Editorial: Borrowing to pay taxes
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Ferguson: Service daughters
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
There is something new under the sun. Women today hang out service flags for girls and put roses before the pictures of daughters in uniform. And they’re just as proud of those daughters as they are of their boys who wear fighting togs. In fact, maybe they’re a wee bit prouder.
A friend whose only son is a Marine and whose only daughter has just become a WAC put it this way:
She said:
I didn’t want her to join. You know how it is. We mothers are more afraid for our girls. But I decided to keep out of it. I knew I would never have dictated to her about other plans. I hate people who want to play God to their children. So, I thought, she’s grown, she ought to know what she wants, and if she wants to be a WAC well go to it, honey, and God bless you.
I had no such sentimental feelings about Bill. I expected him to go into the country’s service and would have been surprised if he hadn’t. I didn’t give a second thought to the temptations or hardships he might meet. We’ve been conditioned to that sort of thing for our boys. But when his sister marched away – well, I felt all gone inside. I think now it was because I sensed that she was marching off into a new world.
She turned to look at the picture of her girl, dressed in khaki. Together we studied that bright young countenance, symbolizing something really new under our sun – a woman soldier and an American moving into a fresh historical era. She went into her country’s service with the same dear old American ideals in her heart. My guess is they’ll be flying high alongside her flag when she comes home again.
Background of news –
Italian campaign lags
By Col. Frederick Palmer, North American Newspaper Alliance
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CIO vote fund wins approval from Biddle
Attorney due to return favorable report this week
By Fred W. Perkins, Pittsburgh Press staff writer
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Homesickness gets the blame in work loss
OWI study of turnover spells disillusionment in many cases
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Pastor assails clergymen who hit raids in Germany
Philadelphian suggests they shut up, asks if they’d have the Axis win
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Italy – (by wireless)
Pilots fly planes, and mechanics fix planes, and bombardiers drop bombs out of planes, and they’ve all been written about. But I’ve never heard anybody mention the guys who out the bombs in the planes, so here goes.
They are called armorers. They not only “bomb up” the planes, but it is their job to keep all the planes’ guns in tiptop working order.
In the 47th Group – A-20 light bombers – there is theoretically one armorer to each plane. But they’re short now, and each armorer usually has two planes to care of.
An armorer is as proud of his plane as the pilot is. He calls it “my plane,” and when this plans fails to come back, he feels horrible. Among the armorers, everybody knows whose plane has the most missions.
Each morning a truck takes them to the area where their planes are dispersed. They start bombing up about an hour and a half before takeoff time.
For really heavy bombs, the planes are equipped with a hitting device. Smaller bombs, even up to 300-pound ones, are lifted by hand. To do this, the armorers of several planes form themselves into a team of four or five men, and go from one plane to another helping each other until their little family is all bombed up.
123 missions to date
I went around one day with a team composed of Sgt. Steve Major of Monessen, Pennsylvania; Cpl. Vincent Cline of Paragould, Arkansas; Cpl. John Peoples of Alameda, California; Cpl. Robert Gerrie of Chicago, and Cpl. James La Barr of Dallas, Pennsylvania. Cpl. La Barr’s plane, incidentally, has more missions than any other – 123 – and is going up by one and two a day.
The bombs have already been hauled out, and are lying on the ground alongside the planes, when the armorers arrive. This day they were loading 25-pound demolition bombs. These were about three feet long and 10 inches thick, and tapered at both ends.
The boys roll them to the planes by kicking them along with their feet. They roll six under each plane. The bomb-bay doors are already hanging down open. The armorers crawl under them and then can stand erect with their heads inside the bomb bay.
One of them takes an 18-inch clamp from the bay wall and hooks it into the two steel rings in the back. Then two of them grab the bomb and heave it up. As it rises, a third gets under it and lifts with his shoulders. The two others put it into position.
It is good heavy heaving. Only the rugged ones stay on as armorers. Now and then, somebody slips and a bomb falls on an armorer, but serious accidents are rare.
After the bombs are clamped inside the bomb bay, they put in the fuses. The bomb has a steel plug in each end. The boys unscrew these plugs, and screw the fuses into the hole. I never knew before that our bombs had fuses on both ends. I asked what it was for. The boys said so that if one fuse didn’t work, the other one would.
Little propeller whirls
Each fuse has a little metal propeller on it. When the bomb is dropped the propeller starts whirling and after dropping about 500 feet it unscrews itself to become a plunger and “arm” the bomb, as they call it. Then when the bomb hits the ground, this plunger is forced back and the bomb is discharged.
There must, of course, be some guarantee that propellers don’t get to whirling inside the planes. So, the boys take a piece of wire and fasten it into the clamp from which the bomb hangs. Then they run each end through two small holes in the propellers, thus locking them.
When the bomb is released, this wire remains fastened to the plane and the ends slip out of the little propellers, freeing them.
If the pilot has to salvo his bombs over free territory, where he doesn’t want them to go off, he can pull a different lever which releases the wire and lets it fall still attached to the bomb, thus keeping the little propellers locked.
The armorer’s job is really not a hard one, except for this heavy lifting which lasts only a few minutes a day. What disgusts armorers the most is when the command keeps changing its mind about what kind of bombload is to be carried on the next mission.
Sometimes, they’ll get an order to bomb up with 500-pounders, then it’ll be changed to frag bombs, then changed again to 250-pounders. On every change they have to take out the bombs and put in new ones.
The boys say the all-time record was one day when they changed bombs 12 times and it finally wound up that the planes never went out after all.
Bing Crosby’s camp trips ‘military secrets’
Defrays all costs of unit calling on soldiers
By Si Steinhauser
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Völkischer Beobachter (March 8, 1944)
Einer der heftigsten Luftkämpfe dieses Krieges –
Schwere Niederlage der Terrorbomber über Berlin
140 Feindflugzeuge – das ist über ein Viertel! – abgeschossen
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