Editorial: An issue, not a football
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Background of news –
The Kefauver Resolution
By Joseph H. Baird, North American Newspaper Alliance
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Roper: Monastery hit by Nazi shells near Cassino
Birthplace of Benedictine order accidentally damaged
By James E. Roper, United Press staff writer
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Pegler: More on Dewey’s record
By Westbrook Pegler
New York –
Some of Tom Dewey’s friends and neighbors are beginning to mutter he owes it to them to say now, somehow, that he will accept the nomination so they will have something to offer the Republicans around the country in competition with Mr. Willkie.
I agree that this bashfulness can be overdone and has just about served its purpose, but I take it for granted that Dewey will not only accept, but put up a fight for the nomination because to his kind of Republican, Willkie is just an imitation Roosevelt and his policies a plagiarized New Deal.
It has got to be Dewey or Willkie for no other Republican running against Mr. Roosevelt would be worth the investment in train fares, wire tolls and printing. Moreover, Dewey is so sore at Willkie for cutting him down in 1940 that you may be sure he would be very happy to accept if only to square matters.
Of course, he should be grateful because Mr. Roosevelt was a bull for strength that year and would have knocked the brash young man right through the skylight, but politicians are peculiar and he thought he had a good chance and was cut off by an interloper.
Willkie evasive on labor
But if Mr. Dewey is being coy, I submit that Brother Willkie is also simpering on an important issue while tearing around to meetings and pelting himself with compliments at close range.
How stands Brother Willkie on labor? That is one of the greatest domestic issues and grows graver day by day. It is not a mere matter of wartime strikes which may abate under the pressure of public opinion communicated to Congress and the bosses of the big organizations, and, in some cases have undoubtedly been provoked by dumb and stiff-necked or incompetent industrial management.
It involved fundamentals, the right of the citizen to join a private lodge, his right not to pay an income tax to a political organization as Sidney Hillman has had the effrontery to propose that he should, his right to bargain through the agent of his own choice as proposed in the Wagner Act and not through an agent thrust upon him by either his employer or the government.
These rights have been flouted in the most cynical way for several years and will wither away if they are not reestablished soon. Another four years of Mr. Roosevelt’s policy would cancel them entirely and if we can assume his administration would continue its creeping encroachments on the freedom and dignity of the individual, we can also foresee a convincing imitation in the country of the labor controls which Mussolini founded in Italy and Hitler adopted in the land of the chosen, but faceless people of the master race.
Dewey fair to labor
I will concede that Mr. Dewey has not declared himself strongly. But, for one thing, not being a candidate thus far, he hasn’t had to and, for another, he did prove as prosecutor in New York that he is at least opposed to criminality in union leadership and that he has a wide knowledge of those union practices which are not criminal but are antisocial.
And notwithstanding his prosecution of crooks in union office, the intelligent labor men have been glad to admit that he was fair and not in any sense the enemy either of unions or labor. In politics he has had the support of many such men.
Willkie’s thoughts on taxes and the American standard of living which he would debase, though reluctantly, in the interests of war efforts, and his foreign policy have been very bold and interesting. He will be accused of a number of sinful ideas against that which we call the American way, but it will have to be allowed that he has not trimmed on those politically dangerous issues.
Therefore, it is hard to understand why he ignores the whole great problem of labor and unionism as though it didn’t exist. It is there all right as prominent as something extremely dead and I can assure him on the basis of, I should say, at least 100,000 letters from laborers and other American toilers in the last few years that it is no minor concern.
These people and many more are thinking of some very precious liberties that have been taken from them at home by a government which has been glib with promises of unwonted and, in some areas, unwanted freedoms, everywhere else in the world.
Clapper: Munda
By Raymond Clapper
Raymond Clapper, before setting out with a naval striking force which took him to his death, wirelessed a few columns in advance. Last Jan. 1, upon leaving the country for the Pacific, he had written that “some people in Washington feel there is no sufficient awareness at home of how much our men are doing and in what a living hell they must sometimes do it.” His mission was to help increase that awareness. Hence we feel that he would want us to print, posthumously, these columns written some days ago.
Munda, Solomon Islands – (by wireless)
I had read a good deal about the Munda campaign, but not until I went over the ground where we suffered more than 25% casualties did the story come to life in all its grimness.
Adm. Nimitz was understating it when he said this was the worst terrain he had ever seen. It is surely the worst he ever will see. One Marine colonel said the jungle was so dense he never saw the sun for days at a time.
We got in here early last August. Three days later, the Seabees moved in with bulldozers and dynamite to remove coconut groves and saw off the top of a hill, and in 56 hours we were using an airstrip. The Japs’ strip here, as everywhere else, was too small. It was 3,700 feet long. We built one 8,000 feet long and three times as wide as the Japs’.
Now, after five months, Munda has a huge coral-surfaced airfield and hard-surfaced roads, and the hills are covered with installations and supplies, making a strong forward base out of this place.
Japs primitive but effective
The Japs had hastily occupied Munda for their meager fighter strip at the climax of the nearby battle of Guadalcanal, when they were about to lose Henderson Field to us. The Japs are primitive but effective. I went through one of their dugouts, running into tunnels 30 feet back into the coral rock. It was blasted and chopped out by hand, and had coconut logs as supporting timbers. In fact, it was so large and strong we used it temporarily for our air-control plotting room.
We had to dynamite the Japs out of there. This and other dugouts stood up under direct bomb hits.
The Japs were clever in that they built their airstrip under coconut trees, which camouflaged it until they were finished. Then they cut down the trees and suddenly the airstrip appeared, ready for use. They planted sprouting coconuts on pillboxes for camouflage.
The Japs had only narrow roads or trails. All their work was done by hand; they had no heavy road-building machinery such as we bring in everywhere out here. We went into jungle this way – patrols first, bulldozers next, followed by jeeps and artillery.
To go seven miles took one month. The Japs were vicious snipers. We ordered our men into foxholes at 3 of an afternoon with orders to stay there and shoot anything that moved. Then we laid down an artillery barrage that dropped only a hundred yards from these men. Yet the Japs crawled through it and dropped grenades into our foxholes, or struck with knives in the dark.
Many invalided home
No American troops ever went through anything more severe. Many of them have been invalided home, but many are still here. The 43rd Division, a New England National Guard outfit, went through a living hell out here. One regiment, the 172nd Infantry, is the descendant of the Green Mountain Boys. Many of these men are still here, and just a couple of nights before I arrived, one of their units was shot up in an air raid, losing one killed and 23 injured.
Another division that has found this to be a long hard war is the 37th, mostly Ohio men. After Munda, they went in at Bougainville.
We are using some of the Jap landing barges captured in battle. Also, for a while we used some Ford and Chevrolet trucks which the Japs had left, and we found an Indian motorcycle of the three-wheeled type which the Japs had converted into a light ammunition carrier. We found oxygen bottles marked “Made in USA,” and two coastal batteries of 47 Armstrong-Vickers guns which are believed to have been captured at Hong Kong.
But it is all quiet around here now except for air raids and the fight against jungle scourges. Lt. John R. Dexheimer of Louisville, Kentucky, said the greatest danger was from coconut trees, with shrapnel-weakened trunks, falling down on tents.
Völkischer Beobachter (February 8, 1944)
Schwere Verluste der Amerikaner bei Cassino –
Erneute Abwehrerfolge bei Witebsk und südlich der Beresina
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Folgen der Stalinschen ‚Verfassungsänderung‘ –
Churchill und Roosevelt ziehen ihre Nutzanwendung
Von unserer Stockholmer Schriftleitung
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U.S. Navy Department (February 8, 1944)
Communiqué No. 504
The U.S. submarine CISCO (SS-290) and the U.S. submarine S-44 (SS-155), are overdue from patrol and must be presumed to be lost.
The next of kin of personnel in the CISCO and the S‑44 have been so informed.
Press Release
For Immediate Release
February 8, 1944
Navy Consolidated Catalina sinks German U‑boat
Struck by heavy flak from the anti-aircraft guns of a Nazi submarine, while still a considerable distance from her target, a U.S. Navy Consolidated Catalina kept straight on her course to make a definite “kill” of the U‑boat, in the South Atlantic some months ago.
Survivors of the U‑boat sinking were subsequently rescued by the USS SIREN (PY-13), a converted yacht acting as a patrol vessel, after they had been adrift in the ocean for some 16 days in life rafts dropped by the naval flyers at the time of the submarine’s sinking. The USS SIREN is commanded by LtCdr. Charles K. Post, USNR, 47, of Bayport, Long Island, New York.
CINCPAC Communiqué No. 33
Organized resistance on Kwajalein Atoll has ceased and its capture and occupation have been completed.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 8, 1944)
SENATE PASSES FEDERAL SOLDIER VOTE BILL
States’-rights group beaten in showdown
Administration forces, however, face another fight in House
Washington (UP) –
The Senate today approved the administration’s federal ballot soldier vote bill after rejecting repeated last-ditch efforts by a coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats to impose at least restrictive amendments.
The measure was sent back to the House, where a similar coalition succeeded in defeating a federal ballot plan last Thursday.
The federal ballot provision was written into previous House and Senate soldier vote legislation by a Senate vote of 46–40, on motion of Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley (D-KY).
Taft’s plan defeated
Mr. Barkley’s motion carried after the Senate rejected, 45–41, restrictions on federal ballot use proposed by Senator Robert A. Taft (R-OH) and the Republican-Democratic coalition.
The Taft amendment would have authorized a federal ballot only for absentee voters whose home states failed to make available, upon application, a lightweight state ballot.
After the adoption of Mr. Barkley’s motion, Mr. Taft made another attempt to keep his amendment alive by moving that it be taken to conference between the House and Senate. He lost again, by the same vote of 45–41.
House must act
With the defeat of this motion, Senate action on the federal ballot plan – in the form of an amendment to the varying state ballot plans passed by both Senate and House – was automatically completed without further votes. It was an unusual thing for the Senate to amend a bill it had previously passed, but the parliamentarian ruled it could be done.
The House now must act on the Senate federal ballot provisions. In view of last week’s overwhelming vote for state ballots, it will presumably reject the Senate plan and throw the matter into conference.
Separate bill approved
However, to guard against the possibility that the House would kill the federal ballot provisions in the pending measure, the Senate also put its federal ballot provisions into an entirely new and separate bill. This was passed, 47–38.
The new measure also goes to the House, where the administration hopes to keep it on tap as a final resort to keep federal ballot legislation alive. No federal ballot legislation can become effective without affirmative House action on the Senate provisions in one bill or the other.
Rome beachhead lashed by waves of Nazi planes
Allies fight with backs to sea; 19 Germans shot down in air battle
By C. R. Cunningham, United Press staff writer
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German bombers kill 22 in crowded U.S. hospital
Five nurses among victims on Rome beachhead
By Daniel De Luce, representing combined U.S. press
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Fortresses batter arsenal city of Frankfurt
Record Allied air fleets pound Europe; Liberators hit French coast
By Walter Cronkite, United Press staff writer
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Two U.S. submarines lost during raids against Japs
1,525-ton Cisco, 850-ton S-44 bring to 19 total of U.S. underseas craft destroyed
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200 tons rock Paramushiru
U.S. shelling of Japan’s base unopposed
By Russell Annabel, United Press staff writer
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