Dry-era warning sounded by Senator
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Snipers, mud can’t stop Yanks at Buna
‘Spray trees’ is order in Guinea as Japs keep up heavy fire
By George Weller
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British storm Nazi hill in rainstorm
2,000 shells pave way for Christmas Eve attack by Allies
By William H. Stoneman
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Enemy broadcast –
Tokyo radio claims Jap sub sinks U.S. sub
San Francisco, California (UP) –
Tokyo radio, quoting an Imperial Navy spokesman said today a Jap submarine sank a U.S. submarine off San Francisco Oct. 12 and a U.S. merchant ship of 10,000 tons off the Pacific Coast.
The broadcast quote Roe Hirata, a navy press representative presumably aboard the raider, as saying it met two U.S. submarines cruising toward San Francisco.
The Tokyo radio quoted from Hirata’s diary:
The captain of our submarine discharged a torpedo against the first enemy submarine. The crew said the enemy craft sank rapidly.
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First Axis night air raid on Algiers brings out the latest fashions in “sky nets” as tracer bullets and anti-aircraft shells stream up from the Allied-controlled North African city. Some damage was caused by the German bombers but casualties were slight. All recent raids on Algiers have been beaten off with little damage to the city.
Jap cruiser hit in Rabaul raid
MacArthur’s forces deepen wedge in New Guinea
By Brydon Taves, United Press staff writer
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News releases banned from Finnish Center
Washington (UP) –
The United States has ordered the Finnish Information Center in New York to cease issuance of news releases and Finland has ordered the U.S. Legation at Helsinki to stop sending out bulletins prepared by the Office of War Information, it was learned today.
The development, apparently reflecting tension in the relations between the two countries, followed recent publication of reports in this country of a party at the Japanese Legation in Helsinki on Dec. 7, anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, attended by Prime Minister J. W. Rangell and other Finnish government officials.
Aides of Giraud hold parleys at White House
Conference with President arranged as French unity is sought
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‘Hi ho, silver’ patrol terrifies Italians; 15 die, 21 quit
By Donald Coe, United Press staff writer
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Ferguson: Women in Congress
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
Clare Boothe Luce, newly-elected Congresswoman from Connecticut, is invariably described as beautiful, talented, witty and wealthy. The fact that she’s married to the notable publisher, Henry Luce, doesn’t exactly detract from her prestige.
Whenever Mrs. Luce appears, verbal skyrockets ascend. She’s that paradoxical event, a glamorous dynamo and she has already proved she can recognize and swat all the 57 varieties of social and political bunk that the frauds employ. Probably she’ll get into the hair of many a staid male House member who deals in platitudes, which is OK with us.
Six other women will be present when the new Congress opens in January. They’ll be on the spot for two reasons – because they are women, and because they constitute a Republican petticoat majority. Mrs. Mary Norton of New Jersey is the only democratic holdover.
This fact doesn’t mean much to the average woman voter. As a rule, we are not partisan. Except for a few in the Deep South, American women are uninhibited by family political tradition. But it does matter to us that our sex is in a position to prove the equality of the feminine mind in affairs of government and that we shall be able to inject some feminine thinking into national and international issues.
It isn’t too early to impress upon these women that they represent something more important than their constituents. They represent womanhood in a new job. Therefore, in creating government policies, their outlook should be fresh and their approach bold.
They are quite literally making history, and upon their conduct and wisdom much of the future destiny of women in politics may depend. For them, and for us, their election is an opportunity and a test.
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Oran, Algeria – (by wireless)
Yesterday, I survived a tour of 150 miles in a jeep.
After 150 miles in a jeep, it takes you 24 hours to stop vibrating. At the hospitals, they tell me they’ve had soldiers down in bed after riding all day in a jeep. So, I feel pretty tough and proud of myself.
We made a grand tour of American camps. I went along with a couple of security officers whose job it is to set up and supervise security detachments in each camp. By security is meant keeping silent about military secrets, and watching for snakes in the grass such as Axis sympathizers and agents.
The security officers have a terrible job because they say Americans simply aren’t security-minded – we won’t keep our mouths shut, and we insist on trusting everybody. They say the French practice better security in peacetime than we do in wartime.
We stopped at the first airport and I ran into some of my fighter-pilot friends that I wrote about from Northern Ireland.
One of them had an arm in a cast. I immediately visualized a good thriller column, but it turned out he had merely fallen off the wing of his plane and broken his arm, the unromantic cur.
Then we stopped at an anti-aircraft gun set in a hole in the ground, and talked to Sgt. John Muir of Chicago. He said that if those Spitfires flying about 2,000 feet overhead were enemy planes, they would be dead ducks.
Helmet serves as foot bath
Afterwards we hit a big tent hospital, just being set up. There I ran onto Lt. Dick Alter and Nurse Katie Bastadiho, both of New York, who came down on the same boat with us. They’re all crazy about living out under canvas. Katie says she has been washing her feet in her steel helmet and it turns out her feet are bigger than her head.
We made quick stops at a supply depot full of railroad rails and at an engineering company that is building some roads. Finally, we would sit up at Sidi Bel Abbès, home of the famous Foreign Legion. Somehow or other, we got acquainted with a Maj. Fuzeau of the Foreign Legion and sat with him for an hour at a sidewalk café though the major spoke no English and we no French, at least hardly any.
We spent the first 15 minutes asking the major such primary questions as how old he was, whether he was married, how long he had been in the Legion, and what his native city was. That exhausted our vocabulary, so we spent the next 45 minutes complimenting each other for our hospitality, extending hands across the sea, touching our hearts, and recalling wonderful Franco-American incidents of the last war.
The reason I knew we were doing this is that the major kept saying, “quatorze-dix-huit,” which I happen to know means “fourteen-eighteen,” and those of course were the war years. We just assumed from his gestures that he was telling us brother-love incidents.
Frenchmen learn our tanks
On the way back, we put in at a place where American tank crews are teaching Frenchmen to run our tanks. They are camped way out on a sloping hillside, on ground covered with sagebrush exactly like hillsides in the American West. The tank boys work from daylight to dark when they’re on the move. They work all night, too, for the ground crews haven’t arrived and they have to do their own repairing.
They are really roughing it. It’s cold out there at night, and they sit around bonfires before going to bed in their little tents.
They were the first troops into Oran, but they’re never been back to the city since. For some reason, they aren’t allowed to go there on leave. Even their officers think it’s ironic that they captured the city and now can’t go into it.
It was long after dark when I left the tank boys. Fortunately, there is no blackout here and you can drive with headlights on. Even so, we almost spilled ourselves a couple of times shying around Arabs who looked up suddenly with immense bundles of sticks on their backs.
We lurched back to Oran at 50 miles an hour, deeply windburned and feeling exactly like men who had seen practically all there was to see. Yet we hadn’t seen the tiniest fraction of what we have actually got around here.
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Our ‘poorhouse in the Caribbean’ –
Puerto Rico is rich in sugar but million persons are starving now!
Unbalanced economy, with dependence on one crop, means misery and squalor for half of population of vital U.S. island
By S. Burton Heath, special to the Pittsburgh Press
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EXECUTIVE ORDER 9291
Authorizing the Procurement Division of the Treasury Department to use block mica acqu"ired pursuant to the Act of June 7, 1939
Whereas the Procurement Division of the Treasury Department has acquired by purchase pursuant to the provisions of the Act of June 7, 1939, 53 Stat. 811, stocks of block mica suitable for the manufacture of military products required for the successful prosecution of the war; and
Whereas the Chairman of the War Production Board has reported to me that a shortage of block mica for use in the manufacture of military products required for the successful prosecution of the war is imminent;
Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States by Section 4 of the said Act of June 7, 1939, it is ordered as follows:
The Procurement Division of the Treasury Department is hereby authorized and directed to make use of the stocks of such block mica which it had in stock on November 30, 1942, by transferring such stocks to the Metals Reserve Company, a corporation organized under section 5(d) of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation Act, as amended, upon such terms of sale as may be mutually agreeable to the Procurement Division and the Metals Reserve Company; and the Metals Reserve Company is hereby authorized and directed to use and dispose of such mica, by sale or otherwise, as the Chairman of the War Production Board shall direct.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
The White House
December 29, 1942
U.S. Navy Department (December 30, 1942)
Communiqué No. 233
South Pacific.
On December 27:
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Army and Marine Corps troops on Guadalcanal Island killed 114 Japanese in patrol skirmishes with the enemy. U.S. casualties during these encounters were 2 killed.
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U.S. Marines, in an exchange of artillery and mortar fire destroyed an enemy mortar, a machine gun position, and killed between 30 and 40 Japanese. The Marines later ambushed and killed 11 more of the enemy. Marine casualties were 2 killed and 1 wounded.
On December 29, U.S. planes made two attacks on enemy cargo vessels in Wickham Anchorage on the southeast coast of Vangunu Island in the New Georgia group of the Solomons. Bombing and strafing resulted in the sinking of two of the enemy vessels.
The Pittsburgh Press (December 30, 1942)
Bulletin
London, England –
U.S. heavy bombers attacked the German submarine base at Lorient this afternoon, a joint communiqué of the U.S. Army and the British Air Ministry said. Formations of enemy fighters were fought off and a number were destroyed. Three U.S. bombers are missing.
Allied planes rake Tunisia
Axis port, supply columns blasted ceaselessly
By Edward W. Beatie, United Press staff writer
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