America at war! (1941--) -- Part 2

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

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

Catholic Church banishes New Testament footnote

Chief of Chaplains William R. Arnold has omitted statement against Jews

War bond drive holds financing at minimum

Ernie Pyle V Norman

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.

Pegler: On Joe Doakes Jr.

By Westbrook Pegler

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’

The colonels’ last stand may pack surprise wallop

By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer

Truman group plans hearings in rubber row

Jeffers declines to discuss issue with Ickes and War Department

Williams: Truth at last!

Major Leagues finally admit that ‘lively ball’ is an actuality – and vitally necessary today
By Joe Williams

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

Lowman: Friendships of wartime enrich life

No one need be lonely in nation’s crisis
By Josephine Lowman

Völkischer Beobachter (April 25, 1943)

Churchill vom amerikanischen Bundesgenossen entlarvt –
Deutsche Versenkungszahlen bestätigt

Senatsausschuß stellt fest: 12 Mill. BRT. im Jahre 1942 versenkt

Amerikanisch-englische Sorgen im Pazifik und in Indien –
Japan setzt neue Waffen ein

Von unserer Stockholmer Schriftleitung

In zwei Tagen 72 Sowjetflugzeuge vernichtet –
Erwarteter Großangriff im Westen Tunesiens begann

Amerikanische Heuchelei

U.S. Navy Department (April 25, 1943)

Communiqué No. 355

South Pacific.
On April 24: During the morning Avenger torpedo bombers (Grumman TBF) and Dauntless dive bombers (Douglas) escorted by Wildcat fighters (Grumman F4F), attacked Munda on New Georgia Island. Buildings were destroyed, a large fire was started, and a heavy explosion was observed.

North Pacific.
On April 24: Despite bad weather, Army Lightning fighters (Lockheed P‑38) bombed and strafed Kiska during the morning. Results were not observed.

The Pittsburgh Press (April 25, 1943)

Americans storm Nazi defenses in big Tunisian push

Aerial onslaught supports Allied armies driving Axis deeper into coffin corner – thousands of Yanks in battle
By Virgil Pinkley, United Press staff writer

Tunisian battle in final phase

Screenshot 2022-04-25 133119
The great attack is on in Tunisia and the fighting is growing in intensity hourly as the U.S. II Corps, the British 1st Army, 8th Army and the French Corps d’Afrique smash at the strongly-entrenched Germans on all sectors of the line defending Rommel’s coffin corner/. Developments:
1. Americans, shifted from south, gain six miles in drive toward Mateur.
2. British 1st Army captured important hill positions east of Medjez el Bab.
3. 1st Army attempts to break through enemy defenses around Bou Arada.
4. 8th Army holds gains against fierce counterattacks, pushes patrol activity.

Screenshot 2022-04-25 142559

Allied HQ, North Africa – (April 24)
U.S. forces storming into the battle of Tunisia on a new front have pushed the Germans back six miles southwest of Bizerte, while to the south, British armies advanced up to seven miles and seized key anchors of the powerful Axis defenses, the Allies disclosed today.

Tens of thousands of U.S. troops and thousands of vehicles, shifted secretly from South to North Tunisia, ripped into the German lines, capturing three dominating hills and holding them against violent counterattacks.

The all-out Allied offensive against the last Axis foothold in Africa was supported by a tremendous aerial onslaught, in which bombers and fighters flew more than 1,500 sorties and dumped the greatest tonnage of explosives ever loosed on Tunisian soil by daylight.

An official announcement revealed that the Allies had captured a German document signed by Col. Gen. Jurgen von Arnim as commander-in-chief, suggesting that Marshal Erwin Rommel had left Tunisia and saying his “present whereabouts and new appointment, if any, are unknown.”

As the Americans were lunging eastward on both sides of the Sedjenane-Mateur Road, the British 1st Army knocked out 16 German tanks, stormed and occupied most of Longstop Hill, which dominates the road to Tebourba and Tunis, and captured Goubellat in the sector southeast of Medjez el Bab.

Violent fighting rages

The British 8th Army, pounding the Afrika Korps on the southeastern coastal flank, consolidated newly-won positions some seven miles north of Enfidaville, halfway along the shore road to Bouficha.

Fighting of exceptional violence raged all along the 110-mile arc clamped against the estimated 200,000 German and Italian troops in the shrinking bridgehead.

Troops of Lt. Gen. George S. Patton’s II Corps charged into battle on the northern front at dawn Friday after their sensational transfer from the Guettar sector far to the south.

Counterattacks repulsed

At the dawn zero hour, U.S. infantrymen attacked in the rugged hills north of the road to Mateur, 20 miles southwest of Bizerte, hurling their main weight at Jebel Mrata and Jebel Aïnchouna five miles to the south.

Scrambling over the rocks through German mortar and artillery fire, the doughboys captured both hills and then withstood a series of sharp counterattacks by Nazi troops trying to wipe out the gains before the Americans could consolidate them.

South of the Mateur Road, other U.S. units stormed Jebel er Raml, a strong hill position north-northeast of Oued Zarga, and captured it. The Germans snapped back with a counterblow, supported by strong artillery fire, but failed to dislodge the triumphant Yanks.

Latest reports said the Americans had nailed down the gains carrying them within about 15 miles of Mateur on both sides of the road, but violent fighting continued in the hills, where a ceaseless rain of blows and counterblows were falling.

Quick shift from south

The U.S. advance was hailed as particularly impressive because the troops were fighting in strange country, including some of the most difficult mountain terrain in all Tunisia.

Their major attack was launched only a few days after they had completed the long move from South Tunisia. The troops of the U.S. II Corps were fighting directly under control of Gen. Sir Harold R. L. G. Alexander, deputy Allied commander, who was coordinating their operations with the British 1st Army offensive to the south.

French troops advance

Alexander, in a formal statement revealing the American shift to the north, said it involved the transfer of large numbers of troops and great quantities of stores and equipment along the whole length of the front.

Above the Americans at the extreme northern tip of the battle are the Corps francs d’Afrique was spearheading the Allied offensive. The French troops advanced in conjunction with the American drive, field reports said.

The French 19th Corps, meanwhile, was holding the hills between the British 1st and 8th Armies and maintaining heavy patrol activity.

29 miles from Tunis

Lt. Gen. K. A. N. Anderson’s 1st Army was concentrating on cleaning out stubborn German resistance on Longstop Hill, 29 miles southwest of Tunis, a position dominating the last mountain approaches.

Farther south below Medjez el Bab, British infantry seized Goubellat, after which tanks and troops burst into the plain southwest of the town against fierce opposition. They had advanced some seven miles in that area, and had occupied Crich-El-Oued, four miles northeast of Medjez.

Tank forces attack

Anderson’s advanced elements were exploiting the gains south of Medjez, hurling strong tank forces into an assault north of Sebkhet el Kourzia, a little salt lake east of the Goubellat-Bou Arada Road.

Violent armored struggles were in progress north of Sebkhet el Kourzia, the scene of the farthest 1st Army advance. A motorized enemy column was sighted south of the lake Friday. An armored squadron skirted the lake and dispersed it. From the area north of the lake, it is slightly more than 30 miles to Tunis across low, rolling ground which fades into a flat plain near the coast.

Celebes attacked –
1,500-mile raid rips Jap base

Planes destroyed, big fires started by Yanks