I DARE SAY —
‘…On winter’s traces’
By Florence Fisher Parry
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‘Good Neighbor’ fund cut sharply by Senate
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Brown urges approval of farm subsidy
Necessary to ‘hold the line’ against inflation, he testifies
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Vital cog in war machine smashed in Antwerp raid
Loss of valuable plant probably explains German fury over American bombing
By Victor Gordon Lennox
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Eden finds U.S., British outlooks are ‘very close’
Foreign Secretary reports to Commons on Washington talks, invites Hull to visit England
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Yanks embrace Tommies like long-lost brothers
Tunisian hills ring with cheers at junction of battle-toughened Americans and 8th Army
By Phil Ault, United Press staff writer
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Allies strafe three vessels in Jap convoy
Near misses scored by planes on destroyer in Solomon Sea
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Tunisia –
The war correspondents over here seldom write about themselves, as it may be interesting if I try to tell you how we live.
There are more than 75 American and British correspondents and photographers in North Africa. Since Allied Headquarters is in a big city to the rear, that’s where most of the correspondents stay. The number actually in Tunisia at any one time fluctuates between half a dozen and two dozen. Each of the three big press associations has a five-man staff – usually three men back at headquarters and two at the front. They rotate every few weeks.
The correspondents in the city live a life that is pretty close to normal. They live in hotels or apartments, eat at restaurants or officers’ messes, work regular hours, get laundry done, dress in regulation uniforms, keep themselves clean, and get their news from communiqués and by talking to staff officers at headquarters.
Heebie-jeebies in the city
Since their lives are closely akin to the lives of newspapermen at home, we’ll deal here only with the correspondents as they live at the front.
Some of us have spent as much as two months in Tunisia without ever returning to the city. When we do, it is a great thrill to come back to civilization – for the first day.
But then a reaction sets in. Almost invariably we get the heebie-jeebies and find ourselves nervous and impatient with all the confusion and regimentation of city life, and wish ourselves at the front again.
The outstanding thing about life at the front is its magnificent simplicity. It is a life consisting only of the essentials – food, sleep, transportation, and what little warmth and safety you can manage to wangle out of it by personal ingenuity. Ordinarily, when life is stripped to the bare necessities, it is an empty and boring life. But not at the front. Time for me has never passed so rapidly. You’re never aware of the day of the week, and a whole month is gone before you know it.
Up here, the usual responsibilities and obligations are gone. You don’t have appointments to keep. Nobody cares how you look. Red tape is at a minimum. You have no desk, no designated hours. You don’t wash hands before you eat, nor afterwards either. It would be a heaven for small boys with dirty faces.
And it was a healthy life. During the winter months I was constantly miserable from the cold, yet paradoxically I never felt better in my life. The cold wind burned my face to a deep tan, and my whole system became toughened. I ate twice as much as usual. I hadn’t been hungry for nigh onto forty years, but in Tunisia I ate like a horse and was so constantly hungry it got to be a joke.
You do everything for yourself
It was a life that gave a new sense of accomplishment. In normal life, all the little things were done for us. I made my money by writing, and then used that money to hire people to wash my clothes, shine my shoes, make my bed, clean the bathtub, fill my gas tank, serve my meals, carry my bags, build my fires.
But not in Africa. We did everything ourselves. We were suddenly conscious again that we could do things. The fact that another guy could write a better story than I could was counterbalanced by the fact that I could roll a better bedroll than he could.
Last, and probably most important of all, was the feeling of vitality, of being in the heart of everything, of being a part of it – no mere onlooker, but a member of the team. I got into the race, and I resented dropping out even long enough to do what I was there to do – which was write. I would rather have just kept going all day, every day.
I’ve written that war is not romantic when a person is in the midst of it. Nothing happened to change my feeling about that. But I will have to admit there was an exhilaration in it; an inner excitement that built up into a buoyant tenseness seldom achieved in peacetime.
Just part of Army family
Up here, the Army accepts us correspondents as a part of the family. We knew and were friends with hundreds of individual soldiers. And we knew, and. were known by, every American general in Tunisia. There was no hedging at the front. I’ve never known an instance where correspondents were not told, with complete frankness, what was going on.
In the beginning, no restrictions were put on us; we could go anywhere we pleased at any time. But things gradually changed, as the established machinery of war caught up with us. Then there was a rule that correspondents couldn’t go into the frontlines unless accompanied by an officer. Maybe that was a good rule. I don’t know. But there were about two dozen of us who felt ourselves in an odd position, as if we were being conducted through our own house.
Money ruin faces China if blockade isn’t broken
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 fifth article in the series.
As the senior victim of Japanese aggression, blockaded China is increasingly resentful of what she considers United Nations neglect of her acute problems.
A number of things have contributed to this unhappy outlook of Chinese public opinion, among them delays in the reopening of the Burma Road, the greater attention being devoted to other Allied fronts, the failure of China to obtain a place of full equality on Allied war councils and, above all, the steady deterioration in China’s economic position.
This concern is growingly reflected in Chinese newspaper editorials. It is only thinly disguised in the utterances of some Chinese officials. But to get a real earful, it is necessary to go to China and talk to the people there who are taking it on the chin.
Yet the Chinese are neither desperate nor thinking of compromise with the enemy. As far as Gen. Chiang Kai-shek, at least, is concerned, compromise is unthinkable. And, incidentally, the Generalissimo’s prestige and influence in China are greater today than ever before. His popularity has grown, rather than diminished, as China’s problems have multiplied. It is as strong in the occupied as in the unoccupied regions. There have been times when some of those under Chiang have wavered, but he himself has never budged in his determination. His unifying influence is a fact of much importance in the China situation.
China weaker
There are real hazards, however, in postponing too long the relief of blockaded China. Despite his prestige, Gen. Chiang, like Canute, is powerless to exact obedience from the sea. The tide which threatens China today is mainly an economic one. The economic crisis created by the Japanese blockade has already brought serious dislocations and will bring more as it continues. Notwithstanding such material help as we are sending China by air, the country is likely to become weaker with every month that the blockade remains unbroken.
China’s economic woes are legion. Topping the list are the twin evils of shortages and high prices. The cost of living has multiplied fabulously. Prices range from 40 to 80 times higher than in 1937 and the ascent continues. The currency issue has reached astronomical figures, and a sizable fraction of the precious space in airplanes going to China has to be devoted to bales of banknotes.
Transport and distribution are painful problems. As in most countries at war, hoarding and profiteering have been unhealthful influences, which even occasional executions have not checked.
The economic crisis has brought a steady decline in the standard of living of a people whose standard was already among the lowest. It is no exaggeration to say that over 90% of the people of China are living in poorer circumstances than the poorest 10% of the population of the United States.
Inflation hurts
Inflation hits hardest at people with fixed incomes, and this is especially true in China where the small but important salaried element have suffered out of proportion with the mass of the people. Salaries and wages, except in a minority of cases, have not begun to keep pace with the rising price level. Junior government officials, professors and teachers – many of them possessing degrees from leading American universities – have gone through a trying ordeal of privation. In some places, as in much-bombed Chungking, many of them are living in flimsy, mud-walled, thatched-roofed huts, without heat in either their offices or homes during the chill winter months.
Although such people receive a small rice allowance in addition to their meager salaries, undernourishment is steadily undermining their vitality. The children of these people are in an even worse way. Milk is fantastically high-priced and out of reach of most. Malnutrition is extremely common among children. Medicines are so scarce and so high-priced that they have to be bought by the pill and by the gram rather than by the box or by the bottle. In numerous instances, teachers and office workers have been obliged to sell their possessions one by one to obtain enough money to keep body and soul together.
Farmers fare fairly
If China’s whole population were hit as hard as these wage-earners, the country’s plight would be desperate indeed. But fortunately for China, the great mass of her population (about 80%) live on the farms. The peasants as a whole have not fared badly despite heavier taxation and rising living costs, for they have received benefit from higher crop prices. Nor have the merchants suffered, nor, for the most part, the coolies.
The foundation of China’s rather primitive economy is food. China has had severe famines in isolated regions during the last year, mainly in Honan and in the coastal areas devastated by Japanese attack, but over most of Free China, the crops were fair. Nature, however, is tricky. One year of bad crops over the country as a whole could provoke disastrous consequences, especially if continuance of the blockade made outside relief impossible.
The big shortages in Free China are munitions of all kinds, manufactured goods of all kinds, transport facilities of all kinds and of course medicines of all kinds. Arsenals, cotton mills and factories transferred to West China from the coast during the hostilities are meeting a percentage of the country’s needs, but not a very big percentage. According to official statistics, 639 factories have been moved piece by piece to new locations in West China, since the war began, to supplement the few industries already there.
Output increases
Free China’s output of cotton yard has increased four times, wheat flour two-and-a-half times, coal two times. Today, articles are made in West China which were never manufactured in that region before – such things as electric wire, military telephones, lamps, alcohol, gasoline, diesel oil, generators and industrial instruments. The difficulty is that though supply is still far short of demand, the production on most items cannot be increased much more, because no more machinery is available.
To ease the terrific supply problem, the Chinese have had to encourage importation of Japanese textiles and other essential goods from occupied China and Indochina. But this source is likely to dry up, as the Japs, too, are running very short on materials. Infinitesimal quantities of goods, mainly textiles, are coming across Tibet from India, by caravan. It is doubtful whether this route will ever become very important. China is receiving almost nothing from Russia. There is a possibility that a roundabout overland line of supply can be opened from the United States to China by way of Chinese Turkestan. But that route would also be restricted in its capacity.
Collapse predicted
How long China can go on like this is a question that has had experts and pseudo-experts guessing for the past five years. The Chinese government has tried a great variety of measures to combat the economic crisis and while they may have slowed up the process of deterioration, they have not stopped it. Economic collapse in China has been often predicted, during those years, but the Chinese, for all their woes, have kept plugging along.
The psychological factor is too often overlooked. America’s entry into the war and relief from bombing have had a very stimulating effect on Chinese confidence and morale. As long as the general military picture remains in our favor, as long as China remains sure of Allied victory, as long as crops in China are good, the long-suffering Chinese people will be able to put up with considerably more punishment. It looks as though they are going to have to. There is now little hope that any major effort can be made to lift the siege of China until after the monsoons. They will end in October. There is no certainty how long it will take, even then, for the Allies to launch an all-out show in Burma.
With some help, China can struggle on for many months, but predictions on China’s condition after another year of blockade have to be made with fingers crossed.