America at war! (1941–) – Part 3

Spread of strikes cited in argument for Richberg plan

West Virginia Congressman is impressed by comments from Armed Forces; sees labor harming itself
By Rep. Jennings Randolph (D-WV)

americavotes1944

Ex-Akron mayor may snub jury on ‘Hopkins letter’

Washington (UP) –
C. Nelson Sparks, former Mayor of Akron, Ohio, said today he may stand on his constitutional rights and refuse to surrender to a federal grand jury the original copy of a letter purportedly written by Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s No. 1 adviser, predicting that Wendell L. Willkie will be chosen the 1944 Republican presidential nominee.

Mr. Sparks made his statement after the Department of Justice announced a grand jury will begin an inquiry next Wednesday into circumstances surrounding the letter, which Mr. Hopkins has branded a forgery.

Poll: Willkie faces sharp fight in Midwest

Indiana, home state of 1940 GOP candidate, favors Dewey
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion

‘Aggressive defense’ against invasion believed planned by German generals

Allied armies may face rocket bombs and zones of mines
By Thomas M. Johnson, special to the Pittsburgh Press

Markley: Jap shot down by Foss fired at major in boat

By Morris Markley, North American Newspaper Alliance


Gen. Arnold: Three-fourths of Berlin razed

‘We’ll finish the job, too,’ air chief pledges

americavotes1944

Editorial: Wartime voting needs

Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Knox have laid down a number of minimum requirements which they believe essential to any soldier-voting plan.

The secretaries sent their recommendations to the Council of State Governments, obviously with the idea that the Council would distribute them among the states.

The requirements which Mr. Knox and Mr. Stimson say are necessary to enable the Army and Navy to carry out an election among the members of the Armed Forces are reasonable and to the point.

They say, in effect, they can’t stop the war while soldiers and sailors vote, but they also say the armed services will do everything in their power to carry out whatever laws are enacted.

But the necessary provisions which they have outlined should be sent to Congress because it is Congress which must enact the basic legislation if there is to be any uniformity in an election among the Armed Forces, or for that matter any election.

Congress resumes sessions Monday and a suitable arrangement for enabling the Armed Forces to vote should be the first order of business.

The purpose of the plan, however devised, is to give the 11 million men in the Army and Navy an opportunity to vote and any method which is so restrictive that it bars any of these men, save possibly those in actual combat at the time the vote is taken, will be satisfactory.

The only way to guarantee that all, or nearly all, of these men will be supplied with appropriate ballots is to set up a uniform system. As Mr. Knox and Mr. Stimson point out, they cannot adapt the military facilities to 48 different systems.

It would be impossible for the states to get together in the next few weeks, or even months, on a uniform voting plan. It is relatively simple for Congress to act. Congress should waste no time in being about it.

Edson: Bombers in China must fly own gas over India route

By Peter Edson

Ferguson: A new type of woman

By Mrs. Walter Ferguson

Congress changes mind –
Cold shoulder given foes of soldier vote

Passage of bill providing for absentee ballot appears assured
By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer

In Washington –
Aircraft output sets new record but misses goal

Industry falls only 200 short of 9,000-plane objective; failure laid to Army’s refusal to accept many units

americavotes1944

Martin boosts Pittsburgh for GOP convention

Governor says Hunt Armory would be ‘ideal’ for purpose

Pittsburgh was advocated by Governor Edward Martin today as a possible site for the 1944 Republican National Convention.

Noting that wartime transportation difficulties will be a chief factor in the selection of the convention city, Governor Martin said “Pittsburgh wouldn’t be so badly located.” He added that the Hunt Armory in East Liberty would be “ideal for the purpose,” especially with the addition of two galleries that would raise the seating company to 15,000.

It was Governor Martin’s first public pronouncement on the subject. Previously, he maintained the stand that any site advocated by the Office of Defense Transportation would be acceptable – and that agency has suggested that the GOP and Democratic conventions be held in Chicago.

The place and time of the Republican convention is to be chosen by the GOP National Committee in Chicago next week.

Governor Martin would not commit himself on possible Republican candidates for state offices in the 1944 elections, declaring “it’s still too early for such talk” and that:

The ball won’t start rolling until after the national convention site is picked.

He said “I have no idea” whether Attorney General James H. Duff will be the party’s candidate for the seat now held by U.S. Senator James J. Davis.

americavotes1944

Bricker opens drive, assails New Deal

Detroit, Michigan (UP) –
Ohio Governor John W. Bricker launched his drive for the Republican presidential nomination today with an attack on the New Deal and an assertion that “win the war” became the motto of “every real American” when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

The three-term Ohio executive, addressing Wayne County (Detroit) Republicans, took cognizance of President Roosevelt’s recent statement favoring substitution of a “win the war” slogan for the term New Deal.

Mr. Bricker said:

Every American citizen today has the right to resent ay political leadership that assumes to take unto itself credit for winning the war.

In his first political speech since he announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination, Mr. Bricker denounced New Deal “inefficiency” and declared a Republican victory this year “will assure us here at home that no one party or officeholder is indispensable.”

Davis proposes post-war U.S. fiscal policy

Senator would cut taxes, expenses and reduce big federal debt
By Robert Taylor, Press Washington correspondent

Packard: Yanks and Nazis fight hand-to-hand in San Vittore

By Reynolds Packard, United Press staff writer


Stoneman: Old Vesuvius gives a show for Americans

By William H. Stoneman

Aerial Burma Road fliers win citation by Roosevelt


Halsey, back in America, plans Tokyo celebration

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

At the frontlines in Italy – (by wireless)
The human packers of supplies to our group high in the Italian mountains interested me much more than the mule trains, partly because their job was much harder and partly because thy talk instead of heehawing.

You can get an idea of the magnitude of this human freight service when you realize that in one 10-day period Americans soldiers packed up this one mountain nearly 100,000 pounds of supplies for their battalion. That was just one outfit. The same thing was being duplicated in a dozen or more places during the same time.

More than half the trail was out in the open, across bare rocks, all under German artillery fire. The top part of the trail was so steep th9ey anchored weights alongside the path for the men to pull themselves upward with.

We tried to hire Italians to do the packing, but after the first day they were never seen again. I heard a report that on one mountain Italian women had volunteered and were carrying up five-gallon cans balanced on their heads, but I was never able to verify this story. I think it’s a myth.

Some of the soldiers carry the water cans on their shoulders while others lash them onto pack boards. At first some of the packers would cheat a little and pour out some of the precious water when the can became too heavy. But the laws of physics soon stopped this, for with the can only partly filled the water would slosh around inside and throw the packers off balance and make it doubly hard to walk.

Miniature Paul Bunyan

From the bottom of the mountain to the top, a good walker carrying nothing whatever could make it in three hours. Carrying a heavy load, it took longer than that, and yet there were some fantastic exhibitions of human strength on that mountain.

The champion packer in our outfit was Pvt. Lester Scarborough, but he had left the area when I was there and I never did get to see him. He was from somewhere in West Virginia, and he was a miniature Paul Bunyan.

He had been sick and was supposed to be convalescing, yet he could take a full can of water to the top and be clear back down again in 2½ hours, where others took three hours and longer just to get up.

He didn’t do this just once, but day after day. He reached the climax of his carrying career when he made four roundtrips in one day – the fourth one being an emergency dash to the mountaintop to help beat off a German mortar attack.

Pvt. Scarborough is no giant. He is 18 years old, stands only 5 feet 7½, and weighs only 135 pounds. I have never heard of so much strength in such a small package.

Bewhiskered and begrimed

When I went up the trail my guard was Pvt. Fred Ford of East St. Louis. He is a tall, rugged fellow, and he had two weeks of whiskers and grime on his face. He looked sort of ferocious but turned out to be pleasant and friendly.

Like practically all the regular packers, Pvt. Ford was a line soldier who had fought for weeks on top and was supposed to be down for a rest. He was a Browning automatic rifleman in an infantry company. And there’s a funny thing about that.

Pvt. Ford said:

I threw dozens of hand grenades, and even rocks, and I guess I killed plenty of Germans. But I never had a single chance to shoot that automatic rifle.

On the back of his jacket Pvt. Ford has printed in purple ink his serial number, the name “Betty,” and underneath that “East St. Louis, Illinois.” Betty is his wife, and she is a chemist in a defense plant.

Pvt. Ford’s feet were all taped up because of blisters, and he walked on his toes to save his heels from rubbing. He said:

Sometimes going up the mountain you get to the point where you know you can’t make it, but somehow you always do.

Actually, some of them don’t. I saw packer after packer report back in at the bottom of the trail saying he “couldn’t make her.” He’d dumped his load and come back down.

A few of these may have been malingerers, but most of them were genuine. The men were exhausted, and their feet were broken out, and infirmities such as arthritis, hernia or heart weakness would leap to the fore on those man-killing climbs.

Mountain aeronautics

When we started back down, German shells began dropping quite a way behind us.

Pvt. Ford said:

If I get to going too fast for you, just yell. When they start shelling, we practically fly down the mountain. We don’t stop for nothing.

But I didn’t have any pressing business engagements along the way to detain us, so Pvt. Ford and I flew down the mountainside together, going so fast the rocks we kicked loose couldn’t even keep up with us.

Pegler: On recent political affairs

By Westbrook Pegler

Clapper: Air transport

By Raymond Clapper

Leaders of the second front –
Spaatz, Pantelleria’s conqueror, to lead air assault on Germans

He plays wild poker but knows planes and pilots
By Boyd Lewis, United Press staff writer

Upon a handful of Allied leaders rests the success or failure of the coming “second front” against the European continent. Who are these men? What are they like? Are they capable of the big job?

In this, the fifth in a series of articles, Boyd Lewis of the United Press tells the story of Gen. Carl Spaatz, the man who reduced Pantelleria by airpower alone, and who will lead Eisenhower’s bombers against the continent.

genspaatz
Gen. Spaatz

Lt. Gen. Carl Andrew Spaatz has devoted most of his adult life to an effort to transform airport from a question mark to a sure thing.

He soared into newspaper headlines in 1929 when he took the Army plane Question Mark aloft in a refueling endurance flight and held it there for six days and a new record. His assistant was a young Army captain named Ira Eaker. Both boys have done rather well in flying circles since.

He comes up from the Mediterranean to command the strategic bombing of Germany for Second Front Generalissimo Dwight D. Eisenhower, convinced that he has erased that question mark on American airpower.

If adequate airpower can be applied against the heart of a nation, no other force is necessary, he asserted after Pantelleria hoisted the white flag to airpower unassisted in June of last year.

Nothing has occurred in the course of the air war since that time has caused him to change the idea – one which he has held, incidentally, since he fell under the spell of Gen. Billy Mitchell as a young officer.

Will get bombers

Informed persons believe that the heavy bomber force which will be available to Gen. Spaatz in Britain, soon to include the B-29 super-bombers, will satisfy him as “adequate.” Of course, he will not be asked to reduce Germany by air assault alone.

His task will be to wage a war without front – to pour destruction through the open roof of the Nazi “Fortress Europe” – before, during and after Gen. Eisenhower hurls his massive land forces across a bridge of ships against the German land defenses.

The man behind this 20th-century war-making concept is no winged automation but an extremely human high-stake poker player, fond of strumming a guitar to accompaniment of group singing and addicted to buckets of coffee and chains of cigarettes when under pressure.

In World War I

One of the first American fliers of World War I, he commanded the training center at Issoudon through which virtually every American pilot and mechanic was filtered. He emerged a rabid fan for air war and was delighted to demonstrate it with a flying circus of Army planes after the war. Then followed command of various Army flying fields and training centers until he and Capt. Eaker took the Question Mark up for its endurance record.

Gen. Spaatz’s name is pronounced “spots,” like in spots before your eyes. Because it was too often pronounced “spats” (like what you wear on your feet!} the colorful air officer added another “a” to his name as it was originally spelled, Spatz. He laughingly admits, however, that his friends and enemies have other, and more colorful, names for him from time to time.

While Eaker held the controls, Spaatz would juggle the refueling hose, leaning far out of the supply hatch. At one point in the flight the Question Mark jerked away from the refueling ship, drenching Spaatz with high octane gasoline which would have scarred his skin. Without hesitation, he stripped off his soaking clothes and resumed refueling – stark naked.

A return engagement

He was one of the first officers called by Gen. Eisenhower to join his air-ground team in North Africa. Teaming up with British Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, another red-hot airpower fan, he had ample chance for experimentation, culminating in the reduction of Pantelleria by air.

His return to England will be in the nature of a return engagement because he was stationed there as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Army Air Forces in the European Theater when Gen. Eisenhower recruited him for Africa. His blunt, forthright diplomatic methods and his flamboyant poker playing made him a popular officer among British as well as American circles.

Of his diplomatic methods, these stories are told:

He had been warned that Sir Sholto Douglas, then chief of the Raf Fighter Command, was a formidable individual. When they met, Gen. Spaatz thrust out his hand and said:

I hear you’re damned tough and that you and I aren’t going to get along together. Is that right?

They got along famously from that moment.

‘You’re a general!’

While reviewing the 8th Air Force with Queen Elizabeth, a storm blew up. With the gallantry of a Sir Walter Raleigh, Gen. Spaatz draped his battered air force raincoat over the Queen’s shoulders and said:

Your Majesty, this makes you a major general in the American Air Force.

His poker playing is described as more enthusiastic than expert, he plays generally with an “inner circle” of officers on his own staff who are said to be regarded by old-0timers among airmen poker artists as “easy meat.”

British Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder and several correspondents are supposed to have discovered that while the free and easy betting of the Spaatz clique is momentarily disconcerting, they usually fall victim to close-to-the-vest players.

HOLLYWOOD —
Sub boys hand Dot Lamour new name

By Erskine Johnson


Selznick serene as clamor for Oscars hits Hollywood

Reason is that three of his roster are top candidates for Academy Awards