Dewey advocates strong post-war arms alliances
Join with Britain, Russia and China to win peace by force, if necessary, New Yorker says
…
‘Gibson Girl’ used by overwater planes
Washington (UP) –
The “Gibson Girl,” an automatic radio to transit distress signals, is now standard equipment on all Army planes making overwater flights, the War Department announced today.
Drawing its name from its hourglass shape, the equipment is pretuned to the international distress frequency so that all an airman need do, when forced down at sea, is turn a crank which causes the set to send out an SOS.
The transmitter is equipped with a 300-foot aerial which can be raised by a box kite or, if there is no wind, two hydrogen balloons contained in the kit.
Women workers sought
Washington –
The Labor Department today joined the drive to recruit women workers, stressing the need for women in essential civilian industries. The Labor Department said that “it takes 12,000 telephone calls to make one bomber,” that “steel workers can’t work on empty stomachs,” and that laundries must be kept open to prevent epidemics and absenteeism in war plants.
An answer to ‘chronic liar’ –
Fourth term inevitable, Democratic bosses think
Drew Pearson said ‘definitely not,’ but events make Roosevelt renomination almost certain
By Daniel M. Kidney, Scripps-Howard staff writer
…
Washington has alert
Washington –
Capital residents and many hundreds of holiday-weekending servicemen and their families were aroused just before dawn today by a surprise test blackout. The all-clear was sounded at 6:28 a.m. ET, 58 minutes after the first siren sounded.
Two Germans escape
Trinidad, Colorado –
Police searched the mountain country along the Colorado-New Mexico border today for two young officers of the German Afrika Korps who escaped from an internment camp near here Saturday.
U.S. bureaucracy –
51 agencies hold the final say-so over $32 billion
Government corporations lack uniform audit, investigators learn in survey of uncontrolled spending
By Marshal McNeil, Scripps-Howard staff writer
…
Nation faces open split –
Simms: Ideologists start fight with Roosevelt and Hull
Active minority group seeks American invention in Europe with its ‘new order’
By William Philip Simms, Scripps-Howard foreign editor
…
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (Sept. 2, by wireless)
The other day I promised to tell you something about maps. You may have never seen it mentioned, but a map is as common a piece of equipment among frontline officers as a steel helmet. A combat officer would be perfectly useless without his map.
It is the job of the engineers to handle the maps for each division. Just as soon as a division advances to the edge of the territory covered by its maps, the map officer has to dig into his portable warehouse and fish out thousands of new maps.
The immensity of the map program would amaze you. When it came from America, the 45th Division brought with it 83 tons of Sicilian maps! I forgot to ask how many individual maps that would be, but it would surely run close to half a million.
The 45th’s maps were far superior to any we’d been using and here’s the reason: Our maps were fundamentally based on old Italian maps. Then for months ahead of the invasion our reconnaissance planes flew over Sicily taking photographs. These photos were immediately flown across the Atlantic to Washington. There, if anything new was discovered in the photographs, it was superimposed on the maps.
They kept this process of correction open right up to the last minute. The 45th sailed from America only a short time before we invaded Sicily, and in the last week before it sailed the Map Section in Washington printed, placed in waterproofed cases, and delivered to the boats those 83 tons of maps, hot off the presses.
Help from Ancient Romans
The 120th Engineers went back into antiquity for one of their jobs. They were scouting for a bypass around a blown bridge when they stumbled onto a Roman stone road, centuries old and now unused and nearly covered with sand grass. They cleaned up the old highway, and used it for a mile and a half. If it hadn’t been for this antique road, it would have taken 400 men 12 hours to build a bypass. By using it, the job was done in four hours by 150 men.
The engineers were very careful throughout the campaign about tearing up native property. They used much extra labor and time to avoid damaging orchards, buildings or vineyards. Sometimes they’d build a road clear around an orchard rather than through it.
This consideration helped make us many friends here.
Bulldozer’s adventure
I met a bulldozer driver who operates his huge, clumsy machine with such utter skill that it is like watching a magician do card tricks. The driver is Joseph Campagnone, of 14 Middle St., Newton, Massachusetts. An Italian who came to America seven years ago, when he was 16, he has a brother in the Italian Army who was captured by the British in Egypt.
His mother and sisters live near Naples. I asked Joe if he had a funny feeling about fighting his own people and he said:
No, I guess we’ve got to fight somebody and it might as well be them as anybody else.
Campagnone has been a “cat” driver ever since he started working. He is so astonishingly adept at manipulating the big machine that groups of soldiers gather at the crater’s edge to admire and comment.
Joe has had one close shave. He was bulldozing a bypass around a blown bridge when the blade of his machine hit a mine. The explosion blew him off and stunned him, but he was not wounded. The driverless dozer continued to run and drove itself over a 50-foot cliff, and turned a somersault as it fell. It landed right side up with the engine still going.
Bathing not for Ernie
Our troops along the coast occasionally got a chance to bathe in the Mediterranean. Up in the mountains you’d see hundreds of soldiers, stark-naked, bathing in Sicilian horse troughs, or out of their steel helmets. The American soldier has a fundamental phobia about bodily cleanliness which is considered all nonsense by us philosophers of the Great Unwashed, which includes Arabs, Sicilians and me.
Bullet-dented Japanese sword tells story of Congressional Medal of Honor
Marine lieutenant held attackers at bay in Solomons
By Ana Atwater
…
Marching – and dancing – ‘gets’ the feet so doctors team, the soldiers to treat
Free services given men in nation’s USO centers
…
U.S. State Department (September 6, 1943)
740.00119 European War 1939/1642
The President’s Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State
Washington, September 6, 1943
Secret
My Dear Mr. Secretary: Replying to your letter NE of September 4, 1943, transmitting copy of a note dated August 13, 1943, from the Greek Embassy, I have taken up with the President the questions presented in your note and am authorized to give you the following information.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The question of our informing General Eisenhower that the Government of Greece has authorized him to sign for the Royal Hellenic Government the proposed terms of surrender of Italy is now under discussion by the President and the Prime Minister of Great Britain.
Sincerely yours,
WILLIAM D. LEAHY