America at war! (1941–) – Part 3

5264

Co-ed’s mysterious return expected by Indian friend

Valsa Matthai hunted in Gotham coal pile

valsamatthai
Valsa Matthai

New York (UP) –
A friend of Valsa Anna Matthai, who disappeared at dawn 16 days ago, said today that she had “sort of a feeling” that the 21-year-old student from Bombay, India, will return as mysteriously as she left.

Pritha Kurmappa, a student living at International House with Miss Matthai, said:

She was very happy the night before she vanished. I can’t believe that she would kill herself – or that anyone would want to kill her.

No confidential type

Miss Kurmappa, from near Calcutta, India, said he had known Miss Matthai since she came here to study business administration last September. She described her as a slight, pretty girl, rather aloof but popular, with Indian nationalist sympathies politically.

Miss Kurmappa said:

She was not the kind of girl who confides in anyone, but she was friendly and like any girl, liked a good time.

Police, who have searched the 534-bed dormitory, a 150-ton coal pile, the Hudson River and the neighborhood of Columbia University for the girl, said that she had a large acquaintance in New York, among both Indians and Americans, but no “special friends.”

Left money behind

She was last seen by an elevator man at the house at 4:50 a.m. Monday ET, March 20, when he took her to the main floor. It was a snowy, blustery morning, but she was clad in slacks, sandals, polo coat and silken scarf. Behind her, police said, she left her pocketbook with $17 in it, and her $1,400 bank account has been untouched.

The daughter of a wealthy Indian industrialist, John Matthai, general manager of Tata Chemical Company, Miss Matthai spent the Sunday before her disappearance having tea with a U.S. Army officer, and, after dancing at an Indian festival at International House, visited Miss Kurmappa and an Egyptian girl in her room.

At the House, there was speculation that she might have been attacked in the nearby park since on March 17, all girl students were warned not to venture into the parks alone after several had been molested.

5265

Other case to be pressed, Chaplin prosecutor says

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5266

Fears of dangerous strikes hang over steel wage hearing

Value of rank-and-file’s endorsement of Murray’s no-strike pledge questioned
By Fred W. Perkins, Pittsburgh Press staff writer

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5267

Editorial: Something funny about it

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5268

Editorial: Post-war aviation policies

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5269

americavotes1944

Editorial: Willkie’s opportunity

Wendell Willkie’s withdrawal as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination is a bow to the inevitable. He chose to make the Wisconsin primary, in which he was the only active candidate, a personal test. Crushing defeat was the result. As he admitted last night with commendable candor: “It is obvious now that I cannot be nominated.”

He says:

I earnestly hope that the Republicans will nominate a candidate and write a platform which really represents the views which I have advocated and which I believe are shared by millions of Americans. I shall continue to work for these principles and policies for which I have fought during the last five years.

As an American, he knows the meaning of sportsmanship. As a politician, he knows the public has no use for a poor loser.

This defeat is at once a test of his character and a new opportunity. In losing his chance to be the Republican nominee, Mr. Willkie by good sportsmanship may get a better chance to serve the ideals he professes. Now that the personal ambition barrier has been removed, the people may hear him more readily than ever. If he believes in his crusade enough to serve in the ranks, he may yet achieve in another way the results and the popularity he missed.

He has been fighting against the administration’s excesses and failures on the one hand, and against “economic Toryism and narrow nationalism” on the other. Well, that fight goes on. It will go on with or without Mr. Willkie.

But Mr. Willkie can help in the fight. He can help very much, for he has a great deal to give. We hope he will.

5270

Edson: Swapping culture pays off in South America

By Peter Edson

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5271

Background of news –
Two styles of bombing

By E. C. Shepherd

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5272

Use more eggs, WFA urges; price juggled

Producers, however, get federal ‘support’

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Vivien: ‘Who’s reading my letters?’

It’s up to coffee, contractor asserts

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5273

G-men peer into carburetors of some Hollywood stars

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5274

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
Our artillery up here is terrific. The beachhead being as small as it is, we can, whenever we wish, train every gun in the 5th Army forces on a single German target.

In my wartime life, I’ve had a good many stray shells in my vicinity, but not until I came to the beachhead was I ever under an actual artillery barrage.

The Germans shell us at intervals throughout the day and night, but usually there are just one or two shells at a time, with long quiet periods in between.

The other night, however, they threw a real barrage at us. It was short, but boy, it was hot. Shells were coming faster than you could count them. One guess is as good as another, but I’d estimate that in two minutes they put 150 shells in our area.

I was in bed, in a stone house, when it started, and I stayed in bed, too, simply because I was afraid to get up. I just reached out and put my steel helmet on, and covered my head with a quilt, and lay there all drawn up in a knot.

Shells came past the corner of the house so close their mere passage would shake the windows. A shell that close doesn’t whine or whistle. It just goes “Whish-bang!” The whole house was rattling and trembling from constant nearby explosions. The noise under a barrage is muddling and terrifying. Of course, we had casualties, but our own house came through unscathed.

That little barrage seemed awful to us and it was awful, but just think – we had maybe 150 shells around us in two minutes, but I know of cases where our guns have fired incessantly hour after hour until we have put 30,000 shells in a single German area.

We have had reports that the Germans were burying their dead with bulldozers, there were so many of them.

Visitors are ones who get hit

I had lunch with one of our artillery batteries which shoots the big Long Toms. They’ve been in the thick of the fighting since a year ago December – three phases of Tunisia, then Sicily, then through the Salerno-Cassino push. Yet they’ve fired more rounds since they’ve been sitting here in one spot on the Anzio beachhead than they did in the entire year before that. And they told me of another battery which fired more in four hours one night than in the previous eight months.

The Germans throw so much stuff back at them that the fields around them are gradually being plowed up. Yet this battery has had nobody killed, and only a few wounded.

They told of one soldier who was standing in a ditch the other day with one foot up on the bank. An 88 shell went right between his legs, bored into the bottom of the ditch, blew an artillery rangefinder all to pieces, and never scratched the fellow. But after it was over, he was so scared he was sick for two days.

The men of this battery say that people who come to visit them, such as nearby ack-ack crews, road patrols and ammunition truckers, are always the ones who get hit. Being in the visitor category myself, I said a quick goodbye and was last seen going rapidly around an Italian straw stack.

Won’t chalk any more shells

One gun of this battery, incidentally, has a funny little superstition. It seems that on the very first shell they ever fired when they hit Africa, in 1942, they chalked a message – the kind you’ve seen in photographs – saying “Christmas Greetings to Hitler,” and all put their names on it.

They sent the shell over, and immediately the Germans sent one back which exploded so close to the gun pit it wounded seven of the 12 men who had chalked their names on the American shell. From that day to this, that crew won’t chalk anything on a shell.

One day an Army photographer came around to take some pictures of this gun crew firing. He asked them to chalk one of those Hitler messages on the shell.

The crew obliged and he took the picture. But what the photographer doesn’t know is that the shell was never fired. After the photographer left, they carried it up the hillside, dug a hole and buried it.

5275

Pegler: Dies Committee (Pt. 2)

By Westbrook Pegler

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5276

Maj. de Seversky: Airpower myth

By Maj. Alexander P. de Seversky

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5277

Kite Doctors – India

Former clerks and salesmen are now crack mechanics
By Sgt. Charles M. Sievert

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5278

Unfit for fighting –
Army’s NP dischargees make excellent workers in war jobs

Consideration of employers and care in placing of men are needed
By Marjorie Van de Water

Men discharged from the Army for neuropsychiatric disability are employable. In fact, most of them will make excellent workers in essential war jobs. But they needed consideration on the part of employers and care in placement.

As a rule, these men feel badly at being out of the Army. They don’t want to go back into combat – they have had a little more of that than their nervous systems could tolerate. But neither do they want to be left out of things. They are eager to do whatever they can to hasten victory.

Some will not want to take a job right away. They want a little time to get reacquainted with their families, to hunt up old friends, to take a look at the old familiar places. If they feel this way, they shouldn’t be rushed into a job. Let them take it easy a while.

It is well for the employer to remember that the type of person who cracks up in military life is nearly always an overconscientious sort of person. The “goldbricker” manages to escape strain; it is the man who won’t shirk and who faces the music who is the one to break. When such a man wants a day or an hour off, you can be sure he really needs it.

Advice from psychiatrists

Here is some advice for employers, gathered from psychiatrists who have been caring for these men:

Don’t heap lots of responsibility on them. Work it in gradually as they grow more used to civilian life and feel stronger. Remember that it may take a year or two before the discharged soldier has recovered completely from what he has gone through.

If the man has come away from the Army oversensitive to noise, be careful not to employ him where he will be exposed to sudden, crashing noise. The hum of machinery may not bother him much, but clanging steel, the noise of riveting, sudden loud bells or whistles may be unbearable.

*Lonely jobs taboo

Don’t give him a job as night watchman in the mistaken but well-meaning notion that it will be light work for him. Loneliness and time for thought are just the things these men do not need. Give him a job where he will be active and pleasantly occupied every minute.

Most of these men do poorly on sedentary work. After an active life in the Army, don’t expect them to sit still at a desk all day long. If you give a man a desk job, plan frequent breaks that will give him a little leg-stretching exercise. Hard work out-of-doors such as farm work is the best possible sort for most of them. It gives them little time to think during the day and makes it easier for them to sleep at night.

Consult his work record

The worst possible type of work for the soldier discharged for neuropsychiatric reasons is that which entails long dull periods of slack work punctuated by peaks of exciting bustle and rush. This, after all, is what he could not stand up under in the Army. Waiting gives time for thinking and brooding. Thinking and brooding lead to depression and the blues. Then the brief spurt of rush work puts the man under acute strain for which he is not fit.

In deciding how the discharged soldier would fit into a particular business or manufacturing organization, the employer should be guided more by the man’s work record before he went into the Army than by any account of his illness or experience in service. If he has a record of failures, tardiness, absenteeism, illness, and temperamental differences with employers and fellow employees, the chances are not good that he will make a model employee now. But if his work records shows he was a steady, reliable worker before the war, you can count on him to be an asset to your company now, once the training and adjustment period is past.

NEXT: Family can help soldier back to health.

5279

Curb on draft of younger men lifted

Employment Service approval not needed

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5280

Millett: Be charming to family

Be nicest to those you love most
By Ruth Millett

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5281

Steel company buys first of U.S. properties

Bethlehem exercises option on equipment
By Robert Taylor, Press Washington correspondent

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5282

Vince DiMaggio signs Buc contract

Last holdout in fold at club’s terms

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Durocher admits temporary return as infield support

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Williams: It’s derby, not darby, on good old U.S. parlance

By Joe Williams

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5283

Radio hospital guest –
Army sets time for network sports hour

Athlete stars to call on soldiers
By Si Steinhauser

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