Tax bill sent to Roosevelt
Pay-go measure gets Senate’s approval
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Ferguson: Doing men’s work
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
After a visit to Fort Oglethorpe, Dick Thornburg wrote:
The Army only has one complaint against the WAACs. It wants more of ‘em. They are taking over more and more of the duties of men, doing more and more men’s work.
And how the men love that. It is to be hoped the training of our enthusiastic WAACs and WAVES will include some research into the psychology of the male animal, who has always been pretty clever at persuading women to work for him.
Releasing soldiers for combat service is of course now a patriotic duty – but Mrs. Oveta Culp Hobby should warn her WAACs about being too generous with their help. Because the more a woman does for a man, the more he expects her to do.
One who has observed this trait over a period of years shudders at the possible consequences of our present situation. You’ve only to glance into the immediate past to get the point.
Long before they were at liberty to go into the business world, women did most of the work at home. Presently they got into the school-teaching profession, where they now do nine-tenths of the labor while men do the bossing. Next, they entered the business offices and gradually took over all the dirty detail jobs, releasing men from the more tiresome and rigorous tasks. The war has sent them into the machine factories and the Army, where we expect to see the same thing happen.
To be sure, this upsetting of routine has given many more women positions of authority, which we pray they may keep after the emergency. Just the same, we must be realistic about the matter.
“Doing men’s work” is a proud phrase. But let’s not forget caution, girls, or we’ll be stuck with something we can’t get out from under.
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Allied HQ, North Africa – (by wireless)
The head man of the photographic section at one of our Flying Fortress airdromes is Sgt. Robert Thompson, of Lansing, Michigan. Thompson has four men in the section with him. They are well organized for future conquests, as one of them speaks Italian and one speaks German.
I am mentioning these boys because they have built themselves a photographic darkroom that is unique in Africa. It is an underground dugout 10 feet deep. Most of it was dug through solid rock, and without any blasting equipment whatever. It took the five boys 10 days to do it.
You go down some steps, turn right along a deep, narrow ditch, and then right again, which brings you completely underground with a three-foot roof of earth and rock over you for bomb protection. They’ve never had a raid at this field, but where they were previously stationed raids were frequent.
Everything in the darkroom is homemade. Running water comes through some curved piping taken from the hydraulic system of a B-17. On the end of the pipe is a spigot from a wine barrel. All their photographic chemicals are kept in old champagne bottles. Their developing trays are gasoline tins cut in half the long way. Their film-printing box was made from fragmentation bomb cases. Their red safety light is the reflector off a jeep. An electric switch from a bombardier’s control-box lid is cushioned with rubber from the pilot’s seat of a Fortress.
Besides Thompson, the men in this section are Cpl. Bennett Tucker, St. Louis, Pvt. Harold Harrington, Carteret, New Jersey (he’s Irish), Pfc. Otto Zinkgraff, Plymouth, Wisconsin (he’s the German), and Pfc. John Martini, New York (he’s the Italian).
They all live in the same tent, and for such an international hodgepodge you never saw five men prouder of their joint accomplishments.
Another Volkswagen owner
A man I’ve been intending to mention for a long time is Capt. A. D. Howell of Maryville, Tennessee, a suburb of Knoxville. Over here he is known as Dixie Howell, but he was never called that before he got in the Army.
We met way back in January, and every time I’ve run onto him since then something new has happened to him. One time he had been slightly wounded and got a Purple Heart. Another time he’d invented a new way to clean up minefields. Another time he had been decorated for bravery. Another he had been promoted to captain. Another had his thumb bandaged because of a cut from a dive-bombing fragment. And the last time he had just abandoned a captured German Volkswagen because it didn’t have power enough to pull over the mountains.
That last item makes us practically blood brothers since we are both former Volkswagen owners now.
Capt. Howell worked for the Aluminum Company of America before the war. His father-in-law is the regional manager at Alcoa. Young Howell didn’t have to live on grits and sowbelly by any means, but regardless of his nice status in life he volunteered in the Canadian Army long before Pearl Harbor, and went to England more than two years ago. He transferred to the American Army last fall.
He has been constantly at the front. He’s the mine and booby-trap expert with a regiment of fighting Engineers. He probably knows as much about the more fiendish types of German explosives as anyone in North Africa.
Shows Eisenhower sideshow
Howell has a truckful of defanged mines, booby traps, flares, rockets, grenades, scare whistles, and other devices which he uses to teach others how to deal with them. Once I saw him demonstrating his sideshow to Gen. Eisenhower, on one of the general’s visits to the front.
Capt. Howell has a 5-year-old daughter, Madlyn, and a beautiful wife. He hasn’t seen them in two and a half years. He says he’d give anything in the world to see them, yet he doesn’t want to go home till after the next show is over, whatever it is.
He’s had more than his share of narrow escapes. He won his Silver Star by working for an hour, under constant fire, setting his charge on a bridge and blowing up the bridge when the advancing Germans were only 400 yards away.
He’s just one of the thousands over here who have done things you people at home can hardly conceive of, and who are now very tired but still willing to go on and on.
Millett: Shortage of better toys tests child’s imagination
Spoiled boys and girls accustomed to best of everything must learn about sacrifice
By Ruth Millett
A woman who works in the toy department of a gift shop that used to have every kind of expensive and ingenious toy for sale, and now has only the most simply play equipment, says she gets disgusted every day at the attitude of many of the parents who come into her shop.
The ones who get her down think it is just a shame that more toys are not being made, and they usually phrase their attitude like this:
I should think that toys for children would be one of the LAST things we would have to give up.
She says such parents usually have a spoiled Junior by the hand, who turns up his nose at every simply toy offered for sale because since he was three years old he has been playing with complicated electric toys that didn’t take any more brains or imagination on his part than the ability to turn on a switch.
So, the saleswoman doesn’t feel much like crying with Junior’s parents over the sad plight of youngsters forced to play with wooden, instead of metal and electric toys.
This toy shortage, that indulgent parents are so worried about, will probably actually be hood for the kids.
It will teach them to take care of what they have, more than any amount of parental preaching. Junior doesn’t leave his tricycle in the street since he has been convinced that there aren’t anymore where that one came from.
It will also do something else for children. It will force them to use a little more imagination in their play, if they have to get along without a lot of fancy, complicated playthings.
And it will tend to make them share what they have with each other – if every child in the neighborhood doesn’t have duplicate toys. It will, unless Mama says:
Now don’t you let the other children play in your wagon. If they break it, you know I can’t get you another.
No, the kids will get along all right for the duration without a lot of expensive toys. Parents don’t have to worry yet not being able to buy them electric trains as long as they can provide them with milk and oranges and cod liver oil.
Treasury orders inventory of American assets abroad
Action taken to protect interests and combat economic strategy of Axis
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U.S. Navy Department (June 4, 1943)
Communiqué No. 401
North Pacific.
On June 1, on Attu Island, small bands of Japanese troops still roamed some areas of the island, although there was no further organized enemy resistance.
The U.S. Army casualties on Attu as of midnight, June 1, were as follows:
| Killed | 342 |
| Wounded | 1,135 |
| Missing | 58 |
In addition to the known Japanese dead of 1,791 on Attu Island (previously reported in Navy Department Communiqué No. 400) U.S. Army troops have captured 11 prisoners.
Press Release
For Immediate Release
June 4, 1943
Command in the Aleutians
The conclusion of planned, operations in the capture of Attu which has been signalized by the collapse of all organized enemy resistance makes timely a summary of the military organization involved in this and in similar operations. These combined operations emphasize the close integration of branches of the armed services which must be effected in present‑day warfare.
In the North Pacific area, joint military operations are under the command of RAdm. Thomas Cassin Kinkaid, USN, who is operating directly under Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet. Adm. Nimitz’s responsibilities extend to the entire Pacific Ocean areas except for the Australian area.
In the Pacific theater of war, operational problems involve the coordination of aircraft, surface ships (including troop transports) and ground operations. The operations against Attu served to illustrate the operational solution which has been devised to meet these problems. The area commander, in this case Adm. Kinkaid, has the overall responsibility for coordinating and implementing the various forces involved in such an operation. Under him, RAdm. Francis W. Rockwell, USN, Commander Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet, had the immediate responsibility of transporting troops over water to the points of attack and providing for their expeditious landing on shore. Once ashore, ground operations were under the immediate command of the Army Commander, Maj. Gen. Eugene M. Landrum, USA. Preliminary to the landing, during the landing, and subsequent thereto, air attack and support was provided by Army and Navy Air Forces. Army Air Forces were under the command of Maj. Gen. William O. Butler. Canadian pilots also took part in the operations.
In all of the Aleutian operations from their inception, the closest cooperation has been maintained between the service commanders, including Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt of the Western Defense Command, and Lt. Gen. Simon B. Buckner of the Alaskan Defense Command, each commander functioning in his specialized field and all cooperating to a common end. It is notable that this operation, under conditions of weather in which fog and low visibility contributed to the difficulties of transport of the ground forces and the landing of a large force of men, was accomplished without the loss of a single ship or of a single man, and that casualties on share were surprisingly low. This fortunate outcome cannot always be anticipated in Amphibious operations which are well known to be the most difficult and dangerous in all modern military warfare.
The Pittsburgh Press (June 4, 1943)
Lewis to end strike
Roosevelt warns miners to return to work or face draft
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Final victory planned in 1946
Allied strategy set for Nazi defeat next year
By Lyle C. Wilson, United Press staff writer
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Can feed 1,500,000 daily
Washington (UP) –
Norman H. Davis said today that the American Red Cross, of which he is chairman, can now feed nearly 1,500,000 persons a day in an emergency.
36,000 prisoners in U.S.
Washington –
A total of 36,688 enemy prisoners of war are being held in 21 prison camps in the United States, the War Department announced today.