Edson: U.S. magnesium project tale of vast waste
By Peter Edson
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Italy – (by wireless)
Maj. Burt Cochrane is executive officer of the squadron with which I’ve been living. He is not a flying man, but he takes most of the onerous duties off the shoulders of the squadron commander, who is always a flying man.
Maj. Cochrane is the perfect example of a man going all-out for his country. He doesn’t want to be over here at all. He is 55, and a grandfather. But he fought through the last war, kept his commission in the reserve, and just couldn’t picture himself not being in this one. He has been away from home three years.
In civil life, Maj. Cochrane is what you might call a gentleman cattle-raiser. He owns about 300 acres in the beautiful rolling country north of San Francisco, not far from Jack London’s famous Valley of the Moon. The nearest town is Kenwood.
He turns out about 75 head of beef cattle a year, has a lovely home, beautiful riding horses, and lives an almost Utopian life. He left the city eight years ago, and says he never knew what happiness was until he got out into the hills.
Maj. Cochrane is quiet and courteous. Enlisted men and officers both like and respect him. He is so soldierly that he continually says “sir” even to me, although I’m a civilian and much younger than he.
Kiss boy goodbye
One of the newer and much-trusted pilots in my squadron is a good-natured, tow-headed youngster named Lt. Leroy Kaegi (pronounced Keggy). He is from Ashland, Oregon.
Lt. Kaegi had quite a day recently. Two missions, morning and afternoon. Returning from his morning mission, he couldn’t get one of his wheels down. He had to fly around for an hour and finally stall the plane in order to shake the wheel loose.
Then just as he was ready to take off on his afternoon mission, some major came rushing up to the plane in a jeep, jumped out and yelled:
Hey, wait a minute. This girl wants to kiss you goodbye.
Lt. Kaegi had never seen the girl before, but she was American and she was beautiful. So out he popped and gave her a great big smackeroo, and then dashed back in again. When he got back, all he could take about was this strange and wonderful thing that had happened to him. He said he was so excited he took off with his upper cowl flap open.
The girl, I found later, was Louise Allbritton of Hollywood. She’s over with June Clyde, entertaining troops for the USO. They are both swell gals.
Since Lt. Kaegi’s adventure, I’ve been hanging around the planes at takeoff time for a week, just hoping, but nothing seems to come of it except that I get a lot of dirt blown in my face.
Shot-up champion
One day I was standing around an A-20 bomber when the crew chief came up and pulled a clipping out of his pocket. It was a piece about his plane written more than a year ago by my friend Hal Boyle of the Associated Press.
At that time, the plane was the most shot-up ship in the squadron, with more than 100 holes in it. The crew chief, Sgt. Earl Wayne Sutter of Oklahoma City, has had this same ship since just before they left England nearly a year and a half ago. He’s very proud of its record. And it still holds the record, too. By now, it has more than 300 holes in it. But Sgt. Sutter and his gang just patch them up, and it keeps on flying. With all that riddling only one crew member has ever been hurt, and he only slightly.
Crew members for the past several weeks have been wearing “flak vests.” These look something like a lifejacket and are made of steep strips covered with canvas. They weight about 25 pounds.
There have been several instances already where these bests have saved men from being wounded by flak. The oddest instance was of one gunner who took his vest off because it felt too heavy, and threw it on the floor. By chance it happened to fall across his foot. A moment later, a piece of flak came through the wall and smashed into the flak vest. If it hadn’t been lying where it was, he would have had a bad foot wound.
Stokes: Willkie’s circus
By Thomas L. Stokes
Washington –
Beginning next week, the Wisconsin woods will echo with something more than the call of a moose to his mate.
It’ll be like a circus in the small towns. In the big cities, there’ll be fun in the streets.
Wendell L. Willkie, the man who would be President, is taking his one-man show for a barnstorming tour to rouse the folks to vote for a slate of delegates who will support him for the Republican presidential nomination in the national convention.
It will be the opening act to revive his languishing campaign. Mr. Willkie is giving himself plenty of time. The primary is April 4.
He goes to Wisconsin somewhat in the role of a mighty nimrod gunning for three fellows who aren’t there, not even concealed behind the trees.
Three other well-known figures have been entered by their sponsors in the Wisconsin primary. Gen. MacArthur is busy with other matters in the Pacific, but still there is no sign from him that he is not a receptive candidate. LtCdr. Stassen, former three-time governor of neighboring Minnesota, is also in the Pacific on Adm. Halsey’s staff. Governor Dewey is chewing his silence at Albany.
Ball for Stassen
Senator Ball (R-MN) is in the state now talking up his friend Harold Stassen.
Governor Dewey tried to get the delegate candidates pledged to him to withdraw, explaining that he isn’t a candidate. They refused. So, he is a factor in the four-cornered contest whether he likes it or not. In 1940, he won the Wisconsin primary against Senator Vandenberg (R-MI), as he did likewise in Nebraska.
Wisconsin’s primary is a vital affair for Mr. Willkie. If he loses there, he can pack up his bag of hopes and go back to practicing law or literature. Weak in the support of politicians, he is now basing his claims for preference on backing among rank-and-file voters. Wisconsin will test that.
Should he win there, his campaign should benefit. If he also wins in Nebraska, which holds its primary a week later, he again would be counted a factor. He will take his road show to Nebraska. There his slate is matched against two others, one for LtCdr. Stassen, the other pledged to Governor Griswold.
An uphill battle
Mr. Willkie admittedly faces an uphill battle. In recent months, he’s become like the rich boy who had everything, and is suddenly thrown out on his own.
This time four years ago, he was rapidly becoming the darling of various interests who thought they had found in him the reality of their dreams – the man who could beat Franklin D. Roosevelt. The sun was high, the skies were bright, and everything was coming his way.
On the day of his defeat, he started running again for 1944.
But, in the campaign and later, something happened. He was partly to blame. He didn’t pay enough heed to the politicians. He disregarded them, snubbed them in some cases.
But he never stopped running. He ran clear around the world, to lift his star again high in national and international notice. Many Republicans didn’t like this, said he was playing too cozy with FDR. He began to try to cultivate the politicians, though never wholeheartedly it seemed, for he broke out, at odd moments, to insult them.
Can he come back? Wisconsin may tell.
Gift to Arabia backed in 1941 by Roosevelt
Senators trace history of plan
By Henry J. Taylor, Scripps-Howard staff writer
New York –
Members of the Senate committee investigating oil matters have determined that money payments to King Ibn Saud and the Saudi Arabian government were sponsored by President Roosevelt as early as 1941, according to a letter written by Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones on Oct. 9, 1941, to James A. Moffett, then vice president of Standard Oil Company of California.
Ibn Saud’s chief income used to come from imposts on Muslim pilgrims to his capital city of Mecca. But from the time of the Ethiopian War in 1935, the pilgrim traffic fell off until, by 1941, Ibn Saud was hard pressed for cash.
In 1933, the King sold jointly to Standard Oil of California and the Texas Company what may or may not turn out to be immense valuable oil-development privileges in his land. However, the oil companies are nervous about their “rights,” according to Mr. Moffett. Ibn Saud, as a sovereign, can cancel his oil concession at any time.
Viewed as reserve
The two oil companies in 1933 looked on Saudi Arabia as a reserve. With many years’ supply left in neighboring Bahrain, the American companies have not developed any production in Ibn Saud’s domain.
But Senators point out that the oil companies got entangled deeper and deeper in Saudi Arabia as time went on. From 1933 through 1941, they invested over $83 million in Saudi Arabia surveys and development work and advance royalties.
As the pilgrim trade grew worse and worse, the next blow fell. King Ibn Saud called on the American companies for a conference in March 1941. The 61-year-old potentate is said to have complained that the British government, which had been sending him around $1,650,000 a year on a personal goodwill basis, had declined to boost the ante to $3,600,000 a year.
Asks $6 million
Accordingly, Ibn Saud asked the American oil executives to accommodate him with a further advance of $6 million a year for the next five years. This was relayed to Washington promptly after the desert meeting broke up in a stalemate.
President Roosevelt first had the matter presented to Secretary of the Navy Knox. The thought was that America might build goodwill with the King by having our Navy buy “underground oil.” Secretary Knox is then reported to have called attention to the vast Venezuelan and Colombian fields, already operating in America’s backyard, and to have returned the idea to the White House in May 1941.
But as Ibn Saud continued to press for action, President Roosevelt is said to have suggested next that the Reconstruction Finance Corporation might assist in obtaining Arabian goodwill. The idea was communicated to RFC chairman Jesse Jones on July 21. Mr. Jones is reported to have been even more disapproving than Secretary Knox, and to have returned the idea to the White House on Aug. 1.
Halifax conference
Ibn Saud persisted in his appeal for goodwill, however, and finally in October 1941, at the suggestion of President Roosevelt, Mr. Jones saw British Ambassador Halifax in Washington.
Members of the Senate committee are preparing to ask whether, as a result of the Jones-Halifax meeting, the U.S. government’s famous loan of $450 million to Great Britain against British-held American securities did not contain a stipulation that part of this sum be delivered to Ibn Saud.
Völkischer Beobachter (March 16, 1944)
Nach der Methode ‚Haltet den Dieb!‘
Für Roosevelt ist Rom ein militärisches Ziel
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Politischer Wirrwarr in der Mittelmeerzone –
England ist an die Wand gespielt
Von unserem Berichterstatter in der Schweiz
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U.S. Navy Department (March 16, 1944)
CINCPAC Press Release No. 313
For Immediate Release
March 16, 1944
Seventh Army Air Force Liberators attacked Truk before dawn on March 15 (West Longitude Date). Airdrome installations, fuel dumps, and ammunition storage areas on Eten and Dublon Islands were bombed, with explosions and fires resulting. Heavy anti-aircraft fire was encountered, but only one of our planes was hit, and all returned to base.
On the same day Army Liberators attacked ground installations at Ponape and Oroluk without damage to our planes.
Army Mitchells and Marine Dauntless dive bombers attacked two enemy bases in the Eastern Marshall Islands on March 14. The Mitchells hit the cantonment and ammunition storage areas and bombed the radio station at one base, and the dive bombers started fires at another. One Dauntless was slightly damaged, but all planes returned to base.
A search plane of Fleet Air Wing Two bombed Pingelap Atoll.
The Pittsburgh Press (March 16, 1944)
Truk blasted by Army bombers
Washington –
Army Liberators attacked Truk, Japanese naval base in the Carolines, in a pre-dawn raid Wednesday, the Navy announced today.
They bombed airdrome installations, fuel dumps and ammunition storage areas on two of the islands in the Truk group – Eten and Dublon. Explosions and fires resulted.
Despite heavy anti-aircraft fire, only one of the big bombers was hit and the entire raiding force returned to base.
Yanks, RAF give Germany heaviest beating of war
U.S. fliers meet thin fighter defense after 3,300-ton British raid
By Phil Ault, United Press staff writer
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Germans cling to the ruins of Cassino
Troops creep back in bomb debris
By C. R. Cunningham, United Press staff writer
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Value of bombings doubted after attack on Cassino
By William H. Stoneman
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