Allied bomber wrecks large Jap freighter
Australian warns enemy has bases ready for 2,000 planes
By Don Caswell, United Press staff writer
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Jap bases in Solomons hit in five bomb attacks
Washington (UP) –
The Navy today reported five U.S. air attacks on Jap positions on the Solomons, including two on Munda, where three grounded planes were set afire and anti-aircraft guns silenced.
All U.S. planes returned from the mission.
The two raids on Munda raised to 111 the total of air attacks on that central Solomons base since late in November.
Ferguson: Farm wives
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
I have said before and I say again: the home group best serving its country is made up of our farm women. They get the least attention, but on the whole are too busy to notice it.
Those people who are rooted in the good earth have certain fine qualities of soul which are often lacking in the rest of us. Farm women are thrifty, practical, kind, and uncomplaining. As proof, I offer here parts of letters from two farm wives of New York State:
Mrs. Howard Bliss, of Bainbridge, New York:
We will have a larger garden than ever this year. On account of the draft, production of our farm will be cut one half or more. During haying and harvesting, I fill the job of extra man, driving horse, or hay fork, or running the silage cutter at silo filling time. I feel that much of this shortage of food could have been prevented if the farmers’ prices had been increased as organized labor wages have – instead of paying us subsidies, which no farmer wants and which are of no benefit in the long run.
Mrs. Clarence J. Sutter, of South Dayton, New York, writes:
Farm women today are facing many varied problems with the good sense and vim that characterized their grandmothers. After each of our sons goes, more work is undertaken by us, their mothers. Behind our tears is a fierce determination to produce more food for those brave sons. Farmers are not grafters, as so many city papers would have one believe, but are we not also entitled to enough for our work to educate our sons and daughters and to live as other people do? Why are farm prices the first to go down and the last to rise?
The right of free men to produce food without subsidy, a price for that food which in some manner compensates for the labor and expense of producing it, the cutting of all this needless red tape and governmental regulations which now hamper us – assure us of these things and then watch our smoke.
Background of news –
Poison gas
By editorial research reports
The near future will tell whether one expected horror of World War II – gas bombardment of cities from the air – has moved forward or has been delayed by the official British warning of April 22 that any use of poison gas by Germany on the Russian front:
…will immediately be followed by the fullest possible use of this process of war upon the German munitions centers, seaports and other military objectives throughout the whole extent of Germany.
Great Britain’s threat of retaliation for any use of poison gas against its Russian ally followed reports from Moscow telling of the capture of German documents which showed preparations to employ gas against Soviet forces on one of the Russian fronts. The new British warning to Hitler came on the 28th anniversary of the first use of poison gas by the Germans in World War I.
At 5 o’clock on the afternoon of April 22, 1915, artillery observers noticed a bank of greenish vapor moving from the German trenches toward the British and Canadian lines around Ypres in Belgium. The vapor, rolled by a breeze, came along a front of four miles. The French had been warned by prisoners and deserters that the Germans were preparing to use asphyxiating gases, but the British High Command was incredulous.
Sir John French, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, later wrote:
It was at first impossible for anyone to realize what had actually happened. The smoke and fumes hid everything from sight and hundreds of men were thrown into a comatose or dying condition, and within an hour the whole position had to be abandoned.
The German High Command appears to have been surprised at the success with which the gas (chlorine) was used, and was not prepared to follow up the breakthrough.
Later in April, gas was used by the Germans against the Russians on the Eastern Front.
Canadian soldiers found that a wet handkerchief over the face gave some protection against the gas, and the first gas masks were received by British forces in mid-May. Improvements in the masks gave adequate protection against chlorine and most of the other gases developed during World War I.
Charges have appeared from time to time that the Germans have used gas against Russian forces and Yugoslav insurgents in the present war and that the Japanese have employed it against the Chinese. In a radio address on May 10, 1942, Winston Churchill said the Nazis in the description of their assault might “make use of poison gas against the armies and people of Russia.” He went on to say that the British government, while firmly resolved not to employ this weapon unless it was used first by the enemy, had not neglected to make preparations “on a formidable scale.”
President Roosevelt said in a formal statement on June 5, 1942, that the U.S. government had received “authoritative reports” that Japanese forces were using poison gas in various localities of China. He added:
I desire to make it unmistakably clear that, if Japan persists in this inhuman form of warfare against China or against any other of the United Nations, such action will be regarded by this government as though taken against the United States, and retaliation in kind and in full measure will be meted out.
The President’s latest statement on the subject was made March 23, 1943. He then said that he was checking on reports from Chungking that Japan was again using gas against Chinese forces.
20th Century Fox gambling $2 million by casting unknown in vital star role
Studio takes big chance on Jennifer Jones who plays saint in The Song of Bernadette
By Erskine Johnson
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Army mule wins the last hee-haw in rivalry with jeeps in Africa
Supply route in mountain open as wheels fail to turn
By James Thrasher, special to the Pittsburgh Press
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Catholic Church banishes New Testament footnote
Chief of Chaplains William R. Arnold has omitted statement against Jews
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Northern Tunisia – (by wireless)
I hate to think of poor little Sfax. I believe it must have been the prettiest of all the Tunisian cities we have seen so far. Somehow it had something of Miami’s Biscayne Boulevard in it, and a little of San Diego too. But it is gone now – I mean the downtown business part, for it lay right on the waterfront and our Allied bombers played havoc with it. The whole business section, of course, was evacuated before the bombing started, so probably there was only a slight loss of life.
Parts of Sfax look like London during the Blitz. A locomotive sprawls on its side across a sidewalk. Royal palms, uprooted, lie pitifully in the street. Little parks are no-man’s-lands of craters. The macadam streets have great cracks across them. There is no square inch left unwrecked in downtown Sfax.
The French feel that we shouldn’t have bombed Sfax because it was French. But it was one of Germany’s big supply ports, and not to have bombed it would have been cutting our own throats as well as the throats of all Frenchmen.
‘Holy city’ welcomes Allies
Kairouan – this holy city is one of the minor Meccas. They say seven journeys to Kairouan equal one to Mecca.
It wasn’t holy to the Germans. They used it all winter as a big rail and highway supply point.
We got to Kairouan shortly after the Germans had fled before the 8th Army. This was the first time I had been close on the heels, of a reoccupation. Three of us correspondents rode into the town in jeeps, and to our astonishment found the streets lined with crowds waving and cheering and applauding each passing vehicle.
Not knowing the difference, they gave us correspondents as big a hand as the rest. And we beamed and waved back just as though we’d run the Germans out ourselves. I might add on our behalf that we did feel like heels while doing it.
Kairouan had been under Axis domination for nearly three years but it was not damaged much by bombing. Therein lies a slight mix-up somewhere, for last winter that one of our fliers “destroyed” the Splendide Hotel, which housed a German headquarters. Yet the Splendide, I can assure you, is still standing, quite unharmed.
In Kairouan we saw the first white women most of us had seen in a long time. I remember three French girls who stood on a street corner for hours waving and smiling at the Allied tanks and trucks as they passed through the town. One of the girls had on a blue skirt and a white waist, I remember, which made her stand out from the others.
That girl in white waist!
The reason I’m telling you this is that in the days that followed, all over Tunisia, I’d fall into conversation with soldiers and they’d begin telling about the wonderful girl they saw in Kairouan. Eventually they’d describe how she was dressed, and it always turned out to be Miss Blue-Skirt-and-White-Waist.
That one girl, merely by standing in the street and waving, had given to scores of women-hungry men an illusion of Broadway and Main St. that they’d not known in months.
Gafsa is the southern town we took back after it had been in German hands for a couple of months. Gafsa was not much damaged by shot and shell, but it was gutted by the cruel hands of mean men. Whether those were the hands of Germans or Arabs or our own army, I’ve not yet found out.
One French officer estimated that the Arabs of Gafsa were 85% for the Germans, 5% for the French, and 10% indifferent. That is a testimonial to the power of German propaganda, for the Arabs are lovers of might.
Destruction is wanton
At any rate, when we returned to Gafsa the streets were littered, and the homes of all the Jews and better-off French and Arabs were wrecked. Windows had been broken, rugs and all other valuables stolen, furniture smashed and thrown out into the streets for desert Arabs to steal. Marauders went into a nice little hotel, apparently with hammers, and smashed every lavatory, every mirror and every window. They smashed the mechanism of every refrigerator in town.
Their crippling of the city power plant was legitimate. Their uprooting of private gardens was barbarism, solely for barbarity’s sake.
That’s about all on my tour of the battlefields. The Germans, by stripping the country of provisions, probably caused more grief than either side did by actual battle.
The tank-tracked fields will soon grow over. The blowing sands will fill the hundreds of thousands of expedient slit trenches. Ammunition boxes and gas cans and abandoned tanks will rust themselves into oblivion. Desiccated little towns will be rebuilt. And the Arab, as he has done for centuries, will go on about his slow business in the old way that suits him best.
Food conference secret –
An Army wife asks U.S.: Why don’t you trust me?
Mother of 3 disagrees with decision that ‘we shouldn’t know what’s cooking’
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The colonels’ last stand may pack surprise wallop
By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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Truman group plans hearings in rubber row
Jeffers declines to discuss issue with Ickes and War Department
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Williams: Truth at last!
Major Leagues finally admit that ‘lively ball’ is an actuality – and vitally necessary today
By Joe Williams
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Millett: Bring food, share the work popular wartime party rule
Hostess hasn’t help so guests might as well pitch in and clean up the dishes
By Ruth Millett
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