Veronica steals picture in death scene
She plays heroic nurse trapped in Bataan
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Nazi attempt to run U.S. papers revealed
New York (UP) –
An audacious plan by the Nazis to assume control in 1933 of all German-language newspapers in the United States was revealed today by Victor F. Ridder, publisher of several German newspapers, when he testified for the government in denaturalization proceedings against Fritz Kuhn and 10 other German Bund members.
Mr. Ridder said a Nazi emissary came to his office in Manhattan and informed him that he had “authority to take over” all German-language newspapers.
The emissary, Heinz Spanknebel, presented letters from Ernst W. Bohle, head of the Nazi Party Foreign Division, and Dr. Robert Ley, head of the German Labor Front, Mr. Riddler said.
Spanknebel, Mr. Riddle testified, had returned here from Germany in 1933 to found the Friends of New Germany, predecessor of the Bund.
Mr. Ridder said Spanknebel told him he would no longer be permitted to publish pro-Jewish articles.
American ship’s officers imprisoned on submarine
Six survivors tell how mates dies in Atlantic ordeal; huge waves swamp lifeboat twice in hour
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Nye proposes food inquiry
Wheeler backs move to quiz Lend-Lease
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Adm. Stark sees ‘long and tough’ war
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
With U.S. forces in Algeria – (by wireless)
Of all the American troops who are about to bust a hamstring to get into battle, I suppose the Rangers are the worst.
That’s because they’re trained like racehorses, and if they can’t race every day they get to fretting.
As you know, the Rangers are American commandos. For months their training has been a violent, double-barreled curriculum of body toughening and scientific elimination of the enemy. All summer and fall in the cold waters of Scotland, they practiced until they were as indestructible as Superman and as deadly as executioners. Then they had a shot of the real business. A few went on the Dieppe raid, and all of them came to Africa.
Here they had one specific and highly dangerous job to do. And they did it so expertly that they suffered almost no casualties and spared all the Frenchmen’s lives.
Rangers want more lands to storm
Since then, the Rangers have had nothing to do. They are in camp now, running through mock landings, swimming in the Mediterranean on the coldest days, doing military police duty in a nearby town. And they are gradually going nuts waiting to get into action again.
Since the specialty of the Rangers is landing on enemy beaches and storming gun positions, I asked one of them:
Do you suppose you’ll just have to sit here until we invade another continent?
He said:
My God, I hope not! It might be too long a wait.
I have got acquainted with one Ranger officer, Capt. Manning Jacob. He called Morristown, New Jersey, home, but before the war he was an oil operator in South Texas.
Capt. Jacob took me on a cross-country walk, following a detachment of Rangers. I had to run to keep up. Finally, I couldn’t go on any longer, and had to sit down and pant. I thought to myself:
I’m ashamed of being so soft and feeble, but after all I’m past 40 and I shouldn’t be expected to keep up with guys like Jacob.
And then it turned out that this lethal athlete called Capt. Jacob is 40 years old himself. Maybe he gets more vitamins than I did.
At any rate, the Rangers are good. If somebody doesn’t think up a new shore for them to storm pretty quick, they may resort to storming Africa all over again.
It’s a small world, Ernie finds
A nurse in an old blue sweater came walking down a muddy street at an Army hospital out in the country. An Army friend with me yelled at her, and stopped and introduced me. And the nurse said:
Well, at last! I’ve been saving sugar for you for two years, but I never expected to meet you here.
I had never seen the nurse before in my life, so a little inquiring about the sugar, business was necessary. The facts in the case are as follows:
Mary Ann Sullivan is a former surgical supervisor in Boston City Hospital. She and her sister nurses were reading this column two years ago, when I was in London and complaining bitterly in the public prints about not getting enough sugar. So, it seems the nurses laughed about it and started saving sugar. Whenever a cube was left over, they would save it, and laugh and say:
This one’s for Ernie.
Then a year ago, these nurses joined a Harvard unit and set sail for England. And they carried with them that sugar especially earmarked for me. Their motive was high but it came to naught. For the Germans torpedoed their ship and my sugar went to the bottom of the Atlantic.
The nurses were eventually picked up and taken to Iceland, then to England, and finally to Africa. And here we all are, and isn’t it a small world after all even if my sugar is gone?
Mary Ann felt badly about my sugar being sunk, but she did bring out a hospitable commodity which both censorship and the ethics of war forbid me to mention. So, our meeting after two years was not without a certain rare delicacy to put in our mouths after all.
Mary Ann wants action too
Mary Ann Sullivan came ashore in Africa on the very first morning of the landings. They operated on wounded men for hours, with snipers’ bullets still pinging on the walls, which is just the kind of life Mary Ann had been waiting for.
She is so steamed up she can hardly wait for the next battle. She is now with a mobile surgical truck, which she calls the super-commando truck. It is equipped to rush into the thick of things, slam on the brakes, and operate on wounded men for 36 hours without replenishments.
I am arranging officially with General Headquarters to be wounded in Mary Ann’s vicinity.
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Clapper: Roosevelt message
By Raymond Clapper
Washington –
Not since the honeymoon 10 years ago had President Roosevelt had such favorable circumstances then and now are quite different.
Ten years ago, the country was flat on its back, confidence had been lost in all leaders, and Mr. Roosevelt stepped into the vacuum and carried the country and a huge Congressional majority with him.
This time, Mr. Roosevelt deals with a Congress that is against him all but in name – or it thinks it is. It is against the New Deal – the name and the bungling, screwball excesses, boondoggling and sloppy government that are popularly associated with the New Deal.
The Congress may not be as much against the ideas for which the New Deal label originally stood as it is against the name and the barnacles that have grown on in these years, of which there are a lot because there hasn’t been a scraping in the whole 10 years. That’s one thing Mr. Roosevelt was too soft and too busy to attend to.
Mr. Roosevelt began with this Congress by talking in a conciliatory, moderate tone. He conceded mistakes, and somehow that went over as an unexpected novelty. Mr. Roosevelt also made some time with Congress by giving as little birthday surprise party for Speaker Rayburn to which a number of Congressmen, including some Republican and Democratic hardshells, were asked. Such little friendly social occasions may become more frequent now.
Jimmy Byrnes sits with ‘the boys’
The President will also make full use of James F. Byrnes, his Director of Economic Stabilization. Jimmy, former member of the House and former Senator, was up in congress when the President delivered his message. But was Jimmy at the President’s elbow to show his old Congressional cronies how close he was to the big boos? No, sirree!
Smart Jimmy was sitting way back there with the run-of-the-mine Democrats where he used to sit as a young Congressman. He sat back with the boys, just the same old Jimmy. Hadn’t changed a bit. From Tommy Corcoran to Jimmy Byrnes – that’s the cycle of White House liaison with Congress. It tells the story of the transition from the old days of sending up “must” bills to these new days of sending up “data” for Congress to study.
About the real things for which the Roosevelt administration took up the battle in the early days – as against the outside trimmings – I don’t think Mr. Roosevelt is compromising. I don’t think they are going to be wiped out. This Congress, and the country, are fed up on a lot of things. But when Mr. Roosevelt says we must fix it so that seven or eight million soldiers and sailors come back to jobs and not to selling apples on the street corners, they are not going to turn him down. Responsibility will sober the Republicans.
Social objectives of honest government
Industrial changes bring political changes. Just as the airplane has changed military conditions so that isolation is impossible for us, so economic and industrial changes bring new policies. Industrial and agricultural capacity have been multiplied so that society cannot justify permitting men to remain idle and hungry if they want work.
After all, it is all part of the long climb of humanity up the hill. As President Roosevelt said at a press conference in 1935, the social objective of any honest government in any country is:
…to try to increase the security and the happiness of a larger number of people in all occupations; to give them more of the good things of life, to give them greater distribution not only of wealth in the narrow terms, but of wealth in the wider terms… to give them assurance that they are not going to starve in their old age; to give honest business a chance to go ahead and make a reasonable profit, and to give everyone a chance to earn a living.
Mr. Roosevelt said that, offhand, when a visiting Canadian journalist asked him what the social objective of the administration was. It is a sound objective that members of both parties can follow – and probably will follow. Sacrifices in this war make such objectives imperative after the war.
Highway to Alaska
Rich region opened by highway expects new Klondike rush
By Tom Wolf, special to the Pittsburgh Press
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Four little guys
Japs’ showing at 1932 Winter Olympics serves warning they are tough, ambitious
By Joe Williams
New York –
Several aggressive letters reached our desk today. One of them had to do with skiing, a sport about which we know very little.
What we know about skiing goes back to 1932 and Lake Placid. That was when and where the Winter Games of the Olympics were held. One of the features was the first appearance of the Japanese.
They turned out to be rather heroic in the sporting page sense. They hadn’t seen much snow; they certainly had not seen those long slides from the top of which guys shot off into the great open spaces – a very daring thing.
We remember writing about them. We remember writing how they put on skis for the first time and fell on their faces just trying to walk around the main street in the town. We were wearing skis for the first time and falling down too, but we weren’t in the Olympics. We weren’t going to try to slide down those long hills.
The Japs did. Everybody did it better than they did. but there wasn’t a day the Japs weren’t in there trying. They knew nothing about skiing but if anybody else could do it – or at least try it – they could, too.
Japs show courage
So, most of our stories out of Lake Placid that year in connection with skiing were about the Japs, the four little guys who wore glasses and skied with glasses, and how they went up to the very top of the championship slide and waited for the starting gun, and how they went down the ice-boated alley, a very dangerous thing, with all the lean and confidence of an old-timer.
That seemed to us to be the story of the skiing program at Lake Placid; these little fellows who couldn’t even stand up on skis as they tried to walk around the town; but when it came to the big test, the Olympic test, they took their places and whisked down the snow lanes with all the bravery and confidence of the old-timers.
They didn’t do very well. The fact is they didn’t place. Most of us laughed at them, that is, at their lack of ability. But none of us laughed at their capacity for trying; it was a capacity that took on almost heroic dimensions.
Proud, reckless race
Of course, in those days you could not sense the treachery of the race. Looking back, even as of today, we doubt there was any treachery, there was only this: If the Americans can do it, so can we.
The war is telling us more and more about the philosophy of the Japs. They are a very proud and determined race, and very imitative. They care nothing about their lives.
This brings us back again to the little Jap – we never took the trouble to remember his name – who stood at the top to the ski slide, the first time he had ever been on any ski slide, and when he was told to go he went. He not only went but at that moment he tied the best record that had been made in the Olympics.
We can still see him. We can see him soaring through the air. We can see him landing at the parked-in space. We can see him tumbling head over heels. There was an ambulance there, we were sure he would be picked up as a hospital case. Instead, he got up and bowed to the right and to the left. We couldn’t hear what he said. We were at the top of the slide. A little golden-haired girl stood next to us.
He’s saying, “how do you like that?”
The little golden-haired girl was Sonja Henie.
Implications now clear
To us that was the big thrill of the winter Olympics of 1932. It had no war implications at the time. It has now, of course. It shows how tough the Japs can be. It is plain warning to Americans that they think they can do everything we can do. It shows, further, that they are determined to do just that.
When we look back on this little incident, we wonder what certain Naval and Army leaders are thinking about when they refer to the Japs as monkeys. To your Sentinel, they are no more than that, but it so happens we know they are sports. They are tough to beat. They think they are just ads good as us. What’s more, they have the idea, as they showed at Lake Placid, that, given the chance, they can beat is, that they are better than we are. That adds up to a strong psychological force. It should not be underestimated, by any of us.
Valid protest
All of which reminds us of a letter we received today from a skiing fan, who protests that Torger Tokle, who is the Joe Louis of the icy lanes, was not mentioned in the annual sportswriters roundup of greats, you know that voting business that decides who’s the No. 1 this and who is the No. 1 that. Tokle wasn’t even mentioned. The sportswriters decided a pole-vaulter, Cornelius Warmerdam, the only pole-vaulter who ever went above 15 feet, was the athlete of the year.
Our correspondent doesn’t gripe at that. What he gripes at mostly is that Tokle was entirely ignored.
We wish to say we agree with him entirely. It so happens we saw Warmerdam break a world record, and it left us cold. We have seen Tokle jump – and just seeing him jump is a thrill. Personally, we don’t care much about records.
We think we can explain why the sportswriters of the country ignored Tokle. So many of them never saw him. There is no snow in the South, for instance, hence there is no skiing. The facilities for pole vaulting are not restricted. You can pole vault in your backyard. That might explain the vote for Warmerdam but it would never justify the total ignoring of the greatest ski jumper this country ever saw.
Patriotic
Golf head says game has place in war
New York (UP) –
George W. Blossom Jr., president, told the 49th annual meeting of the United States Golf Association today that golf was a patriotic and proper form of exercise for men and women and not in poor taste in these serious times.
Blossom said he believed the sport played a dual role in the conditioning program of the country, providing physical exertion out of doors and relaxation at the same time.
Blossom stated:
It is my considered opinion that all who can afford it should continue, financially and otherwise, to sponsor their clubs and thereby make them available for men in armed services as well as themselves.
We would be derelict in our duty to our country if in the coming months, as the strain of war increases, we did not provide some sort of relaxation. It is surprising how morale is benefited and troubles dissipate on the golf course.
‘Ridiculous’
WMC says players can quit winter jobs
Washington (UP) – (Jan. 8)
War Manpower Commission officials today described as “ridiculous” a controversy which has arisen in Cleveland over whether baseball players who took winter jobs in defense plants can return to baseball in the spring.
The controversy arose when a job stabilization program was adopted in Cleveland by WMC, industry and labor to prevent pirating of labor and to cut down labor turnovers due to other circumstances.
A number of members of the Cleveland Indians, American League team, had taken jobs in defense factories for the winter, but planned to return to baseball when the training season starts. When informed that their status was being questioned in Cleveland, officials here said:
Of course, it doesn’t mean they can’t return to baseball.
It was pointed out that the only prospect they face – and not because of the stabilization plan – is the loss of any occupational deferment they might have enjoyed while working at a defense plant.
Officials said:
Baseball is not an essential occupation, so when they report for spring training, they lose their occupational deferments.
U.S. War Department (January 10, 1943)
Communiqué No. 291
North Africa.
Flying Fortresses (B-17) with an escort of Lightnings (P-38) bombed the harbors at Bizerte and Ferryville yesterday, and this were seen on the docks, on oil tanks and among shipping.
Two enemy fighters were shot down by the bombers, two more by the escort.
Elsewhere in northern Tunisia, air activity was slight. Spitfires shot down one Me 109.
Our fighters made many sweeps over the southern area and one patrol of four Warhawks (P-40s) which encountered five Fw 190s near Fondouk shot down two of them without loss. Mitchells (B-25s) attacked railroads at Kalaa Srira (west of Sousse) and at Graïba (between Sfax and Gabes). Targets at Gabes and the Kairouan airfield were also bombed. Escorting fighters shot down two enemy planes on these raids.
From all these operations, six of our aircraft are missing.
U.S. Navy Department (January 10, 1943)
Communiqué No. 246
South Pacific.
On January 8, during the forenoon, “Marauder” medium bombers (Martin B-26) with “Airacobra” (Bell P-39) escort bombed the Japanese airfield at Munda on New Georgia Island. Results were not reported.
During the night of January 8-9, U.S. aircraft again bombed enemy positions in the Munda area. A probable hit on an anti-aircraft battery on Munda Point was reported.
All U.S. planes returned safely from the above missions.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 10, 1943)
MORE JAP SHIPS WRECKED AT GUINEA
Convoy flees after landing some troops
MacArthur’s fliers bad over 112 planes, blast 7 ships
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Axis bases raided –
Allies tighten African pincer
De Gaullists take outpost below Tripoli
By Edward W. Beattie, United Press staff writer
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Jittery women bus patrons cost girl driver her job
Use of female operators abandoned for sa time, line official says
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