Yanks in Australia organized into Army
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U.S. planes fire Japs’ Munda base
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13 Jap planes blasted the Chicago but sinking ship took 12 with her
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Tunisia toll heavy, Stimson reveals
Washington (UP) –
Secretary of War Stimson said today that outnumbered U.S. forces had lost considerable ground and suffered substantial losses in recent fighting in Tunisia but that “the Germans apparently have been slowed down.”
Exclusive of this fighting, he placed U.S. Army casualties thus far in all theaters at a total of 41,858.
He said at a press conference that the German attacks in Tunisia, which drove U.S. troops back 35 miles, did not appear to be a general offensive although “the fighting is continuing.” The Axis purpose, he added, apparently was to expand their corridor between northern Tunisia and the Mareth Line in the south.
Sees Yanks relieved
The British 8th Army is moving against the Mareth Line in operations which, Stimson said, may tend to relieve the hard-pressed Americans.
Stimson said in reviewing the fighting:
We thus have suffered a serious local setback in Tunisia. The importance should not be minimized and still less should not be exaggerated. It is one of the battle losses which must be expected in a battle as extensive as the occupation of North Africa which has already encountered substantial successes.
He said:
Many of our tanks were destroyed by German dive bombers.
Indications are that the Germans are employing two armored divisions against American forces. This is considerably greater than our strength in this area.
Exclusive of the current Tunisian fighting, Stimson said the Army has had 41,858 casualties thus far in the war. These losses, he said, break down into 3,553 killed, 6,509 wounded, 25,684 missing and 6,123 prisoners of war.
He said large numbers of the missing are from the Philippines and will probably turn up as prisoners of war when the lists come through the International Red Cross. About 12,600 of the missing are Philippine Scouts.
As for Tunisia, he said the present German successes were not an unexpected development.
Stimson said:
A large formation of Rommel’s forces were able to concentrate against the relatively more lightly held and more extended American lines.
Editorial: Report on ‘Negroes and war’ by OWI is most constructive
Few of the publications issued by the government’s Office of War Information as thoroughly justifies the work of that much-debated organization as its recent report on “Negroes and the War,” particularly the introduction written by Chandler Owen, who has gained a place as one of the nation’s most reliable and able Negro publicists. Facts and figures, not mere pious or sentimental theories, are given in a handy, interesting way, to prove what may justly be termed the splendid, bright, and hopeful side of the case for Uncle Sam in regard to this nation’s treatment of one of its largest and in some respects most unfortunately handicapped minorities, the Negroes.
It is a case being at present widely debated with more heat than light; and often on the basis of isolated, but undeniable and tragic instances of harsh treatment, or bigoted racial discrimination, with neglect, or ignorance, of the situation as a whole.
As President Roosevelt said in a press conference after his return from Africa, including his visit to the Negro Republic of Liberia, although European nations have controlled that continent with its teeming millions of colored races, since before Columbus came to America, even today the natives in the vast majority are as illiterate, and live on as primitive a scale, as many centuries ago.
In the United States, on the other hand, the Negroes, in spite of the slavery epoch, and their disabilities and troubles since then, which still persist, have registered a great improvement, on a larger scale, than any people, in any time or place recorded in history – considering the point at which their civilized development began.
Socially, economically, and even politically, though this line, perhaps, is the least successfully traced, Negro progress in the United States has been nothing short of tremendous. In 1890, for example, there were some 12,000 Negro clergymen, but in 1930, 25,000. Teachers, in the same period, rose from 15,000 to 50,000; doctors from 200 to nearly 4,000; lawyers and judges from 400 odd to more than a thousand. Today, hundreds of colleges are exclusively their own, and many large general universities are open to them. In 1916, only 1,700 Negro students were taking college courses. In 1941, 40,000 were enrolled. Now most of these latter youths are in the armed services, or war work.
That the great majority of American Negroes are patriotic, and conscious that the nation’s war against Hitlerism and its racial bigotry is also their own war, cannot seriously be questioned by those who know the truth. Much remains to be done to develop the great work already well started. That necessary work will be aided by the wide diffusion of such constructive facts as are contained in the report of the Office of War Information.
Church group asks U.S. bare its peace aims
Urges Congress act on ‘political weapon’ to undermine the Axis
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The Pittsburgh Press (February 18, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
At the front in Tunisia – (Feb. 17)
A big military convoy moving at night across the mountains and deserts of Tunisia is something that nobody who has been in one can ever forget.
Recently I have been living with a frontline outfit. Late one afternoon, it received sudden orders to move that night, bag and baggage. It had to pull out of its battle positions, time the departures of its various units to fit into the flow of traffic at the first control point on the highway, and then drive all night and go into action on another front.
All the big convoys in the war area moved at night. German planes would spot a daytime convoy and play havoc with it. It is extremely difficult and dangerous, this moving at night in total blackness over strange and rough roads. But it has to be done.
Our convoy was an immense one. There were hundreds of vehicles and thousands of men. It took seven and a half hours to pass one point. The convoy started moving at 5:30 in the evening, just before dusk. The last vehicle didn’t clear till 1 o’clock the next morning.
I rode in a jeep with Capt. Pat Riddleberger, of Woodstock, Virginia, and Pvt. John Coughlin, Manchester, New Hampshire. Ahead of us was a small covered truck which belonged to Riddleberger’s tank-destroyer section. We were a little two-vehicle convoy within ourselves. We were to fall in near the tail end, so we had half the night to kill before starting. We stood around the truck, parked in a barn lot, for an hour or two, just talking in the dark. Then we went into the kitchen of the farmhouse which had been used as a command post and which was empty now. There was an electric light, and we built a fire in the kitchen fireplace out of boxes. But the chimney wouldn’t draw, and we almost choked from the smoke.
Some officers had left a stack of copies of the New York Times for October and November lying on the floor, so we read those for an hour or so. We looked at the book sections and the movie ads. None of us had ever heard of the new books or the current movies. It made us feel keenly how long we had been away and how cut off we were from home. One of the boys said:
They could make money just showing all the movies over again for a year after we get back.
We finished the papers and there were still three hours to kill, so we got blankets out of the truck and lay down on the concrete floor. We were sleeping soundly when Capt. Riddleberger awakened us at 1:00 a.m. and said we were off.
The moon was just coming out. The sky was crystal-clear, the night bitter cold. The jeep’s top was down. We all put on all the clothes we had. In addition to my usual polar-bear wardrobe, which includes heavy underwear and two sweaters, that night I wore a pair of coveralls, a heavy combat suit that a tank man lent me, a pair of overshoes, two caps – one on top of the other – and over them a pair of goggles. The three of us in the jeep wrapped up in blankets. In spite of all that, we almost froze before the night was over.
We moved out of the barn lot, and half a mile away we swung onto the main road, at the direction of motorcyclists who stood there guiding the traffic. Gradually our eyes grew accustomed to the half-darkness, and it wasn’t hard to follow the road. We had orders to drive in very close formation, so we kept within 50 feet of each other.
After a few miles we had to cross a mountain range. There were steep grades and switchback turns, and some of the trucks had to back and fill to make the sharper turns. There was considerable delay on the mountain. French trucks and buses would pass and tie up traffic, swinging in and out. And right in the center of these tortuous mountains we met a huge American hospital unit, in dozens of trucks, moving up to the front. They were on the outside of the road, and at times their wheels seemed about to slide off into the chasm.
We had long waits while traffic jams ahead were cleared. We shut off our motors and the night would be deathly silent except for a subdued undertone of grinding motors far ahead. At times we could hear great trucks groaning in low gear on steep grades far below, or the angry clanking of tanks as they took sharp turns behind us.
Finally, the road straightened out on a high plateau. There we met a big contingent of French troops moving silently toward the front we had just vacated. The marching soldiers seemed like dark ghosts in the night. Hundreds of horses were canning their artillery, ammunition and supplies.
I couldn’t help feeling the immensity of the catastrophe that had put men all over the world, millions of us, to moving in machine-like precision throughout long foreign nights – men who should have been comfortably asleep in their warm beds at home. War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.
La Stampa (February 19, 1943)
Altre posizioni nemiche in Tunisia occupate dale truppe dell’Asse
Un contrattacco avversario, appoggiato da mezzi corazzati, respinto; Un piroscafo affondato e uno danneggiato nelle acque di Algeri; Quattro aerei abbattuti durante incursion in Sardegna e in Sicilia
Il Quartier Generale delle Forze Armate ha diramato nel pomeriggio di Ieri il seguente bollettino numero 999:
In Tunisia, ie truppe dell’Asse hanno occupato alter posizioni nemiche, respingendo poi un contrattacco avversario appoggiato da mezzi corazzati. Nel cielo tunisino, quattro aerei nemici venivano abbattuti; tre dal tiro di reparti terrestri, uno dalla saceia.
A nord di Algeri, velivoli germanici attaccavano un convoglio scortato, affondando un piroscafo di 9000 tonnellate e danneggiandone um alter di agues stazza.
Bombardieri americani hanno lanciato bombe dirompenti ed incendiaries su Cagliari, Quarto Sant’Elena e Gonnosfanadiga, causando gravi danni ad abitazioni civili e vittime tra la popolazione. Sono stati linora segnalati 100 morti e 235 feriti.
Attaccati dal nostril cacciatori, tre del velivoli incursori precipitavano presso Samassi, nel dintorni di Nuraminis ed a ponente dell’Isola di San Pietro. Dodici degli aviator lanciatisi sci paracaduto, venivano catturati.
Nel pressi di Catania, uno «Spitfire» centrato dal fuoco di un nostro bombardiere, cadeva in mare.
Avventati piani americani contro il Giappone
Un panorama strategico dalle Aleutine all’Insulindia
Tokio, 18 febbraio –
Il colonnello Yahagi, portavoce dell’esercito, ha oggi illustrato in un discorso pronunciato a Fukuoka le attuali condizioni.della guerra nell’Asia orientale. Egli ha precisato anzitutto che la strategia americana decisa in un primo tempo ad adottare la difensiva profittando della resistenza di Ciung King ad est e di quella sovietica in Europa, si è mutata in strategia offensiva all’Inizio del corrente anno.
Ha rilevato quindi come gli Stati Uniti, dopo le loro cocenti perdite si siano completamente dedicati al rafforzamento dell’arma aerea ed al rafforzamento delle loro basi continentali, più che a quelle insulari. E’ chiaro, ha dichiarato Yahagi che gli Stati Uniti intendono attaccare il Giappone da nord, rinforzando le Aleutine ed apprestando migliori comunicazioni con l’Alaska.
Esaminate poi le difficoltà esistenti per il nemico di condurre attacchi dalle Hawai, Yahagi si è soffermato sull’attività che vanno svolgendo i nordamericani per la creazione di basi aeree nel Pacifico australe usando l’Australia quale base principale. Egli ha rilevato a questo punto che le analoghe attività dei giapponesi sono state più lente e perciò occorre riguadagnare terreno per stabilire saldamente la linea che va da Sumatra a Giava, a Timor, alla Nuova Guinea ed alle isole del Pacifico del Sud, inviando forze adeguate, il cui compito principale sia l’attacco anziché la difesa.
Ha ricordato quindi come allineando nuove basi il Giappone si assicuri una posizione strategica incrollabile che consentirà nuove operazioni. Il portavoce dell’esercito ha proseguito precisando che nonostante regni attualmente la calma sulla frontiera russo-mancese, l’armata nipponica del Kuantung, in previsione di cambiamenti nella situazione internazionale si prepara perfettamente a qualunque eventualità. Dopo aver aggiunto che l’attività dei sottomarini nemici nelle acque del Giappone incomincia a farsi sentire, Yahagi ha dichiarato che la guerra è entrata in una fase sostanziale, ma che la convinzione del popolo nipponico sulla vittoria fide è più che mai incrollabile.
Brooklyn Eagle (February 19, 1943)
Report Pope urged to leave Vatican
Writer sees removal to Brazil as motive of Spellman mission
By Michael Williams
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Rommel blasted by Allied fliers
British fan out along Mareth Line – U.S. forces regroup in Tunisia
Tunisian battle map
The direction of the German Afrika Korps Divisions, when they were causing U.S. troops to fall back in central Tunisia, is shown on this map. Solid arrows indicate gains made by the British 8th Army, which is threatening the Axis rear with an advance up to the Mareth Line, and also shows gains made by Rommel’s forces. Dotted arrows indicate probably objective of these two drives.
London, England (UP) –
Britain’s 8th Army is fanning out before the Mareth Line after capturing its southern outpost of Fum Tatawin and Allied planes are bombing German positions taken from the Americans around Fériana, Tunisian reports said today.
Marshal Erwin Rommel’s offensive in central Tunisia apparently had run its course, and his U.S. adversaries were regrouping in the rugger terrain west of the lost Fériana-Sbeitla line.
Signs mounted that Rommel was dissuaded from further undertakings on that front by the gathering threat to his rear in southern Tunisia. There the British veterans, after occupying Fum Tatawin yesterday, swung northward some miles to a point after halfway to Medenine, near the center of the Mareth forts.
Planes blast Fériana
Allied HQ, North Africa (UP) –
Allied planes blasted enemy positions around Fériana, a headquarters communiqué announced today, while battered U.S. forces regrouped themselves in the hills west of the Germans Fériana-Sbeitla line.
Ground fighting came to a standstill. The Germans were busy consolidating their position in the Fériana-Kasserine-Sbeitla triangle, and they were also concerned about the growing threat from the British 8th Army.
American and Allied planes, in addition to bombing the Fériana sector of Tunisia and made sweeps against roads over which the Axis was bringing up supplies.
Too few U.S. troops
It can be revealed now that the Americans’ difficulties in the battle of the last five days was caused by too few troops holding too long a line. Fragmentary reports from the front say the Americans fought well and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. But they also suffered heavily themselves.
The German Transocean News Agency said today that the Axis forces captured 2,800 prisoners in the occupation of Gafsa and Sbeitla. In addition, they seized 169 tanks, 95 armored scout cars, 96 guns and many other armored vehicles, the broadcast said.
It is clear now that the German VI tank is going to be a big factor in the impending battle for Tunisia. There are no armored vehicles on the Allied side in this theater of operations that are capable of matching it, and even the heavier anti-tank guns are finding the Mark VI to be a tough customer.
What the Germans have done in their offensive against the Americans is gain elbow room north of the Gabes bottleneck. It appears now that their next order of business will be to find out where and when they are going to have to fight Gen. Sir Bernard L. Montgomery’s tough British 8th Army, which chased them 1,400 miles across Libya.
Roosevelt vows U.S. will strike Jap mainland
He publicly promises Mme. Chiang that bases in China will be used
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7,500,000 Army goal to stand, says Roosevelt
1943 figure decided last August, he asserts – was never changed
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Fireman killed in new threat Seattle wreck
5 rescuers overcome while hunting bodies – 28 feared dead
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City plans big parade for French sailors
Mayor conferring on move to welcome crews at City Hall reception Tuesday
By Jack Ramsay
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Editorial: Mme. Chiang Kai-shek’s plea for aid will find response in hearts of U.S.
The plea for China made by Mme. Chiang Kai-shek before the Houses of Congress is sure to find a sympathetic hearing with the American public. American friendship for China goes deep and is long-standing. Nothing would please American hearts more than to extend to China all the aid that brave country needs to turn the tables on our common enemy.
It is true, as Mme. Chiang Kai-shek says, that too many Americans think Japan will be beaten easily after Hitler is defeated, but that erroneous belief in nowise will prevent those Americans from pressing the war against Japan to a victorious end. For better or worse, we are committed to defeat Hitler first. Until then we must hold Japan in check.
To allow China to slip into demoralization in the meantime would of course be tragic and is not to be thought of. The American people are not disposed to allow it to happen. Some people say it is impossible to render effective aid to China while we also aid Russia and Britain, and at the same time build up our own forces in many quarters of the globe. The only answer to that is that wars are won by those who accomplish the impossible. And that is what we must do. We must do more than the possible.
Editorial: Jefferson in 1943
A great deal of attention is just now being centered on Thomas Jefferson because the 200th anniversary of his birth will be celebrated this spring on April 13. We can think of no great American whose life and whose ideas fit so appropriately into these days of crisis through which the United States is now passing.
So, it is highly fitting that Americans of today have his life brought more vividly to their attention. And one of the most useful contributions to this end is the fine new play of Sgt. Sidney Kingsley, The Patriots.
It serves many useful purposes. It brings home to us that Jefferson’s ideas are deathless; that the freedoms for which we are contending are the very ones first enunciated by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and later and constantly reiterated by him. The play brings alive some of the burning issues of those most difficult days after we had won our Independence and were finding it so difficult to retain.
Possibly the most important truth hammered home by The Patriots is that freedom is no magic state that, once won, remains ours forever. It must be fought for constantly. That was Jefferson’s great mission.
Thank God that Americans of today came to realize that our freedoms and our democratic way of life were again in peril and have nobly met the crisis by fighting for their preservation in the same spirit as was shown by Americans of earlier generations.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 19, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
At the front in Tunisia – (Feb. 18)
The jeep in which I was riding was almost at the tail end of our immense armored convoy when we started, but before many hours and passed we had overtaken so many slow-moving vehicles that we worked our way well up into the convoy. As we droned along through the night it was hard to realize that we were part of such a fabulously long string of war machines. Vehicles stretched ahead of us for scores of miles, but of course we couldn’t see them, and our only companionship was five or six red taillights ahead of us. We all drove without headlights, but did have taillights so we could see when the fellow ahead was stopping.
Occasionally we would smoke, and I would light cigarettes for the others. We didn’t try to hide the flare of the match, for it was only a flash and then quickly gone. Once in a while we would overtake a truck with a dead engine, or a big wrecker towing a half-track. But our American machines are good ones, and of the hundreds of vehicles in that great convoy, only a handful had trouble during the long journey.
Our convoy was as complete as a circus. There were ammunition trucks, kitchens, repair shops, trucks carrying telephone switchboards and generators for camp lighting, trucks carrying bombs. There were jeeps carrying generals, and there were great wreckers capable of picking up a whole tank. It was quite a contrast to the Arabs we’d pass in the night, with their heavily loaded camels and burros.
The moon gave us enough light to drive by, but how the bulk of the convoy, which started long before the moon came up, ever got over the mountain range is beyond me. They had to drive in total blackness. Guides would go ahead to study the road. They spotted all the sharp turns and steep banks, and they would indicate the direction of traffic with their hooded flashlights.
About every hour and a half, we would stop for the truck driver’s traditional stretch. At one of these stops the drivers checked their mileage. We had been on the road three hours and come exactly 27 miles. Snaking a huge convoy over a mountain range in the dead of night is slow business.
But open country was ahead, and when we reached that we stepped up to 35 and 40 miles an hour. The night wind cut more cruelly now. We didn’t talk much, for it was too cold. My goggles kept steaming inside, and I would have to lift them off and wipe them. Finally, all of us except the drivers pulled blankets over our heads and dozed a little. But not much, for holes in the gravel roads were hard to see and often the jeep would do a backbreaking hurdle.
At the stops, the soldiers would get out and run up and down the road, or stand in one spot jitterbugging in an effort to warm their feet. The ones I felt sorriest for were the infantrymen, packed like sardines in open trucks with no protection from the bitter cold. It seems as if the infantry always gets it in the neck.
Several hours after midnight the convoy got itself into a ridiculous snarl. During a rest stop apparently some driver far ahead had gone to sleep and forgotten to start on again. We waited for half an hour. Then impatient drivers pulled out and started passing. That was fatal. The first thing we knew two lines of traffic choked the road. At every gully and every turn they would snarl up and one line would have to stop. Eventually it got just like those awful holiday jams at home where you move a few feet at a time.
I said to Capt. Riddleberger:
I’m amazed that such a thing could be allowed to happen. This strikes me as being the perfect way not to win the war.
He agreed, but I was sorry for my remarks later, for in an hour or so, everything straightened itself out. We were clear of the mountains now. We passed through silent little Arab villages, and drove across treeless prairies.
About 4 a.m., Riddleberger and I changed places with two soldiers riding in the back end of the truck ahead. We lay down on barracks bags and pulled blankets over us, thinking we’d snatch a little sleep. Pretty soon Riddleberger said:
These blankets smell so bad I can’t sleep.
Mine didn’t smell exactly like perfume either.
The captain said:
Well, hell. The poor guys never have a chance to take a bath.
Apparently, it didn’t occur to him that he and I never took baths either, I wonder how we smell to others.
My feet were so cold and achy that at last I took off my overshoes and shoes and held my cold toes in my hands, trying to warm them. After half an hour or so they quit hurting. Eventually I went to sleep. When I came to there was a faint light in the sky. It was just 7 o’clock. I had been dead to the world for two hours. It was hard to believe, for the truck had been jolting and bouncing and stopping and starting all that time. Weariness is a great cure for insomnia, or maybe I had been anesthetized by those blankets, who knows?