Editorial: Whew! That relieves us!
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Experts doubt Reds will get warships soon
Russia may be unable to operate Italian fleet during this war
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Mary Beard: Long illness chafes skin
Bedsores can be prevented by good care
By Mary Beard, Director, Nursing Service, American Red Cross
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Italy – (by wireless)
The 47th Group of A-20 light bombers is based on a magnificent field that was bulldozed out of a gigantic vineyard by British engineers in three days’ time.
Its dark earthen runway is more than a mile long, and off it scores of crooked taxi paths lead out to where each plane is individually parked among the grapevines. The field never gets really muddy, for the soil is volcanic and water drains through it.
Every morning the ground is lightly frozen and the grass and the shoulder-high grapevines are covered with white frost. In sunny weather, it is warm in midday, but by 4 p.m. the evening chill has set in and your breath shows as you talk.
Guards theoretically keep Italians out of the airfield area, but you’ll always see a little knot of them standing behind some plane watching the mechanics work. It is an odd sensation to walk along a narrow path and hear a dirty and ragged Italian girl singing grand opera as she works on the vines. Or to go to an outdoor toilet and suddenly discover a bunch of Italian peasant women looking over the low canvas wall at you as they walk past. They don’t seem to care, and you don’t either.
Everybody lives in tent
Everybody lives in square, pyramidal tents, officers and men exactly alike. The tents are scattered throughout the vineyard, 50 yards or so apart, and they are hard to see at a distance.
There are from four to six men in a tent. They all sleep on folding cots and most of them have the big warm air-force sleeping bags. They live comfortably.
The inside of each tent depends on the personality of its occupants. Some are neat and bright and furnished with countless little home comforts of the boys’ own carpentering. Others are shoddy and cave-like, surpassing only a little the bare requirements of life.
All the tents have stoves in the middle. They are homemade from 20-gallon oil drums. Back of each tent is a can of 100-octane gasoline sitting on a waist-high stool. A metal pipe leads under the tent wall and across the floor to the stove.
It is the old siphon system, pure and simple. You have to suck on the pipe and get a mouthful of gasoline to get the flow started. After that you control it with a petcock at the stove end. Stoves blow up frequently, but seldom do any damage.
Some of the tents have wooden floors made by knocking apart the long boxes that frag bombs come in, and nailing them into sections. Others have only dirt floors.
Any old radio program
Many tents have radios. The boys listen to all kinds of stations – our own Naples broadcast, the BBC, the distorted Rome radio, the cynical admonishments of Axis Sally that we’ll go home (if we are lucky) only to find our jobs gone and our girls married to other guys. But most of all they listen to the sweet music from German stations and to the American swing music of our own.
The day begins early on an airfield. Just before dawn the portable generators on wheels which are scattered among the grapevines begin to put-put and lights go on everywhere.
Nobody ever turns a light on or off. The generators stop at 10 each night, and the lights simply go out. Thus when the generators start again at 6 in the morning, your light automatically goes on and your radio starts.
One man in each tent will leap out of his sleeping bag and get the stove going, and then leap back for a few minutes. Little strings of oily gray smoke soon begin to sprout upward out of the vineyard.
In a few minutes you hear engines barking on the other side of the runway, and then with a deep voice that seems to shake the whole silent countryside the planes thunder down the runway and take to the air. These are out on early test hops. A few unfortunates have had to get out of their sacks at 4 a.m. to get them going.
Everybody is up by 6:30 at the latest. Guys clad only in long gray underwear dash comically out under the nearest olive tree and dash shivering back into the tent.
A little cold water out of a five-gallon can is dashed onto their faces. They jump into their clothes in nothing flat. They are on the way to breakfast as full daylight comes.
Soldiers’ vote likely to feed discord fires
President’s test for bill rules out compromise of Congress
By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer
Washington –
The issue between President Roosevelt and Congress is likely to be raised again over the soldier-vote bill.
Congress is expected to complete action on the measure late next week by approving the conference agreement compromising differences between House and Senate versions, and it will then go to President Roosevelt to sign or to veto.
Mr. Roosevelt has seemingly prescribed his test for the bill by saying that the crux of the matter is whether more soldiers will be given a chance to vote under existing law, passed in 1942, or by the new bill.
More then than now
Two of the Senate leaders in the fight for a federal ballot, Senators Green (D-RI) and Hatch (D-NM), claim that more soldiers would get a chance to vote under present law than under the new bill.
An analysis of the bill shows it is not much of an improvement on the original “states’ rights” measure passed by the House which President Roosevelt bluntly labeled “a fraud.” Congress evidently won’t be able to work up much public sympathy, for this reason, and also because of the devious course it took to arrive at this solution, after long delay.
Closer than tax bill
The bill has a closer personal relationship to more people than did the last tax bill, the veto of which was made a cause célèbre when Senator Barkley, the administration leader, became the champion of Congress against the President.
Senator Barkley, incidentally, is a staunch ally of the President on the soldier-vote issue. Both Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Knox expressed skepticism about administering voting under diverse and complicated state laws.
The soldier-vote bill would give the President another opportunity to make political capital against Republicans, for a majority of them in both branches joined with Southern Democrats behind the “states’ rights” bill.
At home and abroad
Under the conference bill, no soldier in this country could get the simple federal ballot, but would have to vote under absentee voting laws of his state. The 1942 act waived payment of poll tax and registration, but the present bill leaves the judging of votes strictly to the states.
Soldiers abroad can get a federal ballot only if they have applied before Sept. 1 for a state ballot and have failed to get one by Oct. 1. But they can’t get a federal ballot then unless they have applied for a state ballot.
Congress has failed, after all these weeks, to make voting by soldiers simple and easy.
4 leading GOP candidates line up for Wisconsin test
Willkie only one to enter full slate of delegates, but Stassen, MacArthur and Dewey are ‘in’
Madison, Wisconsin (UP) –
Four camps were lined up in Wisconsin today to battle for delegates to the Republican National Convention in the April 4 presidential primary, the first real test of strength for presidential aspirants, but Wendell L. Willkie, the 1940 GOP standard bearer, had the only full slate of 24 candidates in the race.
The others were well-armed, however, and the expiration of the deadline for filing petitions last night left Gen. Douglas MacArthur, boosted as a “favorite son” by supporters who listed his address as Milwaukee, running a close second to Mr. Willkie with 22 candidates in the field.
Willkie plans tour
Supporters of LtCdr. Harold E. Stassen, former Governor of Minnesota, had 20 candidates pledged to his support and Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, had 15, despite his request that his name be withheld. In addition to 20 candidates pledged to LtCdr. Stassen, Minnesota’s former chief executive had the unofficial support of Acting Governor Walter S. Goodland.
Obviously, Mr. Willkie will be the only one of the four who will make an out-and-out bid for support in the primary. He is scheduled to spend 12 days stumping the state.
Governor Dewey’s repudiation of the slate bearing his name apparently had little effect, with the exception of cutting the number of candidates to 15. Two of those who dropped out filed as uninstructed delegates, but let it be known they still backed the New York Governor. The Dewey-for-President committee counted two more supporters in another uninstructed delegate and one anti-Willkie candidate.
Bricker bides his time
Standing on the sidelines in the race was Governor John W. Bricker of Ohio, who is seeking Wisconsin’s second-choice convention votes. His backers have had some success among Dewey forces and Governor Bricker planned to better his support with a two-day speaking tour of the state in June.
In the Democratic race, 33 candidates pledged to re-nominate President Roosevelt, as approved at the state convention, are seeking that party’s 26 votes at the national convention.
In addition, 14 independents, who “deplored attempts of various extremists to invade the party,” filed petitions under the label “Stop politics – win the war.”
Poll: Jobs and taxes top questions for after war
Farm prices, labor policy, fourth term are next in public mind
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
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Next job for MacArthur poses political problem
Americans in Pacific are on the move, and new decisions must be made soon
By George Weller
George Weller is recuperating in the United States from illness suffered after spending several years in the Southwest Pacific.
Gen. MacArthur
The two MacArthurs – presidential possibility and Pacific generalissimo – are moving solely into a new focus as a result of the transpacific drive toward Truk by the U.S. Navy.
While adherents of the general’s presidential candidacy are driving hard on his behalf in the United States, the changing pattern of war is throwing into question what his new duties in the Pacific will be.
However separate they ought to be, Pacific and presidential drives are commencing to mesh wheels.
As long as Gen. MacArthur’s forces had not yet reached Rabaul in their two drives up the Solomons and the island of New Britain, it might with justice be said that he had not yet attained milestone No. 1 on his journey back to the Philippines.
Japs weakening
But now Rabaul is weakening.
Fighters over its volcanic harbor are growing less, none having been seen in the last seven daily raids.
And in the Navy’s vicious strike at Truk, there is an anticipation that this stronghold may soon be taken by the hard driving task force under Adm. Nimitz which the Japs have left unchallenged.
As Truk approaches neutralization, Rabaul’s defenses against Gen. MacArthur decline.
Most, if not all the Jap fighters – the yardstick of resistance in airpower – come down the system of island stepping stones from Japan through the Bonins and Carolines, via Truk to Rabaul. If Truk goes, Rabaul cannot be far behind.
Political aspects
When Rabaul goes, two elements begin to appear in the campaign by Gen. MacArthur’s supporters for the Presidency which have hitherto been lacking, namely:
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From having been a hero only, Gen. MacArthur becomes a victorious hero.
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The immediate aim in a military sense of Gen. MacArthur’s drive for the past two years is achieved, and it becomes a matter of decision on the part of his superiors, Gen. Marshall and President Roosevelt, what duties are to be assigned to him next.
The first element is most important to those Republicans who are anxious to have a strong, and not merely a martyred MacArthur, as their candidate.
It is the second element which deserves closer study.
Below the spearhead of the Navy’s transpacific drive, whose goal Adm. Nimitz says is “bases in China” and which necessarily involves first bases in the Philippines, there are two zones of Jap conflict, the “Southwest Pacific,” which takes in all Australia and the Dutch East Indies, and the “South Pacific” which takes in New Zealand and the intervening islands up to the Solomons. Two years ago, Gen. MacArthur was ordered out of the Philippines to take command of the former and last year the latter was also committed to his care, as the two zones converged on Rabaul.
What is next?
However, Gen. MacArthur’s drive has never recovered any territory west of Australian-mandated New Guinea.
The entire left flank of the Southwest Pacific has remained exploited only by harassing raids by long-range bombers.
Being topped by the Navy’s drive on his right flank, with Adm. Nimitz moving westward in between him and the Philippines, what will Gen, MacArthur next be told, after the fall of Rabaul, to do?
It is almost certain that whatever his next orders tell him to aim at, they can be interpreted, by those who wish to do so, as having political significance.
Three possibilities
There are, roughly, only three possibilities of what may be done by Washington with Gen. MacArthur:
If progress by the Navy continues to be rapid into the mandated islands, he may be assigned the Army and air side, possibly even a stronger command in this drive toward the Philippines.
He may be asked to mount an offensive on his western flank, through the Arafura Sea and Indian Ocean where Timor and the Kei, Aroe and Tenimbar Islands were all captured by the Japs after the general had assumed command in Melbourne. This assignment would be important, for it eventually would involve cutting off the Japs from important oil sources. But it would be difficult, for the western and northern coasts of Australia are inhospitable places for mounting an amphibious invasion.
Gen. MacArthur might be transferred out of the Southwest Pacific and given a command elsewhere. Such a command, to be in line with the general’s only expressed military hopes, would have to be on a Jap front.
Short of an overall command of the whole Pacific War – a step that could not be taken without a careful sounding of Navy susceptibilities – the only front left is China.
U.S. occupation of Rabaul near
Foe believed withdrawing men from key base
By Sandor S. Klein, United Press staff writer
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Steele: Stilwell is ready to fight Japs and the Almighty, too
Bad weather clears and Uncle Joe continues his task of opening Burma pathway
By A. T. Steele
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American First conclave
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania –
Gerald L. K. Smith, national director of the America First Party, said today the party would hold its first national convention in St. Louis March 25.
Völkischer Beobachter (March 5, 1944)
England und die USA beugen sich allen Befehlen Stalins
Roosevelt liefert auf Verlangen Moskaus ein Drittel der italienischen Flotte an die Bolschewisten aus
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U.S. Navy Department (March 5, 1944)
CINCPAC Press Release No. 294
For Immediate Release
March 5, 1944
Liberator bombers of the 7th Army Air Force and Search Liberators of Fleet Air Wing Two attacked Ponape and Kusaie in the Carolines on March 3 (West Longitude Date). Harbor and ground installations at Ponape were hit with 23 tons of bombs, while warehouses at Kusaie were set afire.
Navy search Venturas, Army Liberator and Mitchell bombers dropped approximately 23 tons of bombs on four enemy‑held atolls in the Eastern Marshalls on the same date.
Several of our planes suffered minor damage from anti-aircraft fire, but all returned to their bases.