the Department of Justice.”

Comforts of Home. In Philadelphia, FBI men picked up Princess Stephanie Hohenlohe, 45, who had last been reported in Mexico, and Dr. Hermann Ranke, one of the world’s ranking Egyptologists, who held a visiting professorship at the University of Pennsylvania.

In New York, they snared Antoine Gazda, Austrian-born inventor, who holds the U.S. rights to Switzerland’s Oerlikon cannon, now being manufactured in Providence for the U.S. Navy. At Roosevelt Field Inn on Long Island, county police arrested Baroness Lisette von Kapri, a civilian flyer, born in Rumania, who for the past year has been friendly with student pilots at Roosevelt Field. In Alexandria, Va., the prize was pink-cheeked Kurt Sell, Washington correspondent for Germany’s official DNB news agency.

All these suspicious aliens will receive hearings before they are interned. Some may be paroled if found harmless, the rest will go to detention camps. Italians will probably join the 1,000 or so agents of the Duce who are now held at Fort Missoula, Mont. (TIME, Aug. 8). Germans may be sent to Fort Lincoln, N.Dak., where some 300 Nazis are now interned.

They will be considerably more comfortable than they would be at home. At both these concentration camps are warm barracks, playing fields, good food. Chef at Fort Missoula is Orlando Figini, who managed the restaurant in the Italian Village at the New York World’s Fair.

Sorrowful Yellow Men. Not half so happy were thousands of enemy aliens who did not fall into the FBI dragnet last week. In Los Angeles a 61-year-old Japanese, Takematzu Izumi, a resident of California since 1896, swallowed poison when he heard that Japan had attacked Hawaii. Said he: “I am ashamed….” In Seattle the principal of the Japanese Language School did not turn up for classes. Newsmen called to find out what had happened. Said a stoical Japanese woman: “So sorry. FBI have the principal.”

Unhappy too were Nisei, the 79,642 native-born citizens of the U.S. who are descendants of Japanese. Said a young Nisei with yellow skin, slant eyes, and a college education: “Over there I’d be a coolie. Over here…I have enough money to own a car, I can talk to any man. Over here, by God, we believe enough in what we have to fight Japan.” But panic was in his heart. Would other U.S. citizens know the difference?

Not all of them would. At Ann Arbor, Mich., a young Filipino marched into a police station, asked politely: “Now can I shoot the first Japanese I see?” In Nashville, Tennessee’s Department of Conservation put in a requisition for 6,000,000 licenses to hunt Japs at a fee of $2 each. The purchasing department vetoed the requisition, with the note: “Open season on ‘Japs’ – no license required.”

CIVILIAN DEFENSE: To Meet the Improbable

The block wardens met at 8 p.m. in the Borough Hall. It was like a town meeting. The atmosphere was serious, solemn, a little ponderous. They were practical men, met to discuss practical steps to be taken. Nobody suggested the extreme improbability of the Luftwafte bombing this little country town; all the discussion, all the questions centered about the practical details of what to do when the Luftwaffe came.

The chairman, a serious young man, talked of incendiary bombs (one plane can carry as many as 2,000), of the consequences of a lucky hit on exposed telephone wires, or whether or not it would be a good idea to use Boy Scouts as messengers during a raid. (When someone suggested that young boys ought to be kept out of harm’s way, a veteran father said, “Hell, if there are bombs dropping, you won’t be able to keep the kids indoors anyway.”) A man from the gas company feelingly urged his fellow wardens not to attempt any repair jobs on broken gas-mains, etc., but to send for him – “and for God’s sake don’t monkey with any loose wires.”

All over the U.S. last week, but particularly along both flanks of the U.S., such meetings were held, such plans discussed. Civilian-defense offices up & down both coasts were logjammed with applicants. Mayor LaGuardia’s Office of Civilian Defense moved too fast to keep track of its own progress. But this week the civilian-defense picture was taking shape.

Hottest area for defense enrollments was New England, which leads the nation with 1,287 local councils. Coolest was the Midwest. In Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin are only 251 councils altogether.
Though men are wanted (for air-raid wardens, bomb squads, etc.) the big need is for able women. OCD estimated that it could use 500,000 women for home nursing, another 100,000 for nurses’ aides. Some 300,000 women are wanted to take charge of OCD’s nutrition program, 100,000 more to look after school lunches.
Mayor LaGuardia announced that he will enlist 90,000 licensed pilots, 90,000 student pilots, 100,000 ground workers to serve in a Civil Air Patrol for the war’s duration. Under the command of Major General John F. Curry of the U.S. Army Air Corps, CAP will operate from 2,000 airports in the U.S. which are not used for military or commercial flights.

Chief hitch in the Mayor’s program so far is lack of air-raid facilities. It would take a mort of heavy cloth to blackout New York City’s 10,000,000 windows. Most big cities are so noisy that civilians cannot hear air-raid warnings. New York’s Board of Estimate last week appropriated $25,000 to buy sirens. In the newspapers, OCD took full-page advertisements telling civilians what to do (“Keep cool. Stay at home. Put out lights.”) if raiders come.

In all Manhattan, a preliminary survey disclosed virtually no adequate shelters. (OCD does not consider subways adequate – they are too near the surface, covered with a vulnerable network of wires, pipes, cables.) In Stamford, Conn, an old bank vault, nine feet under the sidewalk, was converted into a bomb shelter last March – as a money-raising stunt by British War Reliefers. Detroit, like Chungking, is well supplied with natural shelters. Under the city, 1,100 feet down, are Detroit’s old salt mines, with 25 miles of passageways, all dry, healthful, air-conditioned.

Chai-yo for Thailand

It was a dramatic moment. Thailand had surrendered to the Japanese. In the Thailand Legation in Washington the brisk, round-faced Minister, Mom Raja-wongse Seni Pramoj, had to announce whether or not he surrendered, too.

Eight tan, faultlessly dressed, glossy-haired men arose and shouted in unison: Chai-yo! (Hurrah). They shouted it five times. For the Minister announced that, no matter what his Government said: “I have decided to work from now on for one thing and one thing only – the re-establishment of free and independent Thailand.” The ornate, red-carpeted sitting room, dazzling with gold-silk furniture, pillars and goddesses, echoed with the Oriental cheers. When he finished his eloquent speech, the Minister selected a cigaret from the skull of a tiger whose open jaws were lined with gold, and ended solemnly, in English: “Gentlemen, we’ll lick the hell out of ’em. That is the motto of the Thai people.*

*But not of Thailand’s Premier, Luang Pibul Songgram, who sent, according to Domei, a congratulatory telegram to Japan’s Premier Tojo on Japan’s “splendid achievements in the first few days of war.”

DIPLOMATICS: Litvinoff’s Problem

Russia has her paws full fighting Germany. And since she is doing a good job of it, she had better not take on more than she can handle by trying also to fight Japan. Nobody knows it better than Maxim Litvinoff. This was the news that he last week conveyed by implication to the U.S. people.

Litvinoff was the Foreign Commissar who fell from power when Stalin, changing policy, was preparing to sign the German-Russian Pact. (He was the spokesman for cooperation with the democracies who came back when Stalin needed democratic cooperation; the logical choice for Ambassador to Washington.) Ambassador Litvinoff’s first appearance in Washington should have been the first great move toward reconciling a suspicious Russia with a suspicious U.S.

But when the Ambassador presented his credentials it was in a diplomatic situation as tangled as the plot of a Dostoevski novel. The U.S. was at war with Japan (but not then with Germany) and Russia was at war with Germany (but not with Japan). Japan (with Germany and Italy) had sworn never to make a separate peace with the U.S. and Great Britain (but no such pledge was made about Russia). The U.S. declaration of war against Germany and Italy eased the Ambassador’s embarrassment somewhat. But in the first hours of the war, anxious U.S. citizens created another problem by asking: What will Russia do?

No U.S. official joined in the clamor. President Roosevelt said smoothly that supplies to Russia would continue. It came with bad grace for U.S. citizens – many of whom had opposed aid to Russia before – to censure Russia for not jumping on Japan, merely because Japan had jumped on the U.S.

But Ambassador Litvinoff had to say something. The Ambassador made his country’s position clear. Diplomatically, it was a masterly job. Practically, it said that Russia would take no action against Japan – now. Litvinoff’s chief points:

Hitler’s advance in Russia was made at a stupendous cost to him. Russia would have welcomed a second front then. “We never complained, however, we never made any demands on our ally, England.”
Stories that Hitler had decided to halt in Russia “need not be taken at all seriously…. We intend to beat back and smash up the hordes of Hitler till they are completely destroyed.”
The war is one war: “All that is going on is the result of a vast conspiracy by a handful of international gangsters calling themselves Axis powers…. We now have, in various parts of the world, separate sectors of one great battlefield…. We are proud and happy to count ourselves the allies of your great country.”

Ambassador Litvinoff put the situation very neatly. And in making it plain that Russia would not open up an Eastern Front, he also gave a good reason: “Hitler is the chief culprit in all the present wars, the inspirer of the whole gang, and the destruction of Hitler would mean the end of them all.” The U.S. and Britain, now fighting the whole gang, understood and agreed.

NormanStewart · December 25, 2020, 12:55am

WORLD BATTLEFRONTS

STRATEGY: Declaration and Plan

Surrounded by the gilded cupids of Berlin’s Kroll Opera House, facing the upturned faces of the puppet Reichstag. Reich Marshal Hermann Göring declared with beefy deference: “Führer, speak to us.”

The Führer spoke: “Italy, Germany and Japan will henceforth conduct in common and jointly a war which has been imposed on them by the United States of America and England….

“We will always strike first. We will always deal the first blow.”

By the time this shrill declaration was made there was no longer reason to doubt that Germany had already dealt the first blow. The weapon had been Japan. The attempt to cut the U.S. life line to the Orient was the opening move of the second phase of World War II, designed to prevent the U.S. from helping its Allies while the Axis disposed of them one by one.

Divide & Conquer. The Axis grand strategy, conceived in Berlin, is, almost certainly, to divide the forces of its foes and then to conquer each sector separately. Allied strength is maintained by sea power, supported by a string of fortresses stretching around the world: Portsmouth, Gibraltar, Alexandria, Singapore, Hawaii, Panama. The reduction of any of these bastions would cut the Allied life line. The reduction of several would be a catastrophe. There were signs this week that the Axis was planning an assault on one or several:

Japan was already attacking Singapore.
Spain canceled the sailings of merchantmen for the Americas. Spain’s entrance into the war would be the signal for attack on Gibraltar, perhaps on Portugal and the Azores as well.
Turkey was scared stiff at concentrations of troops in Bulgaria. Turkey issued a declaration of neutrality, but was wavering. The capitulation or conquest of Turkey would be the signal for a flanking attack on Suez, probably an assault on Alexandria from the air.
But the greatest bastion of all is the fortress of the British Isles, and there were suggestions that even that might be assaulted.

In Berlin the Italian and Japanese Ambassadors attended a meeting to discuss “new and important tasks resulting from the common war against the Anglo-Saxon powers.” Present to explain those tasks were Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder and Field Marshal Erhard Milch of the Air Force. Last June, when he launched his attack on Russia, Adolf Hitler spoke of “the tying up of such powerful German forces in the east that the radical conclusion of the war in the west… could no longer be vouched for by the German High Command.” If Germany can now stabilize the Russian front, that radical conclusion might be attempted.

In extending the war to the U.S. the Axis gambled on a short war. A logical schedule for ending it quickly: 1) divide and conquer the British Empire, while 2) keeping the U.S. on the defensive, and 3) choking off aid to China and Russia; then 4) deal with China and Russia, and finally 5) offer the U.S. the alternative of making peace or fighting alone.

Stand & Fight. The Allies were planning joint conferences and staff talks to plan a little grand strategy of their own. For the present they could only stand and fight to hold Singapore, to keep the Burma Road open, to maintain the U.S. life line to the Orient, to fight off any new attacks that came. For the present, Russia was helping more by attacking the German Army than it could by entering the war against Japan. If the European end of the Axis launched such an all-out attack in the Atlantic as the Japanese had launched in the Pacific, the U.S. might soon be fighting for the Azores and even Iceland. But if the bastions of Allied sea power held against assault, the Allies could then turn to the offensive.

BATTLE OF THE PACIFIC: Havoc at Honolulu

Incoming passengers on the American liner watched the planes swoop down over Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field, commended the U.S. Navy’s thoughtfulness in staging a big-scale war game on Sunday morning. An American automobile salesman, en route to Tientsin, gawked admiringly as a bomb whooshed into the harbor a scant 100 yards away: “Boy! What if that had been a real one?” The perspiring ship’s officer who finally broke the bad news flubbed his lines: “It seems there’s a state of undeclared war between Honolulu and the United States.”

Even the Christian Science Monitor’s war correspondent, Joseph C. Harsch, was fooled: “I awoke my wife and asked her if she wanted to know what an air raid sounded like in Europe. ‘This,’ I remarked, ‘is a good imitation.’ We then proceeded to the beach for our morning swim, assuming with everyone else in the hotel that it was just another practice maneuver by the Navy…. Only when the radio began telling the people what had happened could one grasp the incredible fact.”

Most of the incredible facts of Japan’s attack on Hawaii were given to the U.S. this week by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, who flew to Honolulu to get them:

The Story. The first wave of planes slipped in at 7:55 a.m., the Rising Sun insignia clearly visible in the early morning sunlight. Single-engine bombers singled out ships and naval centers in Pearl Harbor, blanketed the area with explosives. Under subsequent attack were the Army’s Hickam Field, Wheeler Field, Schofield Barracks, Bellows Field, Kaneohe Naval Air Station and that portion of the fleet offshore. In all there were six separate attacks, the others coming at 11:29, 11:59, 12:22 p.m., 7:15, and 9:10.

After the first stunning shock, the defenders swung into action. Spotters in the Navy Yard signal tower picked up the attackers, flashed air-raid warnings via visual signals. Working coolly under enemy bombs and machine-gun fire and shrapnel from defending anti-aircraft batteries, the signalmen routed scores of orders to ships standing out to sea or fighting from berths.

A recruit seaman is credited with the first blow against the enemy. General Quarters had not yet sounded when he fought off an attacking plane singlehanded with a machine gun.

A battleship captain* had his stomach laid open by a shrapnel burst as he went from conning tower to bridge to direct his ship’s fight. He fell to the deck, disdained attempts to lift him to safety, continued to command until the bridge went up in flames. Two officers attempting to save him were themselves saved only after a third officer climbed above the fire, passed a line to an adjoining battleship, another to the trapped men, thus led them to safety.

Ten members of a 5-inch gun’s crew fell before a strafing attack. The lone remaining bluejacket took over: three times he grabbed a shell from the fuse pot, placed it in the tray, dashed to the other side of the gun, rammed it home, jumped into the pointer’s seat and fired. A terrific bomb blast finally carried him over the side. He was rescued.

When the brig door blew open a seaman confined earlier for misconduct dashed to his post at an antiaircraft gun. A hospitalized officer brushed aside his nurses when the first alarm was sounded, ran across the Yard to his ship. So effectively did he fight, despite his illness, that his captain recommended promotion. One tough sailor, unable to find a mount for a heavy machine gun, fired the weapon from his arms despite terrific rapid-fire concussion.

A moored aircraft tender, blazing under repeated attacks, downed a Japanese plane on her own decks. Simultaneously her captain spotted a midget submarine’s shadow within yards of his vessel. Hits were immediately scored and, as the sub’s conning tower emerged, a destroyer administered the coup de grace with depth charges. The tender then shot down a second plane. Motor launches from a vessel laid up for overhaul braved a steady hail of bullets and shrapnel, rescued scores of victims from the oil-fired harbor. Almost without exception officers and men exhibited quick thinking, coolness, coordination.

That was the heroic story. There were still questions to be answered, and Frank Knox answered most of them, giving the bad with the good:

The Good. The limited extent of U.S. matériel losses was most heartening, made complete liars out of the Japanese High Command. Lost:

The 26-year-old battleship Arizona (Pennsylvania class, 32,600 tons), by a bomb that “literally passed down through the smokestack.”
The ancient Utah, a target-training ship long since out of combatant service. Atop the Utah was a steel platform for sandbags (as crew protection) when she was doing duty as a moving target for bomber novices. The attacking Japanese, thinking her an aircraft carrier, subjected her to repeated, withering attack.
Three destroyers (of the Mohan class, 1933 program, displacing 1,500 tons), the Cassin, Shaw, and Downes.
The mine layer Oglala, an old passenger ship converted during World War I.
Other damage ranged from “ships which have already been repaired, and are ready for sea, or which have gone to sea, to a few ships which will take from a week to several months to repair.” In the last category Secretary Knox placed the battle ship Oklahoma, launched March 23, 1914, which capsized.
Harbor approaches received little damage, and the vast spread of oil storage tanks was unscathed.

The Japanese, said Frank Knox, lost two of their little-known, tiny two-man submarines (one sunk, one captured), one full-sized sub and 41 aircraft, including those shot down and those forced down for lack of fuel.

The Bad. “The United States Services were not on the alert against the surprise air attack on Hawaii. This fact calls for a formal investigation which will be initiated immediately by the President…. We are all entitled to know it if: a) there was any error of judgment which contributed to the surprise, b) if there was any dereliction of duty prior to the attack.”

Up-to-date Navy casualty figures dwarfed previous unofficial estimates of 1,500 dead, 1,500 wounded: officers (including Rear Admiral Isaac Campbell Kidd, commanding a battleship division of the Pacific Fleet), 91 dead, 20 wounded, enlisted men, 2,638 dead, 636 wounded. Army losses, based on “practically complete reports”: 168 killed in action; 223 wounded; 26 missing. A Japanese fifth column, “the most effective actually in this war since Norway,” knew the sites of all defenses, the comings & goings of the various patrols.

Unanswered Questions. Still unanswered was the question of how the defending forces were caught napping. Said Frank Knox: “The air attack simply took us by surprise. We weren’t on air alert.” His implication was plain: Pearl Harbor looked for attacks, if any, from the sea alone.

Whatever the reason, Frank Knox cautioned against speculation, ruled out any Pacific shake-up until a complete investigation is made. To the U.S., he spoke optimistically. To the Japanese, he issued a taunting challenge:

“The essential fact is that the Japanese purpose was to knock out the United States before the war began…. In this purpose the Japanese failed…. The entire balance of the Pacific Fleet with its aircraft carriers, its heavy cruisers, its light cruisers, its destroyers and submarines are uninjured and are all at sea seeking contact with the enemy.”

*The Secretary explained that names of and awards to individual heroes will be announced later.

The Philippines Stand

The Philippines were ready. For days before the war began, the guns had been manned and the planes had stood alert. The Philippines were still ready. After a week of heavy bombing, of fierce scraps on Luzon beachheads, of dogfights among black bursts of ack-ack, of desperate aerial assaults to hold Japanese ships off the coast, the Philippines stood fast.

For all his losses the Jap had little to show this week. He had done a decently good job of bombing; he had smashed up some buildings, some airplanes. He had managed to grab a precarious foothold on a beach 260 miles from the center of Luzon’s resistance. But the Army’s Far Eastern Commander, lean, brilliant Lieut. General Douglas MacArthur, and his grizzled Navy sidekick, Admiral Tommy Hart, had been waiting with their knives out.

As professional fighters they could afford to regard the enemy’s effort with an appraising eye, to commend him for some military virtuosity that the world did not realize he possessed. They could afford it because they had given him a thumping good round. They had made an impressive start on the proof of a proposition that many strategists had believed insoluble: the Philippines can be held;

At Clark Field alongside Fort Stotsenberg, 50 miles northwest of Manila, the gun crews had just finished their noonday Monday dinner when the Jap struck. Well-trained but combat-raw, the gunners spotted a precise formation of 52 planes high in the blue sky. They watched, began to wonder. Then they knew.

Across the field, in a wicked, jagged line, the bombs struck. The mess truck, rumbling back to quarters, disappeared, and with it the drivers.

“We stood up and had a kind of a relaxation period,” one of the gunners said later. “We all said: ‘I never knew what war would be like…. This is it. Let’s get busy….’ We wished we could fire a couple of rounds to get over that tense feeling, but we held our fire till all of a sudden the pursuits started coming in over us.

“I just yelled to the fellows to stay low, keep calm and keep firing…. None of us were really excited after the first minutes when the bombers caught us. We were too busy – and it felt good to be firing…. We just said: ‘Get those bastards out of the air,’ and we kept at it till we knew we’d run them off. After it was all over we knew we had stood up to them.”

In the Air. Through that day and the following days, the Jap struck in many places from the air. He bombed Nichols Field, just south of Manila, time & again; in one raid alone he lost eleven planes. He struck at Cavite, the Navy’s base on Manila’s south harbor; there he wrought heavy damage, barely missed the base’s commander, weather-beaten Rear Admiral Francis Rockwell.

Youngster officer-pilots of the new Philippine Air Force sailed into the Jap with a daring and skill that popped the eyes of their opposite numbers from the U.S. One army flight of three jumped 20 Jap planes, knocked out three, chased the rest, picked up a straggler on the way home and sent him down in flames. A bombing flight lumbered serenely through heavy ack-ack fire to unload on warships, then kicked off altitude and strafed a landing party on the beach.

A few German Messerschmitts were sighted and some pilots reported whipping past white pilots in dogfights.* On the ground, soldiers picked up many Jap duds, found some marked “Frankfurt 1916.” But there was no conclusive evidence that Nazis were fighting alongside the Japanese.

Out of Manila. Little soldiers in mushroom helmets were soon assaulting the beaches and U.S. soldiers were meeting them, but for the first part of the week Manila busied itself with its own problems. Overnight, on orders from General MacArthur’s headquarters, the islands went on a war basis, with censorship, rationing and all-night blackouts.

Thickly populated areas were evacuated. Manila residents swarmed in orderly droves to the hills, in commandeered trucks and busses. American and Filipino businessmen made their rounds as air-raid wardens and special policemen. Long lax in its air-raid precautions, Manila, like many another Philippine town, quickly caught on.

On the Beaches. The Jap put down troops at Aparri, whence a road leads to Manila 260 miles south (see map). He established a flying field, landed planes. To the invader’s left was the wild, unexplored territory of headhunters and pygmies.

It was far to the heart of the Philippines’ defense, but soon the invader was catching hell. U.S. pilots raided his field. Ground troops, with a good supply road at their backs, slashed savagely at his landing party. But he still kept his hold on Aparri this week.

At Legaspi, 210 miles southeast of Manila, the invader also got ashore, but between him and Manila lay nasty country with a rudimentary road system, and on the far side of it MacArthur’s men waited.

At Vigan there was another landing party. From Douglas MacArthur’s terse communiques it appeared it was under control.

On Lingayen Gulf, long regarded as one of the best beachheads for an enemy on the island, the Jap found defenses to fit its importance. He tried to land 154 motorboats of soldiers in the first attack. To stop them MacArthur interposed a division of his pride & joy, the new Philippine Army.* It sank most of the Jap boats, routed the others. After three days of fighting, not a Japanese soldier had reached shore alive.

At Sea. Tommy Hart’s submarines were busy, but the returns would not be in for a long time, for subs work slowly to stalk their game.

Over the sea, the returns came faster, and they were more decisive. Off the north coast, heroic Captain Colin Kelly jumped the pagoda-topped battleship Haruna, 29,330 tons of modernized fighting machine, sent her down with three bomb hits. Farther west, a Navy pilot, Lieut. Clarence A. Keller, picked up the Haruna’s sister, Kongo, tailed her until bombers came to his assistance. They damaged the Kongo, but apparently failed to sink her.

Early in the week Army flyers sank a Jap transport, damaged two others as they were putting off their landing parties. Later MacArthur had better news: his flyers had sunk three more – loaded with soldiers this time – and had damaged three others. For reinforcements and supply, the Jap was apparently not doing too well.

The Targets. In the first phase of invasion, the invader was either feeling out defense or trying a multiple assault in the hope that the Filipinos (for whom he dropped circulars) would revolt. There was no sign of an uprising. When little President Manuel Quezon appeared on the streets this week, after a bombing raid, Filipinos poured to the curbs, cried: “Long live Quezon,” with tears in their eyes. From the back country began to trickle stories of civilians joining their troops, swinging their bolos, and of invaders found decapitated.

The Jap raided a field at Batangas in southern Luzon over mountains from Manila, perhaps in preparation for a landing there. He bombed targets on Davao Gulf. He returned again & again to the targets on Luzon.

From years of spying in the Philippines, the Japanese flyers knew what targets to go after, where each target was. The raids did plenty of damage, especially at Cavite and at the Navy’s Olongapo repair station. Fifth columnists lighted flares during blackouts, but the best guess was that the Filipinos knew most of the agents, and soon had them rounded up.

This week an officer suggested to General MacArthur that the U.S. flag on Army headquarters was a fine marker for raiding airmen, suggested it be brought down. Said Douglas MacArthur: “Take every other normal precaution for protection of the headquarters, but let’s keep the flag flying.”

*Cracked others: “They were just scared Hippos” (new Air Forces lingo for “Nippos”).

*Organized by Douglas MacArthur (last published strength 160,000) and not to be confused with the small force of veteran professional Philippine Scouts, founded by his father, Lieut. General Arthur MacArthur, in 1901.

Yamamoto v. the Dragon

A humble wireless set trembled last week with quasi-divine vibrations as the Son of Heaven himself sent Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Combined Imperial Fleets, congratulations for the daring execution of a brilliant treachery.

Congratulations from Emperor Hirohito fix upon their recipient an incredible joy; but also a certain uneasiness. This is because they not only bestow praise; they also adjure the congratulatee to continue the good work – or else.

Isoroku Yamamoto had made a wonderful beginning. The four syllables of his name may in future be pronounced twice as reverently as the two of Togo. Japan’s greatest previous naval hero, victor of Tsushima, humiliator of the Russians. But if they are, it will be because Yamamoto, like Togo, follows through and makes his wonderful beginning just a beginning.

That will not be easy. Though he has depleted the forces arrayed against him, Admiral Yamamoto knows that his enemies are still great, that their regenerative powers may soon seem (compared to Japan’s) as formidable as those of the mythical dragon which, when his tail was cut off, grew not only a new tail on his body but a new body on his tail.*

But Isoroku Yamamoto is not fighting U.S. production. It is his job to consume the product. If he can consume it fast enough, he will have accomplished his mission.

His First Step. In order to drive the white man from Greater East Asia, Admiral Yamamoto must drive away, or preferably destroy, the white man’s bridge to Asia: his fleets.

Surveying his assignment, Isoroku Yamamoto saw that his greatest permanent necessity would be to keep British power and U.S. power from effecting a junction. If, with the help of the Army, he could break off the rungs by which the U.S. Navy has to climb over the shoulder of the Pacific to Singapore, his job would be much easier. Therefore the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Wake, Midway and Guam were important; but the penultimate rung, the Philippine Islands, was most vital to his cause.

Perhaps even more vital was the attempt, in which Admiral Yamamoto could be only an abettor, to neutralize, by a land attack down Malaya, the spot at which the great Navies would join – Singapore.

In these great projects, air power was the key and Admiral Yamamoto has a Navy which can turn that key for a short time. By this week his air power had either done or helped to do the following things:

Sunk one U.S. battleship, capsized another, sunk three destroyers, perhaps one submarine; sunk two British battleships.
Partly knocked out U.S. and British air power in Hawaii, the Philippines and Malaya by surprise bombardments.
Established landings in northern Malaya and northern Luzon which promised to provide air bases (especially good in Malaya).
Captured Guam.

On its own, his sea power had:

Captured a claimed 200 U.S. and British merchant ships, including the 10,509-ton S.S. President Harrison.
Cut the U.S. undersea cable somewhere west of Midway Island.

He had, in these initial projects, paid a not-too-exorbitant price:

One battleship (a second damaged and perhaps sunk), one cruiser, one destroyer, perhaps 75 planes.

His Next Steps. To secure a quick knockout in the South Pacific the Imperial Fleet has a hard and dirty way ahead. It must at all costs maintain the two principal operations in Malaya and the Philippines. This means a hazardous and endless duty of convoying, supplying, transporting troops, a duty subject to raiding by U.S., British and Dutch submarines, planes and surface craft. The Japanese Fleet must also continue to harass the U.S. lines of communication. It must, above all, be wary of Allied offensive action, which might take many forms.

The first U.S. offensive action would doubtless be a splicing of the raveled lifeline. The U.S. Navy would doubtless try to relieve Wake & Midway, retake Guam. The first attack was probably already on the way. It may have been, and probably was, slowed by the losses at Pearl Harbor. Even if the U.S. Navy had to draw on some of its Atlantic strength, it would have to try to fight its way to the Philippines. The southern supply route, by way of New Zealand and Australia, might do for a time but not for long.

That job done, U.S. armed forces might raid Formosa, clamp down the blockade of Japan that strategists have long envisioned, and, if Russian air bases were put at U.S. disposal, might bomb Japan’s main naval and industrial establishments. From Alaska the U.S. Navy might punch air raids into Japan’s northern advance base at Paramoshiri Island, south of the Kamchatka peninsula. From Guam and Wake, regained, U.S. Army and Navy Air Forces could bomb the Japanese mandated islands and begin to forge a chain that would be stout and confining.

His Animus. In every way, by feeling, by training, by detailed experience, Isoroku Yamamoto has all his life been bent to one task: defeat the U.S. and Britain in the Pacific.

Isoroku Yamamoto is not the grinning, bowing, breath-sipping little man with horn-rimmed glasses, eager mustache and super-buck teeth which U.S. cartoonists have selected as Mr. Japan. He is not a monster who enjoys killing babies and takes rape after dinner instead of coffee. He is, instead, a hard-bitten professional man with a sixth sense – hatred.

He hates, and all his colleagues hate, the U.S. and British attitude toward Japan, and especially toward Japan’s Navy. He has heard for years the U.S. Navy’s boast that the Japs would be a pushover.* He knows how the cruiser Mogami, some of whose welded seams parted when she fired a full salvo on her trials, was exaggerated into a kind of saltwater One Hoss Shay. He knows how the little torpedo boat Tomoduru, which, because it was overloaded with guns and torpedo tubes and had insufficient displacement, tipped over on steam trials, was exaggerated into a great turtle-turning dreadnought, built from stolen plans.

He has long hated, and did much to fight, the imputation of inferiority which Britain and the U.S. made in insisting on maintaining the 5-5-3 ratio in 1934. Referring to a dinner in London, he says: “I was never told there that being much shorter than the others I ought to eat only three-fifths of the food on my plate. I ate as much as I needed.”

Unlike the Japanese Army, which has built itself a pretty sordid record in China, Isoroku Yamamoto’s Navy displaces better than its own weight in pride, and he has grown up with that pride. He graduated from the Japanese Naval Academy in time to lose the first and second fingers of his left hand aboard Admiral Togo’s flagship Mikasa in the great battle off Tsushima in 1904. Down the years he has absorbed and fostered the morale of Japan’s Navy, the crafty conservatism of Japanese naval statesmanship, pride in such things as the superiority of Japanese Navy bombings over Army bombings of Chungking, 600 miles from the sea.

His Men. Besides rice, the main staple of Japanese diet is fish. To catch enough fish for 72,000,000 Japanese to eat, both raw and cooked, for breakfast, lunch and dinner, it is inevitable that a huge number of Japanese should have got a sense of the sea. Like the isle-bound British, the isle-bound Japanese are primarily seafarers.

Admiral Yamamoto’s men, used to negotiating the rip channel tides and foul weathers of their islands, are fine navigators. They work round the clock. They service their ships smartly. They submit to living conditions at which U.S. sailors would mutiny: Japanese ships have super structures which look like pagodas piled on Shinto shrines astraddle Buddhist temples, and in these great upper horrors the crew lives, to save space, in quarters so crowded that most officers enjoy less room than U.S. enlisted men.

His Theories. “Japan,” says Yamamoto, “has always regarded the aircraft carrier as one of the most offensive of armaments.” How Admiral Yamamoto developed and perfected this concept was demonstrated all too clearly in his opening moves in the Pacific. The exact number of Japan’s carriers is not known: estimates vary between eight and 13. Japanese carriers are small, with space for from 24 to 60 planes, compared with U.S. carriers’ 80 to 100. They are fast, running to 30 knots. And they are daringly designed, with no island above the flight deck and funnels aimed astern like huge exhaust pipes.

Admiral Yamamoto subscribes also to the Japanese predilection for the torpedo as an attacking weapon. He considers the gun an ancillary weapon to be used mainly to create opportunities for decisive torpedo attack. The Japanese service torpedo is larger and more powerful than most (only equals: those fired by Britain’s Nelson and Rodney), and Japan boasts an unusual number of small torpedo-bearing craft.

The use of torpedoes launched by aircraft has been developed by both Britain and the U.S., but Pearl Harbor and the sinkings off Malaya testify to the skill with which Admiral Yamamoto has taken up the idea. This idea, extraordinarily enough considering what it has accomplished, has not been used with any great success by the German Air Force, which prefers dive-bombers.

Admiral Yamamoto must have been trying a little Japanese wool-pulling when he surprised everyone at the London Naval Conference by defining the torpedo as a “defensive weapon.” “Doesn’t it depend, sir,” asked a U.S. naval technician, “at which end of it you are?”

His Person. The Admiral is an adversary who does not want underrating. Yamamoto means Base of a Mountain, and the Admiral is solid. He is deliberate, positive, aggressive. His passion for winning has made him the bridge, poker, chess, and go* champion of the Japanese Navy. Once an American asked him how he learned bridge so quickly. He explained: “If I can keep 5,000 ideographs in my mind, it is not hard to keep in mind 52 cards.”

Admiral Yamamoto is wily as only the Japanese can be. When he crossed the U.S. in 1934, reporters noted that he was short on English, that he answered them through an interpreter. Actually he spoke excellent English then; he used the interpreter to brush off embarrassing questions.

At 57, he is at the top of his powers. He smokes, drinks with gusto, works like a dog, ashore lives a Spartan life in a modest house in Tokyo’s suburbs. He has firm control of his heavy-lipped, firm-jawed face, and crops his hair short to look more like the man of action that he is.

His Wrath. The tasks which confront the Japanese Navy will not provide pleasant afternoon outings for Isoroku Yamamoto and his subordinates. But they will be sustained in them by a deep resentment, something which hurts down around the breastbone. The Japanese have not known an easy life, and they think that this is so because Britain and the U.S. have kept them from their ease.

This feeling is nothing new. It was over a decade ago that the Japanese General Kiokatu Sato wrote a credo to which Admiral Yamamoto would certainly lend his every nerve:

“If we do not break the ambitions of the American people and do not punish it for its unfairness, our souls will know no peace, even when they leave this world. We fought China for Korea. We fought Russia for Manchuria. The circumstances will oblige us to fight America. The war between Japan and the United States is the inevitable fate of our nation….

“The fury rises in our hearts….”

*This week Congress acted to expand the U.S. Navy by 150,000 tons. This amounts to more tonnage than was lost by both the U.S. and British Navies in the first disasters of the war.

*Actually, by no means all U.S. top naval commanders took a light view of Japanese power, especially under the conditions of a two-ocean struggle.

*A type of Japanese checkers in which the aim is to surround the enemy’s pieces, called go-stones, of which as many as 200 may be in play at one time. It is considered great practice in tactics.

NormanStewart · December 25, 2020, 1:10am

HEROES: All the Glory

Along with many first blows of war, the U.S. was given its first individual heroes last week. They were flyers.

If heroism can be compared, the most illustrious of America’s first heroes was Captain Colin Purdie Kelly Jr. His citation was recorded in a single pregnant sentence of a communiqué issued by General Douglas MacArthur: “General MacArthur announced with great sorrow the death of Captain Colin P. Kelly Jr., who so distinguished himself by scoring three direct hits on the Japanese capital battleship Haruna, leaving her in flames and in distress.”

Pilot Kelly probably never returned to his base. A 26-year-old West-Pointer, he was the first Army officer to fly the Boeing Flying Fortress in the Far East. He possibly flew one to his death in the attack on the Haruna. His wife, in Brooklyn with her parents, took the news dry-eyed. She told reporters: “Please, when you write, write only of what Captain Kelly has done, not of me, not of Corkey [their 18-month-old son]. For it is Captain Kelly who deserves all the praise, all the glory.” Praise and glory aside. Captain Kelly had promptly shown that American aviators do not spot any courage even to the Japanese suicide squads.

Other first heroes, their deeds:

Lieutenant Clarence A. Keller, 31-year-old Kansas Navy flyer. He sighted a Japanese battleship, trailed her. despite heavy anti-aircraft fire, until other planes arrived, and scored one, possibly two direct hits.
Lieutenant Boyd D. Wagner, 25-year-old Army flyer from Pennsylvania. Five Japanese fighters attacked him over Aparri, Hawaii. He shot down two, machine-gunned twelve other Japanese planes on the ground, left five of them burning.
Naval Flyer Lieutenant Harman T. Utter, who attacked three Japanese fighters alone. He shot down one, the other two fled. He landed on the sea with engine trouble, taxied to land fixed his engine, returned to his base the next day.
Six Filipinos of a flight led by Captain Jesus Vallamor. Over Batangas, near Manila, Villamor’s flight ran into two flights (27 each) of Japanese bombers. The Filipinos attacked, shot down two and broke up the Japanese formations. Manila reports indicated that Villamor and Lieutenant Caesar Basa were cited for bravery.

There may be more illustrious, more spectacular acts as the war develops, but deeds of America’s first heroes will compare with any. Inexperienced in combat, surprised and not entirely prepared, they more than held their own against long experienced Japanese pilots.

Stand at Wake

From the halls of Montezuma
To the shores of Tripoli,
We fight our country’s battles
On the land as on the sea.

Beyond the International Date Line, where it is always tomorrow, Wake lifts itself in three desolate sandy specks in the midst of a watery nowhere. A Clipper stop on Pan Am’s famed trans-Pacific run, it boasted a small hostel, an imposing concrete air-raid shelter recently built, a catch basin for rain water, a hydroponic tank for growing vegetables, which the coral sand refuses to nurture.

Our flag’s unfurled to every breeze
From dawn to setting sun.
We’ve fought in every clime and place
Where we could take a gun.

At Wake a tiny band of Marines made more of the Corps’s imperishable history that had its beginnings in the fighting tops of John Paul Jones’s Ranger and Bon Homme Richard. They had been there since the first day of war, beating off attack after attack by the Jap. shooting down his planes, sinking his surface ships, probably knocking the spots out of his landing parties. It was “probably” because Wake’s Marines – well-trained rifle marksmen, as all leathernecks are – were busy at their prime calling. Between fighting they had little time for dispensing news.

In the snow of far-off Northern lands
And in sunny tropic scenes
You’ll always find us on the job
The United States Marines.

The crew of the Philippine Clipper was at Wake when the first attack came – 18 Jap planes that bombed and strafed the construction camp, the docks and fuel installations. The Clipper was ordered back to Honolulu. The Marines stayed on. Somehow they managed to sink a Jap cruiser and a destroyer. They knocked down two enemy planes.

Here’s health to you and to our Corps,
Which we are proud to serve.
In many a strife we’re fought for life,
And never lost our nerve.

Farther west, at Guam, the part-Marine, part-Navy garrison had been subdued by the Japanese. Guam, long denied the sinews of defense by a strangely bemused Congress, could have met no other fate. It was almost under the guns of the Japanese fortified island of Rota 70 miles to the north. But east of Wake, on Midway, Marines also stood fast. Quartered on an island group that is a Pacific paradise beside Wake, they sent out no news beyond the fact that they were still hanging on.

At the Marines’ Headquarters in Washington their bemedaled commandant, Major General Thomas Holcomb, said: “What the hell did you expect the Marines to do? Take it lying down?”

If the Army and the Navy
Ever look on Heaven’s scenes
They will find the streets are guarded
By United States Marines.

HOME AFFAIRS

Panic Buying

As always in time of danger, there were some who bolted like frightened yearlings. They started runs on flour, although the U.S. has two years’ supply of wheat in granaries, and on sugar, which is in no immediate danger of becoming as scarce as it was in World War I. In Washington there was a heavy sale of rifles and pistols – for use against parachutists.

In coastal areas there were legitimate runs on goods which became suddenly important. In Los Angeles, demand for flashlights and candles was 200 times normal; stores were nearly cleaned out. Portable radios sold fast; so did garden hose, useful against incendiary bombs.

Coastal cities snapped up everything black that could be used for light-proofing: cloth, oilcloth, automobile-top covers. Stores pulled out old stocks that had been on the shelves since black petticoats and bloomers went out of style, sent orders for millions more to textile factories.

The Los Angeles Times started a new classified-advertising section called “Defense Aids.” A Manhattan department store used half a newspaper page to advertise air-raid whistles, asbestos gloves, first-aid kits, rubber boots, flashlights, axes, shovels, a 100-lb. sack of sand for $1.

Designers of women’s clothes, always eager to ride a trend, worked their imaginations overtime. Sally Victor created a fireproof glass-and-asbestos hat, padded inside against cold and bumps, with a flashlight in the brim. Warborn was a handbag containing a bottle of luminous paint and a flap on which messages could be written.

Theater and night-club business slumped. Even Christmas shopping, which should have hit its peak, fell off.

This week panic buyers of sugar and flour remembered how they had done the same thing in 1939, and how foolish they felt afterward. Theater attendance picked up. Christmas buying edged back to normal. The first shock was over.

The Confederacy Declares

Five Confederate veterans huddled around a radio in Soldiers’ Home, Atlanta, Ga., listening to the news. White-haired Major General Henry Taylor Dowling, who had fought with the First Florida Infantry, sat stiffly erect and announced: “The Georgia Division of the United Confederate Veterans is at war with Japan.” Four nonagenarian heads nodded in fierce agreement.

Banned for the Duration

U.S. citizens may soon have to get along without long-range, detailed weather reports; Washington plans to ban them. Army & Navy experts have decided that that kind of weather information could be too useful to enemy aircraft. Strictly local forecasts* will be permitted. Florida fruit and vegetable growers who worry all winter about killing frosts will continue to get advance information. But Weather Bureau officials predicted that there would be no more wide regional forecasts, detailed information about direction and force of winds, storm centers and storm paths, areas of high and low pressure.

*Forecast in the weekly Brighton (Mass.) Citizen: “For Japan and vicinity – Heavy showers of bombs with scattered clouds of planes, probably followed by parachutes; a rapidly growing cold anger starting in the U.S. coastal regions and spreading throughout the U.S. is moving towards the west with increasing speed….”

ARMY & NAVY

Life Without Father?

If Congress amends the Selective Service Act along the lines proposed last week, every man in the U.S. between 18 and 65 (including aliens) will have to register. Those between 21 and 45 will be liable for military or naval active service.*

Squaring off to broaden the present act, Congress resolutely preambled: “It is the national policy to accept no result save victory…and…to this end it is imperative that liability for military service be extended to further age groups and that a complete inventory of the man power of the nation be taken by registration.”

The House Military Affairs Committee sat down to listen to Brigadier General Lewis B. Hershey, administrator of the draft. The man charged with the vital task of mobilizing the nation’s man power has done a quiet, capable job with the first draft. Young (48), Indiana-born, he once taught school to earn tuition for college. Though his ancestors were Mennonites (who are deeply opposed to war), he joined the National Guard, was sent to the Mexican border in 1916, served in France, returned and passed his examinations for the Regular Army. One of his two sons is at West Point, the other is at Fishburne Military School. In short, General Hershey is a professional.

General Hershey told the committee that it will be necessary to “invade homes quite considerably.” The new dragnet will have a smaller mesh. Commenting on past abuses of deferment privileges, General Hershey remarked dryly: “I must confess that we have found a great number of men who have assumed new and heavy responsibilities at home.”

How many men are needed? Officials talked of an Army of 7,500,000.

War Department and draft officials wanted a bill which made men between 19 and 45 liable for active service. They figured that there were 30,000,000 in the group, about one-fourth of whom were fit for service. But the Military Affairs Committee gagged, finally passed an amendment which set the minimum age at 21. If the bill passes Congress in that form, original calculations will have to be revised, draft officials will have to look more sharply at married men and men with dependents. Some Congressmen vowed they would fight to have the 19-year minimum restored. But whatever bill passes, conscription is going to dip deep down into the country’s male population.

*Age limits in World War I: at first, 21 to 30; later, 17 to 45.

WAR FRONT: The Biggest Job Begins

Your Government has decided on two broad policies. The first is…a seven-day week for every war industry. The second…rush additions to capacity by building more new plants, adding to old plants and using the many smaller plants….

Thus last week did President Roosevelt thumbnail the biggest industrial job ever tackled by the U.S. The “defense program” was over, to be replaced by full war production. It meant that the U.S. economy was to be turned on its ear. That vast, delicate, intermeshed mechanism has been producing about 15% war goods, 85% peacetime goods. To reach the President’s goal, it will have to be put on a 50% war-50% peace basis.

Last week the first steps were taken. OPM ordered capacity production at once in five industries: planes, ships, anti-aircraft guns, ammunition, tanks. Many a citizen had assumed that even under the “defense” program, these and other war industries were already at capacity. Many a citizen was wrong.

Planes. The U.S. had planned to achieve an output of 543 heavy bombers a month by June 1943. Mr. Knudsen last week doubled this program to 1,000.

Before last week not a single U.S. aircraft plant was operating around the clock. Some, like New Jersey’s Brewster Aeronautical (while shifting models) actually had been laying off hundreds of men. But OPM’s order changed all that. California’s Douglas Aircraft (two-and four-engined bombers) began changing from a five-to a six-day week. At Ypsilanti, Mich. Ford-men worked 24 hours daily (under big floodlights at night) to finish the biggest U.S. bomber plant. The first mass-produced four-engined bomber should roll out of Ypsilanti by spring, but handmade jobs from Ford’s Dearborn plant are expected before Christmas.

Fighter planemakers quickly fell in line. Bell Aircraft, almost strike-shut a fortnight ago, announced it was going on a 24-hour day, seven days a week. Northrop did likewise. Curtiss-Wright boasted that its pursuit-plane output had hit a new record. Little Republic Aviation this week jumped to an around-the-clock basis v. two 50-hour shifts previously. United Aircraft reshuffled all its plans, announced that the $26,000,000 it will raise from a preferred stock sale (TIME, Dec. 8) will now go for wartime expansion, instead of post-war contraction.

Metals. Aircraft-parts makers and other metal fabricators have been held back by the metals shortage, especially copper. So the mines of Anaconda, Phelps-Dodge and Miami last week jumped from a sixto a seven-day week. (Kennecott has operated day in, day out for more than a year.) Production increases in the first three companies alone will add perhaps 50,000 tons annually to the U.S. copper supply, an amount equal to 5% of 1940’s entire U.S. production.

But seven-day operations can mean different things. Anaconda miners now work six days but on overlapping shifts so that the mines are never idle. Phelps-Dodge had planned to put its miners on a straight seven-day week, but crashed head-on with the C.I.O. The Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers Union’s complaint: a man’s efficiency declines rapidly if he is overworked. The union’s proposal: increase the force and use three full 40-hour shifts, then install air-conditioning for still more efficiency.

Most lead mines, although Bill Knudsen two months ago asked them to lift output (TIME, Nov. 17), are still on a five-day week – and their output is running at least 20% below 1926.

Steel. U.S. steelmakers alone can produce 85-88,000,000 tons annually v. an estimated 60,000,000 tons for all Axis mills. But 60% of this – the amount now going into war essentials – is still not enough. Last week a steel shortage was bearing down on the U.S. war program with fearful swiftness. Shortages in pig iron and steel scrap were the main reasons.

But additions to pig-iron capacity are 71 going up fast.* The scrap shortage (estimated at 10,000,000 tons for 1942) drove Lessing Rosenwald, OPM’s Conservation Chief, to announce a house-to-house drive at week’s end. The Steelmakers meanwhile began getting more steel into munitions by cancellation of civilian orders and rearranging mill schedules. More than that they cannot do because steelmaking is a seven-day continuous operation and they were already working near capacity.

Tanks, Guns and Engines. Most dramatic industrial reaction to the war was in dramatic Detroit. This week the automakers, who hold over $4 billions in defense orders, suddenly stopped every non-defense production line, told 300,000 autoworkers to stay home. The lines may reopen on Jan. 5 but, if so, only 180,000 men will be recalled because OPM’s latest January passenger-car quotas allow only 25% of the January 1941 rate. And in February there may be no output at all.

Auto bigwigs will not be idle while the assembly lines are stilled. General Motors will put its present defense production on four full 40-hour shifts as soon as it reaches an agreement (expected soon) with U.A.W. concerning overtime rates for Saturday and Sunday work. In addition, its engineers this week will re-examine the dead assembly lines for possible conversion to war work. Six months ago such conversion was not thought possible.

Though they handled it as a sideline, the automakers had already done a Detroit-worthy job of defense production. G.M.’s Allison-engine division last week reached its original goal of 1,000 engines monthly; the Fisher Body division proudly flew the Navy’s “E” (for excellence) pennant for its naval gun housings. G.M.’s arms output was officially set at 24% of all G.M. output in the September quarter. Soon it may reach 50-60%; next year it may be 90%.

Ford, still honeymooning with the U.A.W., asked its men to work a seven-day week until additional men could be trained. It got “unanimous response.” OPM announced this week that U.S. tank makers (Chrysler, American Locomotive, American Car & Foundry) were speeding up so fast they would hit 2,800 units monthly within a year. Current rate: 840. Meanwhile, Timken Roller Bearing (busy on Navy and tank gun mounts) told how it had planned full-time production 20 months ago. Timken’s “anti-blackout” schedule uses three full eight-hour shifts, a fourth swing shift to keep equipment running 160 hours weekly, leaving eight hours a week for maintenance.

Ships. Most shipbuilders had been working five and six days a week. Five days after the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor the Navy ordered all Naval shipbuilders on a full-time basis. This means maximum use of full shifts and overtime work, and a 20 to 40% boost in production. The Navy now expects that most of its two-ocean Fleet will be in the water by Christmas 1944 – two years ahead of schedule.

In all these production increases there was one big hitch: how long could it last? How long before shortage materials became no materials, before 40-hour week men cracked under 60-70 hour weeks, before machines pounding 160 hours weekly almost fall apart? As maintenance declines, as overtime mounts, as skilled labor and management are spread thin, as general-purpose tools are used for special-purpose tasks, and as subcontracting brings in more & more small, marginal and obsolete factories, it is likely that U.S. industrial efficiency will decline. But it is certain that output will soar to levels which, a year ago, would have been considered astronomical.

*On grimy Zug Island in the Detroit River last week a new National Steel blast furnace was blown in less than six months after construction work began (usual time: 12-18 months). It is 105 ft. high, will produce 450,000 tons of pig iron annually, is thus even bigger than the new Bethlehem furnace (“world’s biggest”) blown in at Lackawanna last month.

INSURANCE: War Clauses

U.S. life insurance firms, their best crop of prospects now earmarked for military service, last week broke out in a rash of war-risk clauses in all new policies. Anything but uniform, the clauses all produced the same net result: no payment for death due to war. (Policies already in force are of course not affected.) War-risk clause extremes:

Most liberal (written by Metropolitan Life and others) covers death not due to acts of war, even if it occurs while the insured is in the armed forces and outside the U.S. Beneficiary of a soldier who dies in an auto accident in Manila can collect.
Most drastic (written by Northwestern Mutual Life and others) will not insure any male classified as 1-A by his draft board, will not consider writing a policy unless and until actual deferment has been granted.

No companies are anxious for soldier-&-sailor business (World War I battle mortality was 53 per 1,000 per year, normal is only 7 per 1,000). They discourage all such applicants, suggest they let the U.S. insure them. The U.S. will. During World War I, the Government wrote $40 billion of life insurance on its armed forces, of which 605,716 policies with a face value of $2,565,000,000 (converted from term insurance) were still in force last year. Since passage of the National Service Life Insurance Act last year, the Veterans Administration has written around 600,000 new policies of over $2,000,000,000, now expects a big increase. Servicemen can buy up to $10,000 insurance, which covers death in battle, as well as from other causes, at rates ranging from 64¢ monthly per $1,000 at 18 years to $3.97 at 65.

This rate, based on ordinary actuarial tables, contains no allowance for battle losses – is, in short, subsidized by the taxpayer. On its World War I policies, the Government’s net loss (up to June 1920) was about $900,000,000.

Education: Training Front

The U.S. must go back to school. If U.S. defense factories are to work around the clock seven days a week, at least 3,000,000 more workers must be trained within a year.

In Boston, where the American Vocational Association convened last week, the men in charge of this job faced its staggering dimensions. They thought they had already performed miracles. U.S. Education Commissioner John W. Studebaker reported work done: 1,776,000 trained for defense jobs in 17 months (29 times the number trained in World War I). Congress had appropriated $183,622,000 for their training. Of the nation’s 1,200 busy vocational schools, half were at work 24 hours a day.

But this was now only a beginning. Lieut. Colonel Frank J. McSherry, U.S. Director of Defense Training, told the teachers that to equip and supply one soldier in this war, 14 industrial workers are needed. Greatest need: in shipbuilding, aircraft, ordnance, welding, machine operators, radio and instrument assemblers.

How could it be done? In the whole U.S. there are 85,000 training stations (each station: a lathe, drill press or other machine at which a worker can be trained in one skill). Even working in three shifts, turning out partly trained mechanics in six to eight weeks, they were not enough. But Colonel McSherry had a plan.

Breakdown. His plan, already fact in many factories: break down jobs and training to simpler operations. E.g., although it takes two years to train a machinist, an unskilled hand can be taught to run a lathe (a machinist’s first lesson) in six to eight weeks at school. Then he graduates to a factory, begins at once to produce on his lathe. Thereafter he progresses, under instruction from a factory foreman and in night school, to drill press, shaper, planer, grinder, milling and screw machine. Advantages of this system: 1) training is much faster, 2) trainees produce while they learn, 3) fewer teachers are needed.

The Colonel’s biggest headache is not a shortage of workers but of supervisors. Factories and 144 U.S. engineering colleges are training some (Lockheed has 2,300 in a training school), but level heads and leadership are not produced overnight.

Last week the pattern of the U.S. people’s coming re-education was already visible in many places:

Busiest educational center was Detroit, where 16,000 men & women (more than in New York City and Chicago combined) went to classes in the public schools, thousands more were in training in factories, 10,000 more waited their turns. While Detroit’s great auto factories retooled for tanks and planes, their workers studied plane welding, tank assembling, parachute making, etc. Lights in 30 Detroit schools blazed all night. Factories gave foremen leaves of absence to teach in the schools; some paid their workers full wages to go to school for more training.
In Seattle, feverishly at work training shipbuilders and planebuilders (Boeing), the blackout stopped night classes temporarily. But the schools quickly came to the decision that training would have to go on without interruption, air raids or no air raids.
In the “Victory Building” in Portland (Ore.), busy training shipbuilders for shipyards up & down the coast, the blackout stopped work only one night. Welding was the big subject: Portland’s public schools had 74 teachers teaching it to 1,200 men in classrooms, installed welding machines in shipyards to teach it on the job.

Cinema: Hollywood to the Wars

The sudden fact of war caught Hollywood with its make-up off. Before the first blackout of Los Angeles, the citadel of cinemadom camouflaged its feelings with a vigorous regurgitation of gags. The blackout somehow changed things; everybody wanted to do something to help.

Some results:

Studios were besieged with requests from top executives, $50-a-week writers, et al, for contract releases permitting them to enlist or enroll as civilian volunteers.
Beating the rest of the movie colony to the punch, Actors Gary Grant and Edward G. Robinson each forked out $100,0000 for war charities.
Paramount press agents put out the story that one of their up-&-coming stock girls, Manhattan Model Blanche Grady, had formed a club: The Knit Wits.
Flamboyant Victor McLaglen galloped his gaudy light-horse troop to a Los Angeles jail to sign up for something.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was faced with a title change for its forthcoming musical, I’ll Take Manila.
20th Century-Fox stopped production on Pearl Harbor Pearl, got Secret Agent of Japan ready for instant production.
Studios abandoned outdoor night shots, went on a rigid 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. shooting schedule to get people home before blackout time.
Republic, home of the Western picture, began rewriting Westerns in production to eliminate all possible-gunfire. Reason: civilian authorities wanted the studio’s Wild West arsenal. Future Westerns will be made with prop armament.
A U.S. Army searchlight battery set up living quarters in the animation building of Walt Disney’s studio (adjoining the Lockheed Aircraft plant), flirted with pretty girls from the inking & painting division at lunchtime.
While Hollywood parents pondered shipping youngsters & oldsters to the interior, a wag volunteered: “I understand they’re starting a California Society in Iowa.”
The Hollywood Reporter, trade organ, turned up with a Page 1 item: “First American victory over Japanese was won by the Paramount baseball team Sunday when it defeated the LA Nippons, all-Jap team, 6-to-3. No one was aware of the war until the third inning…. F.B.I. men allowed the game to finish… then rounded up Jap contingent….”

RADIO

Home Front

The nation’s broadcasters last week found themselves the bearers of a new responsibility. Menaced – so they really believed for the first time – from the air, San Franciscans and Los Angelenos hugged the radio as if it were mother’s knee. At first, as elsewhere in the nation, people exploded with sudden disgust at the remnants of saccharine sales talk lilting from loudspeakers.

When the news bulletins ceased to come, people felt a little lost. For nine-and twelve-hour periods in Oregon and Washington, various but generally shorter spells in California, nothing at all could be tuned in on many sets during daytime but a blank buzz. This tribulation was imposed by order of the coastal Interceptor Commands. Reason: carrier-based enemy planes could have flown in above the weather, found military objectives by triangulating on radio broadcasts from commercial stations.

Airline radio beams were also cut off, lest Japanese planes follow them to airports or Army fields. In Seattle the Army Air Forces allowed United Air Lines to use its beam for ten minutes, long enough to get out of town with Fiorello LaGuardia. A few stations in the coast area were used by the Army for 15 to 45-second flashes. But at week’s end uninterrupted daily broadcasting was restored to most stations – subject to quelling on five minutes’ notice.

On the third day of the war, at lunch time, radio stations on the Atlantic seaboard had to grapple with a scare report. In a sweat of swift thinking (“hardest thing I ever had to do”) CBS’s News Chief Paul White decided that until it was more than an unconfirmed rumor, the cause of the alert should be treated as such. He called up NBC’s News Chief Abe Schechter, reached an internetwork understanding. Slight inducement to panic thereafter came from CBS or NBC announcers.

Morale. Neither holding the nation’s hand nor slapping the nation’s back, several dependable radio voices helped keep the nation’s head clear. CBS’s William L. Shirer, in never-flustered tones, anticipated President Roosevelt in explaining what war meant in terms of information. Dry humor was provided by CBS’s Elmer Davis, who snorted gently at Hitler’s bombast about “a year of greatest decision.” Said Elmer: “To judge from the precedent of the past two years, he’s going to have to put the same old record on in 1942….”

Mutual’s deliberative Raymond Gram Swing gave the most searching of all the week’s radio analyses. “We have been the safest-minded people on earth,” he said. “And we have indulged to the full the extravagance of underestimating our opponents…. There is however one mercy in this grievous situation…. Our defeat has come at the beginning…. We can outproduce the Axis. And we can out-will the Axis.”

New Routine. The broadcasting companies at week’s end were nearly acclimatized to wartime. Guards stood at their control rooms and transmitters. All NBC employes were fingerprinted. In the 2nd Corps Area (N.Y., N.J., Del.) the Army decreed: “the public press and radio broadcasting stations form no part of the air-raid warning system.” All-night tricks for announcers were discontinued. President Neville Miller of the National Association of Broadcasters wired all stations to “report war news calmly, slowly and deliberately, so as to avoid horror, suspense and undue excitement.”

Though the Defense Communications Board was formally empowered to commandeer radio facilities. FCC Chairman James Lawrence Fly declared emphatically that the Government was not going to “take over” radio. Broadcasters, feeling their responsibilities, rather desired than feared censorship. But what precise form it would take – other than at the sources of news – remained to be worked out.

Any Bonds Today?

Said Variety:

“Without a war there were $2,500,000,000 in bonds sold. That’s only a fraction of the foreseeable cash needs of America rising to its colossal destiny, and it will fall, it must fall, it has fallen to the broadcasters of the U.S. to disregard all former ideas of a proper amount of ‘free time’ to give any Government agency. The Treasury is perhaps incapable of being ‘popular’ in the frivolous sense, but it must have ‘popular’ support in the wider sense…. Radio will perform a real service if it applies its showmanship ingenuity lavishly to these ends….”

Scarcely breaking stride, Bing Crosby loped off with a blue ribbon for meeting the Treasury emergency in song. With Connie Boswell, on his Kraft Music Hall hour Thursday night (NBC Red, 9 to 10), he plugged the pleasantest of 1941’s patriotic ditties, Irving Berlin’s Any Bonds Today? (copyrighted by Henry Morgenthau Jr.), with a brand-new verse:

Bonds for the planes and bonds for the tanks
And bonds for the ships meaning here come the Yanks;
Bonds for the guns, the shot and the shell,
And bonds to avenge all the heroes who fell.
They died in the night with no chance to fight,
But wait til the final text:
We’ll wipe Mr. Jap from the face of the map,
And Germany’s gonna be next.

Saturday night, Arturo Toscanini conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra in his second and what was to have been his last Treasury program – but it was announced that Maestro Toscanini would be back. Something to listen to was Toscanini’s martial rendering of The Star-Spangled Banner: thunderous, romantic and exalted.

NormanStewart · December 25, 2020, 2:55am

Radio war reporting

For 48 hours after war struck, the U.S. heard the fascinated, friendly voices of radio reporters in the Far East (“We think exactly the same thing about that speech [F.D.R.’s to Congress] as all you folks back home.”). Then for 48 hours more the U.S. heard nothing from them. Then finally, from the war typhoon’s intense center, they spoke again guardedly, inured, under censorship; but not before at least two of them had done extremely valuable pieces of action reporting.

Singapore. Cecil Brown’s cabled, news-reel-clear account of the sinking of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales came into the CBS newsroom in Manhattan hours after his friends there had decided he was dead.

A long-nosed, persistent man of 33, Brown had already proved himself one of CBS’s most military war reporters. He spoke from Rome during the phony war and the first Mediterranean fighting. Last April, kicked out by the Fascists, he crossed to Yugoslavia, just in time to meet the Germans coming in, narrowly missed a grenading by an advance Nazi motorcycle squad, and with a U.S. military attaché drove upstream through the Panzer army to Belgrade. His further progress eastward included a stop in Ankara, a hitch in Syria on the British push into that hellish terrain, and the job of covering the Cretan campaign from Cairo.

Four months ago CBS sent him to Singapore thinking the British there would soon set up a powerful new short-wave transmitter. Brown found that the transmitter would not get going until February, that broadcasts relayed through Batavia were muddy by the time they reached the U.S. Cooling his heels in a new handmade pair of shoes, making friends as usual with fighting men, he jumped at the chance to go into action with the fleet. On Friday night last week CBS jumped at the chance to bring Cecil Brown’s living voice from Singapore, censored, muddy or not.

Manila communicates with California directly by R.C.A. and A.T. & T. radiotelephone (a point-to-point system employing short waves outside the broadcast band). On deck in Manila for CBS were Tom Worthin and Ford Wilkins, for NBC local radioman Bert Silen, for Mutual Royal Arch Gunnison of North America Newspaper Alliance. Burly Bert Silen had assured NBC in Manhattan that he could “broadcast any time, even during actual bombing….” He did.

Silen’s description of the first Japanese bombing of Manila gave listeners in the U.S. plenty to think about. Nothing like it is likely to happen again. Next day R.C.A. relaying of broadcasts from Marrila ceased, not to be resumed for two days and then only under a censorship that required broadcasters to submit their script well in advance of air time. Excerpts of what Bert Silen and his relief announcer Don Bell put on the radio telephone in the shiny moonlight during the first raid:

“We are trying to locate the exact place of the tremendous fire that is raging and turning the sky absolutely crimson….In the vicinity of Nichols Field there is a terrific fire that looks very much as though a gasoline dump or something like that is burning over there….Ladies and gentlemen, there is one thing we definitely found out at the present time: the Japanese came over with the idea of hitting a definite target and they have hit that target….”

This was obviously useful news to the Japanese. But NBC, in broadcasting it did something useful for the U.S.: dispelled at once and forever the prevalent and dangerous notion that Jap pilots are cross-eyed, their bombing crazy.

U.S. War Department (December 22, 1941)

Communique No. 22

PHILIPPINE THEATER – Heavy fighting is in progress on the Lingayen Gulf, 150 miles north of Manila, where the Japanese are attempting a landing in force.

Under strong naval and air escort, a fleet of about 80 troopships appeared off the west coast of the island of Luzon and soon afterward a large number of 150-man barges entered Lingayen Gulf, attempting landings in the vicinity of Agoo. Some of them succeeded in getting ashore.

The Japanese force is estimated at 80,000 to 100,000, from six to eight divisions.

The attempted invasion is being met with fierce resistance by American and Filipino troops.

Fighting is continuing near Davao on the island of Mindanao.

In other sectors, there was renewed patrol activity.

There is nothing to report from other areas.

U.S. Navy Department (December 22, 1941)

Communique No. 15

ATLANTIC THEATER – There are no new developments to report.

EASTERN PACIFIC – The SS SAMOA was attacked by an unknown submarine off the coast of California during the night of December 20. The attack was made at close range, and consisted of gunfire followed by the discharge of a torpedo. All shots missed their mark. The torpedo exploded in the vicinity of the ship. There were no casualties or damage to the SAMOA.

CENTRAL PACIFIC – Thirty survivors of the SS LAHAINA have landed at Kahului on the island of Maui. The LAHAINA was shelled and sunk by an enemy submarine on December 11 while en route to San Francisco. Two of the crew are dead and two are missing.

There has been no enemy activity in the vicinity of Midway Island recently.

FAR EAST – There are no new developments to report.

Statement by Secretary Knox

For Immediate Release
December 22, 1941

The Navy has been aware for some time that enemy submarine activity in the near American waters was impending and naturally has already taken appropriate countermeasures.

The release of information of attacks on our shipping, unaccompanied by information as to what we are doing to protect it, must not be construed by the public as an indication that the Navy has done nothing about it. I can assure the public that the Navy has already adequately dealt with more than one submarine which has sought to make attacks on our naval and merchant vessels. Immediate announcement of the strength and disposition of the U.S. naval forces which are combating enemy submarines the methods that we have used, and the place and time of our attacks upon them, would provide the enemy with military information which he would dearly love to obtain.

There, I do not propose now or in the future, to make immediate announcements of the destruction of enemy forces unless I am satisfied that the enemy himself is fully informed on this subject. From time to time I shall give a summary of the losses we have inflicted on the enemy, and shall indicate the general locality of these actions.

For example, after careful weighing of the evidence I can now state that in the Atlantic Ocean U.S. naval forces have up to the present time probably sunk or damaged at least 14 enemy submarines. This probability, as well as the prevalence of the bitter North Atlantic winter weather which the Germans do not seem to like, may account for the recent comparative security of the North Atlantic convoy routes.

In the Pacific, our naval forces have already effectively dealt with several Japanese submarines.

PROCLAMATION 2531
Day of Prayer

By the President of the United States of America

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
December 22, 1941

The year 1941 has brought upon our nation a war of aggression by powers dominated by arrogant rulers whose selfish purpose is to destroy free institutions. They would thereby take from the freedom-loving peoples of the earth the hard-won liberties gained over many centuries.

The new year of 1942 calls for the courage and the resolution of old and young to help to win a world struggle in order that we may preserve all we hold dear.

We are confident in our devotion to country, in our love of freedom, in our inheritance of courage. But our strength, as the strength of all men everywhere, is of greater avail as God upholds us.

THEREFORE, I, FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, President of the United States of America, do hereby appoint the first day of the year 1942 as a day of prayer, of asking forgiveness for our shortcomings of the past, of consecration to the tasks of the present, of asking God’s help in days to come.

We need His guidance that this people may be humble in spirit but strong in the conviction of the right; steadfast to endure sacrifices and brave to achieve a victory of liberty and peace.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States of America to be affixed.

DONE at the City of Washington this twenty-second day of December in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and forty-one, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred and sixty-sixth.

FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT

By the President:
CORDELL HULL
Secretary of State

The Pittsburgh Press (December 22, 1941)

BIG GUNS ROAR AT 80 JAP SHIPS
Enemy tanks landed on Luzon; Russians sweep over piles of dead

American forces smash at major assault aimed at Philippine capital
By Joe Alex Morris, United Press war editor

map.ph.122241436×822 107 KB

The Japanese began their all-out assault on the Philippines at the points indicated on the map above. Eighty enemy troopships prepared to open the attack as land drives began at (1) Aparri, and Vigan (2). The transports appeared off Lingayen (3) while Nichols Army airfield and Cavite naval base near Manila (4) were bombed from the air and another land attack was intensified at Legaspi (5). The island of Cebu (6) was air raided as the Japs cut communications at Mindanao Island (7) and battles raged at Davao.

American battle forces fought with tanks and heavy artillery today to blast a heavy Japanese blow against the key Philippines Island of Luzon.

Japanese troops, estimated at 80,000 to 100,000 men, swarmed off 80 transports along the coast of Lingayen Gulf, 135 to 150 miles northwest of Manila, striking for a foothold from which to close in on Manila.

The Japanese suffered setbacks in the initial fighting. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, U.S. commander in the Far East, reported that his troops “more than held their own” in the first day’s battle.

At one point the big coastal guns of the Philippines defenses smashed a landing attempt of Japanese destroyers and transports. Japanese casualties probably were heavy.

Japs on 80 transports

The War Department in Washington reported that the Japanese arrived off the Lingayen Gulf coast in a fleet of 80 transports, heavily protected by warships and aircraft, and attempted to send men ashore in the vicinity of Agoo.

The Japanese employed 150-man barges, some of which succeeded in gaining a foothold. Apparently the Japanese moved tanks in on the barges – probably light armored machines. It was the first landing of enemy tanks in the Philippines and American tanks rumbled into action against the Japanese machines.

Gen. MacArthur said that there appeared no doubt that the major Japanese assault on Luzon now has begun.

The Japanese attack caused no surprise to the American GHQ in the Philippines. It long had been anticipated that the Japanese would attempt to go ashore there since this region is linked to Manila by a good roads network. In the first week of war one Japanese landing attempt on the gulf was beaten off.

Air activity increases

The Japanese accompanied their landing endeavor by an increase in general air activity over the Philippines, obviously seeking to keep the U.S. air force from interfering with their operations. There was no more news on the Japanese landing at Davao on the large southerly island of Mindanao.

On the other Far Eastern war fronts there was little new.

Hongkong’s gallant garrison continued its apparently hopeless fight against overwhelming Japanese attack. In Malaya the British had fallen back to new defense lines about 300 miles north of Singapore and reports circulated without official confirmation that reinforcements have arrived.

There was no minimizing the seriousness of the Malayan situation in Singapore. The British said that the situation verged on the critical due to the steady advance of the Japanese who now are nearing Ipoh in Northwest Perak which would give them command of good communications to the south.

The Japanese accompanied their Lingayen operations with a stepping up of air action over Manila. New daylight attacks were made upon the naval base at Cavite and the Army’s Nichols airfield.

The Japanese, in propaganda broadcasts from Tokyo, claimed that a major new operation against Luzon Island is in progress, apparently a reference to the Lingayen Gulf attack. The Japanese also claimed that nine “enemy” submarines have been sunk, that the fall of Hongkong is imminent and that occupation of Province Wellesley in Northwestern Malaya has been completed.

Hongkong holds out

Hongkong reported that it still was holding out in a message received at Chungking at 12:30 p.m. today Chungking Time (11:30 p.m. ET, Sunday).

Sir Mark Young, governor of Hongkong, wirelessed that he was prepared to stand by his post until captured or killed.

On the two other major battlefronts – Africa and Russia – Axis forces continued to retreat.

In Africa, the British were nearing Benghazi.

On the Russian front, the Germans were falling back with stubborn rearguard actions trying to slow the Soviet advance.

Hitler removed his commander-in-chief, Walther von Brauchitsch, and himself took over the supreme command.

The Hitlerian move stirred endless speculation abroad.

The British were wary of an interpretation which indicated the move was a sign of outright weakness on the part of Germany. Rather, it was believed in London, Hitler and Brauchitsch may have differed on the plans for some new German strategy.

British expect new drive

The British watched for signs that Germany is about to launch some desperate new military venture, possibly a blow at Turkey, a move through Spain and Portugal, the taking over of French Africa, or a move against Eire as a preliminary to an all-out offensive against Britain.

It was reported that the Italians have established a state of emergency in Southern Italy; that Hungarian and Swedish volunteers have been pulled out of the Russian front; that the Germans are abandoning the Finnish fronts to the Finns.

These moves may indicate a redisposition of German troops for a new winter offensive.

A Tokyo spokesman was quoted as saying that Japan is conducting “friendly negotiations” with Russia. There was no indication of the subject of negotiations or what part they might play in the general picture.

WAR BULLETINS!

Roosevelt signs new draft bill

WASHINGTON – President Roosevelt today signed the amended draft bill making men between the ages of 20 and 44, inclusive, subject to service in the armed forces on a selective basis. The measure – an amendment to the Selective Service Act – provides for registration of all men between the ages of 18 and 64, inclusive. Officials estimated it will add seven million men to the manpower reservoir from which the armed services may draw.

Aircraft carrier sunk, Nazis say

BERLIN (Official German radio) – A special communique of the German High Command asserted today that a Nazi submarine has sunk a British aircraft carrier in the Atlantic.

Japs and Russians confer

TOKYO (Official Japanese broadcast recorded by UP in New York) – Tomokazu Hori, official spokesman, said today that Japan was conducting friendly negotiations with Russia. He refused to amplify his statement.

Gen. von Bock reported ‘off duty’

STOCKHOLM – The newspaper Allehanda said today in a Berlin dispatch that Field Marshal Gen. Fedor von Bock reportedly is seriously ill and unable to keep his command on the central sector of the Russian front. No successor has been mentioned.

New Guinea invasion denied

CANBERRA, Australia – An official statement said today that there was no information that Japanese forces were attacking New Guinea and it was added that the government was in constant touch with the territory. Rome reported yesterday that Japanese troops had landed in New Guinea, only 100 miles at the nearest point from northeastern Australia across the Torres Strait.

Jap Army strength 2 million

CHUNGKING – An official Chinese spokesman today placed Japan’s army strength at 100 divisions – slightly more than two million men – and said that “short of a miracle, Japan cannot raise enough divisions to meet her commitments.”

500,000-man Navy approved

WASHINGTON – The Senate today passed and sent to the House a bill expanding the authorized strength of the Navy from 300,000 enlisted men to 500,000 and the Marine Corps from 60,000 to 104,000.

British harbors bombed, Nazis say

BERLIN (Official German broadcast) – German planes last night bombed harbor installations on the British coast, the High Command said today, adding there was “no major military activities” on the North African front. It claimed concentrated gunfire repulsed another Soviet attempt to break out of Leningrad.

Dutch at war with Italy

LONDON – The Netherlands declared war against Italy today.

Nazis claim Jap landings

BERLIN (German official broadcast) – Radio Berlin reported from Tokyo today that Jap troops had made successful landings 160 miles north of Manila. This apparently would fix the “new landings” which Tokyo claimed off the west coast of Luzon Island between Vigan and the Gulf of Lingayen.

Hull gets Martinique report

WASHINGTON – Rear Adm. Frederick Horne conferred today with Secretary of State Cordell Hull and other State Department officials about the accord, which he signed last week, “neutralizing” Martinique.

German to seek Vichy-U.S. break

NEW YORK – Private advices to the United Press reported today that Germany will make a determined effort after the holidays to force a diplomatic break between Vichy France and the United States.

Japs deny sinking Red ship

ROME (Official broadcast) – Reports from Tokyo said today that Japanese authorities had categorically denied that the Japanese had sunk the Russian freighter Perekop.

(Reports that the Perekop had been sunk by Japanese bombers had been circulated by Netherlands East Indies authorities).

U.S. warships bag 14 enemy Atlantic subs

Knox says several of Jap undersea boats also ‘dealt with’

WASHINGTON (UP) – Announcement of the sinking or damaging of at least 14 enemy submarines in the Atlantic and several Japanese submarines in the Pacific was “good news” today to a capital that had just received Navy Department reports of enemy submarine activity off both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

The bag of an estimated total of 14 submarines in the Atlantic – undoubtedly German or Italian – may have shattered an “impending” Axis underseas offensive aimed at slicing the United States’ vital supply and convoy routes, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox intimated.

He also said the Navy had “effectively dealt with several Japanese submarines.”

Meanwhile, the Japanese struck “aggressively” by land and air in an effort to knock the Philippines out of the war.

The Army reported a fleet of Japanese transports was attempting to land an invasion force of 80,000 to 100,000 men at Lingayen Gulf, 150 miles north of Manila. The communique said some of the Japanese had succeeded in landing, and that the American Army of the Philippines was fighting hard to turn back the enemy troops.

An earlier Army communique describing the situation in the United States’ outposts at the start of the third week of the war in the Pacific had told of Japanese “aggressive attempts” to land more forces in northern and southern Luzon, in the Philippines.

On the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, land fighting continued around the U.S. Army base of Davao.

Supporting the Nipponese attempt to land more forces in both Luzon and Mindanao and extend their hard-won footholds, the Japanese air force yesterday carried out attacks over Mindanao, Luzon and the small island of Cebu lying in the mid-Philippines about 325 miles southwest of Manila, the Army communique said.

Mr. Knox’s statement outlined a new policy on reports of action against submarines. Heretofore, there have been no announcements of retaliatory moves by the U.S. Navy since President Roosevelt ordered it to “shoot on sight” the Axis “rattlesnakes.” Henceforth, Mr. Knox said, he would give “general” summaries of the losses inflicted on the enemy.

The enemy losses revealed by Mr. Knox covered the period since the “shoot-on-sight” orders were issued on September 11.

Earlier, the Navy Department’s communique No. 14 revealed that there were indications of “enemy submarine activity off the East Coast” and reported details of the sinking of the SS Emidio and the shelling of the SS Agwiworld near the California coast.

Most believed U-boats

Mr. Knox’s announcement did not identify the 14 submarines believed to have been sunk or damaged in the Atlantic. Most of them presumably were German underseas raiders, although Italy has boasted that her submarines are in action in the North Atlantic.

Naval analysts believed the Japanese submarines, which Mr. Knox said had been “effectively dealt with” in the Pacific, may have been several of the 40 or 50 long-range subs which the Japanese are believed to have in their fleet of 80-100 underseas craft.

The Navy has been aware for some time that enemy submarine activity in the near American waters was “impending,” Mr. Knox said.

Says Navy is active

“The release of information of attacks on our shipping, unaccompanied by information as to what we are doing to protect it, must not be construed by the public as an indication that the Navy has done nothing about it,” he explained.

“I can assure the public that the Navy has already adequately dealt with more than one submarine which has sought to make attacks on our naval and merchant ships. Immediate announcement of the strength and disposition of the U.S. naval forces which are combatting enemy submarines, the methods that we have used and the place and time of our attacks upon them would provide the enemy with military information which he would dearly love to obtain…”

Refuses to tip off foe

By this, Mr. Knox meant that the United States, like the British, refuses to tip the Germans off as to what has happened to submarines failing to return to their bases. Submarines do not report while at sea for their own safety. Likewise, an immediate announcement of the destruction of a U-boat would tip the Germans off as to the movement of a convoy or warships.

The secretary of the Navy said he did not intend at any time to make immediate announcements of the destruction of enemy forces “unless I am satisfied that the enemy himself is fully informed on this subject.” He added, however, that periodically he would give a summary similar to last night’s.

Nazis don’t like winter

Mr. Knox then said that “after careful weighing of the evidence,” he was in a position to announce that “in the Atlantic Ocean, U.S. naval forces have, up to the present time, probably sunk or damaged at least 14 enemy submarines.”

“This probably, as well as the prevalence of the bitter North American winter weather which the Germans do not seem to like, may account for the recent comparative security of the North Atlantic convoy routes,” he said.

A statement by the Navy Department Saturday night has blamed careless weather forecasts for “aiding” enemy undersea raiders off the Atlantic coast, by tipping them off that they might expect clearing weather and extended visibility.

First major attack…
Jap invaders sea at 100,000

Nipponese driven off at one point
By Frank Hewlett, United Press staff writer

MANILA (UP) – American battle forces, including the first tank units to see action against Japan, “more than held their own” tonight against a major Japanese attack launched “in great force” against Lingayen Gulf, 135 miles north of Manila.

Gen. MacArthur reported that American and Philippine troops, backed up by the heavy guns of the coastal defense works, smashed Japanese landing attempts at one point and “more than held their own” in a day of fierce combat.

The Japanese faced well equipped American and Filipino troops under the command of a seasoned campaigner, Maj. Gen. Jonathan M. Wainwright, former commander of the Philippine Division.

Gen. Wainwright

The War Department communique issued in Washington estimated the strength of the Japanese expeditionary force on Lingayen Gulf at 80,000 to 100,000.

The main Japanese drive for the Philippines was believed to be underway.

Despite indications that the Japanese have suffered heavy losses, they were reported pressing their assault on the Lingayen shores with vigor.

Japanese tanks have been put ashore at some points, the official communique indicated, and have been met in battle by American tanks in the first U.S. tank combat of the war.

American tanks have seen action in North Africa where they were used by British crews in the offensive in Libya.

The Lingayen attack was described by the U.S. high command as “undoubtedly the major expeditionary drive being aimed at the Philippines.”

“The enemy in great force is pushing his attack” Gen. MacArthur reported. “Heavy fighting is going on in the north, including tank combat. Our troops more than held their own.

Troops behave well

“At one point, Japanese destroyers and transports were driven off by our heavy guns and a landing was prevented. Our troops behaved well.”

A fleet of 80 odd transports brought the Japanese landing parties to the Lingayen shores. The transports were protected by a destroyer flotilla with air support and Japanese bombers intensified their attacks on American air bases in the Philippines, coincident with the landing attempt.

It was believed here that the transports came from Hainan Island, Japan’s base off the Chinese shore about 600 miles directly across the China Sea from the Philippines. The Japanese for months have been concentrating forces on Hainan Island.

Air fields attacked

The Japanese attacked Nichols and Zablan air fields in the Manila vicinity during the day and attempted an attack on the Cavite Naval Base. Little damage was reported in official communiques.

Japanese planes swept over the Manila area in a daylight bombing attack as the offensive opened.

Even before the transport fleet was sighted off the west Luzon coast, conflicting reports were reaching Army headquarters of heavy Japanese reinforcements of the invasion areas – Vigan, on the west coast of Luzon; Aparri on the north, and Legazpi on the south.

Communication was severed with Mindanao Island, to the south of Luzon, where the Japanese had landed a formidable force in the Davao area, long a center of Japanese colonization.

It was known, however, that Japanese planes were active over Mindanao in support of ground forces.

A Navy communique issued in Washington yesterday said slight damage resulted from a light Japanese raid on Cavite. A War Department communique said there had been numerous Japanese raids in the 24 hours between Saturday and Sunday on Luzon, Cebu and Mindanao Islands, and that land fighting continued in Davao. This communique reported increased Japanese patrol activity in northern Luzon, and aggressive Japanese attempts at infiltration.

An Army communique in Manila, reviewing the second week of the war, noted yesterday that there was increasing activity on the invasion fronts, with the Japanese seeking to consolidate their footholds. It said that there was heavy fighting in the Davao zone.

The communique recalled that two Japanese transports had been damaged by American planes during the week, that five Japanese planes had been shot down and that 25 planes had been destroyed aground. This brought to 70 the total of Japanese planes destroyed in two weeks.

Pickets face set bayonets at shipyards

Soldiers protect workers who pass through welders’ lines
By James A. Sullivan, United Press staff writer

SAN FRANCISCO (UP) – The Army stationed troops and armored cars at four shipbuilding plants today to prevent a welders strike from interfering with ship and armament production.

With rifles loaded and bayonets in place, the soldiers began patrolling the Todd-California and Richmond Shipbuilding Corp. yards in Richmond, the Pacific Bridge Co. plant in Alameda, and the Western Pipe and Steel Shipyards in South San Francisco to see that pickets of the striking welders did not interfere with AFL workers.

The strike centered around a jurisdictional dispute between independent welders and the AFL.

No interference

There were no attempts at interference with workers but when a strikers’ sound truck appeared at the Todd-California plant, a number of bystanders, believed to be AFL supporters, rushed toward it. The soldiers turned them back.

Two armored cars, with machine guns bristling from their portholes, supplemented the detail of 400 soldiers at the two Richmond yards. There were 120 soldiers at Pacific Bridge and 60 at Western Pipe and Steel.

The strikers, members of the United Brotherhood of Welders, Cutters and Helpers (I), maintained their picket lines near the plants. When the troops appeared, the pickets moved to the other side of the street opposite the plant gates.

Other plants picketed

The strikers also began picketing at the Bethlehem Steel Co. San Francisco and Alameda plants and at the Moore Dry Dock Company operations in Oakland. There were no soldiers, however, at these three plants.

Maj. Gen. Charles White, commander of the Seventh Division of the Army, and Rear Adm. John Wills Greenslade, commandant of the 12th Naval District, were on the scene at the Richmond plants, which are building freighters for Britain and the U.S. Maritime Commission.

Gen. White, commanding the troops, said that the Army was on hand “for just one purpose and that is to see that any man who wants to go to work will be given the opportunity without intimidation or restraint. The rights of pickets will not be infringed.”

The union and Army and Navy officials disagreed on the number of strikers. Union officials said that more than 300 men had left their posts and more were coming out hourly. Government officials said less than 100 were out and company executives has assured them that the yards were operating normally.

Vote to picket

The welders voted to picket the yards where, they claimed, their members had been “locked out” because of AFL pressure; AFL unions hold closed ship contracts at the yards.

Police, fearing they might be unable to cope with the situation, asked Adm. Greenslade to provide troops to prevent riotous picket lines keeping men who wanted to work from doing so.

Within a few minutes after picket lines were established at the Alameda plant of the Pacific Bridge Co., a detachment of Marines appeared at the main gates.

NormanStewart · December 25, 2020, 3:36am

Army takes over

They were relieved later by Regular Army troops from San Francisco.

The Oakland and San Francisco memberships of the union had voted the strike.

The Los Angeles local of the union said that more than 350 of its members had left the California Shipbuilding and the Consolidated yards there, but it did not set up picket lines and announced its members were simply “quitting and going to find jobs where they didn’t have to pay dues to the AFL.”

Seek autonomy

The welders here sent a telegram to Adm. Greenslade reiterating their willingness to return to work if free from AFL control.

“All the United Welders, Cutters and Helpers are anxious to return to defense industry production because of the grave emergency confronting the nation,” they said.

“Will you find a place for us to go to work welding in defense of our country, working as free Americans without paying tribute to the American Federation of Labor? We pledge that we will give every ounce of our energy for as many hours each week as needed.”

Forced into AFL

The welders seek an autonomous union. They are now compelled, in industries which have the closed shop, to belong to the AFL affiliate which holds the closed shop contract. Some of the members of the unaffiliated welders’ union have refused to pay dues to the AFL union to which they are required to belong.

This has caused the union to require the employer to dismiss the workers, as, under the closed shop contracts, all employees must be members of that union in good standing.

Vital to war effort

The strike was of profound importance to the war effort. Welders are key craftsmen in ship building. Shipyards cannot operate for long without them.

The strike threatened to spread outside the San Francisco Bay Area. Seattle welders were ready to support the walkout with action of their own. Puget Sound locals will meet Thursday night to decide whether to call a strike there, and the welders to call a strike there, and the welders said they would seek support in shipyards throughout the nation.

Off California…
Subs attack third vessel

Enemy shots miss target in Pacific, however
By the United Press

map.tankerattack.up328×437 36.6 KB

The map shows where two attacks were made on American tankers and where a third submarine assault was reported. The Emidio was torpedoed off Cape Mendocino, the Agwiworld shelled near Monterey and an attack on the tanker L. P. St. Clair was reported off the mouth of the Columbia River.

The Pacific War drew close to the California coast as the Navy today announced a third week-end submarine attack on an American vessel in the Pacific, this time on the steamship Samoa off California.

The Navy said all shots, including discharge of a torpedo, at the Samoa Saturday missed their mark. The communique added that the steamship Lahaina was sunk by an enemy submarine on December 11 while en route to San Francisco.

Emidio

Agwiworld

Lifeboats shelled

Meanwhile, 31 survivors of the tanker Emidio, shelled and torpedoed 20 miles off Cape Mendocino, California, were landed at Eureka, California. Five of the men were wounded. The Emidio’s captain, C. A. Farrow, said five members of the crew were missing and one dead on board the rescue ship.

The estimate of the missing contrasted with an announcement by the Navy in Washington that 22 were unaccounted for.

Capt. Farrow said the lifeboats were shelled by the submarine after the torpedoing. The Coast Guard cutter Shawnee landed the survivors.

The skipper said the wounded men were injured in the shelling.

Second tanker escapes

The Emidio, a 6,912-ton vessel owned by the General Petroleum Corp., was one of two tankers attacked off California Saturday. The other was Richfield’s Agwiworld (6,771 tons), shelled eight times 20 miles off Monterey, but not hit.

Unconfirmed reports said a submarine had also attacked and chased the Union Oil tanker L. P. St. Clair off the mouth of the Columbia River but that the St. Clair escaped.

The Navy said 30 survivors of the Lahaina were landed on the island of Maui, in Hawaii, and that two of the crew members were killed and two are missing.

Hunt pressed

U.S. warships and planes pressed a hunt for the enemy undersea craft.

Guarded by the Navy were details of the fate of the Emidio. The last official report was from the Coast Guard that she was sighted nine miles north of Cape Mendocino “riding low in the water.” It was believed she was in tow en route to an undisclosed port.

Capt. F. B. Goncalves of the Agwiworld attributed his ship’s escape to the heavy seas which “made the Japs’ aim a little too high.”

Had only pistols

“If we’d had a gun,” he said, “there might have been one less submarine. All we had were two pistols.

“The submarine appeared suddenly out of the sunlight at 2:15 Saturday afternoon. She was 500 yards to the west of us. She let go at once with four shots from her deck gun – a five-incher. These shots were fired from the almost point-blank range of 500 yards. They missed because of heavy seas.

“She fired four more shots but they were pretty wild. The first shots, however, were so close they splashed water on our deck.”

He said the tanker was broadside to the submarine when the first shot was fired. He ran to the bridge and began a series of maneuvers to escape. First, he swung the ship directly toward the submarine, then, as the second shot came over, swung it around to present its stern to the enemy.

“The sub didn’t chase us into port exactly,” he said. “We zigzagged around, maneuvering always to present the smallest target possible. The sub circled and dodged, trying to get broadside of us again, but never succeeded. As we neared land and the sub fired the last of its eight shots, it quickly submerged.”

Victory program…
Strategy plan sped

Formation of Allied war council nears; Roosevelt confers with ambassadors

WASHINGTON (UP) – President Roosevelt today continued preliminary conferences for joint planning of unity of action among the Allied forces opposing the Axis, the White House announced.

Mr. Roosevelt scheduled three separate conferences this morning with Soviet Ambassador Maxim Litvinov, Chinese Ambassador Hu Shih, and Netherlands Minister A. Loudon.

Secretary Stephen T. Early said the conferences today and the president’s meeting yesterday with the British ambassador, Lord Halifax, were in line with the White House statement Saturday which said liaison between British and American military missions in Washington and London would continue “until the joint planning for unity of action can be extended to Russia, China, the Netherlands and other governments engaged in the common cause of defeating the Axis.”

Mr. Early said today’s meetings were “very preliminary in nature” so far as planning for unity of Allied action was concerned, indicating more important meetings were to come.

Mr. Litvinov went to the White House at 10:30 a.m., meeting the president in the residential study of the Executive Mansion. Dr. Hu followed 15 minutes later, and then at 11 o’clock, Dr. Loudon.

Mr. Early said he did not know whether the president’s talks with the three diplomats would overlap but that the conferences had been scheduled separately.

Following frequent reports that a supreme Allied council would be set up to coordinate conduct of the war against the Axis nations on a worldwide basis, the White House announced over the week-end that steps toward the objective of unified action were “under way.” Previously the president had said in press conferences that discussions on cooperative war action on a basis of close coordination had been in progress for weeks.

Others attend

Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Gen. George C. Marshall, Army chief of staff, and Adm. Harold R. Stark, chief of Naval Operations, followed Lord Halifax to the White House yesterday and remained there until 5:30 p.m.

One of the first moves toward the goal of Allied “unity of action” was expected in the Far East – a major scene of anti-Axis activity. The promotion of Gen. Douglas MacArthur to the rank of a full general in the U.S. Army has led to speculation that he may become the generalissimo of the Allied forces there.

Political alliance seen

Not only collaboration on the fighting fronts – without any overall supreme command but probably unified commands in individual theaters of war – but economic and political alliances are also envisaged as part of the Allied plan. One of the first of these, it was believed, may be a joint declaration pledging each of the anti-Axis nations not to conclude a separate peace.

Alongside discussions for setting up a war council, the president was reported in informed quarters to be considering establishment of a compact inner Cabinet to implement and speed up America’s war effort.

Leahy mentioned

Adm. William D. Leahy, now U.S. ambassador to Vichy and former chief of Naval Operations, is being mentioned as a likely candidate for the post of coordinator of military-naval operations in the inner Cabinet. There also are reports that Wendell L. Willkie, unsuccessful rival of Mr. Roosevelt for the presidency in 1940, might become overall production and supply chief in such a council, similar to Lord Beaverbrook’s job in the British War Cabinet.

The new body, it was emphasized, would not interfere with the existing full Cabinet or the so-called War Cabinet consisting at present of the secretaries of War, Navy, State and Treasury.

Maj. Williams: Wartime job

By Maj. Al Williams

“Japan must be bombed.”

Don’t tell me that a national defense system can’t be revised in wartime. The British did just that when they tore the Royal Flying Corps from the control of the British Army and the Royal Naval Air Service from the British Admiralty during the last war when England’s back was to the wall.

Realistic Englishmen coordinated England’s two air services into the present Royal Air Force. That’s just what we will do some day in this country. And the sooner the better. The United States Air Force is the only salvation in this Pacific war against Japan. It’s the instrument that can win this war against Japan. There’ll be hell to pay – tempests in teapots – getting the United States Air Force organized and working. But we wouldn’t do the job in peace time, and now we must accept the hell-raising as part of the overhead.

One of the most intriguing features of this war is that the Red air forces at Vladivostok – only about 800 miles from Tokyo (and less than that from other strategic points in Japan) – haven’t yet cracked down on our enemy. Winning sea wars and capturing Pacific islands from Japan will never win this war. If Marcus Cato, the old Roman statesman, were alive today, he would close each speech, conclude each letter and conversation with “Japan must be bombed,” instead of his classic slogan “Delenda est Carthago” (Carthage must be destroyed).

Watch Vladivostok!

Perhaps the dire straits existing on the Nazi-Red Front in Russia may have drawn too heavily on the Red air forces known to have been stationed at Vladivostok to permit effective air raids against Japan at this time. And perhaps the Japs may have so timed their offensive against us as to dovetail with this contingency. At any rate, the Red airdromes are still, or rather, I should say “presumably” are still available for our bombers.

Watch the Vladivostok sector, it’s full of potentialities. Japan must be bombed.

This war can be won on any and all fronts by the modernized employment of old weapons and by the creation of new weapons. The engineering and mechanical creative capacity of a nation is one thing. The encouragement, cultivation, and development of that capacity is decidedly another.

War inventions

The British night-fighting invention was developed and put into use long after the war started. This means that the British must have created an alert agency to handle inventions for the defense of England. Quick, responsive action on the part of government in such matters, a quick, decisive test, or even a flat “yes” or “no,” is the inspirational priming charge which keeps a nation’s creative genius alive, alert, and aggressive.

There’s one thing that’s bothering us, and that’s the air raid alarms due to mistakes and reports that have been needlessly stirring up the people of our coastal cities. Repetition of such mistakes has already caused the military and naval authorities to clamp down, and rightly so, upon the agencies handling such vital matters. The trouble that could flow from public recognition of erroneous air raid alarms is the unthinking attitude on the part of the citizenry, “wolf – wolf.” The consequences of such psychological error might well be disastrous in case the raid is real and the danger imminent.

On this point a word to all Americans is pertinent. Stand steady – steady as you go.

The Washington Merry-Go-Round

By Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen

WASHINGTON – Despite the current impression, U.S. military experts never have belittled Japanese air power. Claims that the Japs are poor flyers because of weak eyes were discounted by the War Department as silly.

But despite the conceded potency of the present Japanese air forces and their initial successes thanks to treacherous surprise, the Japanese are up against certain serious handicaps which in the long run should give the United States a big margin of air superiority.

Chief Japanese handicap is plane production, where we have the Japs licked a mile. At the outset of the war, they were credited with having 4,500 battle planes of various types, divided about evenly between their Army and Navy.

However, monthly Japanese war plane output is estimated at not over 500.

Further, Japanese output is limited not only by lack of plant capacity but even more importantly by lack of essential metals, such as aluminum.

Second major Japanese weakness is in pilot strength. They are estimated to have begun the war with 5,000 combat pilots, 3,000 Army and 2,000 Navy. In this respect we also far outclass them.

The Japanese pilot training program, carried on in seven schools, turns out fewer than 1,000 fighting pilots a year. This is a pygmy rate compared to our training schedules.

Plane for plane, some of the Japanese models compare favorably with the best we now have in the air, though not with the latest planes we have under construction.

For the excellence of their planes we can thank the appeasement policy which enabled them to buy plane designs and patent licenses from American and British firms, though the Japs also secured certain models from Germany and Italy.

Bloom’s ‘Sun Dance’

Rep. Sol Bloom of New York, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, received a postcard the other day which almost caused him to fall out of his special “health” chair.

The card was 40 years old. At the top was a business label reading, “Sol Bloom, Music Publisher, Dearborn Street, Chicago, Illinois.”

Forwarded to Mr. Bloom by a New York music house, which had received it from a customer in Chicago, the card stated:

“Mr. Bloom used to be in business here at the above Dearborn St. address about 40 years ago. This is a card his firm used at the time. Do you know where he can be reached now? He published a song back around 1900 called, ‘The Sun Dance.’ I’d like very much to get a copy of it if he’s still in the music business.”

Mr. Bloom, though now in the congressional business, happened to have a copy of the old song at home. He sent it to the inquirer with a wistful letter about “old times.”

Reorganization

Those far-reaching government reorganization powers given the President in the War Prosecution Act rushed through Congress are not going to be wasted.

Nothing has been said about it but he has big plans up his sleeve for a sweeping reshuffling of government agencies.

Equally sensational is the man Mr. Roosevelt is considering to handle the job for him. He is Supreme Court Justice James Byrnes, who has been on the bench only a few months.

When he was in the Senate, Justice Byrnes was the outstanding congressional authority on government reorganization. He had studied the subject for years and was chairman of a special committee that drafted the reorganization bill that Congress enacted some years ago. Justice Byrnes’ parliamentary astuteness also was largely responsible for the passage of the measure.

Justice Byrnes will have to take a leave of absence from the Court if he tackles the special job. The President believes that with Mr. Byrnes’ knowledge and experience he can complete a report in a few months.

The President’s plans include revamping of the hodge-podge of defense agencies, particularly those engaged in procurement. Inner circle advisers have long urged a consolidation of the numerous procurement agencies into a single, centralized body under one head.

NOTE: If Mr. Byrnes undertakes the reorganization mission, he will be the second Supreme Court Justice drafted by the President for war work. Justice Owen Roberts took a leave from the bench last week to head the special board investigating the Pearl Harbor attack.

Stellar attraction

Herbert Hoover is a former president of the United States. The Senate Banking Committee is one of the most important on Capitol Hill. And the price-control measure on which the Committee is holding hearings is a war measure that directly affects every man, woman and child in the country.

But this combination of imposing circumstances was a complete bust as an attraction for drawing a crowd that day Mr. Hoover testified before the Committee. Not even the full Committee was present. The big marble-walled committee chamber was practically empty.

But a little way down the corridor another committee was performing to a packed house. The special Senate committee investigating defense contracts had a witness before it who cast ex-President Hoover completely in the shade as a crowd-drawer.

The stellar attraction was Tom Corcoran, ex-brainbuster, who took the witness stand to hotly deny charges that he was a defense contract “broker.”

The big throng that turned out to see the stocky, wavy-haired, trigger-witted New Dealer perform was not disappointed. “The Cork” put on a snappy show. He had a ready answer for all questions and blandly admitted that he rated himself and his legal services highly.

The thrill-hungry audience loved it and had a grand time. The show was better than any matinee running in the Capital and didn’t cost a cent.

McLemore: Suggestion to horse players: Why not put your money on Uncle Sam-- strictly to win?

By Henry McLemore

NEW YORK – How do you go about feeling sorry for horse track owners?

Ever since word came that Santa Anita would not be allowed to open, I have devoted part of my time each day to trying to work up some sympathy for the owners of that lavish plant where the breed is improved and the bankroll is vice versaed.

It shouldn’t be hard to work up a tear or two. The owners are friends of mine. Dr. Charles Strub, the general manager and high monkety-monk had always gone out of his way to make me comfortable there. He has never complained about cashing my checks when I ran out of the ready and has often invited me to share his private box so that I could get an unobstructed view of my also-rans.

There is Fred Purner, the publicity director. You could beat the highways and the hedges without finding a better publicity director or fellow than Fred Purner. His greeting when I arrived from the East and walked into the press box was always very warm and cordial.

Has perfect background

“Welcome,” he always said. “Doubly welcome. Now we don’t have t worry about where the money is coming from for that flower bed we want t plant near the homestretch turn. You will furnish the means whereby lilies and roses and posies will grow where only weeds have stood before.”

Even in sympathy for Santa Anita did not spring from the fact that I know the men who run it, it should come from the fact that it is part and parcel of me. Suits of clothes I might have had are wrapped up in the starting gate.

A portion of the clubhouse turn in smoother because of my rent money. Seabiscuit whirled to victory in the handicap over clay that, in part, was paid for by money I had planned to use to take a correspondence course in bareback riding.

But the tears won’t come.

In fact, just the opposite.

Up until now all we have heard is that the horse player is bound to die broke and there is no getting around a certain satisfaction for us horse players in contemplating the possibility that horse track owners may go broke.

It would be fun

Not that we really hope they will, but wouldn’t it be fun to have Alf Vanderbilt, who operates Pimlico and Belmont; Col. Matt Winn, who does the same for Churchill Downs, or one of the haughty Wideners, who run Hialeah, buttonhole a hoss-player, just a plain old hoss-player, and ask him for something good in the fifth? Something good enough, in fact, to get him “out” for the day.

Knowing how horse players love a “sure thing,” I think I have a pretty good idea for the men and women, the touts and toutesses who will miss the afternoons at Santa Anita this year.

Why don’t those of us who would have put up our money in the fillies, colts, platers and stakers walk up to the window that really counts and back the surest thing that ever went to the post – Uncle Sam in this war? Why not invest those millions of dollars that would have been bet on the horse in defense stamps and bonds?

Strictly win tickets

We could all go to the window eight times an afternoon and buy a ticket on the biggest race we have ever been in on. The $2 players can buy defense stamps and the $50 players a defense bond.

And we could be sure of cashing every ticket we bought.

We could save time in buying them, too.

We would never have to consider place or show tickets.

They would be win tickets strictly Right on Uncle Sam’s nose.

Let’s not run the risk of having a photo-finish.

Labor parley renews debate on closed shop

President may intervene if group can’t agree on no-strike pact

WASHINGTON (UP) – President Roosevelt’s industry-labor conference was to meet again in joint session today to try to break a deadlock over the closed shop issue.

There were indications that the president might be asked to intervene if today’s efforts to reach a no-strike agreement fail. Mr. Roosevelt was believed ready to give Congress a go-ahead signal on anti-strike legislation if the conference collapses.

The conference recessed Friday when neither management nor labor representatives would budge from their positions on the closed shop. Union representatives demanded that any board set up to administer a voluntary labor agreement during the war be given authority to consider union requests for closed shop agreements. The industrial representatives insisted that closed shop demands be restricted to direct negotiations between the union and employer.

Asks early agreement

Mr. Roosevelt asked the conference to come to an agreement quickly when he talked with the members last Wednesday. He had hoped then for an agreement that day but said one by Friday at the latest was urgent.

Conference Moderator William H. Davis, who also is chairman of the Nauonal Defense Mediation Board, indicated he was prepared to seek new instructions from the president if today’s efforts fail.

Congressional leaders of the drive to enact anti-strike legislation said they would seek prompt action on pending bills if the conference collapses. In that case, they predicted passage of restrictive labor legislation within a week.

Hits labor stand

Rep. Howard W. Smith, D-Virginia, author of the anti-strike bill passed by the House two weeks ago, charged that labor leaders were attempting to use the emergency to force closed shop agreements.

He said labor leaders “can’t control” labor shutdowns, particularly “wildcat” strikes, and demanded that the Senate act on his bill which, he charged, it had “chloroformed.”

Sen. Tom Connally, D-Texas, author of a bill expanding President Roosevelt’s powers to seize plants, said he intended to press for action “at the earliest possible moment.” His bill would “freeze” existing open and closed shop agreements.

Super federal buying agency plan advanced

Two unification proposals prepared for Roosevelt; ‘something big’ seen
By John W. Love, Scripps-Howard staff writer

WASHINGTON – A merger of the buying machineries of the Army, Navy, Maritime Commission and Lend-Lease Agency into a single civilian-directed Ministry of Supply is at last being actively promoted.

Whether it will fully develop remains for the next two or six weeks to reveal. Something big is on the make, though.

At least two proposals for unification of buying under a new National Munitions Board of the equivalent are under construction. One is being drafted for delivery to President Roosevelt by Donald M. Nelson, executive director of the Supply, Priorities and Allocations Board, now the top agency on the bewildering organization charts. Mr. Nelson may head the new board.

Banker mentioned

In another proposal, the Army and Navy Munitions Board would be combined with SPAB and the Office of Production Management, also under civilian direction. Ferdinand Eberstadt, New York investment banker not hitherto part of the big organization here, is mentioned as a possible director.

Mr. Eberstadt, 51, is head of F. Eberstadt & Co., Inc., an old associate of C. S. Eaton, Cleveland financier, he is one of those financial men like Floyd Odlum who accepted the New Deal.

Vice President Wallace, chairman of SPAB, will be prominent in the reorganized picture.

President wants action

The House Committee on Interstate Migration (Rep. John H. Tolan, chairman) gave the rolling ball of reorganization another kick the other day in calling for a single civilian board with full responsibility for procurement and planning.

The chief pressure for speed, if not for simplification or ordering, comes from Mr. Roosevelt, who is reported to be impatient with the length of the lag between the signing of appropriations and the placing of contracts. This lag has averaged four months for the last year.

The four-month wait has resulted in part from the ordnance and other offices of the Army and Navy not having their proposals fully worked out on the technical side at the time their estimates of cost go to Congress, but another part of the lag has been due to the number of reviews which have to be made of these proposals by the OPM and other agencies.

Oklahoma residents send gift to Hawaii

HONOLULU (UP) – The Army acknowledged today receipt of $634 as a gift of residents of Oklahoma through the Oklahoma City Oklahoman and Times in memory of Lt. Robert H. Markley who was killed in an air battle over Hickam Field December 7.

Lt. Markley, 21, was a native of Hardin, Oklahoma. He arrived here September 13.

Lt. Col. Wilham W. Jenna of the recreation and morale office of the Department of Hawaii said: “What a source of pride to his parents to know he died a true soldier’s death … May the spirit with which he was imbued and the love of country which filled his soul be a hiving example to all the youth of America.”

The greatest air force…
Lucey: Many times as big!

U.S. Army’s flying strength to be expanded to more than million men and flood of planes
By Charles T. Lucey, Scripps-Howard staff writer

WASHINGTON – High War Department officials predicted today that the Army Air Forces would be expanded to six or eight times the present size or even more.

Brig. Gen. Wade Haislip, assistant chief of staff, told the Senate Military Affairs Committee that eventually the Army Air Forces would probably need one million men.

Previously, the top figures mentioned had been 41,000 officers and 600,000 enlisted men. But an official said today:

“All previous goals have got to be regarded as past history. From here on, we’re aiming for complete air supremacy, and we’re going to drive toward it no matter how large a force it takes.”

The mechanic-training goal is being expanded from 70,000 to 100,000 a year. The pilot-training goal is 30,000 a year.

New training schools for pilots and mechanics are being opened as fast as they can be built. By June, 41 primary schools, 18 intermediate schools and 21 advanced schools will be turning out Air Force pilots.

This expansion would mean a force larger than the entire present Army of about 1,500,000 men. Two years ago, the Air Corps had only 2,000 officers and 20,000 men.

Top air officers have their eyes on the long-range bombardment planes – Flying Fortresses and Consolidated B-24s – as the most telling weapon in eventual defeat of the Axis. This belief is keyed directly to OPM Director Knudsen’s announcement of a goal of 1,000 heavy bombers a month.

Ex-wife of prince dies in New York

NEW YORK – Mrs. Elsie Moore Torlonia, former wife of the Italian Marino Torlonia, Prince of Civitella-Cesi, died yesterday only a week after her son, Prince Alessandro Torlonia, visited her on a trio that was made possible by the cooperation of two warring nations, Great Britain and Italy.

Prince Torlonia arrived November 20 by Clipper. While here Italy declared war on the United States, but under the terms of the earlier agreement for his safe passage he was permitted to leave by Clipper December 15.

Attempts to sabotage reservoir charged

SAN FRANCISCO (UP) – Guards fired at suspected saboteurs in California today as the Pacific Coast, a full-fledged war zone with enemy submarines operating offshore, moved its defense mechanism into high gear.

Two guards patrolling the restricted Miguelito Reservoir at Lompoc were fired upon by unknown assailants before dawn today. The guards exchanged shots with the assailants whom police believed were trying to sabotage the water-supply for the Camp Cook Army base.

An air raid siren shattered during its first test at Martinez, California. Fragments smashed into a crowd of 100 persons, injuring five boys.

At Sacramento, the California Senate adopted a broad program of defense legislation, including appropriations of 10 million dollars for the state guard and five million dollars for the emergency fund to meet the state’s defense needs.

The Senate also passed a home guard bill giving sheriffs power to establish guard units similar to those in Great Britain.

NormanStewart · December 25, 2020, 3:50am

U.S. shows Japs democracies also can go ‘all-out’

Two-week mobilization of aroused nation offers smashing rebuttal to charge that free men are too lax, inefficient to wage ‘total war’
By Roger Tatarian, United Press staff writer

WASHINGTON (UP) – Two weeks ago yesterday, Japan, masquerading under the cloak of a peace-seeking friend, launched an unprovoked attack on America’s Pearl Harbor.

Since that attack, an aroused nation has mobilized its men and resources in smashing rebuttal to the charge that a democracy is lax and inefficient and cannot compete with the dictatorships in waging “total war.”

Japan gave America a new battle cry – “Remember Pearl Harbor” – and helped write into the book of military heroes the names of the Marines of Wake and Midway islands.

Fewer than 24 hours after Pearl Harbor, Congress acknowledged a state of war with Japan. Three days later, the nation formally accepted the challenge of Germany and Italy.

U.S. moves fast

Swiftly the government and its myriad agencies moved to weld the nation into one weapon.

Congress lifted geographical restrictions on the use of selectees and guardsmen and gave the President permission to create a new American Expeditionary Force for use anywhere in the world against the Axis.

The Selective Service Act was revised to bring in registration of all men between 18 and 64 years, inclusive, and to extend military service to all registrants between 20 and 44 years, inclusive. This cleared the way for a potential American army of seven million – largest in the nation’s history.

Knox flies to Hawaii

Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, after a flying trip to Hawaii, told the nation that the Japanese attack had cost the Pacific Fleet one battleship, three destroyers, a minelayer and a target ship. He brought also the disturbing news that neither Army nor Navy units in Hawaii were “on the alert” when the attack came.

President Roosevelt immediately created a five-man board to investigate the tragedy of Pearl Harbor.

And then came a drastic shakeup in the command of the Hawaiian and Pacific forces.

Congress went to work on a bill to increase the Navy’s fighting strength by 150,000 tons as part of a long-range naval expansion program.

Roosevelt voted power

President Roosevelt was voted drastic war powers – even more far-reaching than those enjoyed by Woodrow Wilson during the First World War. One of Mr. Roosevelt’s first actions was creation of an Office of Censorship to regulate dissemination of information.

Congress passed the first wartime money bill – a huge $10,250,000,000 appropriation to buy more ships, more guns and more planes for a two-front war. It also vote funds for relief of civilians in Hawaii and the Philippines.

Mr. Roosevelt called a labor-industry conference to formulate a voluntary means of ending strikes in war industries.

Plane output hiked

The government was quick to acknowledge the growing importance of aircraft in this war. The OPM stepped up its heavy bomber production program, calling for 100 four-motored craft a month within a year. It also made first use of its requisitioning authority and seized more than one million dollars’ worth of strategic materials lying idle in warehouses.

The Justice Department rounded up enemy aliens, and Congress tightened restrictions of the Alien Registration Act.

The Army ordered its four interceptor commands to take charge of sounding air raid alarms. sound “all clear signals” and to silence radio stations to avoid confusion.

The Office of Civilian Defense advised civilians how to conduct themselves during air raids. It also set up a civil air patrol.

Men rush to enlist

The Weather Bureau curtailed weather forecasts to keep useful information from the enemy.

Amateur radio operators were ordered off the air.

The Office of Price Administration imposed price ceilings on important food products to discourage rising costs and wartime hoarding.

Army, Navy and Marine recruiting offices everywhere were swamped with volunteers.

The French luxury liner Normandie, and the Swedish motorship Kungsholm were seized by the government. The Maritime Commission, having reached its “ship a day” launching schedule, speeded work to realize its new goal – “two ships a day.”

The powerful Economic Defense Board—headed by Vice President Henry A. Wallace – changed its name to the Board of Economic Warfare and imposed tight controls on exports of important materials.

Navy death reports wrong three times

CINCINNATI, Ohio – Reports by the Navy Department to three homes in this area announcing the death of three sailor sons have later proved false.

How the mistakes were made has not been explained.

Notices of death in action came to the parents of John Wesley Woodward of Woodlawn; Isadore Owen of Dayton, Kentucky, and Harold Lee Lunsford of Latonia, Kentucky.

In the Woodward and Owen cases the Navy Department discovered its mistake and sent corrective telegrams.

In the third case, The Cincinnati Post, a Scripps-Howard newspaper, learned that the Lunsford boy had telephoned, only a few hours before the death notice arrived, to say that he would be home Saturday night from Virginia. The Post reached him and learned that he was well and just about to board a plane for home.

The outlook for 1942…
Jesse Jones sees victory in industrial mobilization

Important beginnings made; all should play part, secretary says
By Jesse Jones, Secretary of Commerce

Americans face a war year. What does that year hold? What will Americans be asked to do – and to do without – in 1942? This article by Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones is the second of a series of six, written by outstanding men in industry and government, answering these questions.

WASHINGTON – We are now engaged in the greatest struggle in all history in defense of everything we cherish. We are resolved to destroy once and for all the ruthless aggressors who are warring against us with the avowed intention of enslaving us and of sweeping away our institutions and customs founded on freedom.

We will accomplish the enemy’s destruction by the weight of our armaments, wielded by our own fighting forces and by those of our Allies.

All can play a part

Before that can happen on a decisive scale in this world struggle, however, the flood of all the war machines needed for the job must be provided by the nation’s economic forces.

Consequently it is of the most vital importance for all of us to comprehend the sweeping, total character of the mobilization now under way – economic as well as military. In this total mobilization, every adult American can and should play a part.

Important beginnings to economic mobilization were made in 1941. Four million five hundred thousand persons are already engaged on the economic front. This meant an increase of three million (defense workers) in the past year.

Adjustment necessary

Another step taken in 1941 toward producing the war machines we shall use to smash our enemies was to make the largest addition on record to the country’s productive plant and equipment. During the year, 8½ billion dollars’ worth of new equipment and $3,600,000,000 worth of new plant were added.

By the beginning of 1942, the arms industry, broadly considered, will be no less than third in size of all American industries; by the end of the coming year, it should certainly rank first.

Clearly the prime objective of our economic mobilization is to provide such a crushing superiority of armaments that the enemy’s greatest efforts will be overpowered.

None of us, as producers, shall withhold his hand from this sweeping mobilization of our productive strength. As it proceeds, the country’s aggregate output in the coming year will move ahead. Since most of it will flow into war materials, we shall, as consumers, have to adjust ourselves to the rationing of scarce articles.

Let us, however, take comfort in the certainty that with our unparalleled national strength so dedicated to victory, this great nation will decisively win the struggle so brutally thrust upon it.

Chicago youth admits guilt in 23 sex crimes

Exhibition called strangest since Loeb-Leopold case in 1923

CHICAGO (UP) – David R. Steffey III, handsome blond youth wrestling with the study of philosophy, believes that his criminal attacks on more than a score of women resulted from a human lack of “free will” and a course of events get in motion many decades ago.

“No one has a free will,” Steffey told authorities, who called his record the strangest psychopathic exhibition since the Loeb-Leopold case in 1923.

The youth, an 18-year-old freshman at Wright Junior College, confessed he had attacked or attempted to attack 23 women who identified him last night. Police charged he was guilty of still more.

Trailed by victim

Steffey was taken into custody Saturday after one of his victims saw him on the street. She trailed him while her husband telephoned police. Authorities discovered the youth was the captain of the 1940 football team at Roosevelt High School and the son of a well-to-do commission merchant.

Police questioned him doggedly to connect him with the recent slaying of Mrs. Bergit Kyvik, 40, mother of two children. But the youth insisted:

“I was mean to the women I attacked. I beat some of them and kicked them. But I never killed anyone in my life.”

Steffey talked freely, linking an explanation for his acts with beliefs formed in his study of philosophy.

Blames ancestors

“If you are going to accept the determinist philosophy. you must admit that any action by any individual may be traced back through his ancestors for at least 100 years,” he said. “No one has a free will. He merely does the same things his ancestors have done before him.

“This all sounds like a lot of meaningless abstractions, but don’t you see, if my will had been free I could have done any constructive thing I had desired. As it was, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was not adjusted, am not now.”

Assistant State Attorney Julius Sherwin asked Steffey what penalty he believed he should pay.

Asks examination

“If society feels there must be some revenge, some punishment, then I must endure some penalty even though I don’t agree with it,” the youth replied. “I believe I should be given a thorough examination, then given a rest for six months or a year to get my mind straightened out. In that way I should be able to regain my place in life and contribute to humanity and progress.”

Steffey called himself “an abnormal boy who never knew myself well enough to straighten out my own mental quirks.”

“In my mind there was a great psychological barrier which I felt I had to clear,” he said. “That is one of the reasons I did the things I did.”

He’ll read Darrow

He told police he was losing his “physical strength,” was “emotionally unstable” and had sought guidance in books by John Dewey, Bertram and Russell and Friedrich Nietzsche. He said he intended to spend his Christmas vacation reading Clarence Darrow’s defense of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, slayers of Bobby Franks, for a key to his own problems.

Steffey said his case should not be used as the basis of an attack on science.

“On the other hand, it should be an argument in favor of science,” he said, “because my actions can be traced to the traditional bunk. Such bunk is intertwined all through the individual’s unhappy childhood and sexual maladjustments.”

Last message…
Guam civilians are attacked

Hospital machine-gunned also by Japanese

WASHINGTON – The last message sent by the Guam garrison to the Navy Department was timed at 8:30 p.m. EST, December 9, two days after the Japanese raid on Hawaii, and reported the attackers had machine-gunned civilians and a hospital in Agana, the island capital, it was revealed today.

The Navy said that the last message sent from the Far Pacific outpost (at 3:30 p.m., island time, December 10) reported:

“Last attack centered at Agana. Civilians machine-gunned in streets. Two native wards of hospital and hospital compound machine-gunned. Building in which Japanese nationals are confined bomb.”

A Navy communique December 13 said capture of the island “is probable” because Guam could not be contacted by either cable or radio. This communique said that a force of fewer than 400 naval men and 155 Marines was stationed in Guam, which lies in the midst of Japanese-mandated islands.

The mid-Pacific U.S. islands of Wake and Midway still are holding out.

The last message from Guam did not make clear whether the machine-gunning was by ground-strafing planes or from Japanese landing forces, although it was assumed here that planes were involved in the attack.

Agana has a population of approximately 10,000 and is on the southern shore of Agana Bay.

Right to boo Roosevelt at stake in trial

Republican prefers jail to paying fine

CHICAGO (UP) – Attorneys for the Civil Liberties Union and the National Lawyers Guild promised today to go to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary to prove that a Republican booing the president in wartime is guilty of “foolish tactlessness rather than treason.”

The case, rapidly becoming a free speech “cause celebre,” concerns Edward A. Loss Jr., 23, a welder who received a sound beating from the patrons and a $200 fine from Judge Oscar S. Caplan for booing a newsreel of President Roosevelt.

Loss explained in court that he worked seven days a week, didn’t have time to read the newspapers and consequently didn’t know how people felt about politics these days.

“I’m a Republican,” he told the court, “so when Roosevelt came on the screen, I booed automatically.”

Judge Caplan said the action “bordered on treason” and fined him $200. Unable to pay, Loss began working out the fine in jail at $120 a day.

He was still there today, but not for lack of money to pay the fine. His parents first offered the money, then decided not to pay the fine because “it would leave a blot on the boy’s name.” They offered to buy defense bonds with the money if Judge Caplan would clear their son’s name.

Judge Caplan refused to accept an apology to the president, signed by Loss, but ordered a motion for review continued until Wednesday, pending examination of Loss by a court psychiatrist. The judge, recalling that the fine was assessed on Civil Rights Day, announced in court that he had received hundreds of letters, most of them protesting the stiff penalty.

Editorial: Long live King!

Don’t discount the stories about the new commander-in-chief of the U.S. Fleet as ballyhoo. Adm. Ernest J. King needs no buildup.

If ever a man seemed to fit an emergency call, he is it. If the record means anything, Adm. King is the best-qualified admiral for modern warfare in our Navy, and probably in any allied navy.

Theoretically, he meets every major qualification brilliantly, with the possible exception of youth – and his great initiative belies his 63 years.

Most others are content if they can become expert in one naval field; Adm. King is a recognized expert in all. In his Annapolis class he was graduated first. As a young assistant chief of staff, he won the Navy Cross in the First World War. He later became inspector of ordnance. Not satisfied with service on all types of surface ships, he requested submarine duty.

At 49 he virtually started all over by learning to be a combat flier. Rising in that service, as he had in others, he commanded a carrier, the aircraft battle force, and finally all naval aviation as chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics.

Naturally, when the President months ago chose his first combat commander – to organize an Atlantic Fleet and conduct defensive and undeclared warfare against the Nazis – he picked Adm. King as the leader with the best qualifications on the sea, under the sea, and over the sea. Adm. King was the only one of our three fleet commanders who had an opportunity before December 7 to make or break himself against the Axis wave.

So the new commander-in-chief of all the U.S. Fleets is a flying admiral, who already has been beating Hitler for several months in the vast battle of the Atlantic. Also he is the toughest disciplinarian, the most hard-boiled stickler for “alert” in the Navy. If Adm. King is defeated – and he doubtless will lose occasional battles – it will not be for Pearl Harbor reasons.

Fortunately, Adm. King has been able to pick his own Pacific and Atlantic Fleet commanders in Admirals Nimitz and Ingersoll. He is obviously satisfied with the results produced by his fellow submarine expert, the veteran Adm. Hart, as chief of the Asiatic Fleet.

Linked with the new top admiral are two other fliers, who are in complete command of all Army services in the areas guarding the chief naval bases. Gen. Emmons, the new commandant of the Army’s Hawaiian Department, and Gen. Andrews, chief of the Army’s Panama-Caribbean Department, are air officers.

But even flying commanders like Adm. King, Gen. Emmons and Gen. Andrews must have planes in order to fight them. The British put a flier in command of the army and navy in the Far East, but Air Marshal Brooke-Popham has not been able to do much at Hong Kong and Singapore because he is short of planes.

Now that our flying admirals and generals are being allowed to take over, the American job shakes down more and more to supplying enough planes, fast enough, to enough fronts, to win the war.

Editorial: If not the Army, try Farley

What this country seems to need right now isn’t just a good five-cent cigar but a good siren.

The writer has been through a couple of so-called “alerts” along the Eastern Seaboard since we got into the war in both oceans with both feet. The net of the experiences, in New York and Washington, reminds us of that line in “Once in a Lifetime” where the super-peppy general manager of a Hollywood movie declared in a staff meeting, “We’ll show ‘em how to get a lot done around here without wasting any time thinking.”

It’s been a case of listen for five long and two short blasts or one long and five short, or something, from what siren nobody knows; of stay where you are or get somewhere else; of go to the basement or avoid the basement; of keep calm and don’t hurry or run like hell; of stay under cover or hit for the open – of confusion of tongues and of instructions; of the blind and befuddled leading the blind.

Fortunately no pineapples have been dropped yet. But some might be, even in Emporia or Oshkosh, not to confine ourselves to Washington and New York.

It seems to us that Mayor LaGuardia is the key.to this confusion, with Mrs. Roosevelt the runner-up. Both appear to have taken in too much territory, to the point of not being able to see for the dust.

For whatever suggestions may be worth, we urge the one already made – that the whole matter of civilian defense be put up to the Army; that Mr. LaGuardia put in his time being mayor of the nation’s metropolis; that Mrs. Roosevelt devote herself to her day. Or, if a civilian must be in charge, we suggest drafting Jim Farley. It’s an organizational job. And Jim knows how to organize (1932-1936). He’d get us a siren we could hear.

Ferguson: Free lunches

By Mrs. Walter Ferguson

I have an interesting suggestion about work for national defense from Mrs. L. M. Coleman of New York City. Since we women are eager to tackle something practical and real, I pass her ideas along, because they are valuable:

“The other day I listened to a lengthy program on the virtue and value of free lunches for undernourished children in New York State. Instantly I thought of the homes from which these children come. Isn’t it time we thought of them, since many of our boys have been turned down by draft boards because of malnutrition?

“Will these free lunches be of permanent value to these homes? I fear not. They serve only as a crutch in an emergency. The reactions are likely to increase parent-child problems and delinquency. If we could only help mothers in such families train them to prepare the right foods and to manage their budgets better, we might be able to dispense with this form of charity.

“Both child and home lose something valuable when the child gets a service outside of the home which the home should provide. Giving food like this does not solve, or even lessen, the problem of undernourishment. The cause for all this undernourishment is ignorance, since everyone knows we have enough food for our people. And the only cure for ignorance is enlightenment.

“Taking a hungry child away from his home to feed him isn’t going to build morale or patriotism or brawn for the future. I believe we should establish a home-making service which will take us directly into the homes. In the end it would be less expensive in dollars and cents, and would give something more than temporary aid.

“We ought to remember that most of our great men came from the bottom of the heap. Isn’t it part of our job for national defense to put our charities on a more intelligent basis?”

Amen to that, Mrs. Coleman! Patriotism without common sense won’t get us anywhere.

Background of news –
Unity of command

By Editorial Research Reports

Signs multiply that complete unity of command – naval, military and economic – will very soon be put into effect by the Allies fighting the Axis powers.

Unity of command in World War I was not achieved until after more than three years and several grave military defeats, and even then was far from complete. Economic unity of command came largely from pressure by the United States, where trusts flourished in the business world to a greater degree than in any other country.

Immediately after the outbreak of war in August 1914, an Inter-Allied body was set up in London to regulate French and Russian orders for war materials in Great Britain. And in 1916 an Allied Wheat Council, functioning in North and South America, developed a system of combined purchases of wheat, with allocation of shipping to carry wheat.

But until 1917 Allied cooperation was mostly bilateral. That is, when the French, the Russians, and the Italians wanted certain assistance from the British, they each had to negotiate separately with the British government. In the field, the French and British commanders conferred, but frequently disagreed, while for all practical purposes Russia was fighting a separate war, as was Italy. In fact, it was not until 1917 that the British Empire realized a kind of war unity, through the Imperial War Cabinet in London.

In November 1917, after the Italian military rout at Caporetto, Great Britain, France, and Italy organized at Rapallo a Supreme War Council. Each country was to be represented by its premier, one other member of the government, and a permanent military representative. Meetings were to be held once a month. President Wilson sent word of his accord with the new move, and offered to send Col. House and Gen. Bliss to the meetings. But the powers of the new body were stated vaguely, and it had no authority to force its decisions upon any of the commanders-in-chief. The official British history of the war admits that in 3½ months this Supreme War Council did nothing to prepare for the coming German blow.

Real cooperation was forced by the first German breakthrough in the spring of 1918. On March 26, Gen. Foch was made inter-Allied Generalissimo, and an agreement of April 3 stated: “The British, French, and American governments entrust to Gen. Foch the strategic direction of military operations.” But even so Foch was little more than a coordinator, and the commanders-in-chief could always appeal over his head to their governments.

For instance, Pershing successfully resisted Foch’s pressure to infiltrate American units into the hard-pressed French and British lines, and sections of the front were taken over by unadulterated American forces. On the sea, activities were worked out cooperatively, rather than under a single command.

In 1917-18. inter-Allied Councils were set up to control war purchases and finance, munitions, transportation (land), maritime transport, food, and the blockade.

Americans down 2 more Jap bombers

KUNMING, Yunnan Province (UP) – American volunteers aviators in the Chinese Air Force Saturday shot down six of 10 Japanese bombers which attacked the Burma Road south of this provincial capital, Chinese air headquarters for the southwest defense zone announced today.

Four Jap bombers were credited to the Americans Saturday. Today’s announcement adds two more to their list.

Wreckage of three of the downed Japanese planes has been located, the communique said.

Col. Claire L. Chennault, U.S. Army (ret.), commanded the American fliers. Col. Chennault and the other airmen were permitted to resign from the American Army to fly for China.

Army ‘most kind,’ Jap prisoner says

MANILA (UP) – Axis nationals interned in the Philippines have been placed in a camp where they get sunshine, cigarettes and – for the Japanese – even an occasional batch of sukiyaki.

One Japanese said he was well satisfied with the quarters and that they were almost as good as those he had in a hotel, Manila’s second-best.

He said that American Army officials are “most kind.”

Japanese are the most numerous in the internment center and have quarters separate from the Germans and Italians. All are fed from the same kitchen, with the Japanese doing most of the cooking.

Youths advised to await draft

Factories also need men, Hershey reminds

CHICAGO (UP) – Brig. Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, national director of Selective Service, advised American young men yesterday to remain at their jobs or in their classrooms until called by the armed forces.

Broadcasting from Washington in a University of Chicago roundtable discussion, Gen. Hershey pointed out that to keep one man equipped and in action on the battlefront requires 14-25 men in industry.

“We may expect to have three million in uniform by the end of 1942,” Gen. Hershey said, “but we must raise this Army without disturbing those vital industrial workers needed to supply each man we take.”

Five fliers killed in bomber crash

JACKSON, Mississippi (UP) – Public relations officers at the Jackson Army Air Base said five Army fliers were killed when a medium bomber crashed after taking off from the base yesterday.

The plane took off on a routine flight, according to the public relations officer, and apparently developed motor trouble immediately. Eyewitnesses said it exploded after the crash.

The dead were listed as First Lt. John J. Goerr of Poughkeepsie, New York; Second Lt. M. Schmiell of Chicago; Second Lt. C. A. Knight of Ocala, Florida; Second Lt. R. A. Saner of Fremont, Ohio, and Sgt. H. A. Wissinger of Indiana, Pennsylvania.

Croatians will invest $65,000 in defense bonds

The Croatian Fraternal Beneficial Society announced today it will convert its full $65,000 assets into defense bonds to bring about defeat of the Axis powers “including the Quisling Government of Croatia.”

A meeting of the society’s 300 members will be held in its hall at 141 44th St., at 8 p.m. EST tonight to formally complete the action and adopt resolutions of support to be sent to President Roosevelt.

Lieutenant bails out

AMITYVILLE, New York – Lt. Leonard C. Lydon of Des Moines, Iowa, jumped from his U.S. Army P-40 pursuit ship today after its propeller flew off, and landed safely near the wreckage. He was uninjured.

America at war! (1941– ) (Part 1)

Editorial: A plea for intolerance

Editorial: War with Albania

Editorial: Christmas cards again

EXECUTIVE ORDER 8987 Establishing Honolulu Defensive Sea Area

Hongkong in japanischer Hand: Erfolgreiche Landung auf Mindanao

Riesige Beute in Kaulun

„VB.“-Karte vom Pazifik-Kriegsschauplatz

Die Judengefahr in USA

Wehrmachtbericht

Bollettino n. 567

Communique No. 21

Communique No. 14

U.S. sinks Jap transport, blasts planes, troops

Hewlett: Filipinos flood gold mines to keep them from Japs

Invaders of Luzon learn what U.S. knew all along

Pushing ahead, Tokyo reports

U.S. pilots give Chinese first big victory in 2 years

WAR BULLETINS!

Nazi commander-in-chief reported ousted

Nazi engineers reported in Tunisia

Break with U.S. urged by Paris papers

No holiday letdown at Mitchel Field

Won’t quit Timor now, Allies say

Yugoslav asks aid against ‘murderers’

British airmen down two raiders

U.S. university in China reported closed

Colombians arrest Nazi newsman

Vichy plans to stay neutral

777 Japs arrested in Cuba

Newspapermen held in Paris hotel

U.S. crew safe after bomb attack

Pictures for Tokyo fly ‘round globe

King appointed chief of fleet

‘Dolly’ King, fleet’s new chief, is stern but fair

ENEMY SUBS ATTACK AMERICAN SHIPS OFF CALIFORNIA, ALSO PROWL ATLANTIC Freighter hit, SOS heard on Pacific Coast

BULLETIN

Enemy subs prowl along Atlantic Coast

Berlin boasts despite losses

Post-war Japan faces loss of much territory

Argentine vessel to ‘trade’ diplomats

Jap liner eludes hostile submarine

Report on fifth column seen as exaggerated

Registration of manpower is expected to begin soon

Editorial: The great registration

13 defensive sea areas set

President sets sea defense areas

Hawaii plans raid shelters

Five Marines killed in Virginia crash

Stab at Tokyo… U.S. sub sinks Jap transport

Dutch batter 5 more ships

‘Black Dragon’ tops Japan’s spy system

Supreme U.S. war council may be formed

Italians hear plea to help U.S. win war

Portland leading in Navy recruits

Two new destroyers launched by Navy

Earle expected back by way of Istanbul

Minnesota governor to speak at session of music teachers

Light shed on Hitler’s inner life

Below the Rio Grande… Argentina policy accords U.S. important privileges

Labor affairs taking a turn for the worse

The Weekly Washington Merry-Go-Round

Ship welding strike begun in California

OPM Official Calls Strike Unjustified

Auto industry asked to give plants to U.S.

Smith blames labor men for conference deadlock

Parley futile in bus strike

Stokes: Action by U.S. against Axis airlines urged

Red Cross receives all but ‘fare home’

30 refugees tell of escaping Japs

‘Christmas war dinner’ suggested by experts

Denver attorney gets vacant Senate post

Simms: Power balance vital to peace, Benes believes

Navy to start college student training plan

OPM speeds up conversion of civilian plants

Fugitive Japs disturb sleep as lighthouse

Convicts seek roles in ‘suicide squadron’

Decks cleared, Congress ‘out’ for holidays

New censor chief plans clear rules

Newspapers and radios will continue on voluntary basis

EXECUTIVE ORDER 8987
Establishing Honolulu Defensive Sea Area

Hongkong in japanischer Hand:
Erfolgreiche Landung auf Mindanao

ENEMY SUBS ATTACK AMERICAN SHIPS OFF CALIFORNIA, ALSO PROWL ATLANTIC
Freighter hit, SOS heard on Pacific Coast

Stab at Tokyo…
U.S. sub sinks Jap transport

Below the Rio Grande…
Argentina policy accords U.S. important privileges

The outlook for 1942…
Wickard sees hard work, fair reward for farmers

I DARE SAY —
Listing plays to see on Broadway

Week’s market summary:
Jap attacks, rumors drive stocks down

Querschnitt durch Niederländisch-Indien:
Das Inselreich der Rohstoffe