In Washington –
Attacks on OPA are renewed in House, Senate
Enforcement policies to be target for proposed legislation
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Hull assails move by Japs
Says they only intend to mold Filipinos
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In Washington –
Four zoot-suiters seized in return of hoodlumism
Violence breaks out after Los Angeles opens center where they can let off steam
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
While preparing to return to the wear zones for a new series of columns about U.S. fighting men, Ernie Pyle has written several columns about his visit home. This is the fourth.
Dana, Indiana –
My Aunt Mary Bales stays alone on the farm while my father is in the hospital. She goes to bed about 9, but doesn’t sleep very well because she’s scared.
She doesn’t know what she’s scared of, unless it’s just the dark, and strange noises outdoors. I know how it is, for I was always afraid of darkness on the farm too.
Betty the dog sleeps on the front porch, and Aunt Mary depends on her to keep the “buggers” away. That’s an old Midwest term I’d completely forgotten. It means “spooks.”
Betty is the dog we got for my mother when she was alive. My mother called her Snooky but Aunt Mary called her Betty. Now that my mother is gone, it has become permanently Betty. It has never sounded quite right to me.
The dog is older now, and not quite so frisky. But every now and then she’ll get a spell, and if you keep yelling at her to urge her on, she’ll circle the house about 10 times at a dead run, as though she were chasing a rabbit.
We haven’t any livestock left except chickens, so the work isn’t hard for my Aunt Mary. But she never stops for a second, and never runs out of something to do. In a couple of years, she’ll be 80. You’d have a hard time making anybody believe it.
‘Only’ the labor lost
About three years ago, my folks built an outside chimney on the west side of the house, so they could put an oil stove in the west room. But something was wrong with it, and the stove never worked very well. On days of west winds, the fire would blow clear out.
They decided it was because the chimney was hollow clear to the ground, thus making a suction or something. So, a few days before I got home, Aunt Mary decided to fix it.
She spent an entire day carrying bucketfuls of dirt and small rocks in from the gravel pit, then getting up on a chair and pouring the stuff with a little shovel down through the stovepipe hole. It took from early morning till suppertime to get the hollow chimney filled up almost level with the flue.
We haven’t tried the stove since then, but as Aunt Mary says:
Maybe it won’t work, but it didn’t work the other way either, so all I could lose was a day’s work.
We have a new baseburner in the front room. Rather it isn’t new, but a second-hand one a neighbor sold us. It’s a great big thing, but it doesn’t seem to heat as well as our old one did. They say that’s the way when you get awfully used to something. And we were certainly used to that old baseburner. I forget whether my Aunt Mary said we’d had it for 24 years or 40 years. Anyhow the grate inside it finally burned out, and since you can’t buy a new grate nowadays, we had to drum up a second-hand stove.
I’m crazy about baseburners. They heat so evenly, and never go out. And as somebody said, there’s nothing warmer or cozier than to come home at night and see the soft gentle glow of the baseburner shining through the front window out of the dark room.
Postcard from ‘somebody good’
I think I’ve told you in years past about my father’s weekly postcard from San Diego. It started four or five years ago, before my mother died. Once a week there’d come a postcard from San Diego addressed to “Ernie Pyle’s Mother.” It never said anything except some little cheery greeting, but it never failed to come. We didn’t know who sent them.
Then after my mother died in the spring of 1941, the cards came addressed to “Ernie Pyle’s Father.” They’d still coming, one every week. One arrived during my visit. We must have more than 200 of them by now. We still don’t know who sends them. Just somebody good, that’s all we know.
My Aunt Mary is an emotional woman, and sentimental too, and very expressive. She is terribly proud of the fame that has come to this column, and tells me so in every letter. And she often says:
Oh, if your mother could only be here to see this success.
But my Aunt Mary is wrong. My mother wouldn’t care much about all this. She would only care whether her son was genuine, and modest, and kind. It she thought he was that, nothing in the world could make her half as proud. On our visits home before she died, she hardly ever spoke of our travels or work or the outside world at all.
And my father feels pretty much the same way. It’s the little things that count. I do think he’s sort of pleased at the way things have gone, but he never mentions it.
I brought him one of my books when I came past, and a little ivory kangaroo I’d bought in Khartoum. They’re both on the table beside his hospital bed. I notice he shows visitors the kangaroo first, and says proudly:
See what Ernest brought me from Egypt.
The book is dedicated to my father on the flyleaf, but he hasn’t noticed it yet, and I haven’t said anything to him about it.
Maj. de Seversky: Strategy of airpower more humane than bloodbath of surface warfare
By Maj. Alexander P. de Seversky
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Völkischer Beobachter (November 14, 1943)
‚Dritte Luftschlacht bei Bougainville‘ –
Neuer großer See-Erfolg der Japaner
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U.S. Navy Department (November 14, 1943)
Communiqué No. 484
Pacific and Far East.
U.S. submarines have reported the sinking of seven enemy vessels and the damaging of two others in operations against the enemy in waters, of these areas, as follows:
SUNK:
- 1 plane transport
- 1 large freighter
- 1 medium cargo transport
- 4 medium freighters
DAMAGED:
- 1 large freighter
- 1 medium freighter
These actions have not been announced in any previous Navy Department Communiqué.
The Pittsburgh Press (November 14, 1943)
YANKS WEDGE INTO GERMAN LINE
Clark’s men drive ahead up mountains
Battling with grenades and bayonets, 5th Army increases flank threat
By Harrison Salisbury, United Press staff writer
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Bremen battered by U.S. bombers, 24 planes missing
Fortresses and Liberators smash through heavy opposition and shoot down 43 fighters in raid on big Nazi port
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Man, Churchill can’t take a break.
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Bougainville Japs retreat
Part of enemy fleet withdrawn from Rabaul
By Don Caswell, United Press staff writer
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Victors must preserve peace –
Declarations at Moscow right step, Catholics say
Archbishops and bishops see historic opportunity for U.S. to do full duty
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