Battle unit raids Saipan, Bonin and Volcano Islands, whips powerful Jap fleet
By Courtenay Moore, United Press staff writer
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Peace parley thwarted plan for return of area to Germany for transfer to America
By R. H. Shackford, United Press staff writer
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Ill four days with heart attack
By Henry T. Gorrell, United Press staff writer
U.S. 1st Army HQ, France –
A full military funeral was being arranged today for Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt, 56, whose death Wednesday night was attributed to a heart attack aggravated by battle fatigue which resulted from almost continuous combat activity since D-Day when he led a first wave of assault troops onto the Normandy beaches.
It was expected that he would be buried in a cemetery not far from that landing spot and in the country where his brother Quentin was killed in World War I.
Carrying on the fighting traditions of his father, the former President and Rough Rider, he had been in the thick of the battle of France for weeks.
Ill four days
He had been ill four days but declined medical attention to remain in the frontlines with soldiers of the 4th Division of which he was deputy commander. Friends said he had never fully recovered from pneumonia which he contracted shortly after his arrival in Britain.
He died peacefully in his tent, attended in his last hours by Army doctor Maj. Kenneth McPherson of Beckley, West Virginia, and surrounded by doughboys who knew him as “the fightingest little guy in this man’s army.”
Overage for combat duty, he obtained special permission to lead an invasion assault force.
Lands early
He hit the Cotentin beaches 16 minutes after H-Hour, wearing coveralls, his only weapon an Army .45 pistol. Hobbling on his cane, he waved on his doughboys whom he led into the interior under fire from German 88mm cannon, rockets and concrete-emplaced machine guns.
He personally supervised the demolition by engineers with TNT of the seawall at the beach. I landed in one of the waves behind the first in which the general was the leader. I found Gen. Roosevelt in the thick of it, cheering on his men and loving the hot smell of battle.
I noticed something wrong with his thumb and asked his young aide, Lt. Stevie Stevenson of Texas, what was the matter. Lt. Stevenson replied:
The general’s luck is still holding out. It’s just a scratch from a piece of shrapnel.
In the last hours of the Battle of Cherbourg, he led a reconnaissance in force almost to the sea in which has come to be regarded as one of the bravest acts of this war.
He walked a long way through country infested by German strongpoints at the head of a battalion, past machine-gun nests and snipers, and almost reached the sea northwest of the city.
Covers star with gum
One of his pastimes was to cover the general’s star on his steel helmet with chewing gum and walk along the front areas, mingling with the assault troops. Once when he was walking along, I saw an infantryman stick his head out of a slit trench and ask: “Who’s that guy?”
“Not so loud,” one of his mates hushed him. “That’s the toughest little fighting man in this Army. That’s rough ridin’ Teddy Roosevelt.”
Wounded in last war
Gen. Roosevelt was born in Oyster Bay, New York, Sept. 13, 1887. He graduated from Harvard in 1909.
In World War I, he commanded the 1st Battalion of the 26th Division in the offensives at Cantigny, Soissons, Saint-Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne and was wounded twice.
After the war, he entered politics and served under President Warren G. Harding as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1921. He ran for Governor of New York in 1924 but lost to Alfred E. Smith. Under President Herbert Hoover, he served as Governor-General of the Philippines.
He returned to military duty before the outbreak of the present war and in December 1941 was made a brigadier general. He went to Britain as assistant commander of a division and later saw action in the North African and Sicilian campaigns.
He commanded the first combat team to attack Oran in the North African landings in November 1942.
He and his son Quentin II, a captain, fought together in North Africa and were cited together for gallantry in action. The general received an Oak Leaf Cluster representing a second Silver Star for going to a forward observation post and remaining there until threat of a counterattack had been repulsed.
His decorations from World War I included the Distinguished Service Cross, Distinguished Service Medal, the Purple Heart, Legion of Honor and Croix de Guerre.
One of four sons
He was one of four sons of the former President, all of whom distinguished themselves in the service just as their father did before them. One brother, Lt. Quentin, attached to the 95th Aero Squadron, was killed in action near Chamery, July 14, 1918.
Another, Maj. Kermit, who served with the British and U.S. armies in World War I, died June 4, 1943, of illness while serving with the U.S. Army.
The third, Archibald B., served as an infantry captain in World War I and was wounded while leading a trench raid March 11, 1918. Archibald, now a lieutenant colonel, was wounded June 20 in fighting on Biak Island off the New Guinea coast in the Southwest Pacific. Gen. Roosevelt was married in 1910 to Eleanor Butler Alexander of New York. Besides Capt. Roosevelt, their children are Mrs. Grace McMillan, Theodore III and Cornelius of the U.S. Navy.
Only 20 Italians get instruction
By Robert Taylor, Press Washington correspondent
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Post-war trade, loans advocated
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This is the last Bastille Day that France will be imprisoned by Germany. today – even though only the tiny tip of Normandy has been liberated by Allied arms – the hearts of Frenchmen everywhere are lifted in hope after four years of night.
Americans share France’s prayers. By long tradition the two republics are friends and comrades in democracy, bound together by mutual sacrifices one for the other. But more than sentiment is involved. There is self-interest too – our own. For, without a strong and healthy French democracy, there is little chance of a free Europe or a peaceful Europe rising from this war.
Before victory France still must suffer a great deal. And afterward her burdens will be heavy and her problems hard. The sheer physical problem of rebuilding a country shattered by war and tyrants will be tremendous. But even more difficult will be the task of security, of preventing World War III which a weakened France could not survive.
Of this all Frenchmen are thinking today. Some of their leaders are thinking only in terms of physical force, of better strategic frontiers and buffer states, of keeping the old enemy disarmed and of making France the biggest military power outside of Russia, of European alliances to put teeth in any international organization.
How much force is necessary, and in what form, we do not know. But we doubt that any Maginot Line, even a modern model which blocks the skies, will be sufficient. Indeed, the same old Maginot psychology in newer and subtler form may be her undoing again.
For France’s worst weakness in 1939 was not external, but internal. She was divided. She was sick. She was easy prey for the germs Hitler spread. She fell quickly because she had lost the unity which had once made her strong. The most dangerous enemy was within.
To the old divisions are now added new ones. The most terrible legacy left by the retreating Nazi army and fleeing Gestapo will not be the physical destruction but the spiritual poison which sets Frenchman against Frenchman. The damning of personal enemies or competitors as Vichyites, the feuds between Giraudists and de Gaullists, the suspicions and rivalries within the de Gaulle regime itself, and all the other strains multiplied for victims of military occupation and émigré intrigue, will make unity more difficult. Many will think the cure should be a blood purge instead of patient reconciliation.
The test of Gen. de Gaulle, or of any other Frenchman who aspires to leadership, will be his ability to heal old wounds instead of making new ones, and his reliance on democratic processes instead of the semi-dictator methods of the Algiers regime. France must replenish her strength from within.
Brig. Gen. Roosevelt, Teddy Jr., the fighting son of fighting Teddy the First, is gone. He died in bed, of battle fatigue. But he was as certainly a war casualty as if a bomb or a bullet had got him, as he led his men, half his age, onto the Normandy beachhead.
For all the days since D-Day he had been building up the exhaustion which finally took him away. That he wasn’t killed in action as, at the head of his doughboys, he directed reconnaissance in force on Cherbourg through enemy territory infested by machine-gun nests and snipers – that is one of the many miracles of a charmed life which finally ended in repose.
But the same miracle had hovered over his many times before – in two world wars. At Cantigny, Soissons, in the Argonne and at Saint-Mihiel in World War I, he was young. Thirty years later, he was 56. But despite his age, in the Mediterranean and in Normandy, he was what one of his men described him – “the toughest little fighting man in this Army.”
Those years, however, finally took their toll; did what bombs and bullets couldn’t. Though wounded twice in the first war and twice again in this, the enemy could never get him. That remained for time and the exhaustion that years and strain bring on – such strain as only a brave heart can hear, to the end.
Few who have been in battles had been honored by more decorations than this soldier son of a solder, and none deserved them more.
“Rough Rider” was painted on the jeep he rode in Normandy and Teddy Jr. carried a .45. They didn’t have jeeps on San Juan Hill but they did have .45s. And who said there’s nothing in heredity?
College graduates tend to trust Reds more
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
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