Planning board suggests U.S. enter business
Proposal calls for government to participate in basic industries
By Merriman Smith, United Press staff writer
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Taxing committee labors and brings forth a mouse
Despite Roosevelt, Treasury and Rayburn, House group skips pay-as-you-go provisions
By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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Almost third of Japs’ ships already sunk
Knox puts merchant fleet losses of enemy at 1,857,000 tons
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Editorial: MacArthur needs more
Gen. MacArthur on his first anniversary in Australia appealed to President Roosevelt for more ships and planes. His air commander, Gen. Kenney, and his Chief of Staff, Gen. Sutherland, were received yesterday at the White House.
Presumably, Gen. MacArthur would not have sent to Washington these officers needed at the front unless other methods of obtaining reinforcements had failed.
The kind of “holding” strategy forced on Gen. MacArthur and Adm. Halsey by the small strength available in the south Pacific can be much more expensive in the long run than a properly directed offensive. If a slight increase in Allied strength now could win us Rabaul, the chief enemy base in the South Pacific, that would be cheaper than providing the larger Allied defensive force required to meet a major Jap offensive later. As it is, the enemy with his small advantage is able to tie up Allied forces at many points because we lack the edge to take the initiative.
Gens. Kenney and Sutherland speak with the authority of commanders who have proved threat ability to accomplish much with little. Arms sent to them will not be wasted.
Of course, the President is only too anxious to give gen. MacArthur and Adm. Halsey any supplies not pledged elsewhere. But there is the rub. He has been under similar pressure from other directions.
Responsible for global strategy, he can no more neglect Tunisia than the Pacific. And it is not easy for the President to give Gen. MacArthur more when the Russians need help, with the anti-submarine campaign on in the Atlantic, with a round-the-clock bombing offensive over Europe and when an Allied invasion of Europe is planned.
But our guess is that the Commander-in-Chief somehow will manage to find more planes for the South Pacific and also for China. We hope he can.
Ferguson: Airpower and our future
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
Maybe it’s because I’m a woman, but as I listened to Maj. Alexander Seversky on “The Future of Airpower,” I felt all shriveled up inside. Perhaps, I felt, the life of a beetle under its rock wouldn’t be so bad.
Certainly, in the kind of a future he pictured, human life isn’t going to be so good. With every major nation straining every facility to outdo the others in manufacture of bigger planes and bombs, it will be impossible and rather silly to boast about progress.
The technicians are valuable in such times as these, and I suppose we’d be sunk without them. I only hope, however, there will be ways to make them pipe down when the worst is over.
Is God just an old word we remember out of a Book? Perhaps, as Leslie D. Weatherhead, the great British preacher whose books are published in our country by Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, says in This Is the Victory:
We had better not think of God at all until we can base our actions upon His plans.
After the war, what will we do with these horrible toys we’ve played with? What direction will humanity take? Toward bigger and more awful wars, or toward the building of some mechanism for peace?
Dr. Weatherhead continues:
The invention of the airplane is without moral significance. Everything depends upon the use we make of it. We can take little pride in the annihilation of distance and the ingenuity of men when we think of the errand of the bombing airplane. A good man on horseback is a better symbol of progress than a bad man in a plane. Civilization is a vast and complicated structure. We cannot build it on physical force. That is too shaky. When spiritual responsibility does not keep pace with material discovery and invention, true progress ceases.
To that can we not all say a loud “Amen”?
China-America air hitchhike takes 29 days
Trip along U.S. supply line is good lesson in geography
By A. T. Steele
Chicago, Illinois –
It has taken me 29 days to hitchhike 15,000 miles along the longest aerial supply line in the world – the U.S. Army’s zigzag skyway between Chungking, China, and the United States. It was no record. The trip has been made by others in as little as six days. But it was a journey not lacking in exciting moments. And as a short-term lesson in geography, it was unsurpassed.
You’ve got to take a trip like this to appreciate the truth of the wartime saying that “the sun never sets on the American Army.” I hitched rides on eight different planes and landed in a score of airports, each with its American ground crews and its American installations.
Doing swell job
Uncle Sam’s Air Transport Command, whose job it is to push airplanes across the Atlantic to the battlefronts of Russia, Africa, India and China, is doing an extraordinarily difficult job with growing efficiency. There are losses en route – perhaps more than Americans realize – but the population is small in relation to the whole. The great majority of these aircraft are going, of course, to Africa and Russia.
I was interested, though, to meet numbers of transports and pilots bound for China – proof that the promise made to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of a stepping-up in the volume of airborne supplies is on the way to fulfillment.
It is a stirring experience to stand, at dusk, in the African bush, on the African coast, or on a speck of land in the Atlantic and watch these armadas of new planes come in through the equatorial sunset. By nightfall, at most airdromes, billeting facilities were jammed to overflowing with arriving pilots.
Weather is good
We were lucky to have perfect flying weather on the first stage of our journey from China to India. This 500-mile jump across the Himalayan barrier can be the dirtiest stretch of transport flying in the world when the barometer hangs low. Then we crossed India.
From India, we had a long hop across the Arabian Sea and came down to a brief landing on an airfield built on the glaring sands of Arabia. From the cool upper air, Arabia is a fairyland, with its naked tumbling hills, its oceans of sand, its silver and turquoise shoreline and its occasional villages, which, in their sandy setting, have a bleached ghostly quality.
Five minutes after landing in the Arabian airport, I would have sold my interest in the country for a nickel. Emerging from our airplane, we were hit by a blast of sunshine which had the penetrating power of an X-ray. The reception committee consisted of several American airport attendants, stripped to the waist and as brown as Indians, and a trio of robed Arabs carrying antiquated guns in their hands and silver-sheathed knives on their belts.
Guard planes
I asked the Americans:
Who are your friends?
A soldier with an Alabama accent volunteered:
These are from the Sultan’s army. They guard our planes.
We were conducted to a mess tent shimmering in the desert heat. A table was lined on one side with piles of American canned goods. It was a first-class meal and 100% American from start to finish.
A couple of hops later, we were in Italian East Africa. Here again, the Yanks were very much in evidence, and so were the Italians. Italian prisoners of war – those who preferred work and income to staying behind a barbed-wire fence – were employed in numerous capacities around the American air base.
Serve as chauffeurs
Some served as chauffeurs, some as skilled laborers, some as cooks and waiters. There were even Italian barbers. However, while the Americans are allowed the luxury of Italian haircuts and shampoos, they are obliged to shave themselves. It is against the rules for the Italians to use razors on the Yanks.
In the airport cafeteria, excellent food was dished out by a row of smiling white-aproned Italians, under American supervisors. The Italians seem fairly content and glad to be out of the war. They get along with the Americans, less well with the English.
We flew on then across the waist of Africa toward the Atlantic coast. Below us sped the brown wilderness of the Sudan. This plateau land of desert and brush and thorn trees forms a wide belt from one side of Africa to the other. It is broken occasionally by low ranges of hills, weird pinnacles of rock and tiny villages of circular, thatch-roofed huts – each looking like the next.
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Bombers blast Rabaul Airport
Many Jap planes caught on ground by Allies
By Don Caswell, United Press staff writer
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Allies feed Algerian district picked clean by Axis
By C. R. Cunningham, United Press staff writer
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Lady Astor resents idea of Eden kissing
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MacArthur wins cheers from Australian House
Canberra, Australia (UP) –
Amid loud applause, Premier John Curtin told the House of Representatives today:
Had Gen. Douglas MacArthur been Australian-born and served in the Australian Army, he could have done no more for the defense of Australia than he has.
Referring to the anniversary of Gen. MacArthur’s arrival, Mr. Curtin added:
MacArthur has not only been a great organizer but his presence here has been an inspiring force to this nation.
Japs claim sinkings
London, England –
Radio Tokyo said today that Jap forces sank six enemy submarines between March 6 and March 11. It added that two Jap seaplanes were lost during the same period.
Merger of two aircraft firms wins approval
Unification of Consolidated, Vultee seen speeding plane output
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Eastman Kodak makes refund to government
Renegotiation of contracts brings U.S. $14 million
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In North Africa –
The other night I met Lt. Col. William Clark, a great, tall, gaunt man from Princeton, New Jersey. Since the war started, he has been in Australia, Africa, and twice in England. He was in France in the last war, and personally I think he‘s having the time of his life in this one. Col. Clark is a bigshot back home. He’s judge of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. He’s the guy who declared the Prohibition Amendment unconstitutional. It’s beyond his powers, however, to create much drinkin’ likker in this part of the world.
Judge Clark is liaison officer with the British Army in Tunisia, right up where everything is hottest. He asked me if I’d put his name in the paper so his family would know he was all right. I said sure, and asked him what he wanted me to say about him.
He said:
Oh, just say you met the damned old fool.
The average American soldier has been without eggs for a long time, and I for one can testify that we miss them very much. The problem has been alleviated somewhat here on the desert. It seems the Arabs have eggs, so we go around and buy them up. We foolish Americans have already raised the price to five francs apiece (about seven cents), but what do we care? Everybody has too much money anyhow, and when you reach our state, an egg is practically golden.
Two egg orgies in a week
I’ve been on two egg orgies within a week. One night Maj. Austin Berry, of Belding, Michigan, bought 29 eggs from an Arab. Maj. Berry is a young squadron leader, and he has an appetite. We took the eggs to an Army kitchen and had them scrambled. Then Maj. Charles E. Coverley, Capt. Jack Traylor, Maj. Berry and myself ate all 29 eggs at one sitting, with nothing else whatever to go with them. That’s an average of better than seven eggs apiece. True, I woke up at 2 a.m. with a historic stomach-ache, but what of it?
Undeterred, I tried it again three days later. Two of my Flying Fortress friends came past about 11 in the morning, and we went to the village market and scoured around sort of speakeasy-like until we found a guy with some eggs. We bought two dozen.
My fellow gourmands were Lt. Bill Cody, of 1001 Oakwood Ave., Wilmette, Illinois, a bomber pilot, and Lt. Bob Wollard, of Clovis, New Mexico, a bombardier. We had the cook hard-boil them and then we went to my quarters and gorged ourselves. The three of us ate 24 eggs and 20 tangerines in half an hour flat. I’m getting this all down on paper quickly before the spasms set in.
Way back in Oran, a soldier was telling me a funny experience he had. He was WO Luke Corrigan, of 816 Hemlock St., Scranton, Pennsylvania. It seems that a large bunch of American nurses were headed for the front and had to be outfitted in short order.
He meets Scranton neighbor
Now Corrigan is in charge of one of the Army’s big warehouses, so it was his job to outfit the nurses. But Army warehouses, it seems, don’t carry such things as slips, step-ins, brassieres, and what not. So, Corrigan had to get himself an interpreter and go blushing all over Oran buying up dozens of those feminine items.
He completed his mission, and dashed to the train just before departure time. One nurse saw what he had, and grabbed at a box. Then others grabbed. The boxes flew open, and the first thing Corrigan knew he looked like a Christmas tree very much bedecked with panties, undies, and other pink unmentionables. He was very ill at ease. And just at that moment, he heard a familiar voice saying:
Well, Luke, I’ll have to write home and tell your mother how you’re fighting the war.
He turned around and it was a Scranton girl who lives just a few blocks from him at home. Her name was Helen Jeffers and she was a nurse too. Luke has been in the Army two years and in all that time Helen Jeffers is the only person from home he’s ever run into. And she had to find him like that.
All ain’t fair in peace or war.
U.S. Navy Department (March 19, 1943)
Communiqué No. 317
South Pacific.
On March 18:
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U.S. Army Flying Fortresses (Boeing B‑17) carried out minor attacks against Japanese positions at Kahili and Ballale in the Shortland Island area and at Vila in the central Solomons. Results were not observed.
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In the afternoon, a force of Dauntless dive bombers (Douglas), escorted by Wildcat fighters (Grumman F4F), bombed Vila in the central Solomons and started a fire.
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All U.S. planes returned from these operations.
The Pittsburgh Press (March 19, 1943)
YANKS TAKE SECOND AXIS BASE
Americans throw 3 divisions into drive for coast
Twin columns advance 44 miles in rain and mud in 2 days – British lose town in north
By Virgil Pinkley, United Press staff writer
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U-boat yards hit in biggest Yank bombing
1,000-pounders hit right on targets in daylight raid near Bremen
By Walter Cronkite, United Press staff writer
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