Military heads, WPB chief Nelson embroiled
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Contract shifts are considered for assuring quitting workers of continued war jobs
By Charles T. Lucey, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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Ignorance of state of affairs charged
By Daniel M. Kidney, Scripps-Howard staff writer
Washington –
Vice President Henry A. Wallace’s Russian speeches were as inept as some he has made here, contends David J. Dallin, writing in the New Leader, liberal-labor weekly.
Mr. Dallin said:
Mr. Wallace’s speeches, although delivered in Russian, sounded like Wallace-English all the same. He not only promoted the American cause; what he said sounded perhaps a bit strange to his audience. After visiting industrial plants in Magadan, Komsomolsk and elsewhere in eastern Siberia, again and again he said, “I can bear witness to the willingness with which your citizens give their utmost efforts in mines, aircraft factories, metallurgical works.”
It so happens that the recently-emerged industry of this region has been built and is being operated largely by the manpower of the labor camps of eastern Siberia.
These camps, consisting of deportees, convicts, and “socially dangerous” elements, are among the saddest features of our sad times. Mr. Wallace, speaking of the inmates’ “willingness” to work, was unwittingly ironical.
Smuggled report cited
A report allegedly smuggled from Magadan forced labor camps, giving details of the wretched conditions there, is then cited by the writer. It says:
Half-decayed wooden barracks inside a ruin of wooden bunks, dilapidated fireplaces in which things could hardly be warmed up. No lighting after sundown. Food less than scanty.
One of the women’s camps in Magadan is being run by two young women leaders from the NKVD [formerly GPU], both very pretty, energetic but hellishly bad and hard. This camp is surrounded by barbed wire. During the summer, prisoners live in tents, men and women together. Women who keep to themselves are teased by the men.
People are extremely weakened, exhausted by the heavy labor. Most suffer from kidney trouble, from swelling of legs, from open wounds, from scurvy. Men often go blind. There are many cases of frostbite. Illnesses are spread because of the lack of recreation and of any signs of civilized life. Many die from diarrhea and general exhaustion…
‘Was it necessary?’
Mr. Dallin then concludes with this advice:
It certainly was no part of Mr. Wallace’s task, especially in wartime, to take up these problems with Russia, either publicly or privately. But he ought to be acquainted with the state of affairs, just as was Wendell Willkie who, after his visit to Russia in 1942, mentioned the problem in his reports.
Was it really necessary for Mr. Wallace to exclaim in Irkutsk that “men born in wide free spaces will not brook injustice” and that “they will not even temporarily live in slavery”?
Collaboration with Russia hardly requires statements of this kind before a well-informed audience in the Russian Far East.
German shortage of fuel indicated
By Edward V. Roberts, United Press staff writer
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Captured La Haye an awesome sight
By Robert J. Casey
On the U.S. front in Normandy, France –
South of La Haye-du-Puits, U.S. troops today were slowly blasting through more hedges, stone walls and ranks of unconvinced Germans on their way to the promised land of flat country where a man has a chance to see what he is fighting.
The weather, as usual, was rotten and mud thick and plentiful in fields and roadways, and the going was still tough and dangerous from one end of the line to the other, but when various corps spokesmen announced that “progress was satisfactory” you felt inclined to believe them.
Town a terrible sight
We got into La Haye in force yesterday morning and crashed through the principal defenses at the railroad station. To one who had looked at it across the lovely valley in the British sun of five years ago, the town was an awesome and terrible sight.
There was no charm about it now. Snipers were still sending out venomous fire from skeletons of rooftops. Rocket guns – “screaming meemies” – were dropping their howling slugs promiscuously from some concealed spot in orchards south of the town. The infantry moved about close to the battered walls, with heads well down and necks pulled in.
The ditches leading into the town were cluttered with German dead. Along hedgerows, turned over clear of the road, was a procession of the skeletons of burned and tortured trucks.
At the end of a side street under a tree, a dead German lieutenant, whose name had been Franz Ritter, lay grazing sightlessly into the rainy sky. Around him were scattered belongings that probably had been loose in his pockets when he fell – his paybook, military identity card, certificate of good standing in the Nazi Party, and a collection of snapshots, mostly of himself.
An American doughboy cradled his carbine under his arm and picked up some of the photographs. Looking through them, he said:
You can tell a lot about this guy from these. Look, here he is as one of those mugs in the Youth Movement.
He held out a picture of Franz in socks, shorts and military shirt, a sour-faced boy of about 17.
That’s about the time he started listening to this Hitler. And here he us as a member of the labor battalion.
Arrogant expression
That picture showed him in front of a barracks, leaning on a shovel and looking on the world with the same arrogant expression that now was frozen into his face by death.
And here he is as an officer, a bright new shavetail with a swastika on his arm. I suppose the whole world was his that day. All his folks were sending him congratulations and maybe presents.
The doughboys turned the picture over. There was a date on it: Feb. 17, 1944. That, as the doughboy said, probably had been the greatest day in the life of Franz Ritter, the Hitler Youth, the eager young laborer, the stiff-necked soldier of the Reich, the arrogant lieutenant. And on that day, he was less than five months from July 9 and only a few hundred miles from the muddy slopes of La Haye-du-Puits – a town of which he probably had never heard.
The doughboy bleakly said:
He’s had some hard luck, but you can’t say he didn’t ask for it. He was a Nazi and he was a sniper.
He laid the pictures back in a neat pile where he had found them and turned away. Franz Ritter continues to stare up into the rain.
Arrival of Yanks recalls Prussian-like entry of Rommel four years before
By W. C. Heinz, North American Newspaper Alliance
Cherbourg, France – (July 7, delayed)
On June 18, 1940, the mayor of Cherbourg, a thin, white-haired, white-mustached old man in a black suit, black tie and black shoes, stood with his staff on the steps of the little city hall here in the Place de la Republique and watch silently while a German tank roared up and gnashed to a halt. Four years and nine days later that same thin, old man in the same black suit, tie and shows and with his staff again around him, stood on the same step and watched while an American jeep swirled to a halt on the same spot.
Today in that same little city hall, you heard from that same chin, little man and one of the members of that same staff the story of those two days. The story that 73-year-old Dr. Paul Reynaud and 71-year-old Eugene Simon, his deputy mayor, told you, however, is also the story of the four years between, the story of two armies, and the story of the little people caught in the tide of this war.
‘Walked past us’
M. Simon said:
When the German tank halted, the top flew open and out climbed three German officers, all cleanshaven and in clean uniforms. While we stood and watched, not knowing what to do, they just walked past us and into our offices.
They said nothing to us but we could hear them talking in the mayor’s office, and then in a moment everyone outdoors snapped to attention as Gen. Rommel walked past without looking at us. We could hear Rommel shouting in the office, and then he came out, followed by the others, and again they walked past us without saying anything and drove away.
“Here we call Rommel the little man,” M. Simon said, and you could tell from the way he smiled when he said it that what the French here mean by that is only that little field marshal’s short stature.
People ignore band
Next day, however, the officers were back. They came back with orders that life was to go on as usual. Mayor Reynaud’s only comment on that was that it was a thing which was easily said.
As you sat, then, in the little office with the big desk and with chairs covered with red plush and listened to these two pale, old men with their black suits and their soft, slow way of thinking, you heard how on the next morning a Nazi military band marched into the Place de la Republique and gave its first concert in a bandstand which you could see through the window still standing there, dusty and in need of paint.
“Nobody went to hear the concert,” M. Simon said, “and after a month, the concerts stopped.”
Barges flop
You heard, too, how in a few days the Germans began building barges for the invasion of Great Britain, and how, when they put the barges into the water and loaded them with tanks in rehearsal, many barges were overturned and many tanks and German soldiers were lost.
You heard how the Germans, like children in their ignorance, actually though that the English Channel, for which their word is “canal,” was only 20 miles wide and how they went into the schoolrooms and tore down the maps, and when they saw that the Channel was 70 miles wide, they shouted in fury that the maps had been faked, and tore them up.
You heard, too, about the Nazi naval captain of the port. He was the former captain of the luxury liner Bremen who, before the war, received a gold medal from the Cherbourg Chamber of Commerce.
Commits suicide
M. Simon said:
If you want his name, you may find it in the cemetery. The Germans say that he committed suicide.
Then the two pale, old men, one wearing the Cross of Lorraine and the other the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor, told you about German planes. They told you how, in the hard fall and winter of 1940 and 1941, they watched German planes wing overhead on their way to Britain.
The mayor said:
We watched them leave by the dozens and come back in twos and threes. Then we knew that there was something over there.
After that, the two men told you, there were long years of waiting. They told of five ounces of bread a day, of no tea, no coffee, no cheese and only eight ounces of meat a month – this in the most fruitful part of France.
Nazis grow nervous
They told of the growing nervousness of the Germans at the news of the U.S. landings in France, and how they wanted to laugh and sing but couldn’t, and of the orders of evacuation, of the fight for the city, and then of how they stood in their old, black suits on the steps of the old city hall and watched the American jeep as it swirled to a stop.
You heard that when the jeep drove up the men in it were not cleanshaven and were not in bright, smart uniforms. They were grimy and dirty and there was dust on their clothes, but when they got out of the jeep, they didn’t walk stiffly past the pale, old men, but strode up to them and shook their hands.
The man who shook hands with the mayor was Lt. Col. Frank Howley of Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, head of the Allied civil affairs unit in Cherbourg, but no one has to tell you of the civil affairs unit or what it has to do here. You can see that everywhere on the face of this city and in the faces of the two old men and the other people.
Says goal attained in Roosevelt talks
By R. H. Shackford, United Press staff writer
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Doughboy comes to rescue of war reporter after she enters frontline town in Italy
By Eleanor Packard, United Press staff writer
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The fact that 66% of the public favors a two-term limit for Presidents after this year’s election, as shown by the Gallup Poll, indicates that although prior to 1940 the two-term limit was only a tradition, it was nevertheless a tradition that the people approved of.
When the Constitution was written, many different suggestions concerning presidential tenure were put forth. Alexander Hamilton favored life tenure. Other proposals of single seven-year and five-year terms were made. None was accepted, other than the provision that the term be for four years. Not a word was said about reelection, or about how many reelections were desirable.
The two-term tradition was instituted by the first occupant of the office, President Washington. It took on the strength of an accepted limit principally by Jefferson’s insistence that two terms were enough, and that for any man to seek to exceed that limit would stamp him as an enemy of free government. It was one of Jefferson’s opinions on the subject, quoted by Senator Carter Glass in nominating Jim Farley, that drew resounding boos at the convention of Jefferson’s party in 1940.
The tradition was cast aside in 1940, however, by the people themselves. The issue was clear-cut and the third-term candidate won by a decisive, though not overwhelming, majority. The decision was reached constitutionally and legally, by the court of last resort in a republic – the voters.
But it is a different matter if now the same people seek to prevent a repetition. The only method possible to prevent it is by amendment to the Constitution which the Gallup survey finds that 66% of the people are for.
That does not necessarily mean that a majority which voted for a third term in 1940 is so disappointed in the experiences that it regrets its vote of four years ago. It may mean only that it is willing to accept this one exception, but is aware of the potential danger of unlimited tenure and believes a legal limit should be established.
Be that as it may, the tradition itself is dead. If the two-term principle is to be reestablished, an amendment is the only recourse. And if 66% of the people want it, it likely will be adopted – perhaps not at once, but in times to prevent a longer-than-two-term issue ever arising again.
The British capture of Caen has broken a dangerous stalemate in the Battle of Normandy. Caen was scheduled for capture a month ago. The British took part of it on D-Day, but had to retreat quickly. The enemy then succeeded in holding up the British advance for 33 days.
It is no secret that Allied victory depends on slashing, rapid advances, and that Nazi strategy is to contain the Allies within a fixed line where attrition is heavy. In this case, the Nazis achieved a temporary stalemate without calling out their major strategic reserves. That makes the Allies’ task ahead all the more difficult.
When went wrong with Gen. Montgomery’s plans will probably remain a mystery until after the war. Some of the experts are suggesting that his famous super-caution may have tricked him into a slower and, in the end, more costly operation than necessary. This criticism strikes us as premature.
Bad weather may have accounted for most of the Caen stalemate. Many of those 33 days were such that Gen. Montgomery could not land supplies on the beaches to build up his forces, and could not use his great air superiority to turn the balance. Apparently during the past two weeks, he has had infantry and artillery superiority amounting to a 4-to-1 advantage in firepower. Whether he was or was not slow to use it, he had taken advantage of it fully in this successful two-day offensive.
Another reason why criticism seems to us premature is that much depends on the next big move by the Allies. The German General Staff still does not know whether Gen. Eisenhower will put all his eggs in the Normandy basket, or whether he soon will make other landings in the region of Le Havre or Brest, or even in Belgium or Holland.
Events may prove that the Caen delay was due more to Gen. Montgomery’s overcaution than to the Germans’ refusal to be caught off balance by drawing their main reserves toward Normandy, which in turn delayed an Eisenhower invasion elsewhere.
Whatever the explanation, it must be admitted that little was achieved by the Allies in the period between the fall of Cherbourg and that of Caen, compared with the miraculous first period of the invasion. Three or four more Caen clinches would carry us close to the fall stalemate for which the Germans are fighting. Every week counts now.
World watches to see how ‘liberators’ act and future peace hopes rest in balance
By Edward P. Morgan
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By William Philip Simms, Scripps-Howard foreign editor
Cherbourg, France –
Among the things which have alarmed friends of France the most was the decree of the Provisional Government in Algiers placing press, radio and films under state control.
The Algiers ordinance would seem to destroy freedom of the press and other means of public expression. The state would have the say as to who could run newspapers. The French Information Agency alone would have the right to circulate government communiqués, domestic and foreign news and to acquire the services of foreign news agencies.
Movies could not operate until authorized by the Commissioner of Information.
Tempered ruling hoped for
Events here, however, lead to the hope that the Algiers degree may be somewhat tempered in practice. Supposedly, all newspapers and periodicals which carried out Nazi or Vichy policy were to be confiscated. Yet none of that seems to have happened here.
One of the oldest newspapers in this part of France is Éclair of Cherbourg. After the German occupation, it turned collaborationist. But when the Americans marched on the port, the editor fled to Paris, leaving the paper in the hands of his brother-in-law, M. Hamel.
New name for paper
After the fall of Cherbourg, Algiers Regional Commissioner François Coulet began to apply the law. He ousted Hamel and appointed Roger Pillet, a newspaperman and member of the resistance group, as editor. Printers and other employees of Éclair struck. They contended Hamel had never written any collaborationist stuff. He had only managed the property as he had done before 1940, and throughout the occupation he had carried on “in a spirit of friendly cooperation with the workers,” they maintained.
Subprefect Leviandier, a Coulet appointee, who was called in to arbitrate, decided to give the newspaper a new name, La Presse cherbourgeoise, and to go on publishing with the old staff, including Hamel as managing director and Pillet as editor.
Commendable discretion
Throughout all this the U.S. Army’s Civil Affairs officers remained aloof.
Whether this incident means a more democratic formula will be followed remains to be seen. Certainly, Commissioner Coulet, who has wide powers, appears to have used commendable discretion.
In England, many liberal Frenchmen had looked askance at the Algiers press-radio regulation. They observed that the road to liberty is hardly through dictatorship. They said that if democracy is to be restored in France, the way to do it is not by abandoning the principles which are the foundation of democracy.
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