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After the battle, a Marine boards a transport with his face begrimed from two days and nights of hell on the beach at Eniwetok in the Marshalls, but with the light of battle still in his eyes.
Vermillion: ‘Mother, oh mother,’ moans Yank in bombed hospital
By Robert Vermillion, United Press staff writer
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WLB warns defiant mail order house
Montgomery Ward won’t obey board
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Don’t say ‘Hell, no’ in Memphis!
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Editorial: Insidious stuff
All those who have been holding up a moistened finger to the wind profess to detect a determined slump in Democratic prestige for the coming election.
There is evidence to support the view that the fourth-term candidacy will have a harder row to hoe than the third-term candidacy.
But–
Some Republicans seem anxious to make out the best possible case against themselves and their party.
There are numerous examples, but one of the best was the recent speech of Werner W. Schroder, Republican National Committeeman from Illinois. Mr. Schroeder was the man picked by Col. McCormick, the great Chicago rabble-rouser, for national chairman, but Wendell Willkie upset that plan.
In a radio broadcast, Mr. Schroeder attacked the OPA, the burden of his speech being that rationing is being forced on us by New Deal bureaucrats who propose to imprison the whole country in a straitjacket so they may better impose their political “whims” on the people.
Mr. Schroeder, speaking of the bureaucrat, said:
He is with you at every meal telling you what coffee, sugar, bacon and canned goods you can consume. He prescribes the shows you buy and the cut of your suit. He limits your tires and gasoline, while Lend-Leasing it to all the world.
If that’s the kind of insidious stuff the Republicans plan to use, they’ll succeed only in making the most bureaucratic bureaucrat look like a statesman by comparison.
Willkie flays backroom boys
Superior, Wisconsin (UP) –
Wendell L. Willkie was scheduled to end his two-week pre-primary tour of Wisconsin here today after blasting the “backroom boys” of the Republican Party who threatened to make the New Deal the “lesser of two evils” facing the nation in the November election.
Mr. Willkie told an Eau Clair, Wisconsin, audience last night that certain factions of the GOP “think you can be elected by telling one group one thing and another group something else.”
Stumping the state in support of 24 delegates pledged to him in Tuesday’s primary, Mr. Willkie demanded that the Republican Party and its leaders “take an affirmative stand on the issues of the house because when confronted by the lesser of these two evils, the people will continue to vote for the New Deal” rather than an undecided GOP.
He said:
The Republican Party is entitled to leadership. I would be ashamed to lead a party made up of Gerald Smiths, a party with no guts, whose leaders don’t want to be men when men are dying for us.
Earlier, Mr. Willkie told audiences at Chippewa Falls and Menomonie that “the very men who hate the administration so much that they cannot see its good points are actually proving to be its best friends.”
He said:
These men and these forces, such as The Chicago Tribune and the Hearst papers, hate the administration so much that they advocate always-negative policies which prevent the people from removing the New Deal from leadership.
Gas reserves resume rise
Show gain of million barrels in week
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Maximum jobs in peacetime urged by Olds
U.S. Steel head sees solution to problems
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
With 5th Army beachhead forces in Italy – (by wireless)
You’ve heard how flat the land of the Anzio beachhead is. You’ve heard how strange and naked our soldiers feel with no rocks to take cover behind, no mountains to provide slopes for protection.
This is a new kind of warfare for us. Here distances are short, and space is confined. The whole beachhead is the front line. The beachhead is so small that you can stand on high ground in the middle of it and see clear around the thing. That’s the truth, and it ain’t no picnic feeling either.
I remember back in the days of desert fighting around Tébessa more than a year ago, when the forward echelons of the corps staff and most of the hospitals were usually more than 80 miles back of the fighting. But here everybody is right in it together. You can drive from the rear to the front in less than half an hour, and often you’ll find the front quieter than the rear.
Hospitals are not immune from shellfire and bombing. The unromantic finance officer counting out his money in a requisitioned building is hardly more safe than the company commander 10 miles ahead of him. And the table waiter in the rear echelon mess gets blown off his feet in a manner quite contrary to the Hoyle rules of warfare.
It’s true that the beachhead land is flat, but it does have some rise and fall to it. It’s flat in a western Indiana way, not in the billiard-table flatness of the country around Amarillo, Texas, for example.
You have to go halfway across the beachhead area from the sea before the other half of it comes into view. There are general rises of a few score feet, and little mounds and gulleys, and there are groves of trees to cut up the land.
Roads – good and bad
There are a lot of little places where a few individuals can take cover from fire. The point is that the generalized flatness forbids whole armies taking cover.
Several main roads – quite good macadam roads – run in wagon-spoke fashion out through the beachhead area. A few smaller gravel roads branch off from them.
In addition, our engineers have bulldozed miles of road across the fields. The longest of these “quickie” roads is named after the commanding general here, whose name is still withheld from publication. A painted sign at one end says “Blank Boulevard,” and everybody calls it that. It’s such a super-boulevard that you have to travel over it in super-low gear with mud above your hubcaps, but still you do travel.
Space is at a premium on the beachhead. Never have I seen a war zone so crowded. Of course, men aren’t standing shoulder to shoulder, but I suppose the most indiscriminate shell dropped at any point in the beachhead would land not more than 200 yards from somebody. And the average shell finds thousands within hearing distance of its explosion. If a plane goes down in no-man’s-land, more than half the troops on the beachhead can see it fall.
Already spoken for
New units in the fighting, or old units wishing to change positions, have great difficulty in finding a place. The “already spoken for” sign covers practically all the land in the beachhead. The space problem is almost as bad as in Washington.
Because of the extreme susceptibility to shelling, our army has moved underground. At Youks and Thelepte and Biskra, in Africa a year ago, our Air Forces lived underground. But this is the first time our entire ground force has had to burrow.
Around the outside perimeter line, where the infantry lie facing the Germans a few hundreds yards away, the soldiers lie in open foxholes devoid of all comfort. But everywhere back of that, the men have dug underground and built themselves homes. Here on this beachhead the dugouts, housing from two to half a dozen men each, will surely run into the tens of thousands.
As a result of this, our losses from shelling and bombing are small. It’s only the first shell after a lull that gets many casualties. After the first one, all the men are in their dugouts. And you should see how fast they can get there when a shell whines.
In addition to safety, these dugouts provide two other comforts our troops have not always had – warmth and dryness.
A dugout is a wonderful place to sleep. In our Anzio-Nettuno sector, a whole night’s sleep is as rare as January sun in sunny Italy. But for the last three nights I’ve slept in various dugouts at the front, and slept soundly. The last two nights I’ve slept in a grove which was both bombed and shelled, and in which men were killed each night, and yet I never even work up. That’s what the combination of warmth, insulation against sound, and the sense of underground security can do for you.
Stokes: Third party
By Thomas L. Stokes
Madison, Wisconsin –
Typical of the times, the La Follette Progressive Party which dominated this state so completely a few years back is suffering now – at least temporarily – the usual fate of third parties when everybody has a job and there is no economic discontent.
Coming to its 10th anniversary which it celebrates in May, the party is weak and torn by factional strife.
Beyond its lack of a major economic issue, on which it flourished in the depression years and some time afterward, the party now is sharply divided on issues growing from the war. One faction clings to the isolationist tradition handed down by the elder La Follette to his two sons, Robert M. Jr., and Philip; the other is breaking away toward a program of international cooperation. The schism nurtures some bitterness.
The party reached its heyday, when Phil sat in the governor’s chair here a few years back. It controlled the legislature and had an effective machine down through state officers. Bob, then a Senator as now, had a close working alliance with the New Deal that supplied patronage and prestige.
Phil now with MacArthur
Today it has only 13 out of 100 members of the Assembly and six out of the 33 members of the Senate. Two of its leading members in the legislature switched to the Republican Party two years ago, and more are expected to join the exodus this year. Phil is on Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s staff in the Pacific. Bob is no longer so cozy with the administration.
What is happening to the Progressive Party has occurred in other third party and independent political movements in what was formerly known as “the radical frontier,” including Minnesota with its once-powerful Farmer-Labor Party and North Dakota with its Non-Partisan League.
The twin personalities, Phil and his older brother Bob, have held the Progressive Party together in a dual leadership. Phil tried a few years ago to branch out with a national Progressive Party, but it failed. He was defeated for governor and went into law practice.
In the tense days of debate before Pearl Harbor, he spoke all over the country under the auspices of America First, trying to stem the surge toward war. Then he went into the Army. He had served overseas in World War I.
Keeping hands off primary
The Progressive Party is keeping hands off officially in the presidential primary which culminates in next Tuesday’s election of convention delegates.
Very likely the Progressives will split their votes among the four candidates: Wendell Willkie, Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Gen. MacArthur and LtCdr. Harold E. Stassen. Some may vote for the Roosevelt slate of delegates in the Democratic primary.
What about the Progressive Party in the November election, and what about its future?
One thing is certain! There will be no formal alliance with the Democrats behind President Roosevelt as in the past. One authority told me that more Progressives would vote Republican than Democratic this fall. Bob La Follette is not up for reelection this year.
The Progressive Party may be in only a temporary slump. It is not wise, one is warned, to count it out.
Furthermore, it is pointed out that in the post-war period there are likely to be pressing economic issues which the party can capitalize to draw a clear line between itself and Democrats and Republicans. The Democratic Party is a third part in this state, and perhaps will continue to be.