Editorial: We can’t featherbed a war
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Editorial: ‘Ordinary guy – extraordinary touch’
From The Fort Hamilton Post
The G.I.’s newspaperman – Ernie Pyle – is doing a great job. Day after day he is simply and forcefully telling the American public what the fighting soldier says… thinks… believes.
Years ago, Ernie used to write about average men and women in average towns all over the United States. His style was always direct and refreshingly clear. It was homely without being naïve. It had humor without a trace of cynicism. That style makes his war reporting the best we have today…
Unlike many war correspondents, he has gone right out with the men who were doing the fighting. He has written about what it’s like to lie in a shell hole for days, how a mortar crew feels after hours of raining hell from enemy guns, what a soldier thinks about when his pal has been knocked off by a landmine.
He is an ordinary guy with an extraordinary touch.
Civilians and soldiers in this country depend on Ernie to give them true pictures of the war from the enlisted man’s viewpoint. His column is syndicated in hundreds of newspapers. His book, Here Is Your War, is a leading bestseller.
Recently, Ernie launched a campaign to give the doughboy “fight pay” comparable to the Air Corps’ “flight pay.” It was taken up immediately by members of Congress. Sensible people everywhere are hoping it will become part of Army regulations.
Ernie Pyle brings honor and distinction to the newspapermen’s craft… as he brings truth and enlightenment to America.
Background of news –
The South stays in line
By Jay G. Hayden
Washington –
The prospect of Southern opposition to a fourth term for President Roosevelt, either in the Democratic nominating convention or the November election, all but vanished when Senators Claude Pepper of Florida and Lister Hill of Alabama won easy renomination this week.
Anti-Roosevelt leaders in the South, including a majority of its businessmen and editors and a fair sprinkling of top-flight Democratic officeholders, have insisted that their section was thirsting for New Deal blood if only it could find a way to express itself, short of going Republican.
The significance of the Florida and Alabama senatorial contests was that they squarely met their specification. Senator Pepper had stuck to the New Deal line, even to the point of favoring enfranchisement of Southern Negroes, and Senator Hill had done likewise, with the single notable exception of the race issue.
Participants in these primaries, both candidates and voters, all were Democrats. The sole difference was that Messrs. Pepper and Hill stood squarely on their pro-Roosevelt records and their opponents just as definitely opposed the President and all of his domestic works.
Both clear-cut winners
In a straight two-man contest against James A. Simpson, president pro tempore of the State Senate and a leading Birmingham lawyer, Mr. Hill won with approximately 55% of the votes cast.
Mr. Pepper’s victory is even more decisive in that he appears to have won the clear majority of votes necessary to insure his reelection as against four opponents. With three-fourths of the state heard from, Mr. Pepper had an overall majority of 10,000 and was 46,000 ahead of the next best runner, Judge J. Ollie Edmunds.
In addition to these senatorial results, Roosevelt adherents are crowing over the lead in Florida of delegates pledged to the President, as against a slate entered in the name of Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, and the defeat of Rep. Joe Starnes for renomination in Alabama’s 5th district.
Incomplete returns indicate that a minority of Byrd delegates may have been elected in Florida, but in light of the Pepper and Hill victories, nothing short of a Byrd sweep of the state could have given encouragement to the Southern anti-fourth term movement.
Rep. Starnes has been known chiefly as the first assistant of Rep. Martin Dies in the much-controverted Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities. His votes in the House have frequently been anti-New Deal.
What Alabama likes
One of Mr. Starnes’ Alabama colleagues, asked the reason for his defeat, said he thought it was not so much that his constituents disagreed with the findings of the Dies Committee as that Mr. Starnes’ name was printed so frequently in connection with it.
He said:
You know, folks down in Alabama don’t want their representatives to be bothering about any of these big national things. When they hear their man talk about things going on in New York, they just think it would be better if he tended more to getting things for his home district.
In their overall meaning, the present Southern primary results seem to beat out the notion, held by any political observers all along, that while the upper crust elements in the South are violently anti-Roosevelt, this sentiment has not penetrated very deeply into the voting mass.
Also, the administration still has its vast civilian bureaucracy, numbering into the hundreds of thousands in single states, now supplemented by the military and naval bureaucracies. There is no doubt that the Washington administration did everything in its power to marshal these forces in behalf of Mr. Hill, Mr. Pepper and all others of its recognized supporters in Alabama and Florida.
Invasion prayers urged in South
Baptist chaplains in England alert
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American news in Britain urged
Need to ease relations seen
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Quinine now manufactured in scientists’ laboratory
Success achieved in work on which men have been working for 100 years
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Etten proof that Yankee uniform makes the player
By Glen Perkins, United Press staff writer
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Second day –
Buc-Cub game postponed by cold weather
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
London, England – (by wireless)
I hadn’t realized now immersed one can become in a war zone until we got to Casablanca, where there is no war.
Our war at Casablanca was brief and has long since moved on and far away. Our soldiers there now are only a few. They handle the port, which still receives supplies, and they handle the flow of airplanes to and from the war zones, but Casablanca really is a city at peace.
More than anything else you are impressed by the traffic on the streets being normal traffic. In every other city I had been in of recent months the streets were choked with speeding Army trucks, both American and British. Everywhere you would see a hundred Army vehicles for every local one.
But Casablanca has returned to its old ratio. Local autos and trucks and horse-drawn barouches fill the streets. The olive drab of the American uniform stands out as an individual thing among the sidewalk crowds, rather than forming a solid sea of brown as it does in our other war cities.
Being now such a backwash of the war, our few soldiers in Casablanca are bored. Some of them have been there a year and a half. They live almost normally, which in a manner is really the worst way to live during a war.
I talked to one officer who was typical. His chin was down. He said:
A WAC could do my job. A cripple could do my job. I’m young and healthy and should be at the front. But here I am, and here doubtless I will stay.
Crisis of the necktie
Military regulation is always stricter the farther away from the front you get. There in Casablanca they regulate your appearance, which is something you usually don’t have to worry about in Italy.
I did go so far as to get a clean uniform before leaving Italy, and considered myself very much dressed up. Yet when we go to Casablanca, I suddenly realized that anybody in uniform without a necktie was practically naked.
Once upon a time I had a necktie, but that was long ago and I have no idea what became of it. In Casablanca, I was caught between the devil and the sea, for one regulation required that you wear a necktie while another forbade transients from buying neckties at the post exchange.
My good name was saved by a soldier who took pity on me. This was Sgt. Ed Schuh of Altoona, Pennsylvania. He asked me up to his room for a chat one afternoon and, seeing my pitiful condition, gave me one of his numerous neckties.
Sgt. Schuh has a sister who is a nurse in one of our Army hospitals in England, and I promised to carry a verbal message to her. But the prospects of my succeeding look slim. This necktie will have me choked to death before I ever find her.
The Air Transport Command treats you well on these long trips. During our several days’ layover at Casablanca, waiting for the weather over the ocean to clear up, the ATC put us up at the best hotel in town and fed us fine food at an Army mess in another hotel.
My roommate for this stay was Lt. Col. Maynard Ashworth of Columbus, Georgia. Time was really heavy on our hands. There is nothing worse than waiting from day to day in a strange place for a plane to get ready to go somewhere. You don’t feel like settling down to reading. You’ve seen so much foreign country already that you don’t enjoy sightseeing. So, you just lie on a bed and look at the ceiling and count the slow passage of the hours and days.
Pal from Pittsburgh
One day, however, Col. Ashworth and I got a guide and went through the medina, which is the Arab quarter. I had been in medinas before, and they’re picturesque but horribly filthy. I would just as soon never see another one.
Another afternoon we hired a horse and buggy and took a long drive out along the seahorse road. We passed the country hotel where President Roosevelt stayed when he was there.
A couple of friends who helped us pass the time were Lt. Col. Tom Cassady of Pittsburgh and Maj. Charlie Moore of Inglewood, New Jersey, old acquaintances of mine from Marrakech and Dakar.
Lt. Col. Cassady is a son of Mrs. Susan Cassady of 521 El Court Street, Wilkinsburg, and was proprietor of two downtown parking lots before being called from the Officers’ Reserve to active duty in 1940.
He had been with the 176th Field Artillery for about 15 years, but after returning to service as a major he transferred to the Air Force and later to the Air Transport Service, with which he is stationed in North Africa now, his family reported.
Everybody was wonderful to us, and Casablanca is the nicest city I’ve seen in the Mediterranean Theater, and the weather was lovely – and yet a person who has nothing to do but wait almost goes crazy under the best of circumstances.
Women in service go for Stewart and Gable –
Greer Garson tops the ‘glamor girls’ as No. 1 pinup of American soldiers
Crosby beats Sinatra by two-to-one!
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Small dailies’ publishers spurn press subsidy pleas
By Robert Taylor, Press Washington correspondent
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