Truk hit in two-way raids from South, Central Pacific
Other islands in Carolines also blasted; Australians advance on New Guinea coast
By William B. Dickinson, United Press staff writer
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Lardner: Beachhead never in danger of being lost
Those calamity howls about Anzio came from commentators in other places
By John Lardner, North American Newspaper Alliance
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Kirkpatrick: De Gaulle feud with Roosevelt may cost lives
Issue is a personal one with President
By Helen Kirkpatrick
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
London, England – (by wireless)
The American contingent in London has many new terms since I left here in 1942. The newest and most frequently heard is “SHAEF.” This is the initials of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. It is SHAEF that is planning and will direct the invasion. Gen. Eisenhower is head man of SHAEF.
I mention it only to show how initials grow into words over here, just as they do back in Washington.
The word ETOUSA still exists. That stands for European Theater of Operation United States Army. That is, headquarters of the American Army as distinct from Allied Headquarters. It is two years old and still functioning.
When we were here in 1942, ETOUSA was always pronounced “eetoosa.” For some unexplainable reason, the pronunciation has now changed to “eetowza.” Being old-fashioned and set in my ways, I like the first one better.
‘Frozen’ soldiers rejoin units
I had a quick V-letter the other day from the Mediterranean. It was from one of the “frozen” boys in Casablanca that I wrote about – the American-bound soldiers who had hit a dead-end street and had been hung up in Casa for six weeks when I ran into them.
Well, they got a decision on their fate. But it was the wrong one. Their schooling program was called off, their transfer home was canceled, and they were ordered back to their original outfits. The letter says:
It was a great dream while it lasted, but it’s over now. We have been riding the Forty-and-Eights and hitting the replacement depots – and you know what that means.
The only thing that really hurts is that we didn’t catch the many boats we might have caught if we had seen “somebody” sooner. But enough of this crying in your Scotch, Ernie. We will see you again someday. And again, thanks a million from all of us.
It was a cruel and disappointing thing, but that is the way real soldiers take it. The Army is so big that things like that are bound to happen. But they shouldn’t happen too often.
Such a thing had happened to one of those boys four times in two years. Even the best soldier can’t have too much discouragement and disillusionment heaped upon him.
The other day I took a trip up to mid-England to see a man from Albuquerque. He is, in fact, the man who built our little white house out there on the mesa, and who subsequently became one of our best friends.
His name is Arthur McCollum. He was a lieutenant in the last war and he is a captain in this. He spent 20 years regretting that he never got overseas the other time, and he is very happy that he made it this time. He is attached to a big general hospital in the country.
Son missing following reunion
In January, Capt. McCollum had a reunion with his son, Lt. Ross McCollum, Ross was chief pilot of a Flying Fortress. Father and son had two wonderful weekends together. And then on his second mission over Germany, Ross didn’t come back. Nothing has been heard from him since. That was nearly four months ago.
Capt. Mac and Ross were real companions – they played together and dreamed and planned together. After the war, they were going to fish a lot and then start an airplane sales agency together.
Capt. Mac says he kind of went to the bottom of the barrel over Ross. For two months, he was so low he felt he couldn’t take it. And then he said to himself, “Look here, you damn fool! You can’t do this. Get yourself together.” And having given himself that abrupt command, he carried it out. And today he is all right.
I found him the same kind of life-loving, gay friends I had known in Albuquerque. We rode bicycles around the countryside, celebrated here and there, made fools of ourselves and had a wonderful time.
Capt. Mac talked a lot about Ross, and felt better for the talking, but he didn’t do any crying on my shoulder. He feels firmly that Ross will come back, but he knows now that if he never does, he can take it.
Even though he is an intimate friend of mine, I consider him one of the finest examples I know of what people can and must do when the tragedy of war falls fully upon them.
What’s going on behind the German defenses?
Hitler and aides base post-war hopes on plan to split U.S., Britain, Russia
Nazi Party still in the saddle in Germany
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 fifth, Mr. Barrows reveals 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 –
Nazi Party leaders – Hitler, Göring, Himmler, Bormann and the rest of that cunning, merciless band – are making their own post-war plans against the inevitable day when their crackpot empire tumbles about them like Allied bombs on Berlin.
Secretly they are exploring the chances for banking their own personal loot in neutral countries and for finding avenues of escape if necessary. They know that the game is nearly up and now they are trying to save their own necks and, at the same time, are busy devising fiendish plots to win the peace, even when they lost the actual war.
One of their secret plots is the development of their own brand of “underground” which will foster trouble between America and Britain, on the one hand, and Russian on the other. They hope that this movement, under one name or another, will one day return the defeated Nazis to power.
Both ends against middle
The Nazi Party chief are also following a policy predicated on the hope that the Allied invasion will be repulsed and the German Army can then smash Russia in the East and make a compromise peace with the Allies in the West.
It is a negative but consistent policy – and an excellent indication of how Hitler is trying to play both ends against the middle. Briefly, this wishful policy can be defined thus:
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Countries in Europe should join together to defend the “European idea” against Asiatic Communism.
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Germany is the chief persecutor of this European culture against Russian and American – and to a somewhat lesser decree – British savagery.
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Russia is a land of barbarism; America is politically bankrupt and has nothing better to offer the German people than they already have, and Britain is only to be pitied as it trots at the heels of one ally or another trying to salvage crumbs.
This is not idle rumor. It is the type of thinking that Hitler and his fellow criminals are following. It is their great dream – a war between the British and Americans and Russia, with both sides trying to woo Germany’s support.
No surrender expected
The Nazis have succeeded all too well in making the German people believe that they face certain extermination unless they fight on to the bitter end. They are weary, and some of them in the mire of defeatist psychology, but the vast majority has no thought of surrender thanks to the insidious propaganda that surrender means extermination.
All this is written after months of careful, precise checking. More importantly, it is written following consultation with a nongermane observer who left Berlin only three days ago after five years inside Germany.
He believes that revolution will never come to Nazi Germany until military collapse is already an accomplished fact. He sees the Nazi Party today like a house of cards, standing upright only by a combination of Hitler’s power and the fact that the war still continues. If either collapses, the house then falls in ruins.
Sudden military defeat, he thinks, is the best solution for the troubles of the German people.
Hitler still in saddle
But if the Allied invasion in the West should become a long, dreary war of attrition, then it is his opinion that the Nazi system will disintegrate suddenly into what will be the “bloodiest chaos the world has ever seen, and I doubt if any occupying power, even the Allies, could succeed in putting the pieces together again.”
Any talk of Hitler’s losing his grip on Germany is incorrect. Certainly, his popularity has decreased since Stalingrad, and he has lost something of his “God-like” character for the German people. But he is still the supreme boss of Germany and firmly in the saddle at Army High Command headquarters.
The various factions in the Nazi Party fully realize that Hitler, and Hitler alone, is able to maintain the unity which is their only strength.
No matter what rumors have been spread abroad, Hitler has not handed over military power to his generals, nor in reality is there any potent opposition in a political sense among the generals. The German generals will not trespass beyond certain limits their tradition of discipline, obedience and loyalty.
Thus, at the moment the army remains in the background, lurking a political factor of great potentialities but with no actual political power today. The Nazi Party still has its monopolistic state control over Germany.
Factions within party
The Nazi Party itself is divided into the factions led by Hangman Heinrich Himmler, dreaded Gestapo chief, and Martin Bormann, successor to Rudolf Hess and the real power behind the Nazi throne.
Both men are hated and despised by the German people but they are able to keep the Nazi Party itself united as never before.
Himmler’s own method of preventing dissention is reaching incredible proportions. In the past year he has ordered more than 10,000 persons executed for defeatist talk or activities against the Nazi Party. Only five weeks ago, he caused five aged civil clerks to be stood against a wall in Liebenwalder Strasse, Berlin, and shot, for singing a vulgar drunken song about Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring’s matrimonial relations.
Thus, in a mixture of terror and blind, sheeplike stupidity, the Germans grope along, fanatically determined not to surrender – while Hitler retains as much practical power as ever and make his plans to win the peace regardless of what happens inside the Atlantic Wall, after the Allied D-Day.
It is something to which to give deep thought as we look ahead into the future.
TOMORROW: German people, tired and overworked, still fear to voice discouragement.
Poll: If Roosevelt doesn’t run, 50% would switch to GOP
Almost 80% think President will run again; Hull is second choice
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
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Monahan: Errol Flynn playing criminal at Penn
Lukas as detective and he stage duel of wits in Uncertain Glory
By Kaspar Monahan
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Foster: Hutton gams under wraps; ain’t it a shame!
By Ernest Foster
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Barkley backs Roosevelt as best qualified for job
Washington (UP) –
Senate Democratic Leader Alben W. Barkley (DKY) today unequivocally endorsed a fourth term for President Roosevelt with the assertion that a vast knowledge of the war and close relations with Allied leaders make him best qualified to guide the nation through the “treacherous cross-currents” it must traverse to achieve victory and write a lasting peace.
Mr. Barkley, who recently submitted his resignation as Senate Majority Leader after the President vetoed the tax bill, prefaced a glowing testimonial to Mr. Roosevelt by emphasizing that he had not discussed a fourth term with him and did not know whether he would accept renomination. He added, however, that he thought the President would do so.
He said in an article in the current issue of Collier’s Magazine:
Nothing that I shall say in this discussion… is to be construed as indicating that he will seek a fourth term or permit a fourth term to seek him. I do not know what his intentions are and I may never know until events reveal them.
Any man, honored already beyond any other American, might well prefer the quiet and refreshing shades of individual peace amid his books and memories. Or he might infinitely prefer to spend his remaining years making an accurate chronicle of the events in which he has played so great a part.
Can he do it? Can he voluntarily renounce any obligation or opportunity to complete the job? I do not think so.
Defends Roosevelt
He unfolded a staunch defense of some of the charges brought by the President’s critics.
- That a fourth term would lead to “dictatorship:”
There can be no such thing as dictatorship which some honest people fear and others pretend to fear, so long as the American people have the right of free choice. There is no pretense anywhere that they do not have a free choice. No sort of coercion of the individual voter is possible or would be attempted or countenanced.
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That the President has violated propriety by breaking the no third term precedent: In accepting a third term, he said, Mr. Roosevelt “fulfilled the very conditions which George Washington Gave in his farewell address as the reason for his own retirement, to wit, that the conditions existing in the country no longer required him to serve as President…” He said he believed Mr. Roosevelt would have liked to retire after his second term but could not, because “the conflagration against which he had warned the people was upon us.
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The President’s use of wartime powers:
There was no way to avoid this enormous and unprecedented delegation of power.
- Mr. Roosevelt’s personal traits:
There are some who say that the President is stubborn now and then, and sometimes unforgiving. He may give way to the impulse to look at the political implications involved in a given course of action. He may even listen too much to the advise of those who always agree with him… So did Theodore Roosevelt; so did Andrew Jackson; so did Grant; so did Hoover.
World bank is proposed by Mexican
Banker sees need of global agency
By H. P. Mercer, North American Newspaper Alliance
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She said ‘play ball’ –
Big league game broadcasts woman’s idea
Gave Amos ‘n’ Andy their first break
By Si Steinhauser
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Invited to Russia by Stalin, priest replies to critics
Premier quoted as saying aid of Pope in struggle against persecution is possible
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