Daylight raids gain favor with British, U.S. airmen
Results achieved by Fortresses dispute trend of opinions in Washington over bombings
By Nat A. Barrows
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GOP chairman hits scuttling of pay-go plan
Democrats never so lacking in leadership, Ditter declares
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Mother of 5 launches USS The Sullivans
San Francisco, California (UP) –
Mrs. Thomas E. Sullivan of Waterloo, Iowa, yesterday christened a new destroyer, USS The Sullivans, named in honor of her five sons lost last November in the sinking of the cruiser USS Juneau.
Mrs. Sullivan told a crowd of 5,000 persons:
I am proud to be here to christen this lovely ship in the name of my five boys.
I only wish that my boys could be here to see this warship but I know they must be happy that this ship is ready to go out there and carry on the fight.
With Mrs. Sullivan were her husband and her daughter Genevieve, who will soon be sworn in as a member of the WAVES.
RAdm. Clark H. Woodward, Chief of the Navy’s Incentive Division at Washington, DC, paid tribute to Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan’s spirit in making a nationwide tour of war plants to speed production.
Joan Crawford, husband adopt 10-month-old boy
Hollywood, California (UP) –
Joan Crawford and her actor-husband, Philip Terry, announced today they have adopted a 10-month-old boy. His name is Philip Terry Jr.
Miss Crawford said the boy’s parents are dead and the adoption is permanent. The actress once adopted a child only to have the mother learn the whereabouts of the boy. Miss Crawford gave back the child because, she said, it seemed the right thing to do.
She also has a three-year-old girl whom she adopted.
Berle hints U.S. accepts Russian territory claims
Buffer state theory ‘dead as a dodo,’ Assistant Secretary of State declares
By Lyle C. Wilson, United Press staff writer
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Millett: Modern-minded granddad suggests ‘save your advice’
Young mothers of today are more competent than ancestors, elderly man informs women
By Ruth Millett
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria –
The home of the Legion was a great and pleasant surprise to me. I expected it to be a slovenly tent-camp out in an almost unbelievable desert, with dirty cutthroat troops and brutal-looking officers.
Everything is just the opposite. The headquarters is in a city of 60,000 people, with fine sidewalk cafés and paved streets and modern apartment houses. It is not in the desert at all, but in rich farming country.
The Legion buildings form a sort of academy, right in the heart of the city. There are four-storied permanent barracks, and fine parks inside the walls, with many flowers and extraordinarily clean grounds and buildings. There are museums, and beautiful statues and monuments about the grounds. There are nice homes for officers and noncoms and their families.
Officers are uniformed as though by Bond St., and most of them might be American businessmen or professors as far as their looks are concerned. At Saint-Cyr, the West Point of France, the top man in each class has the privilege of choosing where he shall serve. And it is a tradition that he always chooses the Foreign Legion. So, the Legion is led by career men.
Wooden hand is prize memento
Legionnaires tell me that many of the officers, though strict, are almost fatherly in their attitude toward the soldiers. And certainly, the ones I met are, without exception, gentlemen in anybody’s country.
The French Foreign Legion was created in 1831. So, it has more than a century of tradition behind it. The Legion is extremely proud of the two museums here in headquarters which depict its history. On the museum’s tiled floors there are beautiful brown-and-white Algerian rugs, somewhat similar to our own Navajo Indian rugs. Around the walls are case after case of Legion mementos – old swords, flags, pieces of uniform, guns, bullets, decorations.
The walls are hung with hundreds of pictures of Legion members who have died gloriously. Life-sized wax figures standing around the walls of one room show the dozen or so types of uniform worn by the Legion over the years.
The Legion’s most prized memento is, of all things, a wooden hand. In 1854, the Legion fought in the Russian Crimea, and in that campaign a Capt. Danjou had one hand shot off. So, he had a wooden hand made to replace it. The hand is of fine workmanship, the fingers are all jointed, and the thing looks almost lifelike.
Legion abandoning its cavalry
Well, the Legion went to Mexico during Maximilian’s reign, and there was fought the most memorable battle in its history. A tiny party of 115 Legionnaires barricaded themselves in a hacienda at the town of Camerone, and battled 4,000 Mexicans. All but three of the Legionnaires were killed. It was much like our own Alamo. Capt. Danjou with the wooden hand was killed in this battle. Later his hand was found, and sent back to Sidi Bel Abbès.
The battle was fought April 30, 1863. The Legion observes April 30 each year with great parades and reviews. Capt. Danjou’s hand is brought out in its glass case and stands there as a symbol of what the Legion means.
It all seems a little gruesome, but the Legion feels deeply about it.
The Legion, though hard, is just as sentimental as any other organization. You can see it especially right now among their cavalrymen. As we came unexpectedly into the stables, we caught a glimpse of one young soldier kissing his horse’s forehead as he finished currying it. He was a tough-looking boy who didn’t seem capable of tenderness or sentiment. Something will be lost when the Legion’s cavalrymen start riding iron horses.
Stilwell, Chennault lead Americans in Asia conflict
By A. T. Steele
Almost a year before Pearl Harbor, Arch Steele, of the Chicago Daily News foreign staff, took a trip into Japan and dug up startling facts about Tokyo’s plans against the United States. Then, to avoid censorship, he slipped back into China, and filed his now-famous series on “Japan Takes Aim.”
Since then, Mr. Steele’s accurate and uninterrupted war coverage has carried him into many battle zones – including Russia’s. And now – back in the United States for the first time in four years – he has written a fact-filled series on the task that faces us before we can come to final grips with Japan. The following is the second article in the series.
A Yank and a Southerner are America’s two outstanding military men in continental Asia, and both are as tough as salty as they come. Each in his own way, Lt. Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell and Brig. Gen. Claire L. Chennault are making ready for the still-far-off big push. Given the tools, it would be hard to find two men better fitted for delousing Burma and China of the noxious Japanese invaders.
China, under Chiang Kai-shek, and India, under Sir Archibald P. Wavell, have the armies. The Americans have the Air Force. But the U.S. Army’s role in China, Burma and India is more than just knocking Zeros out of the air and bombing Japanese bases.
Our Army is doing a tremendous job of supply. It is also helping to equip and train a model Chinese military force in India which is expected to demonstrate that the Chinese, when properly armed, can hit as hard and as effectively as any other fighting force.
The day may possibly come when it will be necessary for the United States to send big armies to India and China to help the British and the Chinese to complete their job of expelling the Japanese from continental Asia. How much American military assistance will be needed depends to a very large extent on how effectively China is able to utilize her enormous manpower. Six years of war have sapped China’s military strength. But Gen. Stilwell, for one, is convinced that once China’s lifelines are restored that strength can be refreshed, revived and directed in such a way that China’s vast armies will become a very powerful offensive factor.
Proud of camp
“Uncle Joe” Stilwell’s pride and joy is a camp, “somewhere in India,” where a unit of Chinese troops is being groomed, with American equipment and under American and Chinese instructors, to show what the Chinese can do when given half a chance. This detachment, consisting partly of Chinese soldiers who retreated from Burma with Stilwell, has been outfitted and armed almost entirely with American materials. You’d never recognize them for the same men who staggered out of the jungle a year ago.
They have made astonishing gains in weight and general physical well-being. They are as delighted as children with their new weapons and keep them in immaculate order. What’s most important, they have responded remarkably to instruction and have made a record on the target range and on the maneuvering grounds which compares favorably with that of any modern army after a similar period of training.
Gen. Chiang Kai-shek has promised that when the reconquest of Burma begins, the Chinese will take an active military role. They will attack not only from China, but also from China. It is then that this experimental Chinese force in India will have an opportunity to show what Chinese soldiers can do when, for once, they can face the enemy with decent odds. It has been possible to divert to this Chinese Expeditionary Force some part of the Lend-Lease materials which have been piled up in the India bottleneck awaiting shipment to China.
India a base
Generally speaking, India has been a bigger base of American military activity than China. This is natural, for not only is India much more easily supplied, but it is also the logical base for the main push against Burma – most important Allied chore in continental Asia. For our air offensive, however, which is steadily growing in power and which must be pushed regardless of delays in the Burma campaign, China offers the only suitable bases from which we can strike deep into the vitals of the Japanese Empire.
Until recently, our Air Force in China, Burma and India was under a combined command, with Brig. Gen. Clayton Bissell as its head. Now our small China airwing has been made a separate air force – the 14th – under Chennault. This is good news for it means greater harmony in a place where it was badly needed. The outspoken differences of view between the Chennault and Bissell camps had long been a cause of anxiety to detached observers who recognized the special abilities of both these officers, but felt the need of better understanding between their adherents. Both Chennault and Bissell remain, of course, under the general command of Lt. Gen. Stilwell.
Proof of talent
Chennault, a rugged, weather-beaten oak of a man, has long been and still is one of the outstanding air theorists in the U.S. Armed Forces. Some of his tactical theories are so revolutionary that they do not set well with more orthodox minds. But among his own subordinates Chennault is idolized almost to the point of worship. His record as commander of the old “Flying Tigers,” and more recently, of the China Air Task Force, provides convincing proof of his talents.
During his early years in the Army Air Corps, when flying was still in its infancy, Chennault delighted in tearing up out-of-date theories and devising new ones. His specialty was pursuit flying. He had the annoying habit (to the older heads) of thinking years ahead. He was an admirer of Billy Mitchell. He wrote a manual on pursuit flying. He devised a new system of gunnery. He was a most vocal advocate of teamwork in pursuit flying long before it had been developed to its present technique. While he was stationed with the Army Air Corps in Hawaii, he began thinking out his theories on air-raid warning networks which were later applied with great success in China.
Watched Japanese
After he was invalided out of the Army, Chennault came to China as an aeronautical adviser to the Chinese government. For years he remained there, helping to train Chinese pilots and studying Japanese tactics. He spent hundreds of hours, during Japanese air raids, watching Japanese aerial maneuvers through his binoculars. He rarely bothered to go into a dugout. The result was that when Chennault took over command of the American Volunteer Corps (the “Flying Tigers”) he was able to tell his men exactly how the Japanese would behave and to instruct his pilots in a revolutionary method of dealing with them.
Chennault came back into the U.S. Army as a brigadier general when the Flying Tigers gave way to the China Air Task Force. He has been handicapped by insufficient planes, but has done wonders with the small force at his command. Chennault’s theory is that the Japanese are using China as a training ground for pilots destined for the South Pacific. He believes that given enough fighter planes he could cripple Japanese air operations in the South and that given still more planes he could knock the Japanese Air Force into a cocked hat.
If Chennault has any weakness, it is his softheartedness. He is lenient to a fault.
It would be unfair to Uncle Joe Stilwell’s boys in China and India to pass up the great job they are doing in ferrying strategic supplies to China over the Himalayan “hump.” A share of this traffic between India and China is handled by the Chinese National Aviation Corporation, a Sino-American concern; but the bulk of it is carried in Army transports, with Army pilots.
Deserve praise
These young transport fliers, who are increasing in numbers as more and more transport planes go into service, have not had half the recognition they deserve. They’re performing a task less glamorous but no less dangerous than that of the men who drop bombs on Japanese bases – and it has to be done almost every day of the year, regardless of conditions. Their hazards are not only Japanese Zeros – for they often skirt the Japanese lines in northern Burma – but also foul weather, mountains higher than Mt. McKinley, fierce winds that toss you scores of miles off course, and frequent icy conditions that push down transport to dangerously low altitudes at the very peak of their climb.
The roll of Americans who have died fighting the elements over the humps a lengthening one. Bad weather and blind crashes into mountainsides are usually responsible. Several fliers had had narrow squeaks from the Japanese.
There is the pilot, for instance, who lost his way and was forced to land in a river bed behind the Japanese lines. He finally got his bearings and took off, just in time to get a bird’s-eye view of a Japanese patrol beating its way toward the spot where his plane had been.
The Pittsburgh Press (April 6, 1943)
AXIS CONVOY, AIR TRANSPORTS DESTROYED BY ALLIED PLANES
U.S., British fliers bag 48 Nazi aircraft
Only 12 of our planes are lost in record attacks; enemy on defensive in land fighting
By Virgil Pinkley, United Press staff writer
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In raid on Antwerp –
‘Forts’ smash key Nazi plant
U.S. attacks on Belgium, Paris called best yet
By William B. Dickinson
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Subs taking heavier toll in Atlantic, Knox asserts
Navy Secretary says increased sinkings during March were helped by new U-boat tactics
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