Editorial: Hoover on the home fronts
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U.S. production short of goal, probers claim
House committee scores ‘haphazard’ steps to mobilize for war
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Court limits bench inquiry
Secretary Perkins upheld in subpoena rights
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Court sends back California milk case
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Race question a world issue
Must practice democracy, Church Council says
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Berle fears new war if peace is bungled
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
With U.S. forces in Algeria –
Being with the troops in Africa is, in many ways, like attending a national political convention. Especially if you’re around one of the headquarters set up in the various coastal cities.
In Oran, for instance, the censor’s office serves as the press box, and that’s where you meet other correspondents and exchange dope and listen to the radio news. Everybody eats at two big messes set up by the Army. If you want to see somebody and can’t find him, you wait till mealtime and you’re bound to see him there.
As at a convention, you run your legs off from one building to another, looking up various officers and having confabs. Everybody fills your ear full of dope, rumor, and fact. Most of it you can’t use, and most of it isn’t true anyway.
Convention-like, people wander in and out of my room all day and night. Some of them you know, and some you don’t. Rooms are scarce, and you’re liable to have one friend and two strangers sleeping on your floor.
Parade of faces goes on and on
You shake hands with scores of people whose faces you know, but you can’t remember their names or at what camp in Ireland or England you met them. And you’re always running surprisingly onto some genuine acquaintance.
A moment ago, Pvt. Crosby Lewis walked into my room. He’s a brilliant young American who joined the Canadian Army and was sent to England two years ago. Now he’s with us. The last time I saw him was at a cocktail party in London announcing his engagement.
Last evening, I bumped into Lt. Col. Louis Plain of the Marine Corps, who was one of my friends at Londonderry last summer. He’s a big Clevelander, hard as nails, who got the Marine situation well in hand here and then lost his voice, so he just makes motions.
On my first day here a beaming fellow in British uniform came up and started pumping my hand. It was Guy Ramsey, of the London News-Chronicle, whom I last saw nearly two years ago when we were following Wendell Willkie in England. Ramsey is the greatest reciter of limericks in England. All of them are unprintable.
Fellow college man turns up
Way out in the country one night, I was introduced in the darkness to Maj. William H. Pennington. We chatted a few moments, and it turned out we were in school together at Indiana University 20 years ago.
Yesterday, a fellow came up whom 1 hadn’t seen for 10 years. He was Grainger Sutton, once a linotype operator on the Washington Daily News. He is a major now.
So it goes. Friends you had in England, good friends from America, people you hadn’t seen for two decades. Tomorrow, they’ll disappear again.
In wartime, people leave without saying goodbye – a fellow will be gone for three or four days before you realize his absence. It’s no use to inquire. You just accept it, and months from now you’ll be pumping his hand in some other foreign country. Or maybe you’ll never see him again. You can never tell.
Luggage is nuisance
Personal luggage in wartime is a paradox. You must have it, and in order to have it you must carry it with you, and you can’t carry it with you because there’s too much of it. You have to carry your own bed and tent, some extra rations, your clothes, and a lot of purely military stuff such as gas mask, dust mask, tin hat, canteen, mess kit, and so on.
No man can carry all that on his back; I personally couldn’t carry that much if there were two of me. Consequently, it has to go on trucks. And inevitably it gets lost. The result of this overweight of baggage is that people simply abandon part of it, even if they don’t lose it. They’ll be less comfortable, but they just can’t lug it all. Go into any billet or barracks and you’ll find bedding, or clothes, or barracks bags that the guy ahead of you left.
In the room I’m now occupying, I picked up a nice cap which fitted me better than my own, and I also took the blankets I found on the floor and left mine in their place, because they were nicer than mine. There’s also a brand-new mess kit here if anybody wants it.
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Millett: Resolutions really count because they aid America
Nation’s women say they’ll do things this war year and they mean what they say
By Ruth Millett
This year, no one greeted the New Year in a frivolous frame of mind.
Once Mrs. America’s New Year’s resolutions might have gone something like this:
I resolve to lose ten pounds; to play a better game of bridge; to do more entertaining.
But not this year. This year, Mrs. America is keeping firm, hard-headed resolutions. And those resolutions aren’t just important to her. They are important to her country.
This year, she is promising itself:
I will somehow find more time for war work. If I can do so without actually neglecting my family, I will prepare myself for a job outside my home.
I will waste nothing, neither time, nor energy, nor things, nor money.
I will become more efficient in the job of running my home, cutting out what is unessential – but being sure to keep its members feeling that it is the nicest place in the world.
I will not use the war as an excuse for getting out of things that I should do, but dislike doing.
I will watch myself that I do not leave others feeling worse, rather than better, for having talked with me.
I will keep whatever of beauty and peace I can in my life and in the lives of my family, instead of gearing our home life to the breathless hurry of the radio news announcers.
I will face whatever hardship or sorrow the year may bring to me with courage and faith in a better future. Sorrow and grief will come to many in 1943, and I must be able to live with the idea that it may come to me.
But even knowing that, I will not dread the New Year – but look forward to it courageously, realizing that I must help make it as successful a year as possible. I have a job to do, and I will do it as well as I can, because my small job is part of as great a job as my country has been undertaken.
U.S. Navy Department (January 12, 1943)
Communiqué No. 249
South Pacific.
On January 11:
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A force of “Dauntless” dive bombers (Douglas SBD) escorted by “Wildcat” fighters (Grumman F4F) was attacked by 12 Japanese “Zeros” between Santa Isabel Island and New Georgia Island. Four “Zeros” were shot down and 2 others were possibly destroyed. One “Wildcat” failed to return.
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A force of “Marauder” medium bombers (Martin B-26) with “Airacobra” (Bell P-39) escort attacked Japanese positions at Munda. Clouds over the target areas prevented accurate bombing and made observation of results difficult.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 12, 1943)
NAPLES RAIDED
Nazi fighters shoot down 2 U.S. raiders
Daylight attack starts fire in harbor; French gain in Tunisia
By Edward W. Beattie, United Press staff writer
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Eyewitness reports on carrier –
Seared bare hands work red hot guns on sinking Hornet
Navy reveals names of 11 U.S. warships sunk in Solomons; reporter describes actions in which Japs lost 25 vessels, 125 planes
By Charles P. Arnot, United Press staff writer
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BOOST IN VICTORY TAX HINTED
10% sales levy, forced savings seen
Author of pay-as-you-go bill says 27 million now in debt to U.S.
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Republicans warm to battle –
Flynn appointment places Democrats in tough position
Senators feel Roosevelt gave juicy political issue to GOP
By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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I DARE SAY —
The unremembered
By Florence Fisher Parry
She said to me:
So many people tell me about their having known my father. They tell me this and that about him, and it always seems so unreal, hearing about someone I cannot remember at all. It seems so queer. A phantom father. Someone who had everything to do with my life and nothing to do with its living. There ought to be a way that children could remember!
And as she spoke, the picture came to me of the millions and millions of phantom fathers, the unremembered, destined by this war to remain myths to their children… never, never to win a place in their memories.
We are not told – yet – of the casualties. We will not be asked to bear the burden of these awful facts for a long time. Not until long after the war’s end will the grim statistics begin to amass. And then – because the peace will have been returned to us – it will not matter so much, except to those who find themselves bereft. Who of us remembers that one out of 10 of the AEF who were transported to France was a casualty in the last war? At the time, it did not register, or was it even told?
Now we know that that war was but a little prelude to this one; that its casualties, compared with those to come, will seem infinitesimally small. Oh, lives have been lost fast in past wars! The Marne and Gettysburg and the gaunt horror of Verdun still provide history awful records. But the deaths of this war will forever remain incomputable. The millions purged and starved, the millions dead of broken hearts and mangled dreams, the millions turned to zombies, living dead.
No compromise
The millions of unremembered fathers, their progeny disinherited of all memory of them! I pity them above all others. The young, the older, fathers, denied the gift of all remembrance, from those to whom they gave the breath of life!
Now the question arises all the time shell these young soldiers marry knowing they are to leave their brides? Shall they risk – or more, encourage – leaving behind them pregnant wives? It is not a question for which there is a wholesale answer; sometimes such action amounts almost to desertion, sometimes creates social problems almost insoluble.
But if solution can be found; if a way can be reasonably provided, I would say: YES! If a fine man is to be cut down before his time by war, far better that he leave behind some progeny! Far better that his wife be given another life to replace his!
There is no more bleak nor sterile premise than that upon which I see all too, too many war marriage built; the premise that because of the uncertainty of the man’s life, in war, pregnancy should be avoided at any cost.
Nothing could be more destructive to “that far-off divine event toward which the whole creation moves.” For a man to go into this war with the idea of saving the world, only to himself deny to its future his own progeny, is an
Of course, there are exceptions. Of course, there are hasty and inept war marriages which would do well to provide against the contingency of offspring. All over the country there is a surge of war marriages. Many of these should not be. They have in them a transitory urgency that bodes no hope of their endurance. Many of these marriages will dissolve after the war, by legal or other means.
It would be folly to turn our minds away from the countless artful marriages that are being contrived by wily parents and chiseling girls. It would be silly to accept as a sacred and unalterable vow the pledges which thousands of callow girls and confused boys are making at improvised altars and “justice” offices.
Parents too
But I say: When two responsible young persons, supported in their intention by their families, decide that in thew face of war and separation they are resolved to become man and wife, it is the duty not only of the young wedded pair but of their families as well to accept the full responsibility of that marriage, and all that normal marriage brings – including children.
I would no more consider that my son were fulfilling his obligation to the country he now serves, if he married now and then deliberately refused to have a child for the duration, than I would consider my daughter a fit member of society were she to undertake marriage now, fully cognizant of the separation and risk it entailed, only to plead exemption from its normal, full expectancies.
If young people who are to be torn apart by this war still insist upon marriage, let them enter it ready to take its most solemn consequences. And it is the duty of the parents of these young couples to stand ready to assume whatever is to be their share of those consequences.
I am shocked at the scurry of otherwise intelligent women to have their daughters “married off” hurriedly, to men in our Armed Forces, yet who profess unwillingness for their daughters to enter into any of the basic obligations of marriage.
If our daughters can’t have babies while their husbands are away at war, and mothers aren’t willing to help them through with them, then they’d better give up the idea of there being as war marriage.