In Washington –
Congressional committee on war proposed
Would keep check on preparedness
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Soldier vote bill back in Senate
Washington (UP) –
The soldier vote issue will return to the Senate today in form of a bill bearing only slight resemblance to the federal war ballot measure passed and sent to conference with the House some weeks ago.
Senator Tom Connally (D-TX) will file with the Senate the agreement finally reached by the conferees after prolonged discussions in which so many restrictions were placed on the federal ballot that the entire issue may again have to be thrashed out in the Senate.
Rayburn favors measure
Convinced that the new soldier vote bill will enable more service personnel to vote this year than were able to do so in 1942, Speaker Sam Rayburn said he would support the measure when it reaches the House.
Mr. Rayburn told reporters that Chairman Eugene Worley (D-TX) of the House Elections Committee, and Rep. Herbert C. Bonner (D-NC), both members of the House conference delegation, had assured him that the measure would make it possible for more soldiers to vote this year.
Ballot’s use restricted
As it emerged from conference, the measure provides a federal ballot for overseas personnel only if they apply for a state absentee ballot by Sept. 1 and fail to get it by Oct. 1. Use of the ballot within the United States is limited to servicemen whose states have no absentee voting laws – namely, Kentucky and New Mexico.
House committee to study Ernie Pyle’s ‘fight pay’ plan
Weiss bill will be considered along with other proposed reforms in military pay law
*By Robert Taylor, Press Washington correspondent
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Editorial: Another Republican victory
Republicans have scored another victory in a special Congressional election, raising their hopes for national success in November. Colorado’s 1st Congressional district is the latest. Before that, it was districts in Pennsylvania and Kentucky. Even more encouraging to Republicans was the result last week in New York City, where they polled more votes than the Democrats in a heavily Democratic district and were nosed out only by American Labor Party ballots.
In Denver on Tuesday, a GOP businessman took away from the Democrats a seat they have held since 1932. When Colorado went Republican in 1940, that district remained Democratic by almost 10,000. In 1942, its Democratic margin was 8,000. This week’s reversal was the more remarkable because the defeated candidate was a disabled bomber pilot with all the political glamor of a brilliant war record.
Politicians in Washington were watching this Denver test as an indication of urban trends. Democrats admit that the Roosevelt administration is weak in the rural areas of the North and West, and that it must depend largely on the city vote in November. Hence the Republican joy and Democratic gloom over results in Denver, following the show of GOP strength in Philadelphia and New York.
To lick the Democratic war hero, the Republicans campaigned on the national issue of “less government in business and more business in government.”
When an ordinary businessman, with no previous political experience and no campaign “it” can lick a wounded war hero on that plea, it must have a lot of public support.
Background of news –
The West and the GOP
By Bertram Benedict
Republican victory in the special Congressional election in the traditionally-Democratic 1st district of Colorado on Tuesday may be the most significant of the special elections prior to next November.
In a New York district last week, the Republicans made substantial gains but did not win the seat at stake.
Within the last three months, they have taken two House seats from the Democrats: In the Pennsylvania 2nd (in Philadelphia) and the Kentucky 4th. But in the former, the Republican candidate had a 1942 Democratic majority of only 713 votes to overcome, and in the latter the Republican had a 1942 Democratic plurality of less than 5,000 to overcome and was aided by a factional fight in the Democratic ranks. Moreover, the Kentucky district is made up entirely of rural territory, where Democratic strength is admittedly weaker than in 1942.
On the other hand, the Colorado 1st lies entirely in the city and county of Denver. It elected a Democratic Representative in 1942 by an 8,060 majority, and gave President Roosevelt a majority of 9,600 in 1940, although the states as a whole went for Wendell Willkie. And the Democrats hope Mr. Roosevelt has lost less popularity in the West than in the East.
Chances look bright
The Republican gain of a House seat from the Democrats in Denver make GOP chances look bright for November. In 1940, Roosevelt carried every city of over 4000,000 except Cincinnati. In New York, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, a pro-Willkie vote in rural territory was more than counterbalanced by a pro-Roosevelt urban vote.
The Republican insurgency which wrecked the Taft administration was largely a conflict of West vs. East. It was largely Republicans from beyond the Mississippi who followed Theodore Roosevelt out of the Republican Party in 1912.
Throughout the 1920s, Republican members of Congress from west of the Alleghenies bedeviled the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations with agitation for special farm relief legislation.
The split was signalized when Senator Moses, an Eastern Republican, called the Western insurgents “sons of the wild jackass,” and Senator Grundy, another Easterner, complained that too much legislation was affected by member of Congress from “backward” states.
Most Republican leaders who abandoned Hoover in 1932 and came out for Roosevelt were from west of the Mississippi.
Party of semi-discord
A combination of Midwest Republicans and Southern Democrats enacted the anti-strike bill over President Roosevelt’s veto last year. But in the House, almost one-fourth of the Republicans voted to sustain the veto, and they were mostly from large cities.
In fact, the Republican Party has always been an organization of semi-discordant elements. At its birth in 1854-56, it held together anti-alien “Know-Nothingers” and recent German immigrants, farmers who wanted free land and workmen who wanted a protective tariff, hardboiled Whig politicians and idealistic abolitionists and Prohibitionists.
The GOP usually has developed more party discipline in holding together discordant elements than have the Democrats – probably because many Republican candidates for Congress need a presidential victory to be elected, while most Democratic candidates from the South can be elected without victory for the national ticket.
Millett: Scholarships urged for war orphans
Ruth Millett suggests clubs pay living expenses for children of victims
By Ruth Millett
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Italy – (by wireless)
Most of my time with the 47th Group of A-20 Boston light bombers has been spent with the gunners. All the gunners are sergeants. Each plane carries two. They ride in the rear compartment of the plane.
The top gunner sits in a glass-enclosed bubble rising above the fuselage. The bottom gunner sits on the floor during takeoff, and after they’re in the air he opens a trap door, and swivels his machine gun down into the open hole.
Due to the nature of their missions and to the inferiority of German fighter strength in Italy, the A-20 gunners seldom have a battle in the air. Their main worry is flak, and that’s plenty to worry about.
The gunners live in pyramidal tents, four and five to a tent. Some of their tents are fixed up inside even nicer than the officers’. Others are bare.
The gunners have to stand in chow line the same as other soldiers, and eat out of mess kits. Now and then they ever have to go on cleanup detail and help pick up trash throughout their area. They must keep their own tents clean, and stand frequent inspection.
They count missions
I found them a high-class, sincere bunch of boys. Those who really love to fly in combat are the exceptions. Most of them take it in workaday fashion, but they keep a fanatical count on the number of missions flown, each one of which takes them a little nearer to the final goal – the end of their tour of duty.
Ordinarily a gunner goes on only one mission a day, but with the increased air activity of late they sometimes go both morning and afternoon, day after day. There are boys here who arrived only in December and are already almost finished with their missions whereas it used to take six months and more to run up the allotted total.
Life in the combat air forces is fairly informal. In several days on this field, I’ve seen only one salute. But that’s all right, for the Air Forces don’t need the same type of discipline that less specialized branches require.
The enlisted gunners and the commissioned pilots work so closely together that they feel themselves in the same boat.
Don’t like braggarts
Gunners don’t like braggarts, either among commissioned officers or their own fellows. After I got to know them, they told me of some of their own number who talked too big, and of some with the bad judgment to tell “whoppers” even to their gunners.
One night I sat in their tent with five gunners for about three hours. After I had been with them some time, their natural reserve in front of a stranger had worn off, and we talked and talked about everything under the sun, and about what men think and feel who are caught in the endless meshing of the war machine,
One by one they told me of the experiences they had been through. Every man in the tent was living on borrowed time. Every one had stayed alive at least once only by a seeming miracle. Several had been badly wounded, but were back in action again.
When I started to leave, they said apologetically:
We’re kind of ashamed. Here we’ve been doing all the talking, when actually we wanted to hear your experiences.
And I tried to say:
People like you saying things like that! Just one of your ordinary missions is more than everything I’ve seen put together.
And they said:
Well, anyhow, you don’t know how much we appreciate your coning and talking with us. We don’t get to talk to anyone outside very often. It has meant a lot.
And as I followed the twisting path by flashlight back to my own tent among the grapevines, I couldn’t help but feel humble and inconsequential before these boys who are afraid and yet brave, who yearn for something or somebody to anchor to, who are so sincere they even want to listen to the talk of a mere spectator at war.
Stokes: Dewey’s challenge
By Thomas L. Stokes
Washington –
Governor Dewey seemed to be talking very much like a candidate when he went out of his way to denounce the administration and its proposals for a federal ballot for soldiers in his message to the New York Legislature outlining a plan for state ballots.
He backed up the “states’ rights” position of a majority of his party in Congress and of Southern Democrats against that of President Roosevelt and, incidentally, of Wendell L. Willkie.
What cheered Republicans most was the Governor’s vigorous language when he swapped epithets with President Roosevelt, the old epithet master. Governor Dewey called the federal ballot “a blank piece of paper,” as against the term “fraud” which Mr. Roosevelt applied to the original state ballot bill.
Republicans have been looking for somebody who could “tell” President Roosevelt.
Welcomed as GOP champion
They were glad to have their position justified by the Governor because he is now the man voted in the polls as the most likely to succeed as candidate at the Chicago convention in June.
It is no secret here that Republicans moved rather hesitantly and nervously to their strong “states’ rights” position on the soldier vote issue. They now await President Roosevelt’s next move. They do not expect him to drop it; certainly not since Governor Dewey has chosen to challenge him.
The more comfortable feeling of Republicans over the soldier vote issue, should be linked up to other events on the political front, for example, the Republican victory in a Denver Congressional district that had been Democratic for 14 years, another in a chain of byelection successes.
They are beginning to feel so good about these developments that they are worrying less about individual issues, observing signs of a strong trend reflecting dissatisfaction with the administration.
Denver victory encouraging
Perhaps the most cheerful aspect of the Denver victory was that Democrats could not check the Republican tide even with a famous war hero. An inclination to throw war heroes into the breach seems to be a part of Democratic strategy in this tough year. The result in Denver was encouraging to members of Congress who have been quaking in their boots about war veteran opponents and who, to offset it, have been rushing forward with bounteous legislative offerings for the benefit of veterans.
The Republican trend inures to Governor Dewey’s benefit as it does to that of his party. It makes the Republican nomination more of a prize than it appeared some months ago when he announced he was not a candidate, which accounts for the willingness of a Governor now, so it is made known, to accept a convention “draft.”
Everybody knows he is a “candidate” in this sense.
His gratuitous intervention in the soldier vote issue gives the appearance that he is talking like a candidate. Does this mean that, henceforth, he will seize the occasion to discuss the issues?
He is getting demands that he make his position plain on all the issues on the ground that he owes it to his party since he seems headed for the nomination.
Hargrove: America still is land of plenty to one used to British austerity
Shortage of steaks is minor point; England has food enough but no more
By Rosette Hargrove, special to the Pittsburgh Press
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Monahan: Purple Heart an epic drama of heroes
‘Trial’ and torture of eight Yank fliers at Jap hands depicted
By Kaspar Monahan
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