Joint Chiefs of Staff oppose Nelson’s plan for reconversion now
Warning sounded that such action might serve to prolong the war
By Fred W. Parker, United Press staff writer
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Tribune head protests slur on Chicago
Col. McCormick cables Lord Beaverbrook
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Tule Lake rioters are transferred
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Millett: Ring labels him ‘sold’
Military hubbies ‘marked men’
By Ruth Millett
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Last attempt made to reach entombed men
Shaft being cut into Ohio mine
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Sky trails –
Nazis’ robot planes called ‘a weapon of desperation’
Chief of Air Forces Materiel Command says idea tested in U.S. as far back as 1918
By Henry Ward, Press aviation editor
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O’Daniel raps New Deal in paper inquiry
Senator is asked to explain reply
Washington (UP) – (July 8)
“The New Deal squad operates like skunks and dogs,” Senator W. Lee O’Daniel (D-TX) retorted today when informed that the War Production Board was asking how he got the newsprint to begin publication of an anti-New Deal newspaper July 4.
He asserted his paper, the W. Lee O’Daniel News, had been given a “clean bill of health” by the WPB Regional Board in Dallas, Texas, and added:
It clipped the New Deal’s ears back twice in Texas and it’s going to do it again. That’s what it’s for.
Letter awaited
Mr. O’Daniel said he had not yet received the letter which Arthur Treanor, director of WPB’s Printing and Publishing Division, addressed to him yesterday asking when and where O’Daniel bought a year’s supply of critically short newsprint to start publication of the News at 100,000 copies an issue.
He said:
It’s the New Deal fashion to turn news over to newspapers to start a smear campaign before an addressee receives his letter. The New Deal squad operates like skunks and dogs, you know that old game. The dog can run faster than the skunk but he can never catch up to it – and you know why.
Regional chief quoted
He said he had received a letter from George L. Noble Jr. of the WPB Regional Office in Dallas in which Mr. Noble, replying to a Fort Worth publisher, said inquiries by his office “failed to reveal any evidence of violation of the WPB limitation order” by Mr. O’Daniel’s newspaper.
The publisher, D. E. Weaver of the Fort Worth Press, had asked Mr. Noble to find out how Mr. O’Daniel obtained “several carloads” of newsprint and stored a year’s supply in a warehouse in Fort Worth.
Mr. O’Daniel quoted Mr. Noble’s reply to Mr. Weaver to the effect that “inquiries made failed to reveal any evidence of the violation of the WPB limitation order.”
Allies to start new phase of air warfare
Battle for rule of skies almost over
By E. C. Shepherd, North American Newspaper Alliance
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Wheeler: Saipan Island dust worse than that of U.S. prairies
Disintegrated coral coats everything with gritty, yellow stucco
By Keith Wheeler, North American Newspaper Alliance
Saipan, Mariana Islands – (June 22, delayed)
I was born on the edge of the American Midwestern dust bowl and I’ve seen prairie gales lift the granulated top soil and draw it like a curtain across the sky.
But I’ve never seen anything like the dust of the Saipan beachhead.
Probably before we came, Saipan’s roads were no more dusty than coral-surfaced roads ever are – although that’s dusty enough. Now the narrow roads carry more traffic every 24 hours than they ever carried in any previous year.
Amphibious tractors, laden with men, ammunition, guns, water and barbed wire, claw into the coral with their steel-toothed treads. Tanks, halftracks and great track-laying prime movers churn through the dust. Jeeps, trailers, trucks, captured Jap vehicles, bicycles, oxcarts and tramping men crawl back and forth in an endless procession.
Under this pounding, the coral has disintegrated. The roads are eight inches deep in a fine yellow powder and the whole five miles of waterfront lies perpetually hidden under an opaque yellow pall.
“It’s like wading knee-deep in talcum powder,” one gasping Martine said. The dust permeates everything within 1,000 yards of the beach and dictates the life of the men that live there.
You plod 100 yards through the dust and your face is plastered in a gritty, yellow stucco so that not even your abundant sweat wets the outside later. It coats the palms, breadfruit, and papaya trees so thickly that they bend with its weight.
It blinds red-eyed drivers in rolling yellow clouds, picked up by their own vehicles, and all traffic moves at a crawl. It sifts down like a harsh unmalting snow into the faces of sleeping men, flavors their food, fills their clothing and packs and provides a thin burial shroud for the fetid Jap corpses that no one has yet had time to bury.
Neither dust nor bombs nor shells nor snipers can halt the great river of men and tools of war that flows painfully up from the sea to the land. Beach parties have contrived to land thousands of tons of food, water, ammunition, guns, wire, oil, gasoline, trucks and tractors each day. Hardly a day has passed that the pace has not been kept up. It is backbreaking, brutal, dangerous and utterly without glory.
MacGowan: Few Norman girls found married to Nazi soldiers
Majority of French women await return of countrymen; others ostracized
By Gault MacGowan, North American Newspaper Alliance
Colombières, Normandy, France – (July 8)
The name of this place means dovecots in English, and the little church of the village has a popular matrimonial altar. But you will search in vain for records of weddings between Nazi soldiers and French girls.
An aged parish priest told me today:
We have had no weddings of that kind here or in any of our parishes. Civil weddings may have taken place, but I haven’t heard of any. There were some clandestine liaisons, of course, but none solemnized by the church. No self-respecting girl would have anything to do with the Germans.
I have been checking up on reports of French girls’ retreating with the Germans and on the invasion-day stories of French girls as snipers and roof-spotters, and have learned that those who became such collaborationists were few indeed. The priest’s story of Colombières is true, I feel sure, for most communities in Normandy. Tradition is strong in this region, and family life is even stronger. There is no sympathy for the scarlet woman.
Spoke to ‘pink sister’
I spoke to one pink sister today, discovering her hue only after I asked her opinion of why the Germans did not invade England in 1940 and she flashed back so aptly with her reply.
“Why should they?” she said. “They had everything they wanted here – wine, women and the best of cooking.”
In justice to French women in general, I should make clear that I have asked the same question of many others, and they have given me quite different answers.
It must be admitted that there has been a definite psychological problem involved with the occupation army. Young Frenchwomen, with their own young men far from them and only old men or comparative weaklings to choose from, could not keep from glancing occasionally at healthy, young German soldiers, looking very difference from the caricatures of them circulated before the fall of France. Not all were the strictly Nazi types. Large numbers of Saxons, Bavarians and Austrians. Some had been educated at the Sorbonne or in England or America. They spoke French well and their manners were cosmopolitan.
Germans frowned on unions
These more attractive ones were pushed forward in the early campaign to implant Hitler’s ideology in France. Parties, tennis and other games were organized for collaboration families; and it was difficult to refuse all German invitations without causing reprisals.
If any weddings resulted – genuine weddings – they took place in Paris or somewhere else far from local cognizance. Any weddings learned of here would have caused social ostracism. The girls involved would have been compelled by the pressure of public opinion to leave their families and go to Germany. Another side of the truth is that the Germans themselves frowned on such unions in their customary insistence on “racial purity.”
The comparatively few women of Normandy who lived openly with the Germans are targets of the scorn of their countrymen or are described bluntly as members of the world’s oldest profession. Norman instincts are too courteous to sanction dealing with them as the Corsicans did when I was there ands saw such women returned to their homes after camp life with the Nazis. Guerrilla patriots had cut off their hair and stripped them naked. Then they marched them to the top of the village street and turned them loose.
For four years, the great majority of Frenchwomen have drawn themselves into shells. they don’t come out easily even to greet the young men of the Allies. The German occupation of their country has made them more nationalistic than ever. They are reserving their welcomes for their imprisoned sweethearts and for those who come back with the Fighting French.
Shapiro: David Niven plays real war role as a British officer in France
Normandy version like Hollywood’s; Yanks see him, turn autograph hounds
By L. S. B. Shapiro, North American Newspaper Alliance
With U.S. forces in Normandy, France – (July 8)
Every movie fan knows how David Niven looks in the role of a British officer fighting in France.
As a Hollywood actor, he played the part od a British officer in the 1914-18 war at least a dozen times. His realistic performance as Errol Flynn’s fighting pal in the picture Dawn Patrol sent him to stardom.
Niven looks no different as the real thing. He is a British officer on this Normandy bridgehead and is temporarily attached to a U.S. formation headquarters as British liaison officer.
I met him yesterday, and except for the fact that he is wearing battledress instead of the service dress uniforms officers wore in World War I. He is a same David Niven you’ve seen in so many Flanders pictures.
He was natty, his eyes had the same old twinkle and his grin had that quality of mischievous charm which made him so great a film favorite.
“I was honestly laughing with tears in my eyes when I landed in France the other day,” he said, chuckling.
We had a rough passage. You know how the Channel can be – and I was pretty shaky on my pins when I came ashore and dreadfully ill.
There were a lot of American troops working on the beach and the first thing I know they were rushing at me with bits of paper and pencils. I was awfully sick but I had to laugh. It was all too funny – and it is when you come to think of it. Here we are in the biggest, most dramatic operation of the war, and what happens? Autograph hounds!
As though to emphasize the truth of Niven’s dilemma, some British troops moving up to the front paused as they passed our roadside rendezvous and gave the movie star what is known in Hollywood as “the double take.” They looked curiously at first, as though searching their memories, then gave him a wide stare and a wave of the hand.
He looked up and down the muddy road filled with transport trucks and troops against the background of a shattered French village.
“It doesn’t look too different from a Hollywood set, what?” He remarked. Then Officer Niven climbed into a jeep and moved toward the battlefront.
Long run predicted for mystery show
Ten Little Indians, new thriller, gets great sendoff in New York
By Burton Rascoe
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Jokes are immortal, even the bad ones, says radio comedian
Head man of It Pays to Be Ignorant explains nine lives of a gag
By Si Steinhauser
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Yanks prefer grand opera
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Battle between television, movie companies looms
Wise planning urged now to speed emergence of great new industry
New York (UP) – (July 8)
The post-war struggle between television and motion picture companies may assure gigantic proportions, Arthur Levey, president of the Scophony Corporation of America, said yesterday, but he expressed confidence that a common ground for understanding between all major film interests would be reached.
Admitting that at this time there is no television industry in the modern sense, Mr. Levey asserted that:
Wise planning now within the orbit of cooperation with the Federal Communications Commission can remedy that situation and speed the emergence of a great new industry.
Speaking before the Radio Executives Club here, the Scophony executive predicted the use of two-way television-telephone communication in the not-too-distant future and said his company plans the production of home television receiving sets with a 24 by 20-inch screen to cost about $200 when mass output can be attained.
The reasons Scophony sets have not appeared on the American market before thus, he added, was because the company viewed the early period of television as experimental, and that “until the FCC standards were set and considerable demand for home television sets developed” the company would not be justified in expending money on small-scale manufacture.
Scophony Corporation of America is an outgrowth of Scophony, Ltd., of England, which succeeded prior to the war in projecting televised pictures on an 18-foot-wide screen in several London theaters. The American company is partially owned by Paramount Pictures, Inc., and General Precision Instrument Corporation.
The major film corporations are now in a more favorable financial position than ever in their history. Mr. Levey told his audience and can easily undertake, if so inclined, to put television on the map rapidly, as it represents a new industry allied to show business. However, some officials, he asserted, actually believe that their particular companies can afford to “sit this one out,” but nevertheless benefit by the financial courage of other companies pioneering in television.
Mr. Levey said:
It is a matter of complete indifference to our company whether the coaxial cable method or radio booster links are used to pipe programs into theaters, except insofar as they relate to our own corporate welfare and the public interest. We do, however, have the liveliest interest in making sure that the motion picture exhibitor shall have available a television projector of proven reliability, which utilizes motion picture technique, and with which his film projectionist may familiarize himself within a few hours.
Change in value of gold favored
Plan submitted to money parley
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Night game question to be discussed here
Major League confab at Schenley to precede All-Star game Tuesday
By Carl Lundquist, United Press staff writer
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Logical choice –
Sweden may have Olympics in 1948
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On Normandy front –
Hard-pressed Nazis use salvaged guns
On the U.S. 1st Army front, Normandy, France – (July 8)
The war on this complicated front started inching its way southward again this morning after a night of reorganization and another artillery earthquake. Movement was slowest in the west, more where new gun mobilizations have failed to compensate Heinie for having been caught out at the Aire crossing.
Troops that went in on the extreme left yesterday morning had reached a point 500 yards south of Saint-Jean-de-Daye during the night and were still advancing. The second spearhead in this attack, which cut across the Vire et Taute Canal during the afternoon, had cleared the marshes and was beating back the Germans successfully on dry ground beyond.
Queer artillery
Thanks to the murderous terrain, Heinie has been able to put up a good defensive fight, but in the eastern sector his luck at the moment seems to have run out. His artillery continued to plaster roads and battery positions with plenty of force, but to the disinterested observer, it looked like queer artillery.
It doesn’t make much difference to you, as you try to make yourself flatten in a mud puddle, whether the incoming shells are of orthodox caliber or not, but you begin to take notice when whizbangs and slow-moving crumps arrive in the same spot almost simultaneously. That just isn’t the way to fire artillery if you can help yourself.
It has been known for some time that the Germans all along the front, have been throwing in guns only recently salvaged from the junkpiles of 1939 and 1940 – Polish and Czech field pieces, Russian howitzers and French 75s and railway guns, not to mention exotic varieties of off-size British cannon abandoned before Dunkerque – and here’s proof of it, as a U.S. artillery major sharing my frontline mud puddle pointed out.
“If he [the enemy] gets away with this, he’s a Chinese magician,” the major said. He pulled his head down while two more Heinie shells came blasting into a hedge, one with a boom, the other with a flat crack.
Real supply problem
He said:
That’s it. This is a fine place to find out what every kind of shell in the world sounds like. He’s using them all. Think what is going on up there in his artillery positions. He has everybody’s guns up there but you can see for yourself that he hadn’t got very many of any one kind in any one place.
Tentatively, I guess it will be some 75s and a couple of 25-pounders and about half a dozen 12-inchers. And that’s no kidding. He must be getting down pretty close to the bottom of the barrel.