Slash of 15 minutes from official lunchtime finds ‘underground’ eating when it wishes
By Fred W. Perkins, Pittsburgh Press staff writer
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Defense wins point on Rogge’s remark
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Morgenthau: Currency stabilization plan agreed upon by 30 nations
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Allies attack Japs with orders to catch enemy ‘with their kimonos up’
By Harold Guard, United Press staff writer
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Nazis decree penalties for readers
By Walter McCallum, North American Newspaper Alliance
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May lead army in invasion of Europe
By Phil Ault, United Press staff writer
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Problem has to do with fliers who have become afraid under nervous tension
By Newbold Noyes Jr., North American Newspaper Alliance
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Washington (UP) –
Vice President Henry A. Wallace today named the five members of a Senate committee which will investigate the campaign expenditures of candidates for President, Vice President and Senators in the 1944 election.
He appointed Theodore F. Green (D-RI), Tom Stewart (D-TN), James M. Tunnell (D-DE), Joseph H. Ball (R-MN) and Homer Ferguson (R-MI).
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
Who opposes the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution? Organized labor, chiefly, is the answer given members of the National Woman’s Party who have worked for it for 24 years.
Last February, the amendment’s sponsors, recovering from the bitter shock of their 1943 defeat, had obtained the promise of more than 100 members of the Senate and the House that they would sign a petition to bring the bill to a vote. Petition action requires 218 signatures. To the sponsors the temper of the Congress seemed good and their hopes ran high.
Then on Feb. 25, a letter signed by Philip Murray, president of the CIO, was sent to all Congressmen.
Repeating the familiar arguments that the proposed amendment would deprive women of all protective legislation, Mr. Murray said:
In the name of the CIO, of whose 5,285,000 members a large proportion are women, I urge you to refuse to sign the discharge petition for the misnamed Equal Rights Amendment.
Upon receipt of this letter, many Congressmen who had promised to sign the petition notified the Woman’s Party they had reconsidered and could not do so.
Such an incident would seem to justify the charge by the Woman’s Party that one of the opponents of the equal rights cause is organized labor. Old timers in the movement like Alice Paul and Helen Hill Weed say that a constant barrage of propaganda emanates from the offices of labor leaders and that this propaganda has influenced certain women’s groups against the amendment.
Among those who are fighting it are such notable organizations as the YWCA, the League of Women Voters, the American Association of University Women, the Leagues of Jewish and Catholic women, and the director of the Women’s Bureau of Labor.
Action to oust Axis diplomats approved
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
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With ammunition gone, he maneuvers plane so that Hun can’t get accurate shot
By Capt. Don Gentile (as told to Ira Wolfert)
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By Ernie Pyle
With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
The greatest apprehension I’ve found in the Anzio-Nettuno area is not among the men on shore who have been under it constantly for weeks, but among the crews of ships that sit out in the Mediterranean, unloading.
It takes several days to unload a big freighter, and during all that time they are subject to shelling from land and air raids from the sky. Their situation, I’ll admit, is not an enviable one.
It’s true that few of them get hit, considering the amount of shooting the Germans do out there. Yet there is always the possibility. And what gives them the creeps is when they’re sitting on a ship full of ammunition or high explosive.
The crews of these big freighters are members of the Merchant Marine. They merely operate the ship. They don’t do the stevedoring work of unloading. That’s done by soldiers.
They have a good system for this. At Naples, a whole company of port-battalion soldiers is put on each ship just before it sails. They make the trip up and back with the vessel, do the unloading at Anzio, and when they return to Naples, they go back to their regular dock jobs there. A different company goes aboard for the next trip.
New system promotes efficiency
The result is that each one-time unloading crew is so anxious to get unloading and get out of Anzio that everybody works with a vim and the material flies.
Up until a few weeks ago, all unloading was done by port-battalion groups based at Anzio. As soon as the crew finished one ship, it would have to go to work on another. There wasn’t any end to it. The boys just felt they couldn’t win. Since the new system went into effect, efficiency has shot up like a rocket.
The bigger ships are unloaded just as they would be at a dock, with winches hoisting out big netfuls of cargo from the deep holds and swinging them over the sides and letting them down – not onto a dock, however, but into flat-bottomed LCTs which carry the stuff to the beaches.
Each hold has a dozen or more men working down below, plus the winch crews and signalmen. They are all soldiers. They work in 12-hour shifts, but they get intervals of rest.
I was aboard one Liberty ship about 10:00 a.m. all five hatches were bringing up stuff. You could lean over and watch the men down below piling up ration boxes. And on the deck immediately below us you could see scores of other soldiers trying to sleep, the deafening noise of the winches making no difference to them. They were the night shift. They slept on folding cots between blankets, with their clothes on.
One crew boss was Sgt. Sam Lynch of Wilmington, Delaware. He is a veteran soldier, having served four months in the Arctic and 14 months on this side. Before the war, he was a fireman on the Pennsylvania Railroad and later a railway mail clerk. He is married and has one child.
Feel defenseless on ship
I asked him how he liked coming up to Anzio on a ship and he said he didn’t like it any too well. He said:
The trouble is that you feel so darned defenseless. If you could just man a gun and shoot back, it wouldn’t be so bad.
But the Navy operates the gun crews aboard all these freight ships and the soldiers can only sit there idle and sweat it out when bombs or shells start flying.
You should see them work when a ship is about finished and it looks as though they might not get through in time to catch the next convoy.
They laugh and tell a story about one ship which finished 45 minutes after the convoy started. The skipper pulled anchor and started chasing the convoy. The Navy radioed him orders to stop and wait. But this fellow kept right on going. He simply figured he’d rather face disciplinary action at Naples than German bombers for one more night at Anzio.
The Navy’s premise was that he was in greater danger from German subs and E-boats while running alone after the convoy than he would be from another night at Anzio. They have it all figured out by percentages, and they are right.
But this fellow was lucky and caught up with the convoy. I never heard what his supporters did when he got there, but I bet they didn’t invite him out for a round of golf.