Editorial: ‘Marching as to war’
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Background of news –
GOP and the farm vote
By Bertram Benedict
The Republican Party’s subcommittee on a farm plank for the 1944 platform, of which Iowa Governor Hickenlooper is chairman, will meet in New York this week.
Just as the Democrats count upon the Solid South as a bedrock foundation in the 1944 campaign, the Republicans are counting upon all the predominantly rural states east of the Rocky Mountains as safe for the GOP.
Seven of the 10 states carried by Wendell Willkie in 1940 fall in this category – Maine, Vermont, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota. Of the other three Willkie states in 1940, two are classified in the 1940 census as about half rural, half urban – Colorado and Indiana. Only one is predominantly industrial – Michigan.
All the rural states carried by President Roosevelt in 1940 are in the South or the Rocky Mountains. Six non-Southern states carried by Mr. Roosevelt in 1940 are listed as half rural, half urban – Delaware, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, Washington and Oregon.
1942 figures recalled
The 1940 census lists a dozen states, all of them outside of the South, as having 56% or more of their population as urban. These 12 account for 235 votes in the Electoral College, 21 short of the majority necessary to elect. Hence the importance of the farm vote or the rural vote (the rural non-farm population) in the election next November.
In the elections for Congress in 1942, the Republican Party carried more states than in the election for President in 1940. The GOP retained all its states of 1940 (in Colorado, a Democratic Senator was elected for an unexpired term, but by a narrow margin, whereas a Republican Senator was elected for a full term by a large majority, and the total Republican vote for members of the House was much larger than the total Democratic vote).
In addition, the GOP won senatorial elections or had the better of House elections in the following states which had voted for Roosevelt in 1940: Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wyoming.
Population shifts cited
These 15 states, together with the 10 states which Mr. Willkie carried in 1940, have a total of 274 electoral votes – eight more than necessary to elect a President.
The rub in using the 1942 figures as a basis for estimating the 1944 results is, if course, the fact of large population shifts – into the Armed Forces or into industry. In general, the rural states show a loss of population as compared with the urban or the rural-urban states.
The 1940 Republican platform endorsed benefit payments to farmers, “based upon a widely applied, constructive soil-conservation program free from government-dominated production control, but administered, as far as possible, by the farmers themselves.”
The platform promised to continue the present payments until the GOP long-range program equalizing the condition of agriculture, labor, and industry became effective. The platform came out for tariff protection for these three groups, and condemned the manner in which the administration tariff reciprocity agreements had been put into effect.
The Democratic platform, naturally claiming credit for having put the farmer on his feet, charged the Republicans with “allegiance to those who exploit him.”
In Washington –
More civilian goods supplied liberated areas by Lend-Lease
Money spent for everything from bicycles and engines to razorblades and kettles
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Screen scouts in frantic search for new talent
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Ladies Courageous tells story of girl ferry pilots
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Army consolidation plan aims to save men, avoid overlapping
By Henry J. Taylor, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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Man threatens McNutt; is held
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Millett: Salt Lake City wife has little gossip to tell
Sharing husband in polygamy is said ‘to have its advantages’
By Ruth Millett
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
London, England – (by wireless)
About the most touching thing that has ever happened to me, I think, happened in Casablanca.
One afternoon, there was a knock at my hotel door. When I opened it, in walked six soldiers. Two of them I had known in Italy. They were in a predicament.
They were at a camp outside Casablanca, on their way back to America for specialized training. They were frontliners, men who had been through the mill. Most of them had been overseas for nearly two years. They were specialty selected men and carried in their pockets official orders sending them home.
But they had got so far as Casablanca and then hit one of those famous Army dead-end streets. They had been “frozen.” The details are too involved to explain. But they had become officially lost.
About to give up hope
For weeks they had pleaded, appealed, explored every approach imaginable, to try to get themselves unfrozen and on the way. They just couldn’t find out anything. They had exhausted all their possibilities and were just sitting there without hope. They were truly desperate. Then they heard I was in town, and with a new ray of hope came to see me.
These six had been chosen as representatives of 180 such men out at the camp. As I say, I had known two of them in Italy – Sgt. James Knight of Oklahoma and Pvt. Gerard Stillwell of Minnesota. I knew they were swell boys and true veterans.
Now it happened that in Casablanca I had some old-time friends who were pretty high-ranking officers. So, I picked up the phone and told one of them the story. He was a full colonel, and when he heard the story, he was furious. He asked if I could bring my soldier friends and meet him at the Red Cross Club immediately.
So we met. The big Red Cross lobby was full of soldiers, reading or talking or loafing. Officers aren’t supposed to come into an enlisted men’s club, but nobody seemed to pay any attention to the colonel.
Out of my six boys, I chose the two I had known in Italy to talk to the colonel. The four others sat at a distance.
The colonel is handsome and straight, silver-haired but youngish and a very vital kind of man. He is the kind real soldiers trust and are proud to say “Sir” to.
Sgt. Knight sat on the edge of a deep leather chair facing the colonel, and Pvt. Stillwell knelt on the floor in front of him, and they told their story. Their great sincerity and desperation showed in every word they said.
Colonel promises decision
The colonel took some notes as they talked, and asked some blunt and pointed questions.
For the first time in six weeks, the boys had found somebody who gave a damn. The colonel’s interest was electric. As old soldiers, they could instantly sense that here was an officer who meant business.
They finished, and then he said:
I’ll get a decision on this. I promise that by tomorrow night you will know one way or the other. Don’t get up too much hope. You might be sent back to your outfits instead of going home. But at least you’ll know right away.
That was all the boys wanted. They had got to the point where they didn’t much care whether they got home or not. All they wanted was for somebody to recognize that they existed.
I left Africa that night, so I don’t know what the decision was. But I have enough faith in my friend to feel positive that some immediate decision was obtained.
The colonel was busy, and as he started to rush out, he said to me, “Come jump in my car and I’ll take you back to your hotel.” But as we had risen from our chairs, I could sense that soldiers all over the lobby were getting up and starting to move tentatively toward us. I told the colonel I’d stay at the club awhile.
The moment he left I was surrounded by soldiers. There were more than 100 of them, mostly from this gang of lost men out at the transient camp. I didn’t know them, but they knew me, from Tunisia and Sicily and Italy.
Were frantic to get unlost
They surged around and talked and tried to tell me how desperate they had become. They tried to say they didn’t just selfishly want to go home, but were frantic to get unlost and get to doing something in the war again, even if it meant going back to the front at once.
Then they pulled out notebooks and franc notes, lira and postcards and snapshots of wives, sweethearts, and shoved them at me to sign. One boy even ruined a fresh $10 bill with my signature. I sat and wrote my name for 20 minutes without stopping.
Then they asked if they could take some snapshots on the sidewalk out front. So we moved out in a great body and held up sidewalk traffic while soldier after soldier snapped his camera.
Finally, we were through and I said goodbye and asked the way back to my hotel. And at that, a white-helmeted MP stepped out of the crowd and said, “We’ll take you back, sir.”
And so, in the splendor of a weapons carrier with an MP on either side of me, I rode back to the hotel. And that is the end of the story. I tell it because a man cannot help but feel proud to be thought well of by frontline soldiers.
Most men ‘stuck’ at Casablanca ‘frozen’ March 17 by Army
Washington –
War Department officials, shown the above Ernie Pyle dispatch, said today that they believed most of the men “stuck” at Casablanca were caught by the Army order of March 17 “freezing” – pending further instructions – all prospective Air Force trainees overseas who had not yet left for the States.Two weeks later, the Department ordered the “frozen” men reassigned in the theaters from which they had been scheduled to depart for air training.
Gen. H. H. Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, in announcing that the Air Forces training program had been cut back – because air casualties were lighter than anticipated, and the demands of the ground forces were increasing – spoke of his “full knowledge of the disappointment” this would bring to personnel of the ground and service forces volunteering for air training, and expressed his “heartfelt appreciation for their proffered services.”
Sgt. Knight and Pvt. Stillwell, mentioned by Mr. Pyle, have now been restored to their original units, the War Department said. It added that Stillwell arrived in Casablanca March 4, just missing the ship home, and Knight arrived March 20. The men were never “lost,” it was said, but were under orders at all times pending War Department action.
What’s going on behind the German defenses?
Nazis furiously strengthen forts along highly-touted ‘Atlantic Wall’
Denmark also improved in bitter race against time
By Nat A. Barrows
How tough an opposition will our invading forces encounter when they land in Western Europe? What is really going on behind Hitler’s Atlantic Wall? From his observation post in neighboring Sweden, Nat Barrows has been collecting closely guarded information about Germany’s ability and willingness to cope with the titanic forces assembled in England for Allied victory. In a most important series of articles, of which the following is the first, Mr. Barrows will reveal many hitherto unknown facts about the men directing the German war effort, Germany’s heavy industry, and other hitherto undisclosed information about the German war machine.
Stockholm, Sweden –
In their machine-gun nests overtopping the fjords of Norway, behind their tank traps and minefields, along the shallow coast of Denmark, amid their “sandwich system” fortifications in Holland and their 20-mile-deep defenses in France, a million Germans await the Allied invasion.
What does D-Day mean for them?
What will happen behind that 2,000-mile stretch of the Atlantic Wall when the Nazis’ anti-invasion commander, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, tries to outguess Allied Commander-in-Chief Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower?
How have five Nazi leaders, wielding vast power, been able to reorganize Germany’s heavy industry and keep these Atlantic Wall fighting men superbly equipped and confident of victory in face of slashing Eastern Front defeats and relentless air bombardments?
What, then, is going on today inside the Atlantic Wall?
Only from Stockholm can such details be told. Here are men – and women too – newly arrived from inside the Atlantic Wall. They have heard and seen what our Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen must find out for themselves.
Would face torture
In this series, telling what the Germans are doing and thinking in the shadow of the greatest battles in history, are many details which have not hitherto been printed. Long weeks of careful checking and rechecking lie behind this assembly of facts, culled from travelers, refugees and deserters as well as German publications.
Some of these men and women are still in Sweden; some are now back home in Germany, France and other Nazi-occupied countries. I protect their true identities as I guard my American passport; torture or death would overwhelm them and their families if the Nazis learned that they had talked.
First, let us take the Atlantic Wall itself. One million Germans sit there, from the North Cape of Norway to the Pyrenees, waiting, waiting, waiting, only because Rommel forced the German High Command to make the greatest military dice-throw the Nazis have ever undertaken and transfer 50 crack divisions from the Eastern Front. The consequences of this sacrifice, leaving about 1,750,000 men facing the Russian Army, may soon become apparent.
Troop quality varies
The quality of these Atlantic Wall troops varies country by country; trainees and older men are the nucleus in Norway; absolutely first-class fighting men, the flower of all Germany, in France. They have good morale, thanks to Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’ insidious program and they have splendid equipment, thanks to the way five Germans have been able to implement the ideas of a man long dead – Fritz Todt.
This Atlantic Wall stretch of 2,000 miles is divided into definite coastal defense zones, which the Germans call Küstenverteidigung Zone, two each in Norway and France, one each for Holland, Belgium, Denmark and Northwest Germany.
Denmark strengthened
The Germans today think that they will get at least one diversionary attack somewhere along the shallow coast of Denmark – perhaps Jutland. They took Prime Minister Churchill’s speech seriously when he encouraged the Danes with such a hint.
Accordingly, they have been working feverishly in the past month, trying to strengthen defenses already heavily fortified, especially against paratroopers seeking to utilize the flat Danish terrain. They have sown vast minefields in every channel approach to the key Jutland harbors of Esbjerg, Hirtshals and Hansted and they have dug a triple line of tank traps 30 feet wide and 15 feet deep, strongly protected with pillboxes, casemates and artillery.
One of these tank traps extends entirely across Jutland from Jammerbugten in the north to the German border.
Six divisions ready
In all, Denmark has six divisions under the Nazi commander of occupation troops, Gen. Hermann von Hanneken, including one brigade of Gen. Vlasov’s traitorous Cossacks. The fighter plane strength in Denmark is small due to the presence of German bases hardly an hour’s flying time away.
In the past weeks, Todt Organization workers have been improving Danish airfields.
Danish improvements started when Rommel visited Hanneken at his Silkeborg headquarters last December and warned him that his guns were pointing the wrong way.
Rommel scolded:
You’re not fighting tin soldiers now, general. You must be ready to meet attack from all directions.
Problem is different
A different military problem confronts the Germans in Norway. There the terrain aids the defenders and Gen. Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, Nazi occupation troop commander there, has tried to taker every advantage of the overhanging cliffs and deep fjords.
Harbors like Oslo, Narvik, Trondheim and Bergen are guarded with torpedo tubes mounted on cliff platforms, 12-inch howitzers and even 13-inch naval guns on railroad mounts. Every possible sea approach is protected with machine-gun nests and minefields.
Von Falkenhorst plainly built his defenses around the conception that the Allies would find it difficult to maintain proper air cover over the beachheads. His air force is now less than 100 planes on the theory that a powerful striking force could reach Norway within two days by a series of shifts in Luftwaffe power from the Mediterranean to the north.
Second-rate troops
Von Falkenhorst has eight divisions whose second-rate fighting abilities the Germans think to offset by the natural advantages of the terrain, although some members of the Nazi High command are known to have said that von Falkenhorst should not count too much on the impregnability of his section of the Atlantic Wall.
Holland, with eight divisions stationed in what its Nazi commander, Gen. Friedrich Christiansen, calls the “sandwich system of defense” is to be defended, of course, by flooding. Thus, the sandwich system: coastal fortifications, floods and inland fortifications.
But the Nazis have not forgotten how they crossed Holland’s flooded land in 1940 with 20,000 rubber boats and they have laid careful plans to make certain that the Allies do not use the same trick against them.
Antwerp may be hit
Christiansen thinks that the sector around the mouth of the river Scheldt, approaching Antwerp, will be one of the targets on allied D-Day and there he has concentrated his heaviest guns, torpedo batteries and minefields.
Three of his eight divisions guarding Holland are actually stationed across the German border at Wesel, Münster and Krefeld for greater mobility in the third layer of his sandwich system.
Denmark, Norway and Holland are part of this uncensored, detailed picture of what is happened behind the Atlantic Wall – but only one part. There is France… and the Luftwaffe… and the Kriegsmarine… and the five warlords running heavy industry… and the German people themselves. Other articles in this series will discuss them all in detail from the viewpoint of what lies ahead for the Allied boys preparing to fight and bleed and conquer inside the Atlantic Wall.
TOMORROW: Nazis have 200,000 entbehrlich troops on the Western Front. That word means “expendables,” men who will be sacrificed in the first push of the Allies into the continent.
Dewey tightens lead position
Washington (UP) –
Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York has a substantial claim on first or second ballot votes of upward of 480 delegates of those so far elected to the Republican National Convention.
His nomination daily becomes more likely.
Some of Mr. Dewey’s supports insist he will have a comfortable majority of first ballot votes when the delegate-election process is completed and before the convention meets. There will be 1,058 votes in the convention.
530 votes needed
A bare majority of 530 is sufficient to nominate a Republican presidential candidate.
Formally committed Dewey delegates, however, number between 50 and 60. This year has been notable for less formal although persuasive commitments. Governor John W. Bricker of Ohio will about equal Mr. Dewey in committed delegates after tomorrow’s Ohio primaries. Mr. Bricker will get the entire 50-vote Ohio delegation. The 52 Ohio delegates to the Democratic National Convention will be for a fourth term.
Stassen receptive
LtCdr. Harold E. Stassen, former Governor of Minnesota, remains an avowedly receptive candidate and Rep. Everett Dirksen (R-IL) is campaigning but has entered no primaries. There is a long shot scattering of favorite sons.
Mr. Bricker, however, is the principal challenger to a Dewey walkover and his backers concede nothing to the New Yorker. The Ohioan is conducting the only sustained campaign and this week will speak in Nebraska, Iowa and Wisconsin.
Meanwhile, it was disclosed that a Bricker-for-President headquarters will be opened here Thursday under the direction of Canton publisher Roy D. Moore, assisted by Arthur Leedle, former secretary to Senator Robert A. Taft (R-OH).
Other states watched
Meanwhile, political interest this week turns to Ohio, West Virginia, Texas and Wyoming, where presidential preference or state primaries and conventions will afford new slants on the pre-election outlook.
Tomorrow, Ohio will nominate candidates for the Senate and 23 seats in the House and chooses delegates to the national conventions. West Virginia will also choose candidates for six House seats. Wyoming will name delegates to the national conventions, and Texas Democratic county conventions select national delegates.