Editorial: J. P. Morgan
…
Woman photographer on bombing mission
Margaret Bourke-White tells Sewickley Club group of thrilling experience over Tunisia with U.S. airmen
By Anne Weiss
The first woman to accompany a bombing crew bent on the grim business of putting a major Axis airfield out of commission in Tunisia, Margaret Bourke-White, ace photographer, recounted her thrilling experience before the Sewickley Valley Woman’s Club yesterday at the Edgeworth Club.
But thrilling adventures are nothing to this slight, brown-haired woman who, for the duration, has given up her internationally-famous photographic studio to follow the American armies up to the very battle lines in various parts of the world.
An accredited war correspondent with the U.S. 8th Air Force, she has been “shooting the war” with her camera for Life Magazine. She arrived in Great Britain in August 1941, and later was transferred to the 12th Air Force and sailed for North Africa.
The British transport on which she sailed, carrying officers, nurses and hundreds of British soldiers, was torpedoed off the coast of Africa and its survivors drifted in lifeboats more than eight hours before being rescued.
Miss Bourke-White said:
While I lost much of my valuable equipment, I was able to save two small cameras and film, and though we sat in water up to our waists in a lifeboat, I managed to make a few good camera shots.
Working with the Flying Fortresses and bomber command in North Africa, it was not uncommon to eat meals in open dugouts while Nazi planes strafed the ground much too close for comfort. I practically lived in my helmet while in the field – which was about the entire time.
I talked with Ernie Pyle, your Scripps-Howard correspondent, every day for a week while in Tunisia.
Recalling her trip with the bomber crew, she said:
It is thrilling to fly in a bomber some six miles above the earth with the temperature at something like -40º. And you know death can be a matter of minutes when flying even four miles up if your oxygen supply is not properly used.
Targets are always a secret when on a bomber mission. Ours turned out to be an airfield in Tunis held by the Axis. Camera shots I made disclosed that we were quite successful, setting large fires, damaging more than 100 planes and destroying 40 on the ground in addition to shooting down three Messerschmitts which attacked us and hit our right wing. Our B-17s – 30 of them – and 24 fighting planes which took part in the raid all returned safely.
After six weeks in North Africa, Miss Bourke-White flew across the Sahara Desert, then over the South Atlantic to South America and home. She has been in the United States a little more than a month and plans to return to war duty following a brief lecture tour.
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Algiers, Algeria – (March 15)
The staff of the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes, now being published in Africa, as well as in England, is probably the most compact little family among all our troops abroad. By sticking together and using their noodles, they’ve just about whipped the miseries of African life.
There are 18 of them. Their big boss is Lt. Col. Egbert White, a gray-haired, lovable man who speaks quietly and makes sure that the boys under him are well cared for. Col. White, incidentally, spent a week at the front recently, wandered around until he got behind the German lines, and got himself shot at.
The actual working editor of Stars and Stripes in Africa is Lt. Bob Neville, who was promoted recently from sergeant. Like all others who have been commissioned in the field, he’s had a terrible time getting himself an officer’s uniform. Col. White gave him a blouse, which fits perfectly. A correspondent gave him a cap. He bought a pair of pants from another officer. He picked up his bars here, there, and everywhere. He cut the stripes off his overcoat and pretends it’s from Burberry’s. But, as somebody has already said, the rules at the front are pretty elastic, and how you look doesn’t matter much.
The Stars and Stripes has its editorial offices in the Red Cross building, a beautiful brand-new structure of six stories in downtown Algiers. It’s just as modem as New York, except the acoustics engineer was insane, and if you drop a pin on the first floor, it sounds on the fifth floor like New Year’s Eve in a boiler shop.
They’ve licked the cold too
The staff of the Stars and Stripes works and lives in this building. On the top floor, they have a huge front room, which serves as both dormitory and clubroom. At first, they were sleeping on the hard tile floor. Later, the Red Cross dug up French iron cots for them, so now they’re almost as comfortable as at home.
They have big steel cupboards to use as shelves, and a large table where they write letters and play cards. There’s always a huge basket of tangerines sitting on the table. The windows are blackened out so they can have lights at night. They’ve bought an oil stove, so they have the unspeakable winter climate whipped and tied.
A dozen of the staff write and edit the paper, half a dozen do the mechanical work. They have made an arrangement with a local newspaper for using its composing room. But the American soldiers do all their own mechanical work.
There are four linotype operators on the staff. The boss is Pvt. Irving Levinson, of Stamford, Connecticut. He is a good-natured genius at getting work done in a foreign country.
He has to get out a paper in a French composing room in which not a soul speaks English, and Irv speaks not a word of French. But his native good humor works so well that within two weeks all the French printers were addressing him by the familiar “tu,” they were having him out to their homes for dinner, and the paper was coming out regularly.
Pvt. Wentzel has permanent job
Two of the other lino operators were Pfc. William Gigente, of Brooklyn, and Cpl. Edward Roseman, of Pleasantville, New Jersey. The fourth is Pvt. Jack Wentzel of Philadelphia, and his is the funniest case of all. He hasn’t run a linotype since he joined the staff of Stars and Stripes. He’s been too busy cooking.
Pvt. Wentzel never cooked a meal in his life, outside of helping his mother a little when he was a kid. But the Stars and Stripes decided to set up its own mess right in its own building, and by drawing straws or something. Pvt. Wentzel became the cook.
Before many meals passed, the staff discovered they had a culinary wizard in their midst. Wentzel sort of liked it himself. So, by acclamation they made him permanent cook.
Now the three other linotype operators work overtime, doing his composing-room work for him, so he can remain as cook. As they say, it isn’t quite in line with union rules, but right now they don’t happen to be under union jurisdiction.
At any rate, the staff contributes to the mess fund out of their own pockets, for various local delicacies in addition to the Regular Army rations. So, they wind up with what is unquestionably the best Army mess in the Algiers area. The food is so good that Lt. Neville and Capt. Harry Harchar, the circulation manager, who are supposed to eat at some officers’ mess, eat most of their meals with the men instead.
The whole shebang is about the nearest thing in spirit to a genuine newspaper office back home that I can conceive of.
Clapper: Womanpower
By Raymond Clapper
Washington –
There is another angle to the question of manpower. Can we afford to waste medical skill when it is so limited?
Many communities have been stripped of their physicians. Yet it is not enough. The War Department announces that 9,000 more physicians must be taken from civilian life this year. Approximately a third of them will be used as internees and hospital residents.
In California, a friend of mine visited an Army hospital. Only a portion of the beds were occupied. My friend found on duty there a prominent child specialist serving now as a major in the Army Medical Corps. He was putting in a very light day’s work largely in an administrative capacity around the hospital.
Yet in the small town nearby, not a single physician is left. Under Army regulations, the residents cannot be treated at the Army hospital, although it has the most modern X-ray and other equipment standing idle much of the time, and a staff of fine physicians with little to do. Some of them would not only be glad perhaps to handle obstetrical cases in that nearby community in order to keep themselves in training for a return to civilian practice, but this would be a very much needed service to the community.
An unemployed Army
However, there may be sound reasons for the regulations and I am not arguing that so much as I am asking questions as to whether we are making the best use of our medical skill in this emergency.
Here is one question about women doctors. The Army needs 9,000 physicians this year. But not a single one of them will be a woman doctor. Yet there are 8,000 women physicians and surgeons in the country.
Secretary of War Stimson has a niece, Dr. Barbara Stimson, who is an orthopedic surgeon. She went into the British Medical Corps and was promoted to be a major. But she was unable to obtain a commission in the American Army.
The Army Medical Corps is not to be blamed for the refusal to use women physicians except perhaps in that it has not been aggressive in trying to do something about it. The barrier has been created – and accepted complacently by the Army – through a ruling of the Comptroller General to the effect that the law permitting the President to commission “qualified persons” for service in the Army does not apply to women. Legislation is necessary to change this ruling that women are not persons.
The American Legion and numerous medical societies have urged the use of women physicians in the Armed Forces. There are hundreds of women physicians and surgeons with special skills in the fields of surgery, anesthesia, pathology, bacteriology, blood bank work, psychiatry and general medicine. Those are just the kind of physicians that the Army could use.
It’s not a Victorian war
Canada and Australia take women into their medical corps without distinction. It is very much the same in England. The Russian Army makes no distinction between men and women physicians.
There is no reason in common sense why a woman physician can’t go anywhere that a woman Army nurse can go. We have the Army taking a number of physicians out of civilian life this year that is larger than the total number of women doctors in the country. In such a stringency, it seems foolish to consider doctors on a basis of sex instead of skill and specialty.
Why should not physicians, whether men or women, be considered as one pool and be distributed either in the Army or in civilian life according to the most effective use of their particular specialties?
1 Like
U.S. Navy Department (March 17, 1943)
Communiqué No. 314
North Pacific.
On March 15, heavy and medium Army bombers, with Lightning (Lockheed P‑38) and Warhawk (Curtiss P‑40) support, carried out six heavy bombing attacks on Japanese installations at Kiska. Results were not reported.
South Pacific.
During the night of March 15‑16, light naval surface forces bombarded Japanese positions at Vila on the southeast coast of Kolombangara Island. Good results were reported and no casualties were suffered by our forces.
On March 16:
-
During the early morning Army Flying Fortresses (Boeing B‑17) harassed enemy positions at Kahili and Buka in the Bougainville area and at Munda on New Georgia Island.
-
Later in the morning Dauntless dive bombers (Douglas), with Wildcat escort (Grumman F4F), attacked enemy positions at Vila. Results were not reported.
-
Later in the day Lightning fighters strafed shore positions in the vicinity of Viru Harbor on New Georgia Island.
Communiqué No. 315
North Atlantic.
During the latter part of February, the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter CAMPBELL (WPG-32), while operating as a convoy escort in the North Atlantic, encountered and sank a German submarine. The CAMPBELL sighted the submarine on the surface and a collision course was set to ram her. The CAMPBELL bore down on the submarine and opened fire with her deck guns.
The submarine was hit a glancing blow by the CAMPBELL and drifted clear of the cutter following the collision. Several rounds were fired into the submarine at point blank range and the submarine settled slowly by the stern and sank. The collision tore the side plating of the CAMPBELL and she was left partially flooded and without power of electricity.
In order to lighten the CAMPBELL as much as possible a number of her crew were transferred to the Polish destroyer BURZA which had been standing by to assist. The crew members from the CAMPBELL were provided quarters aboard the BURZA until landed at an Atlantic port.
The CAMPBELL has since been towed to an Atlantic port for repairs.
The Pittsburgh Press (March 17, 1943)
U.S. WARSHIPS BLAST JAPS IN SOLOMONS
Fliers attack Kiska 6 times in single day
Blows may presage new and important action in Pacific War
…
Only five of 15,000 Japs survive sinking of convoy
Hundred reached shore after Bismarck Sea attacks, but most of them were rounded up, Davis reports
…
I DARE SAY —
Parrygraphs
By Florence Fisher Parry
How long ago it seems when the President told us that we should not lose one social gain, come war… What now?.. Feed the world and have our cake too? Ah millennium, how you do elude us!
Heaven knows we need to sell war bonds; but whenever I see a news picture of some nice modest factor in his community blushing under the photo-flash of a news photographer who has just “snapped” him kissing some glamor girl on a war bond kissing tour (a kiss for every $100 bond!) – it disgusts me.
Surely, we can combine dignity with our war bond sales.
Now might be a good time to reread that excellent compilation, the Complete Works of Stephen Vincent Benét. We have lost too many good writers this year. Erie Knight and Stephen Vincent Benét would have been my very choice to set down, imperishably, after the melee, the terrible odor of its smoke…
Benét did not feel himself qualified. He said, shortly before his death:
I’m 44. I haven’t been in it. I won’t have had the experience to write about it… It will be written out of the emotion created in the hearts of the men who have seen it.
I do not agree. Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage. And Benét himself, steeped in the history he pored over in the library of his Army father, set down one of the most vivid pictures of the Civil War ever to stand among the classics of our literature.
High flight
How many of our sons are now in the Air Force? And do you think for a moment that these men will return, come peace, and keep for long their feet upon the ground, having known high flight?
Besides, the blueprint for the future charts the stratosphere, and those of us still earthbound will be speaking a dead language, not understanding the brave new idiom of our sons.
Shall we let the war end, then, without trying to learn at least its primer?
Here are some good books; I think all of us with sons or husbands in the Air Force should saturate themselves with their reading:
Primer for parents of bombers: John Steinbeck’s Bombs Away, factual and accurate, with a preface that will make the mothers and fathers of these sons proud!
Both of Exupéry’s induplicable prose-poems, Wind, Sand and Stars and Flight to Arras. (I am of the mind that these two books constitute the most thrilling contribution that literature will procure out of this war).
A remarkably good compilation of “flight” reading, gleaned from almost all the really articulate fliers, and called (inadequately enough) Happy Landings. For they are not all happy landings. The book contains terror as well as ecstasy, and horror beyond imagining. But when you have done reading it, you will comprehend far better than before, the restless questing soul of your son – when he returns and tries to live without wings.
Mill ends
I am glad Gen. MacArthur’s men came back with their insect exterminators and sprayed their flit over the Jap survivors. That’ll show ‘em, maybe, that were not as tender-hearted a people as they thought we were.
What a long and terrifying way we have come, we who by nature wouldn’t hurt a fly!
Well, I see by the papers they popped the question to the President – rather obliquely, to be sure, but the question. What did the President think about what his party people thought about 1944?
To which the President, this time, did not recommend a dunce’s cap and a dunce’s corner. He just parried. And when our President parries, he PARRIES. He didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no, he just looked irritated. Oh, for a man who cleaves an issue with an explosive YES or NO!
that seems highly unlikely
1 Like
U.S. imposes ban on candy Easter eggs
Substitutes still undecided, but the hens will give usual help
…