Editorial: ‘Treacherous voices’
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They’re envied by millions, but stars have their woes!
Certain assignments scare them, as for instance Dot Lamour’s dancing chore
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
NOTE: This is one in a series of columns by Ernie Pyle reporting on his 13,000-mile trip into the heart of Africa, made before the heavy fighting began in Tunisia.
Somewhere in Africa –
At any number of our camps in Central Africa, I noticed with sharp surprise a playful little thing which you would never be aware of if you hadn’t been at the front.
In these camps, soldiers will walk along in groups, kidding and laughing, and you’ll hear them give each other mock others of “Squads Right,” or “Halt.”
The first time I heard that shouted word “Halt” down there, I stopped dead still, and my heart skipped a couple of beats. For believe me, when you’re up at the front, halt means halt and no monkey business. Nobody ever says it in play, and when you hear it, you freeze in your tracks. If you don’t, you’re likely to get a bullet through you.
It’s a sound that bears the same deadly warning as the whine of a shell or the hiss of a snake, and you obey it automatically and instinctively.
Too hot to walk the dog
For some reason, and I can’t explain it, the troops on Central Africa don’t go on for pets the way they do up north.
True, I’ve heard of soldiers who had baby giraffes for pets, and others who had monkeys and parrots, and even leopards. But they are rare. The small number of dogs is what amazed me. Up north, the soldiers have thousands and thousands of dogs for pets.
I guess it’s just too hot down here to walk the dog around.
Many of our officers and men, by the nature of their jobs, have covered Africa from stem to stern. They know the whole continent intimately, and they rattle off the merits of some unheard-of jungle river port as knowingly as they’d speak of Cape Town or Cairo.
And they are impressed. I’ve heard many an American say he’d sure got his eyes opened by coming over here. Before the war, he was hardly aware that Africa existed. But now he sees the immense richness of the jungle and the plains going partly to waste; he wonders who said there was no more land left in the world to pioneer.
Soldiers global-minded
Of course, the average soldier swears that after the war he’ll never set foot out of his hometown again. But everybody isn’t average. I’ll bet you that within five years after the war, you’ll find thousands and thousands of Americans scattered to the remotest points of the globe, carving out careers for themselves in spots they’d never heard of before 1942. This war is making us global-minded.
One evening, at a campo way down on the Slave Coast, an officer came up and introduced himself. He was Lt. Walter Wichterman, an insurance man of Indianapolis. The reason he spoke to me was this – we were college mates at Indiana University, and once went to Japan together when the Indiana baseball team made a tour over there. Our paths had not crossed for more than 20 years.
U.S. homes must be museums
If what I’ve seen is any indication, the average American home by now must look like the Natural History Museum. Soldiers are fiends for buying stuff and sending it home.
There isn’t so much to buy in North Africa. But in other parts, there is. The carved ivory, carved ebony, leather work, knives and stuff that have been sent home from Central Africa must reach an appalling total.
Add to that all that must be flowing home from India, China, Alaska and elsewhere, and we’re surely becoming a nation of ivory-hoarders.
Pegler: On the Zooter Riots
By Westbrook Pegler
Chicago, Illinois –
The so-called zoot-suit riots in Los Angeles may seem to be strictly local trouble arising from the local peculiarities of that peculiar community, but the problem is broader and more dangerous than that.
The same friction between gangs of young civilians and lone men in American uniform was noticed in Tucson, Arizona, during the winter, and an outbreak which might have been equally bad or worse was averted as soldiers and university students made more or less informal plans to go to town on Saturday night and beat up anyone found wearing a zoot suit.
Being forewarned, the police, a local judge and the editors of the papers started a counterpropaganda to minimize as isolated and strictly personal troubles a number of street fights which had previously aroused public alarm and moved one judge to declare that anyone brought before him wearing a zoot suit would be found guilty. Thus, a riot was averted.
Trouble is a mystery
In Los Angeles, as in Tucson, the trouble is a mystery, and in both places, there has been idle, troubled speculation as to whether the fights could be provoked by some enemy power, although there seems to be no evidence of that. Because the strife has been more dangerous in Los Angeles, it has been given more serious thought there.
One liberal newspaper reporter, who knows the Mexican people from many years of contact not only in Southern California, but in old Mexico as well, believes the young Mexican-American marauders are victims of frustration. Contrary to intimations in recent dispatches from Los Angeles, the majority of them are not Mexican nationals, but native Americans of Mexican blood.
This journalist says they feel that they are socially excluded for racial reasons, but admits that the gangs are made up of thoroughly vicious young hoodlums, including some girls. It is undeniable that they have been guilty of a number of killings and rapes.
There is nothing to be gained by pretending that the American soldiers and sailors started this trouble. American soldiers and sailors are almost always well-behaved, and the present personnel is distinctly superior in this and some other respects to any other wartime force in the history of the nation.
Provocation was great
Therefore, when they are moved to mob action against any element of the community, as they were in Los Angeles, it is plain that they are acting under great provocation. That was the fact in Los Angeles. So many men in uniform had been beaten up or “pushed around” that their individual resentment broke out in mob action.
Nobody seems to understand why the zoot-suiters, not all of whom, incidentally, wear the outlandish uniform of the group, are so bitter against men in the nation’s uniform. It may be bravado, but that is only speculation. But there is nothing mysterious about the delayed, violent reaction of the servicemen.
They just got tired of taking it and, as fighting men, will fight back. It is all very well to say they should have let the law take its course but the law was not doing its job, and when an individual is attacked on the street, he does not wait for a cop to happen along. He takes law enforcement into his own hands to the best of his ability.
It is a mistake to sympathize with these gangsters on the theory that they are misunderstood or the victims of social yearnings. The soldiers and sailors deserve the public sympathy and the protection of the law, and the problem will not be solved by placing out of bounds permanently the attractive city areas, which, in much of Los Angeles are pretty sordid at best, lest they undertake to defend themselves and their wives and girls against unprovoked attacks by repulsive gangs of cowards who always outnumber their victims.
Jive music inspired cult
It is the gangsters who must be restrained, and American cities must be policed so that others may go about in safety on the streets.
Indirectly but unmistakably, this cult got its inspiration from the degenerate exhibition of youthful mass hysteria which began on Broadway with hundreds of them writhing, twitching and howling gibberish to the horrible squeals and squawks of the jive bands.
That all this was sheer, intentional affectation, there is no doubt, for they behave so only in numbers, when they have an audience to show off to. The newspapers had a part in the promotion of the cult by treating it as a new expression of the spirit of American youth.
Although the zoot-suit gangs are predominantly native Americans of Mexican blood, not Mexican subjects, that does not mean that there is hard feeling, although obviously there is a danger of indiscriminate distrust and hostility on both sides. A little dose of good quick police work by efficient detectives and cops should be the answer.
Mrs. Dempsey likely to end her testimony next week
Hannah says Benny Woodall and Lew Jenkins were ‘just two of many admirers’
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Lack of water blamed in fall of Pantelleria
Gen. Spaatz’s instructions on surrender followed by Italian island
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CANDIDLY SPEAKING —
Rumor-mongers enjoy field day giving it to WAACs
By Maxine Garrison
Well, the rumors finally came out in the open. Perhaps that’s the healthiest place for them.
Rumors flourish when passed around in whispers. They thrive behind that immortal gesture of the gossip-hand half-covering the mouth, while the chin wags furiously. They flower in the dank near-darkness of being kept undercover.
This particular set grew to alarming proportions. When last heard from, the rumor-mongers were taking their oath that a whole shipload of WAACs had been returned from Africa because they were pregnant. The number reported had reached around thousand.
Silly of course. The sort of thing no one actually believes, but loves to repeat. Give them a good strong argument when they tell you such things, and they’ll start to back down. Listen to them, and they make the story better as they go.
Here are facts
In this instance, the facts, as attested to by a WAAC officer at headquarters in New York, are that only about 300 WAACs altogether have been sent to Africa. Of them, exactly three have returned to this country – one because she was pregnant (she’s the wife of an Army officer, and didn’t know about her condition until after she was shipped), and the other two because of illness.
Another rumor had it that Gen. Eisenhower considered the WAACs more trouble than they are worth.
The truth is that Gen. Eisenhower denies any such statement emphatically, and said so in writing to Col. Hobby. More than that, he has asked for three or four times as many as he has now.
And yet, absurd as they seem when you look at them calmly, these stories spread all over the country.
I strongly doubt if anybody actually and honestly believed them.
I think they spread because of several factors. There are people, not true Americans certainly, to whose advantage it is to spread any story they can cook up which will set one body of the people against another, which will put any large and well-known group in disrepute.
Enjoy scandal
There are other persons who simply roll their tongues over the thought of immortality. They enjoy accusing others of living in sin, and do so at every opportunity. The mere idea of women in the armed service is a glorious opportunity to this group.
And then there are simply those persons who pass on, just as a matter of course, every “spicy” thing they hear, say they don’t mean any harm. Maybe they don’t.
But the net result has been to malign and falsely accuse, by implication, every girl who’s had the spunk to sign up for one of the most self-sacrificing of duration jobs.
If only the gossips who started all this could be aired and dried out as thoroughly as can the juicy rumors they started, maybe we could really get somewhere in keeping such stories from spreading.
U.S. Navy Department (June 13, 1943)
Communiqué No. 409
North Pacific.
During the morning of June 11, Army Liberator (Consolidated B‑24) heavy bombers, Mitchell (North American B‑25) medium bombers and Lightning (Lockheed P‑38) and Warhawk (Curtiss P‑40) fighters carried out 'five attacks against Japanese installations at Kiska. Hits were scored in the main camp from and on the runway. Barges in the harbor were bombed and strafed.
South Pacific.
On June 10, during the night, Flying Fortress (Boeing B‑17) heavy bombers and Avenger (Grumman TBF) torpedo bombers bombed and started fires among Japanese positions in the Buin area.
On June 12:
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During the morning a force of Navy, Marine Corps and Army fighter planes intercepted about 40 or 50 Japanese fighters in the vicinity of the Russell Islands. 25 Zeros were shot down and eight more probably shot down. U.S. losses were six planes with all but two of the pilots being rescued.
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On the same morning Army Liberator bombers encountered two Mitsubishi bombers twenty miles west of Buka Island. One enemy bomber was destroyed.
In Navy Department Communiqué No. 408, it was reported that U.S. fighter planes intercepted and shot down four Mitsubishi bombers over the north end of Malaita Island. A later report now reveals that five enemy bombers were shot down instead of four as previously reported.
The Pittsburgh Press (June 13, 1943)
LAMPEDUSA GIVES UP TO ALLIES
Italians surrender after 24-hour blitz
Another stepping stone to Sicily occupied
By Reynolds Packard, United Press staff writer
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Here we go again!
New air blows aimed at Axis
RAF puts new offensive on around-the-clock basis
By Walter Cronkite, United Press staff writer
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