The Pittsburgh Press (May 15, 1943)
Knox hints current attack is only start of push in North Pacific
By Joseph L. Myler, United Press staff writer
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Bombers blast 4 ships, hit airfields, rail lines in Sardinia
By Virgil Pinkley, United Press staff writer
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Smart tactics, tremendous Allied supply effort smashed Axis in Africa – victory sets pattern for invasion
By Edward W. Beattie, United Press staff writer
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Phoenixville, Pennsylvania (UP) –
Nazi planes in the Tunisian campaign used girl tail gunners, wounded U.S. soldiers said today at the Army’s Valley Forge General Hospital, where they are convalescing after being wounded in the North African campaign.
Sgt. Victor R. Woodward, of Seymour, Indiana, said one German plane shot down near him carried a pretty blonde tail gunner. Several of his companions said they had seen other girls in the Nazi planes.
Tec. John Chandler, of Cleveland, Mississippi, said he was “knocked cold” when shrapnel struck his helmet, was bombed 16 times in one day and that a shell knocked the steering wheel of a jeep from his hands. He said grinning:
And then they sent me home with stomach ulcers.
Yank bombers hit Kiel, Belgium, Holland
By Robert Vermillion, United Press staff writer
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Prime Minister warns that danger from Axis remains until its unconditional surrender
Washington (UP) –
President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill are trying today to restrain enthusiasm over recent Allied military successes lest a wave of overconfidence slow the forward movement of the war effort.
Both men have made obvious efforts to prevent runway optimism as a result of the Tunisian victory. Mr. Churchill’s radio speech to the British people yesterday was an example.
He said:
People who note our growing mastery of the air, not only over our island, but penetrating into ever-widening zones on the continent, ask whether the danger of invasion has not passed away.
Let me assure you of this, that until Hitler and Hitlerism are beaten into unconditional surrender, the danger of invasion will never pass away.
He admitted that the news was predominantly good, but he reminded that the drive for victory is still in its early stages.
Mr. Roosevelt followed the same theme recently, incorporating into his public statements such warnings as “the war is not over” and “the war has not been won.” He has stressed to me after time the necessity for still greater individual effort if final victory is to go to the United Nations.
War Information Director Elmer Davis also warned that this is not the end, although admitting that “this has been a glorious week.”
In his weekly radio review, Mr. Davis said that the mass surrender of Germans in Tunisia was proof that:
The master race will quit when it coincides that it is licked; and someday, that will happen in Germany itself.
But it won’t happen, he added, “until they have taken some more lickings.”
With their eyes “fixed upon the future,” as Mr. Churchill put it, he and the President planned to spend a weekend in uninterrupted conference. Late yesterday, they met for the second time this week with their full military, naval and air staffs and ranking government leaders closely related to the war effort.
To address Congress
They canvassed the developments since the arrival of the Churchill party and may have made4 some interim decisions which were reported to the President and the Prime Minister.
The public will have a better view of the war planning sessions next week when they are explained at a joint press conference by the President and the Prime Minister, and again when Mr. Churchill addresses a joint session of Congress on Wednesday.
Six others believed shot down over Guinea
By Don Caswell, United Press staff writer
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Total forgiveness accepted after five substitutes lose; GOP fights conference
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New York (UP) –
Deems Taylor, president of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, last night received the Henry Hadley Medal for the greatest service to American music during the past year. The award was made at the annual reception of the National Association for American Composers and Conductors.
By Florence Fisher Parry
I do not feel qualified to write on this subject, for I have not been confronted with the problem. Yet so many girls and mothers have asked that I tell them “what to do” that I shall try, however lamely, to set down here my own feelings about our daughters enlisting in the WAACs, the WAVES, and the other branches of the Armed Forces which, within a little year, have swept thousands of our young women into enlistments.
I may as well confess: I hope my own daughter will not join up in any of these splendid branches of the service. Or, indeed, in any work that will take her far from me again. I know I am selfish and craven in my quite old-fashioned qualms. I confess my cowardice openly because I feel that there are many mothers who share my own misgivings. We rationalize our selfishness by making ourselves believe that our daughters are “better off” or “more useful” where they are, and in their present occupations.
But by the same token, I believe that these same mothers would be quick to acknowledge, with me, that were our daughters to profess a genuine desire and intention to join up with any or these branches of the armed service, we would not withhold our consent and blessing.
On this point, I can in all conscience hold firm. I am committed to the belief that this war and this world from now on are theirs, not ours, theirs to live absolutely. We cannot stand between; we must give ground.
Let them decide
For cannot we see, if we have eyes at all, that the pace and tempo of life have surged beyond us? Its urgency is for younger hearts and bodies than our own. We cannot longer keep up with our children. Time has moved up too fast.
In my day, we were caught up with the great issue of equal rights for men and women. The first great suffrage parade of women was held in 1915 or ’16, and because I wanted to step right down off the curb and join in, my family considered me a radical.
That was long ago, you say? But May 15, 1942, was not long ago, was it? Yet when the President on that date authorized the setting up of the WAAC, with Col. Oveta Culp Hobby to command it, confess did it not seem to us mothers that it was a kind of Eleanorish, White-House-ish step to take?
I admit I thought so. A year ago. One year. Yet since, our whole concept of its importance has gone through a revolutionary change. I say revolutionary. For the first time in U.S. military history, women have been given rank and recognition in the Army and Navy and Marines. It is in its way as much a step forward into the ranks of sex equality as was the passage of the 19th Amendment.
In one year, the first of the great military units of women has established itself as INDISPENSABLE to our conduct of the war. The call has gone out for enlistments, still more enlistments to meet a quota which a year ago would have seemed fantastic.
First in service
Shall we mothers lift our hands, then, vainly to stop the tide? I think not. Just as I should have been “allowed” to step off the curb into that first great parade of women down 5th Avenue, New York, just so, my daughter must be “allowed” to make her own choice, cost what it may to me.
WAACs, WAVES, SPARS, MARINES, RED CROSS, or a defense job or some other WAR-work, that is not my choice but hers. New worlds, new banners, new places for women: that is as it should be, must be. It is ridiculous to withhold our encouragement and consent because of fancied dangers and “exposures.” Consent is an outworn word, and danger is the adjective for all that is ahead of us!
The proof of the WAAC’s magnificent accomplishment lies in the appeal of the U.S. Army for more recruits! And reading and hearing of its great growth and work. I marvel that in one short year it could have worn down the last prejudice against American WOMEN in U.S. uniform, and brought a blush of shame to the cheeks of those of us who were so quick originally to deprecate their “place” in the ranks of our Army and Navy.
Hail the WAACs! Gangway for the WAVES! And their sister organizations, all releasing to the war manpower so needed for the victory now on its breathless way!
By Ernie Pyle
Northern Tunisia – (by wireless)
I hope somebody in this war writes a book about the medics at the front. I don’t mean the hospitals so much as the units that are actually attached to troops and work on the battlefields under fire.
They are a noble breed. They and the telephone linemen deserve more praise than I have words for. Their job is deadly, and it never ends. Just in one battalion, several of the battlefield medics have been killed, and a number decorated.
But noble as it is, it seems to me – and to the doctors themselves – that our battlefield medical system isn’t all it should be. There aren’t enough stretcher-bearers in an emergency, and in a recent battle at which I was present, some of our wounded lay out as long as 20 hours before being brought in. The work of the medics comes in peaks. If they had enough stretcher-bearers for all emergencies, there would be thousands of men sitting around most of the time with nothing to do. Yet when an emergency does come and there are not enough, it’s an awful thing.
Stretcher-bearing difficult work
Wounded men had a rough time of it in this rocky, hilly country of northern Tunisia. It is hard enough to walk when you aren’t carrying anything, but when two or four men are lugging 200 pounds on a stretcher, it is almost impossible to keep on their feet. I have seen litter-bearers struggling down a rocky hillside with their heavy burden when one of them would slip or stumble on a rock and fall down, and the whole litter would go down, giving the wounded man a bad shaking up.
Litter-bearers sometimes had to carry wounded men five miles or more over this rugged country. A bearer is just about done in by the time he does that, yet in battle he has to start right back again. And somehow, although it gets to be just a miserably tough job, I’ve noticed that they manage to keep their sympathetic feeling for the wounded.
Few complaints on Nazi ethics
We heard stories about the Germans shooting up ambulances and bombing hospitals, and I personally know of instances where those stories were true. But there are also stories of just the opposite nature. Many of our officers tell me the Germans fought a pretty clean war in Tunisia. They did have scores of crafty, brutal little tricks that we didn’t have, but as for their observance of the broader ethics of war, our side has no complaint.
One battalion surgeon told me of running his ambulance out onto a battlefield under heavy artillery fire – whereupon the Germans stopped shelling and stayed stopped while he evacuated the dead and wounded for eight hours.
I’ve heard other stories where our ambulances got past German machine-gun nests without knowing it until the Germans came out and stopped them and, seeing they had wounded, waved them on. And so far as our doctors know, the German doctors give our captured wounded good medical care – as we do theirs also, of course.
Some ‘anxiety neurosis’ faked
In the last war, nerve cases were called “shell shock.” In this war, they’re called “anxiety neurosis.” About 50% of our neurosis cases are recoverable, and even return to fighting units. A large proportion of these cases are brought about by complete fatigue, by fighting day and night on end with little sleep and little to eat.
Surgeons sometimes spot neurosis cases that they suspect of being faked in order to get out of the frontlines. Their system is to put these men on stretcher-bearer duty – a hard, thankless, dangerous task. If they are faking, they get well quickly and ask to be returned to their regular outfits.
Constant noise gets one’s goat
In the frontlines, you get so used to the constant boom of artillery that you stop jumping every time a big gun went off. If you didn’t, you’d look like somebody with St. Vitus’ Dance. However, there’s another reaction – you get irritated. You get irritated in the same way you lose patience with a baby that cries all day or a dog that barks all night. The damn noise just never ends. There’s hardly a second of the day when the guns aren’t rolling or those ghostly shells rustling through the air.
Finally, you get so bored with its consistency that you feel like jumping up in a huff and yelling:
Oh, for God’s sake, stop it!