America at war! (1941–) – Part 3

Supreme HQ Allied Expeditionary Force (June 12, 1944)

Communique No. 13

The U.S. advance east of the VIRE River was continued into the FORÊT DE CERISY.

In the CHERBOURG PENINSULA, enemy mobile batteries have been under a heavy fire from Allied warships, and some further progress has been made west of the inundated valley of the MERDERET River.

Intense fighting against German armor continues in the TILLY-SUR-SEULLES area.

Air operations were curtailed sharply after midday yesterday, when cloud and rain obscured much of the battle area.

After escorting heavy day bombers, our fighters joined fighter bombers and rocket-firing fighters in attacking oil tanks, rail centers, and road and rail traffic, including several hundred railroad cars, tanks and armored vehicles. From these operations, 24 aircraft, including three heavy bombers, are missing.

During the night, heavy bombers struck rail centers at NANTES, ÉVREUX and TOURS, and a railway bridge at MASSY-PALAISEAU south of PARIS.

Allied medium and light bombers and rocket-firing aircraft hammered rolling stock, a ferry terminal and road transport.

Intruder aircraft operated with success over enemy airfields in HOLLAND and FRANCE.

U.S. Navy Department (June 12, 1944)

Communiqué No. 524

Mediterranean.
PC‑558 was sunk as a result of enemy action in the Mediterranean on May 9, 1944.

The next of kin of casualties have been notified.


Communiqué No. 525

Pacific and Far East.
U.S. submarines have reported sinking eighteen vessels as a result of operations against the enemy in these waters, as follows:

  • 1 large tanker
  • 1 medium transport
  • 6 medium cargo transports 6 medium cargo vessels
  • 4 small cargo vessels

These actions have not been reported in any previous Navy De­partment communiqué.


CINCPAC Press Release No. 441, June 12, 1944

For Immediate Release
June 12, 1944

Carrier aircraft again struck Guam, Rota, Tinian, and Saipan on June 11 (West Longitude Date).

Truk Atoll was attacked by Liberators of the 7th Army Air Force at night on June 9 and 10. Airfields at Param, Eten, Dublon and Moen Islands were principal targets. Several fires were started.

Ponape Island was bombed by 7th Army Air Force Liberators on the night of June 9. Ponape Town and gun positions were hit.

Ventura search planes of Fleet Air Wing Two bombed Ocean Island during daylight on June 9, encountering moderate anti-aircraft fire. Two of the planes continued to Nauru Island to strafe small craft there.

On June 10, Mitchells of the 7th Army Air Force bombed Nauru, and started fires visible 20 miles. Heavy anti-aircraft fire downed one Mitchell bomber. A Catalina search plane of Fleet Air Wing Two rescued the crew.

Enemy positions in the Marshalls were bombed and strafed on June 9, during the night of June 9‑10, and on June 10. Corsair fighters and Dauntless dive bombers of the 4th Marine Aircraft Wing, Catalina search planes of Fleet Air Wing Two and Navy Hellcat fighters participated in these attacks. Coastal defense guns and anti-aircraft batteries were hit.

The Brooklyn Eagle (June 12, 1944)

map.061244.up
Drive on Cherbourg: Allied troops moved a step closer to their coastal objective with the capture of Carentan (1). Meanwhile, a U.S. spearhead drove into the approaches to Saint-Lô (2) and British forces took a number of villages east of Caen (3) in a flanking movement. Bayeux has become the base for operations aimed at cutting off the Cherbourg Peninsula.


1,400 U.S. BOMBERS RIP FRENCH TARGETS
Record force hits bridges and airfields

Fortresses, Liberators escorted by huge armada of fighters

London, England (UP) –
More than 1,400 U.S. heavy bombers – the biggest force ever dispatched on a single mission – smashed at 16 German airfields and six bridges in France today to lead thousands of Allied planes supporting the invasion campaign in Normandy.

The record fleet of Flying Fortresses and Liberators was escorted by strong forces of Mustang, Lightning and Thunderbolt fighters comprising an armada of probably more than 2,150 planes.

Seven bombers and 14 fighters were missing, an announcement of the mission said. U.S. fighters shot down at least 17 German planes.

From daybreak until early evening, the skies over northern France were black with raiding fleets taking advantage of clearing weather to bring the full Allied aerial striking power to the support of embattled ground troops.

In the first 18 hours from midnight to 6:00 p.m., the combined air forces had flown some 6,000 sorties and it appeared certain they would top the 10,000 mark by tonight.

Plane pound troop columns

Fighters, fighter-bombers and giant four-engined U.S. bombers swarmed over the enemy wherever they found him. They hit his troop columns with blockbusters, rockets and machine-gun fire and they tore up his road lines and airdromes in one of the most savage tactical assaults of the war.

Almost 1,000 Flying Fortresses and Liberators, accompanied by about 750 U.S. fighters, split up into dozens of task forces to roam over a vast area of northern France, bombing 15 key fighter bases and the Rennes and Amiens railway junctions.

The escorting fighters, meeting only limited enemy fighter opposition, dive-bombed and machine-gunned Nazi airdromes and road lines.

By nightfall, official reports showed that nine Allied planes were lost, excluding U.S. heavies, whose losses were not immediately announced, and at least 21 enemy fighters were shot down.

The German DNB News Agency said violent air battles raged all across the invasion beachheads and asserted that German fighter-bombers attacked Allied tank columns around Caen.

Germans retreat 70 miles past Rome in chaotic rout

Nazi 14th Army no longer a fighting force
By Robert Vermillion

U.S. sub chaser sunk by enemy


Tokyo warns people U.S. plans massive assault

Armed French patriots battle against Germans in south

Half-million reported in uprisings

London, England (UP) –
Unprecedented uprisings were reported throughout France today in Spanish dispatches from the French frontier as German-controlled radio stations warned all patriots they would be shot and said that the big naval base of Toulon, on the southern coast, had been bombarded by Allied naval vessels.

The reputed attack on Toulon and claims of a subsequent naval engagement in which a British warship was set afire were broadcast by the Vichy radio.

Travelers reaching the Spanish border said approximately a half-million French patriots were taking part in the uprisings, particularly in the Tarbes and Toulouse areas in southwestern France, and had engaged German troops and French militiamen in bloody fights.

The patriots were said to be well armed, possibly with supplies and equipment dropped by parachute from the Allies.

Radio information obtained in Algiers from inside France said Grenoble, near the Italian border, had been isolated for the past two days by French resistance forces, and a Zürich dispatch to the London Daily Telegraph said the patriots were trying to storm the town.

Swiss dispatches to newspapers here also reported serious patriot attacks in the area near the Swiss border, where the Germans established martial law in the railroad center of Bellegarde and carried out mass arrests in Lyon after ousting the police force and bringing in another from Loire.

The same dispatches said that big guerrilla engagements were being fought near Saint-Hippolyte and that patriots had occupied Faucille Pass in Jura in a drive toward Pays de Gex.

Berne reports indicated the Germans were suffering heavy losses on the invasion front and had closed 40 theaters and movie houses in Paris for conversion into hospitals.

Berne also reported that all telephone and telegraph communications had been suspended throughout northern France, including the capital, where water and electricity were curtailed 15%.

McMillan: Tanks secondary to infantrymen who lead way

By Richard D. McMillan

With British forces in France (UP) –
“This is a new kind of fighting,” an infantry major told me today as I completed a dawn tour of the British fighting front south of the Bayeux-Caen road.

This country is so thickly wooded and cut up into so many hedge-rimmed meadows that it is necessary for the infantry to go in first and locate the German gun posts and snipers, after which the tanks open fire and clean out the pockets of resistance.

The days of “naval battles on land” according to the North African desert pattern, with fleets of tanks cruising freely and maneuvering for favorable position, are gone, I discovered. Here the tank is merely a mobile, protected cannon which waddles up and plugs a few heavy shells into the German nests when the infantry can’t get through.

Most of the fighting is being done in the country lanes and hedgerows where the British Tommies are learning to stalk the Hun like an American Indian. The trick is to make the German expose himself without getting killed yourself. Since the German only reveals his position when he shoots, this is a neat art.


Gorrell: U.S. troops hunt Nazis like dogs seeking rats

By Henry T. Gorrell

With U.S. assault troops outside Carentan, France (UP) – (June 11, delayed)
The Germans have thrown their most fanatical troops and one of their most fearsome weapons – a 32-centimeter, multiple-barreled rocket gun – into the defense of Carentan, but today U.S. assault troops were digging them out of their concrete pillboxes like terriers going in after rats.

This is a key town on the Cherbourg-Paris railroad and it controls floodgates affecting acres of lowlands across which Allied troops are fighting. Field Marshal Karl Gerd von Rundstedt has garrisoned it with crack paratroopers, the same stripe of wild-eyed young Nazis who defended Cassino to the last ditch.

These paratroops rejected an ultimatum to surrender and now picked assault troops have gone in against their pillboxes. I watched doughboys going into the outskirts from a hilltop which I reached in a captured German caterpillar motorbike driven by Chaplain Raymond S. Half of Lynn, Massachusetts, who jumped with U.S. paratroopers on D-Day and has been up near the frontline ever since helping move out casualties under enemy fire.

German gunners cut loose

The Germans were firing from concrete pillboxes, often pinning the men down in ditches where the water was knee-high. To the murderous cackle of their pandaus, machine pistols and mortars was added the scream of the rocket gun. The projectiles came over with an unearthly scream and descended as though aimed at the back of your neck with a sound like a giant pig whistle.

After the Germans refused to surrender, artillery began to weed out their emplacements one by one. Carentan has been under siege since 1:00 p.m. Saturday when doughboys captured four bridges over canals on this side of Carentan.

Moving up toward this front, I watched a column of G.I.s marching in double file at each side of the road to meet the Germans. They moved past wrecks of German gun carriers in which the blasted bodies of the crews still sprawled grotesquely, past scores of dead German infantrymen lying at the roadside where they had fallen, with never a second look.

Their eyes were fixed forward – toward the battle – and their faces were grim with anticipation. A bunch of German rockets came over with an ungodly scream and my jangled nerves vibrated. But the plodding infantrymen didn’t seem to hear. They just marched along looking straight ahead. They’ve had so much noise out to them since D-Day that they’re immune to terror.

Mobile secret weapon none other than Flak Happy jeep

With 9th Air Force TCC, France (UP) – (June 11, delayed)
A sentry called the sergeant of the guard on a beachhead northwest of Carentan and reported, “It looks like a secret weapon approaching.”

The sergeant looked and replied, “Let it pass, that’s a flak-happy jeep.”

Flak Happy, salvaged from wreckage, was the first jeep to gain renown among U.S. troops on the Cherbourg Peninsula.

When a glider flying troops and equipment behind the lines cracked up, the jeep was damaged so badly that ordnance men abandoned it, but it was repaired so well it provided transportation for 12 glider pilots back to the beachhead to be evacuated for further missions. Among them was Flight Officer B. Ripson of Hempstead, New York.

Censorship leak probe continues

Japs beating down Chinese resistance

Two-pronged drive threatens to cut her from Allies

Task forces raid four bases in Marianas

Secretary Hull faces many intricate problems

Corby: Jimmy Durante will be seen Wednesday in new film, Two Girls and a Sailor

By Jane Corby

Editorial: Stern justice, not revenge, needed for enduring peace

Heffernan: Insularity and our continental republic

The Pittsburgh Press (June 12, 1944)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Normandy beachhead, France –
Due to a last-minute alteration in the arrangements, I didn’t arrive on the beachhead until the morning after D-Day, after our first wave of assault troops had hit the shore.

By the time we got here, the beaches had been taken and the fighting had moved a couple of miles inland. All that remained on the beach was some sniping and artillery fire, and the occasional startling blast of a mine geysering brown sand into the air. That plus a gigantic and pitiful litter of wreckage along miles of shoreline.

Submerged tanks and overturned boats and burned trucks and shell-shattered jeeps and sad little personal belongings were strewn all over these bitter sands. That plus the bodies of soldiers lying in rows covered with blankets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in a line as though on drill. And other bodies, uncollected, still sprawling grotesquely in the sand or half hidden by the high grass beyond the beach.

That plus an intense, grim determination of work-weary men to get this chaotic beach organized and get all the vital supplies and the reinforcements moving more rapidly over it from the stacked-up ships standing in droves out to sea.

Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all. For some of our units it was easy, but in this special sector where I am now our troops faced such odds that our getting ashore was like my whipping Joe Louis down to a pulp.

In this column, I want to tell you what the opening of the second front in this one sector entailed, so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you.

Ashore, facing us, were more enemy troops than we had in our assault waves. The advantages were all theirs, the disadvantages all ours. The Germans were dug into positions that they had been working on for months, although these were not yet all complete. A one-hundred-foot bluff a couple of hundred yards back from the beach had great concrete gun emplacements built right into the hilltop. These opened to the sides instead of to the front, thus making it very hard for naval fire from the sea to reach them. They could shoot parallel with the beach and cover every foot of it for miles with artillery fire.

Then they had hidden machine-gun nests on the forward slopes, with crossfire taking in every inch of the beach. These nests were connected by networks of trenches, so that the German gunners could move about without exposing themselves.

Throughout the length of the beach, running zigzag a couple of hundred yards back from the shoreline, was an immense V-shaped ditch fifteen feet deep. Nothing could cross it, not even men on foot, until fills had been made. And in other places at the far end of the beach, where the ground is flatter, they had great concrete walls. These were blasted by our naval gunfire or by explosives set by hand after we got ashore.

Our only exits from the beach were several swales or valleys, each about one hundred yards wide. The Germans made the most of these funnel-like traps, sowing them with buried mines. They contained, also, barbed-wire entanglements with mines attached, hidden ditches, and machine guns firing from the slopes.

This is what was on the shore. But our men had to go through a maze nearly as deadly as this before they even got ashore. Underwater obstacles were terrific. The Germans had whole fields of evil devices under the water to catch our boats. Even now, several days after the landing, we have cleared only channels through them and cannot yet approach the whole length of the beach with our ships. Even now some ship or boat hits one of these mines every day and is knocked out of commission.

The Germans had masses of those great six-pronged spiders, made of railroad iron and standing shoulder-high, just beneath the surface of the water for our landing craft to run into. They also had huge logs buried in the sand, pointing upward and outward, their tops just below the water. Attached to these logs were mines.

In addition to these obstacles, they had floating mines offshore, land mines buried in the sand of the beach, and more mines in checkerboard rows in the tall grass beyond the sand. And the enemy had four men on shore for every three men we had approaching the shore.

And yet we got on.

Beach landings are planned to a schedule that is set far ahead of time. They all have to be timed, in order for everything to mesh and for the following waves of troops to be standing off the beach and ready to land at the right moment.

As the landings are planned, some elements of the assault force are to break through quickly, push on inland, and attack the most obvious enemy strong points. It is usually the plan for units to be inland, attacking gun positions from behind, within a matter of minutes after the first men hit the beach.

I have always been amazed at the speed called for in these plans. You’ll have schedules calling for engineers to land at H-Hour plus two minutes, and service troops at H-Hour plus thirty minutes, and even for press censors to land at H-Hour plus seventy-five minutes. But in the attack on this special portion of the beach where I am – the worst we had, incidentally – the schedule didn’t hold.

Our men simply could not get past the beach. They were pinned down right on the water’s edge by an inhuman wall of fire from the bluff. Our first waves were on that beach for hours, instead of a few minutes, before they could begin working inland.

You can still see the foxholes they dug at the very edge of the water, in the sand and the small, jumbled rocks that form parts of the beach.

Medical corpsmen attended the wounded as best they could. Men were killed as they stepped out of landing craft. An officer whom I knew got a bullet through the head just as the door of his landing craft was let down. Some men were drowned.

The first crack in the beach defenses was finally accomplished by terrific and wonderful naval gunfire, which knocked out the big emplacements. They tell epic stories of destroyers that ran right up into shallow water and had it out point-blank with the big guns in those concrete emplacements ashore.

When the heavy fire stopped, our men were organized by their officers and pushed on inland, circling machine-gun nests and taking them from the rear.

As one officer said, the only way to take a beach is to face it and keep going. It is costly at first, but it’s the only way. If the men are pinned down on the beach, dug in and out of action, they might as well not be there at all. They hold up the waves behind them, and nothing is being gained.

Our men were pinned down for a while, but finally they stood up and went through, and so we took that beach and accomplished our landing. We did it with every advantage on the enemy’s side and every disadvantage on ours. In the light of a couple of days of retrospection, we sit and talk and call it a miracle that our men ever got on at all or were able to stay on.

Before long it will be permitted to name the units that did it. Then you will know to whom this glory should go. They suffered casualties. And yet if you take the entire beachhead assault, including other units that had a much easier time, our total casualties in driving this wedge into the continent of Europe were remarkably low – only a fraction, in fact, of what our commanders had been prepared to accept.

And these units that were so battered and went through such hell are still, right at this moment, pushing on inland without rest, their spirits high, their egotism in victory almost reaching the smart-alecky stage.

Their tails are up. “We’ve done it again,” they say. They figure that the rest of the army isn’t needed at all. Which proves that, while their judgment in this regard is bad, they certainly have the spirit that wins battles and eventually wars.

The Free Lance-Star (June 12, 1944)

U.S. TROOPS 18 MILES DEEP IN FRANCE
Deep penetration made in center of beachhead; Cerisy Forest and Carentan taken

Germans still hold Caen; Cherbourg near isolation

SHAEF, England (AP) –
U.S. troops have driven 18 miles inland in the middle of the Normandy beachhead, capturing the whole forest of Cerisy, and the German High Command said today the strategic stronghold of Carentan had fallen to U.S. forces.

The smashing advance through the Cerisy Forest punched the deepest dent yet in the Nazi line.

Doughboys were converging on Saint-Lô, communications hub in the center of Normandy, less than nine miles away, from the north and east.

Headquarters did not confirm the fall of Carentan, guarding the narrowest neck of Cherbourg Peninsula, but said Americans were within 14 miles of Cherbourg itself from the southeast, and had punched halfway across the cape, threatening to seal off the tip.

German broadcasts said Caen, eastern bastion of the 60-mile-long front, was menaced by encirclement – with British troops slashing nine miles east of the city.

A front dispatch today said Caen had not yet been captured, although “a considerable German force has been brought to battle and hit hard.” Another story dated Sunday declared Allied troops pressed within a few miles of Caen “after blasting the Germans out of the town” late Friday. This suggested the Nazis had pulled back at least the main part of their armored force from the city.

Supreme Headquarters said further gains were made around Montebourg on the southeast avenue to Cherbourg, and reported “considerable progress” around Carentan, a vital junction.

The doughboys were cracking in the Cherbourg Peninsula Line in the center, and a Berlin broadcast reported seaborne forces had landed at Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue, 16 miles east of Cherbourg.

In the widening hole in the center of the beachhead to the southeast, Berlin said British formations were concentrating in the Balleroy area, 12 miles inland, flanking Cerisy Forest to the east, thus in position to aid the U.S. drive on Saint-Lô.

Headquarters said the beachhead front now had been lengthened to 60 miles, and said the German command had been forced to throw in reserves piecemeal, sapping potential strength from his anticipated major counterattack.

Naval guns cause evacuation

The Germans said Carentan, whose floodgates control the main peninsula water defense system, was evacuated in order to continue a stand on ground less exposed to allied naval guns.

As for Caen, German broadcasts said that the British drive has reached nearly to Troarn, nine miles east of that bastion, and that Allied parachutists had landed south of Caen. British troops were driving down west of Caen threatening the other flank. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel has mounted his fiercest armored counterattacks in this Caen sector, and Berlin said major British forces were concentrating for a full-fledged assault on the town.

As the U.S. frontal attack across the Merderet River on Cherbourg Peninsula reached within 12 miles of the West Coast roads – whose capture would seal off Cherbourg – Vichy radio said doughboys had pushed into Quinéville on the East Coast.

This would put Lt. Gen. Omar N. Bradley’s flank within 14 miles of Cherbourg on a four-mile front between Quinéville and Montebourg, where street fighting was reported.

The Germans, apparently reeling under the force of the first invasion week, said 300,000 to 400,000 Allied troops had already been poured into a mighty bridgehead flood and that these represented only a third of the amphibious assault forces poised in Britain to hammer home attacks against the continent.

The German radio declared:

The bulk of the huge forces of the 21st Amphibious Army Group is still standing by to pounce on some important harbor.

Report new landings

Continuing a stream of reports of new Allied landings, Berlin’s Transocean News Agency said seaborne forces had been put ashore at Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue near the top of the peninsula and due east of Cherbourg yesterday.

The Germans said the Allies had crossed the Orne estuary, ferrying over tanks and threatening Caen, which Marshal Erwin Rommel by his counterattacks had made a testing point.

The crossing of the estuary forced the Germans to evacuate two towns before the Allied onslaught was checked near Troarn, by German account.

A breakthrough here would link up infantry with parachute troops which the Nazis said had landed in the Troarn area earlier.

Heightening of the prospect of encirclement of Caen was the German report of other parachute troop landings south of the town.

To the west, British troops were also flanking the town by a thrust through Tilly-sur-Seulles where armored columns were engaged in fierce combat.

Officials reports said only that British and Canadians were holding their own satisfactorily along the explosive Caen line, but field dispatches declared Gen. Sir Bernard L. Montgomery had mounted a powerful encircling sweep, with the Allies driving ahead on both flanks around the town.

Nazis use reserves

Headquarters Communiqué No. 13, issued at 11:00 a.m., reported that intense fighting against German armored columns raged without respite in the Tilly-sur-Seulles area on the British sector of the front.

Field Marshal Karl Gerd von Rundstedt was rushing reserves up from as far back as Paris to meet this mounting menace, but his new men and guns, and the roads over which they moved, were under bomb cannon, rocket and machine-gun fire of an Allied air armada which before noon had flown more sorties than all day yesterday.

Allied warships – among them the battleships USS Texas and Nevada and the cruisers USS Tuscaloosa and Quincy, and the British battleship HMS Warspite – hurled tons of explosives miles inland upon German guns which still were able to subject the invasion beachhead to sporadic fire.

The targets of the warships were principally the Nazis’ mobile guns, for by now virtually all fixed-position defense batteries were knocked out.

The invasion beachhead was regarded as secure and progress inland along the whole front, now roughly 55 miles wide, was viewed officially today with “sober satisfaction.”

The fight had reached the phase of exploiting the beachhead success and now, favored by the best weather since D-Day, the team of Gens. Montgomery and Bradley was expected to accelerate operations.

Strong attacking force

The German radio said Allied pressure northward along the canal from Caen to the Bay of the Seine had increased this morning.

It declared the Allies had thrown 20 regular divisions and four to five airborne divisions into their 55-mile front.

Ferry terminals at the mouth of the Seine were shot up by RAF rocket typhoons yesterday.

The Germans asserted their bouncers sank a 7,000-ton Allied troop transport in the Bay of the Seine and damaged another.

The German Air Force was little in evidence yesterday, but Allied planes had to cope with intense flak in many places.

An improvement in the weather, which permitted the RAF heavies to pound rail bottlenecks behind the German Western Front last night, gave the Allied air arm a field day over France.

Medium and fighter-bombers spread havoc among von Rundstedt’s concentrations and fighters were working so closely in contact with ground troops today that they were able to spray destruction into Nazi frontline strongpoints holding up sector advances.

Despite German claims of E-boat attacks on a powerful Allied convoy guarded by cruisers as it was crossing the western part of the Bay of the Seine, SHAEF regarded the enemy’s overnight E-boat action as on a diminished scale.

It was pointed out, however, the fight against the torpedo sting of German small boats must be […] the Germans have hundreds of them and, so far, have not dared to bring into the invasion zone anything large than E-boats and destroyers.

Headquarters followed up midnight Communiqué No. 12 with an official tribute to American progress yesterday on the beachhead’s right wing. It called the situation “excellent – could not be better.”

Bond campaign is begun in country

Strong effort will be made here to reach district quota; $16 billion is goal

Roosevelt broadcast to start bond drive

Texarkana, Arkansas (AP) –
Momentum already built up in the Fifth War Loan was termed “terrific” by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. today as he arrived to open the $16-billion bond drive.

The Secretary declared the results thus far were “better than OK.” He said he would announce the cost of the advance from Sicily to Rome and estimate the cost of the war this year in a four-network broadcast officially opening the bond campaign at 9:00 p.m. CWT tonight.

President Roosevelt will speak from Washington on the program.

Morgenthau found Texarkana flying thousands of flags and packed with 20,000 visitors.

americavotes1944

Texas Democrats refuse to change

Dallas, Texas (AP) –
The Texas State Democratic executive committee by a vote of 37–6 today refused to certify the name of Texas Democratic presidential electors named at a pro-Roosevelt convention for printing on the July primary ballot.

The committee turned down a request by pro-Roosevelt Democrats to submit at the Party primary a question for binding presidential electors to vote for the party’s candidate for President.

Merritt Gibson, chairman of the Resolutions Committee, said that the question has been decided at the state convention, out of which the Roosevelt backers walked after losing two test votes.