Editorial: Wallace blast emphasizes friction within New Deal
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Editorial: Prejudice
Passengers on a Long Island Railroad train moving in the wrong direction are reported in our own news columns to have laughed and speculated upon the possibility a woman motorman was in the cab. Just what would there be about a woman at the controls to make passengers think that explained the train going in the wrong direction? The passengers seem to have fallen into the stubborn prejudice that women taking on men’s jobs do things badly. Anyway, wasn’t it a man, Wrong-Way Corrigan, who flew his airplane East instead of West?
The Free Lance-Star (June 30, 1943)
Surprise air-raid test is successful
Blackout last night is second here in less than week; few violations
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GOP would probe Wallace charges
Democrats adopt hands-off policy in row with Jones; Roosevelt blames the press
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Federal troops stop threatened race riot
Passaic, New Jersey (AP) –
Federal troops held a crowd of several hundred persons in check to prevent a threatened race riot last night, after city police had left the scene in belief the danger was over.
Persons at the scene, the intersection of Main Avenue and Summer Street, said the trouble started when some soldiers left a tavern and became engaged in an argument with some Negro girls. A report that one of the men had knocked down a 16-year-old girl spread through the neighborhood and the crowd collected.
The Pittsburgh Press (June 30, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
North Africa – (by wireless)
The letters you readers write to me here in Africa begin with everything from “Dear sir” to Hi, Ernie.” Any columnist can expect a nasty letter once in a while, but you have yet to write me a nasty one. Maybe you’re just saving up to slaughter me all at once.
Many of you write long letters about how things and people are in your hometown, just as though that were my hometown too. I like that. Your letters have kept me pretty well informed on the progress of rationing, shortages, and public spirit at home.
Most of you write from your own goodness just to tell me you enjoy the column. A few of you make unusual requests such as asking for an Algerian postcard to add to your collection, or a camel bell, or a dissertation on the ancestry of Tunisia’s black and white sheep. Unfortunately, there had not been time for me to comply with these requests.
A number of you have asked me to send you the names of soldiers who get no mail so you can correspond with them. I shall have to fail you there too, for I have never known a soldier who didn’t get any mail, and I can’t go around asking each man if he’d like somebody to write him.
About a third of you ask me to look up your sons and husbands and brothers and say hello. Once in a while, I just happen to be near the outfit you mention when your letter comes, but those are just coincidences. Ordinarily it would be like writing to me in New York and asking me to look up somebody in Chicago, for our Army has grown to be that big over here.
Many of you have asked me to look up sons you haven’t heard from for a couple of months and see if they are all right. I can’t do that either, but I can tell you this – no news from your boy (dissatisfying though that may be) is almost always good news. For if anything serious has happened to him, you’ll hear about it from the War Department long before you would have begun worrying because of the lack of letters.
The absence of letters is usually due either to a jam in the mail service or to the fact that he just isn’t writing as often as he should.
A small percentage of my letters are from families who have already received the dreaded telegram from the War Department. Those telegrams are stark, blank things – they deal you the blow and leave you hanging in thin air. Your letters ask me to try to find out all the little details of how it happened and let you know. How I wish that it were possible. Those are the letters I would give anything to comply with. Those of you who have lost close ones seem to write so beautifully, so resignedly, and so patiently, that it is doubly hard on me to be forced to do nothing about your letters.
At first, I did try, and I was able (largely by the freak circumstance of having been there at the time) to send details home to a few parents. But now those letters have grown to the point where I dare not even try anymore to get the details of the death or capture of any one person. It requires days of tracing down through headquarters records, and then either a personal trip hundreds of miles or a long letter to his commanding officer or his buddies.
All this would be a full-time job, not for just one man but for a whole staff. It would require a full-fledged information bureau.
I know how you feel – you think to yourself:
But surely, he could find time to answer just this one request.
That’s true. I could find time to do one. But it isn’t just one. There are scores of them. If I were to obey my impulse and carry out these touching requests, I would have to stop writing the column altogether.
No matter how it may seem to you who read our stuff, a war correspondent works mighty hard. We all do. Spare time is something that has ceased to exist for us. The War Department accredits us here to write for you publicly, and the minute we stopped doing that, we would be sent home.
That’s the way it is. And so, this column is addressed to all you readers who have written me, and even to a large percentage of my friends back home, to tell you why I can’t answer your letters individually, and yet to thank you from the bottom of my heart for writing them.
U.S. Navy Department (July 1, 1943)
Communiqué No. 429
South Pacific.
On the night of June 29‑30, Avenger (Grumman TBF) torpedo bombers and Dauntless (Douglas) dive bombers attacked the airfield, the stores and camp areas at Vila, Kolombangara Island.
On June 30:
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A formation of Mitchell (North American) medium bombers, Dauntless dive bombers and Avenger torpedo bombers attacked Japanese defensive positions and camp area at Munda, New Georgia Island. A large fire was started.
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Commencing in the early forenoon and continuing until late afternoon, an estimated total of 110 Japanese planes comprising Zero fighters, Mitsubishi medium bombers, Aichi dive bombers and various other types attacked at intervals U.S. naval forces during the landing at Rendova Island, New Georgia Group. U.S. surface units and air forces destroyed 65 of the enemy planes according to an incomplete report. 17 U.S. planes are reported missing.
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The transport McCAWLEY (APA-4) was attacked and disabled by Japanese torpedo planes after landing troops on Rendova. Subsequently the vessel was attacked and sunk by a Japanese submarine. Reports indicate that all personnel were removed before the vessel sank and that there was no loss of life.
On July 1, Viru Harbor on New Georgia Island, was taken by joint U.S. forces.
Brooklyn Eagle (July 1, 1943)
Down 65 Jap planes in battle off Munda
U.S. occupies vital harbor, loses transport; men safe
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Byrnes fails to end Jones-Wallace feud
Bitter controversy may force President to intervene
By Lyle C. Wilson
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Traitor Stephan to die tomorrow
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Staten Island man held as Nazi agent brought here
Orgell, German-born, lived near two confessed spies
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Gen. MacArthur commanding Pacific attack
Offensive first joint operation of his and Adm. Halsey’s forces
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Begin probe of Jap activities in U.S.
Washington (UP) –
The Dies Subcommittee on Un-American Activities begins an investigation today of Japanese activities in the United States, with a Japanese who fought for the United States in World War I and another who is fighting for it in World War II as the first witnesses.
Chairman John Costello (D-CA), who has promised 10 days of “sensational hearings,” identified the witnesses as Tokie Slocum, who fought under Sgt. Alvin York, and Pvt. Joe Kanazawa, now stationed with a Japanese combat unit at Camp Shelby, Mississippi.
Editorial: Massacre of Nazi U-boats quick shift in war’s trend
Smashing the U-boat menace
One of the most encouraging recent developments in the war – even during a period when good news has been coming steadily from many fighting fronts – is Prime Minister Churchill’s announcement of the total defeat of enemy submarines in the past 60 days.
Mr. Churchill described it as massacre, said that 30 of these undersea terrors were accounted for in May alone and that in spite of desperate enemy efforts, scarcely a single merchant ship has been sunk since the middle of May. In his opinion, the U-boat menace is being crushed.
It is seldom that a situation is so speedily reversed as the war between the Nazi submarines and the Allied fleets bearing men and supplies across the Atlantic. Only last February, our naval leaders were seriously alarmed over our shipping losses. Even though the fighting was going along well in Russia, North Africa and in the Pacific, Washington and London were issuing warnings that the sinkings might neutralize victories ashore.
We were told of the huge packs of U-boats roaming the seas, that the Nazi building program was progressing so speedily that between 500 and 700 subs would be thrown against our supply lines by spring. Sinkings were described as heavier than those boasted by von Tirpitz in the First World War.
Just what is responsible for the vast improvement in the Allied position at sea has not yet been revealed. Of course, the American shipbuilding campaign is a vital factor. The output of our plants, plus those of the British and Canadians, was somewhere between seven and ten times as much as our losses from enemy action in the month of June.
Larger protective forces, better conceived defensive planning – these and many other factors were doubtless involved. Certainly, it is a tribute to the courage and skill of the officers and men of the American and British Navies. But laymen will naturally speculate as to whether some new anti-submarine device has not finally been perfected and put in successful operation.
As a matter of fact, Churchill’s entire speech was optimistic in tone. He spoke of the success of our air attacks on Nazi targets. He reiterated that there would be no compromise with a defeated Axis. He predicted heavy fighting in the Mediterranean and elsewhere by fall.
Americans will take special satisfaction in the dramatic reiteration of his pledge that Britain will fight on with us in the Far East until total defeat of the Japanese is achieved.
U.S. prisoners tortured by Japs, author tells Rotary
Relates how he aided in burial of nurses raped by soldiers
The Japanese are using British and American war prisoners as guinea pigs in experiments on the refinements of cruelty, author and educator Wenzell Brown told members of the Brooklyn Rotary Club yesterday at a luncheon meeting at the Hotel Bossert.
Recalling some of the horrors he had witnessed during six months as a prisoner himself in the Stanley Prison Camp at Hong Kong, Mr. Brown voiced an urgent appeal that everything possible be done for the rescue of the hundreds of men and women left “in the grip of hell.”
It was a hell, as described by the speaker, consisting of confinement under unsanitary conditions, dearth of food and ill-treatment ranging from insults and casual blows to torture and murder. This cruelty, he warned, was inflicted by the Japanese deliberately with the purpose of demonstrating their racial “supremacy” and their fitness, as they saw it, to dominate the world.
Seek race supremacy
Mr. Brown said:
The Japanese are maddened by the idea of race supremacy. To impress it upon their white victims, they walk them needlessly through the streets under guard, slapping them from time to time and repeating, “Don’t look down on the Nipponese.”
They take particular care to inflict these humiliations on the whites in the presence of the Chinese by way of warning the latter that their Allies are weak and powerless to help them. Wherever they go, they emphasize that they are destined to dominate the white peoples.
Mr. Brown was assistant professor of English at Lingnan University until the fall of Hong Kong. During the siege of the city, he served as a special guard on British transport trucks bringing supplies to the frontlines. Captured when the city fell, he was herded with other prisoners, including American and British civilians, into a small Chinese hotel. From there, after two and a half weeks, they were taken to the Stanley prison camp.
Details atrocities
Details of many of the atrocities he witnessed there were of an unprintable nature. But he told of seeing the bayoneting of men at the slightest pretext, and how he helped to bury the bodies of three British nurses raped and killed by the Japanese soldiers.
Eventually, he was released and returned to this country on the Gripsholm. But in leaving, he declared, he pledged that he would tell the world of the sufferings of those still in the hands of the Japanese and to appeal for their rescue. He is the author of the book Hong Kong Aftermath, which is soon to be published.