Noxon learned shocks killed, friend admits
Father of slain baby asked about electrocution, expert says
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Rules on gifts for prisoners in Reich given
General’s wife represents Red Cross service on visit here
By Maxine Garrison
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World fooled by Truk base, experts hint
Absence of big drydocks means islands are not key naval station
By Sandor S. Klein, United Press staff writer
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U.S. bombers rip Jap ships
PT boats also attack in Southwest Pacific
By Don Caswell, United Press staff writer
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Italy – (by wireless)
All the highways from Naples north are thick with speeding convoys of supplies, day and night.
Lights are used right up to the combat zone. Both British and American trucks crowd the roads. Drivers pound the big trucks along at 40 and 50 miles an hour, and the main highways are no place for a nervous Nellie.
The highways over here were originally good macadam, but now they are filled with holes from the intensity of the traffic. Engineers work on them constantly.
At the edges of the cities, the roads are wide and lined with stately sycamore trees, you feel as though you were driving through a beautiful tunnel.
Both the American and British armies have put up thousands of stenciled and painted signs along the roads, directing drivers to the numerous units.
When you come to a central crossroads you can see anywhere up to a hundred signs clustered on top of small stakes, like a flower garden in bloom.
If you were really puzzled about your destination, you’d have to pull off and study the hodgepodge for five minutes before finding out anything.
Somebody in our Army must have been a roadside advertising man before the war, for we have all kinds of signs along the highways in addition to the direction signs. They are tacked onto trees, telephone poles and posts.
Signs Burma Shave style
There are many in the Burma Shave poetic style, the several phrases being on separate boards about 50 yards apart, such as this one:
If you leave… good clothes behind… you may need them… some other time.
That’s an admonition against the American soldier’s habit of abandoning gear when he gets more than he can carry.
Another one in Burma Shave fashion, and of dubious rhyme, says:
Some like gold… some like silver… we always salvage… bring it, will you?
There are also frequent warnings against venereal disease, and one sign way out in the country says, “Is your tent clean?” A lot of frontline soldiers who haven’t even been in a pup tent for months would get a laugh out of that one.
As we advance mule by slow mile across the Italian mountains and valleys, our many command posts are set up wherever possible in Italian farm or village houses.
The house are mostly all alike. They are very old and substantial-looking, yet they shake all over from the blast of our nearby guns.
Sometimes the Italian family still lives in one room of the house while the Americans occupy the rest. At other times the family has gone – nobody knows where – and taken with it everything but the heaviest furniture.
Faded pictures still hang on the walls – wedding-group pictures od 40 years ago, and a full-face picture of some mustachioed young buck, in the uniform of the last war, and old, old pictures of grandpa and grandma, and always a number of pictures of Christ and various religious scenes and mottoes.
Pictures invariably of same sort
I’ve billeted in dozens of Italian homes on the farms and little towns of our frontlines, and invariably the faded pictures on the walls are of the same sort.
In one house, nothing was left inside except the heavy cupboards and two heavy suitcases stored on top of the cupboards. We didn’t nose into the suitcases, but I noticed that one bore the label of a big Italian steamship line and underneath the label it said, in English, “Steerage Passenger.” Somebody in that poor family had been to America and back.
One day I heard a soldier say:
I’d sure like to see just one good old-fashioned frame house. I haven’t seen a wooden building since we came to Italy.
They say there are frame buildings farther north, but in this part of Italy everything is brick or stone. You almost never see a building afire.
These pitiful towns like Vairano and San Pietro and San Vittore and Cervaro and even Cassino, which have been absolutely pulverized by exploding shells and bombs, have gone down stone by stone and never from flame. They die hard, but they die.
Annapolis at war!
Jap mementoes kept at Annapolis despite hotheaded protests
By Jess Stearn, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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Congress to speed action on U.S. jobs for veterans
Roosevelt asks right to designate certain positions for returning servicemen
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Völkischer Beobachter (March 1, 1944)
Örtliche Stellungsverbesserungen bei Nettuno –
Voller Abwehrerfolg bei Newel
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U.S. Navy Department (March 1, 1944)
CINCPAC Press Release No. 290
For Immediate Release
March 12, 1944
Liberators of Fleet Air Wing Two bombed and strafed installations on Wake Island on the afternoon of February 28 (West Longitude Date).
The attack was made at extremely low altitude. Airdrome installations were bombed, and six planes on the ground were destroyed or severely damaged. All of our planes returned safely to base.
A single Navy search plane bombed Nauru on February 28.
On the same day, Mitchell bombers and Warhawk fighters of the 7th Army Air Force and Venturas of Fleet Air Wing Two attacked three enemy-held bases in the Eastern Marshall Islands.
The Pittsburgh Press (March 1, 1944)
5TH ARMY SHATTERS ANZIO ATTACK
Germans use robot tanks on beachhead
Onslaught subsides after day and night of heavy fighting
By Robert Vermillion, United Press staff writer
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MacArthur takes Jap isle 610 miles below Truk base
Yanks rapidly extending beachheads on Los Negros, in Admiralty group west of New Britain
By Don Caswell, United Press staff writer
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Soldiers’ vote hits new snag
Compromise reached once, but debate goes on
Washington (UP) –
Senate and House soldier-vote conferees – who yesterday voted 9–1 for a compromise federal war ballot plan – ran into another snag today.
Today’s meeting was to have been merely a routine windup to straighten out technical language of the compromise bill before issuing a conference report to the two chambers. But the morning session ended in what appeared to be merely an extension of the argument which has kept the conference deadlocked for nearly three weeks. The conferees agreed to meet again this afternoon.
Senator Carl A. Hatch (D-NM) told reporters the House conferees are now balking on extending the restricted federal ballot to service personnel within this country as well as overseas. Yesterday’s agreement provided that the federal ballot should be given all men who certify that they have applied for, but by Oct. 1 had not received, a state absentee ballot.
Senate conferees understood this was acceptable to the House, and regarded the 9–1 vote as binding.
He said:
We don’t know where we are. The Senate thought yesterday that everything was settled, but now it apparently isn’t.
Rep. John E. Rankin (D-MS), leading opponent of any federal ballot plan, had declared he would fight vigorously to defeat the once-approved compromise.
A moral victory –
New York vote heartens GOP
Democrats squeezes by with ALP and CIO aid
By Lyle C. Wilson, United Press staff writer
Washington –
New York City’s Tammany-controlled 21st Congressional district remains Democratic today after a presidential year byelection that cut machine majorities from a fat two-to-one to a skimpy fraction.
Republicans claimed everything from a moral victory to evidence that the country will “repudiate the Democratic leadership next November.” They estimated a 12% GOP gain in the byelection.
With the help of ALP
Democrats could point out that their men won. Yesterday’s returns had been awaited for indications of New York State political trends. The aggregate vote was light. By percentages, the trend definitely and substantially was against the Democrats.
James H. Torrens, Democrat and American Labor Party candidate, polled 11,707 votes to 10,136 for Republican William S. Bennet. Democrats suffered some intraparty differences, but both the Wendell L. Willkie and Governor Thomas E. Dewey factions of the Republican Party backed the GOP candidate. Of Torrens’ aggregate. 3,226 votes were from the American Labor Party. His majority was 1,571.
What interested politicians here was a comparison of Mr. Torrens’ margin yesterday with the votes by which Democrats have won in the past three elections. Here are the figures:
| Democratic | Republican | Majority | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1938 | 84,000 | 36,000 | 48,000 |
| 1940 | 108,000 | 46,000 | 62,000 |
| 1942 | 60,000 | 30,000 | 30,000 |
Campaigning on a pro-Roosevelt platform and to win-the-war, Mr. Torrens charged Mr. Bennet’s election would send to Congress an opponent of the administration. Mr. Bennet also campaigned for win-the-war and bore down heavily on tax simplification.
A normal vote
The small number of votes case was normal for such a byelection but it seemed to support the American Labor Party contention that it holds a balance of power in New York City. Furthermore, some political observers believe that the sharp reduction in the ratio of Democratic victory is an indication that President Roosevelt’s hold on his home state has been broken where it was strongest.
The vacancy was created by resignation of Democrat James A. Gavagan. The 21st is an Upper Manhattan district going deep into Harlem and about 35% of its voters are Negroes. It is an area in which a Democratic supporter of Mr. Roosevelt should be as safe as any statesman seeking office could expect to be anywhere.
Had left-wing backing
Metropolitan papers except the liberal and left-wing press uniformly supported the Republican candidate.
The Daily Worker, New York organ of the Communist Party, has been conducting front-page editorial campaign for Mr. Torrens, warning its readers that “it would be a fatal mistake for labor and other supporters for FDR to take this byelection casually or to be at all overconfident because the district happens to be Democratic.
The Worker also emphasized the opportunity for the American Labor Party to roll up a comparatively large vote for Mr. Torrens to “give it added weight in the political councils of the state and greater prestige among the people.”
The returns show that the ALP did very well.
Mr. Torrens was further aided by support of the Congress of Industrial Organizations Council. The Republican candidate, however, had support of the Central Trades and Labor Council.
Democratic House membership will total 217 when Mr. Torrens takes the oath. It would have totaled 218 except for the death last night of Rep. Thomas H. Cullen, Democrat from New York’s 4th district.
Republicans now number 209; Progressives 2; Farmer-Labor 1; and ALP 1. There are five vacancies, four of them formerly held by Democrats in New York, Illinois, Colorado and Oklahoma.
The fifth vacancy, in Illinois, was held by a Republican.
GOP expects gains
Republicans confidently expect byelection gains in Oklahoma and Colorado and to retain the Republican seat in Illinois. The other Illinois vacancy was created this month by death of Repo. Leonard W. Schuetz, a Democrat from the 7th Congressional district in Cook County, the political domain of Mayor Edward J. Kelly.
Mr. Kelly has a powerful machine, but Mr. Schuetz won last time by only 1,975 votes out of 357,837 cast.
Mr. Cullen’s death gave the Republicans another opening to fight for an additional seat. He polled 21,456 votes to 10,070 for his Republican opponent in the 1942 elections.
Jukebox candidate leads in Louisiana
New Orleans, Louisiana (UP) –
James H. “Jimmie” Davis, jukebox song composer and actor in Western movies, piled up a commanding lead and appears assured of the Democratic nomination for Governor of Louisiana today, after one of the most bitter campaigns in the political history of this one-time kingdom of the late Huey P. Long.
Mr. Davis of Shreveport held more than a 27,000-vote lead over his opponent, Lewis L. Morgan of Covington, in a runoff primary. Democratic nomination is tantamount to election.
With 1,639 of the state’s 1,864 precincts reporting, the unofficial vote was:
| Davis | 204,940 |
| Morgan | 175,292 |
Not only was Mr. Davis apparently headed towards the Governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge, but he was also handling the old regular machine bossed by New Orleans Mayor Robert Maestri the worst beating in its recent history.
Fred Leblanc, mayor of Baton Rouge, running on the Davis ticket for state’s attorney general, was leading State Senator Joe T. Cawthorn of Mansfield. J. Emile Verret, running mate for Lieutenant Governor, held a lead of almost 20,000 votes in his race against former Governor Earl K. Long, brother of the late “Kingfish.”