Jap destroyer, 2 cargo ships are sunk
New attempt to help Wewak frustrated
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Roosevelt stays in study
Washington –
President Roosevelt’s cold was described as “decidedly better” today, but for the fourth successive day, he remained away from his office and worked in his White House study.
Simms: Hull statement helps to ease fears
People from occupied lands hail definition of war as a fight for freedom
By William Philip Simms, Scripps-Howard foreign editor
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Hull gives Senators outline of foreign policy details
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
With the Allied beachhead forces in Italy – (by wireless)
In order to report the war on the Anzio beachhead, it was first necessary to get to the beachhead. I got here by boat, as everybody else does.
Our troops up here are supplied and replaced by daily ship convoys. Since this is a very frontline kind of war up here, isolated and horny-handed like the early old days in Tunisia, there is little red tape about it.
A correspondent who wants to come to the beachhead simply drives to the dock where the ships are loading, tells the Army captain in charge he wants to get to Anzio, and the captain says, “Okay, get on this boat here.”
I came up on an LST (landing ship tank) – a type of vessel which is being considerably publicized at home now, and which is probably the outstanding ship of our amphibious forces.
It is a great big thing, bis as an ocean freighter. The engines and crew’s quarters and bridges are all on the back end. All the rest of the ship is just a big empty warehouse sort of thing, much like a long, rectangular garage without any pillars in it.
Two huge swinging doors open in the bow, and then a heavy steel ramp comes down so that trucks and tanks and jeeps can drive in. It can land at a beach for loading and unloading, or run nose first to a dock. We loaded at a dock.
Very same LST boat
This was the second time I had been on an LST. The first time was last June at Bizerte, a few days before we took off on the invasion of Sicily.
At that time, I was living on a warship, but took a run around the harbor one day going aboard various types of landing craft, just to see what they were like. I spent about half an hour on an LST that day, and never had been aboard one since.
So, imagine my surprise when I climbed aboard for the Anzio trip, checked in with the skipper, and suddenly realized this was the very same LST, still commanded by the same man. He is Capt. Joseph Kahrs of Newark, New Jersey. He is a 37-year-old bachelor, the product of two universities, and before the war was a lawyer in practice with his father in Newark.
After Pearl Harbor, he went into the Navy. His sum total of seafaring had been several trips in peacetime.
Exactly one year to the very day after he entered the Navy, Capt. Kahrs and a crew equally as landlubberish as himself took over this brand-new LST and pointed her bow toward Africa. Only two men of the crew of more than 60 had ever been to sea before.
Just the other day they celebrated this ship’s first birthday and everybody aboard had a turkey dinner. In that one year of existence this LST had crossed the Atlantic once, taken D-Day roles in three invasion, and made a total of 23 perilous trips between Africa, Sicily and the Anzio beachhead.
They were almost blown out of the water once, and had countless miracle escapes, but never were seriously damaged. Most of the original crew are still with it, and now instead of green landlubbers they are tried and true salts.
Carry new type of barracks bag
Long lines of soldiers loaded down with gear marched along the dock to enter adjoining ships. They were replacements to bolster the fighters at Anzio.
You could tell from their faces that they were brand-new from America. They carried a new-type of barracks bag, which few of us over here had seen before. The bags were terrifically heavy, and it was all the boys could do to handle them.
One of the passing replacements remarked:
Hell, I’ve got more clothes than I had when we left America. I don’t know how we accumulate so much.
Italian children scampered along with the marching soldiers, insisting on helping with the heavy bags.
One of the oddest sights I’ve ever seen was a frail little Italian girl, not more than 9 or 10, paddling along with a barracks bag, that must have weighed 75 pounds, slung across her tiny shoulders.
The big soldier who owned it was laughing at the incongruity of the thing, and we had to laugh too. So did the little girl.
Stokes: Middle-of-road
By Thomas L. Stokes
With Willkie in Wisconsin –
Wendell L. Willkie is carefully building up, in his Wisconsin primary campaign, a middle-of-the-road philosophy designed to attract the large independent vote.
Upon this he is resting his chief claim for renomination as Republican presidential candidate.
Mr. Willkie is frank about his objective. As he describes it, the only way the party can win is to adopt a forward-looking program, both domestically and internationally, to appeal to the independent vote.
He estimates that vote as between 35 and 40 percent of the electorate. That seems high. But polls show a much larger percentage of voters undecided this year than usual, which indicates a greater degree of independence.
His is a difficult task. He is trying to show, on the one hand, that he is not a New Dealer, not still a Democrat, not “another Roosevelt” and, on the other, that he is not an old-line GOP-type Republican.
When he arrived here, he found the air full of talk that he is not a real Republican. He has been dangling these rumors before his audiences – rumors, as he describes them, that “I’m a carbon copy of Roosevelt,” that I’m in league with Roosevelt,” that “I’m trying to help the administration.”
He says:
I’ve never talked politics with President Roosevelt in my life.
Not Democrat or New Dealer
Then he reads his bill of particulars in proof that he’s not a Democrat or New Dealer.
On foreign policy, he specifies, he has disagreed in a number of instances with the administration, including most recently the Polish question. He even went so far as to accuse the administration of having no foreign policy.
On domestic policy, he charges the administration with poor administration and the President with having a Cabinet of “yes men.” Outstanding men are needed, he says. He holds up two Cabinet members as horrible examples – Secretary of Agriculture Wickard and Secretary of Labor Perkins.
The independent commissions in Washington, he says, should be more independent. They are too much under the executive thumb.
He saves his heaviest attack for the “power complex” which he attributes to President Roosevelt and the administration, and he describes the New Deal regime as being “tired and cynical,” with a supreme belief that they know what is good for everybody in the country. This, he concedes, is often a sincere belief, but the egotism of it he deplores as the result of people being too long in power.
Tempers criticism of New Deal
He tempers his criticism of the New Deal by admitting that it has achieved some worthwhile reforms. He speaks harshly of those who are against everything just to be against, who react adversely to everything the administration does.
He says:
They are not thinkers – they are just pathological.
On the other hand, he denounces stand-pat Republicanism as bitingly as any Democrat ever did, and, if he should get nominated, President Roosevelt, or any of his campaign speakers, would be able to quote him at length without bothering to coin any new phrases.
He tells time after time, here in Wisconsin where isolationism was so prevalent, how he fought for Lend-Lease and he takes credit for helping to get the bill through Congress, though 80% of the Republican Party leadership, he says, was against it.
In telling an audience at Manitowoc yesterday that they must “bear in mind always that the objective of the party is to advance social relations,” he said:
I’m anxious to remove the impression that the Republican Party is a brutal, cold party that does not recognize social obligations.
Baby flattops track down U-boats
Bringing plane down on moving carrier is no fun at all!
By W. C. Heinz, North American Newspaper Alliance
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Elliott choice to guard hot corner
Frisch will not risk change; Handley may switch to outfield
By Dick Fortune
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May be lucky 13 –
Mack hopeful this is A’s year
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Here we ‘stop and go’ –
Joe E. Brown ‘takes listeners for a ride’
Big-mouthed star joins air authors
By Si Steinhauser
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Völkischer Beobachter (March 24, 1944)
Die Gründe für Badoglios Schwenkung zu den Sowjets
Der Verräterkönig und sein Marschall als Handlanger des Machthabers im Kreml
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Auchinleck versucht zu trösten –
Besorgnisse in Neudelhi um die Burmafront
Von unserem Berichterstatter in der Schweiz
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Ein bemerkenswertes Geständnis –
‚US-Bevölkerung am schlechtesten informiert‘
Eigener Bericht des „Völkischen Beobachters“
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White House Statement on Opening Frontiers to War Victims and Justice for War Crimes
March 24, 1944
The United Nations are fighting to make a world in which tyranny and aggression cannot exist; a world based upon freedom, equality, and justice; a world in which all persons regardless of race, color, or creed may live in peace, honor, and dignity.
In the meantime, in most of Europe and in parts of Asia the systematic torture and murder of civilians – men, women, and children – by the Nazis and the Japanese continue unabated. In areas subjugated by the aggressors, innocent Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, Dutch, Danes, French, Greeks, Russians, Chinese, Filipinos – and many others – are being starved or frozen to death or murdered in cold blood in a campaign of savagery.
The slaughters of Warsaw, Lidice, Kharkov, and Nanking – the brutal torture and murder by the Japanese, not only of civilians but of our own gallant American soldiers and fliers – these are startling examples of what goes on day by day, year in and year out, wherever the Nazis and the Japs are in military control – free to follow their barbaric purpose.
In one of the blackest crimes of all history, begun by the Nazis in the day of peace and multiplied by them a hundred times in time of war, the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe goes on unabated every hour. As a result of the events of the last few days, hundreds of thousands of Jews, who while living under persecution have at least found a haven from death in Hungary and the Balkans, are now threatened with annihilation as Hitler’s forces descend more heavily upon these lands. That these innocent people, who have already survived a decade of Hitler’s fury, should perish on the very eve of triumph over the barbarism which their persecution symbolizes, would be a major tragedy.
It is therefore fitting that we should again proclaim our determination that none who participate in these acts of savagery shall go unpunished. The United Nations have made it clear that they will pursue the guilty and deliver them up in order that justice be done. That warning applies not only to the leaders but also to their functionaries and subordinates in Germany and in the satellite countries. All who knowingly take part in the deportation of Jews to their death in Poland or Norwegians and French to their death in Germany are equally guilty with the executioner. All who share the guilt shall share the punishment.
Hitler is committing these crimes against humanity in the name of the German people. I ask every German and every man everywhere under Nazi domination to show the world by his action that in his heart he does not share these insane criminal desires. Let him hide these pursued victims, help them to get over their borders, and do what he can to save them from the Nazi hangman. I ask him also to keep watch, and to record the evidence that will one day be used to convict the guilty.
In the meantime, and until the victory that is now assured is won, the United States will persevere in its efforts to rescue the victims of brutality of the Nazis and the Japs. Insofar as the necessity of military operations permit, this government will use all means at its command to aid the escape of all intended victims of the Nazi and Jap executioner, regardless of race or religion or color. We call upon the free peoples of Europe and Asia temporarily to open their frontiers to all victims of oppression. We shall find havens of refuge for them, and we shall find the means for their maintenance and support until the tyrant is driven from their homelands and they may return.
In the name of justice and humanity, let all freedom-loving people rally to this righteous undertaking.
U.S. Navy Department (March 24, 1944)
Communiqué No. 514
Pacific and Far East.
U.S. submarines have reported the sinking of eleven vessels as a result of operations against the enemy in these waters, as follows:
- 1 converted minelayer.
- 2 small freighters.
- 3 medium-sized transports.
- 1 medium-sized tanker.
- 3 medium-sized freighters.
- 1 large tanker.
These sinkings have not been reported in any previous Navy Department communiqué.
CINCPAC Press Release No. 324
For Immediate Release
March 24, 1944
Thirty‑three tons of bombs were dropped on four enemy positions in the Marshalls by Mitchell bombers of the 7th Army Air Force, Ventura search planes of Fleet Air Wing Two and Navy Hellcat fighters and Dauntless dive bombers and Corsair fighters of the 4th Marine Aircraft Wing on March 22 (West Longitude Date).
A large fire was set on one of the atolls and ground installations were hit on another. All of our planes returned.
On March 21, a search plane of Fleet Air Wing Two bombed facilities on Ant Island.