MacArthur fliers blast five ships
Troop-laden transport among those hit
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Victory in 1944 ‘quite likely,’ Monty asserts
Things are going well, general declares
London, England (UP) –
Gen. Sir Bernard L. Montgomery said in a broadcast from France last night that it is “quite likely” the Allies will knock Germany out of the war this year.
Recalling that when he spoke to his officers on the eve of D-Day, he told them “if we do our stuff properly this year in this business, we shall have Germany out of the war this year.” Gen. Montgomery added: “I still hold to that.”
The commander of the Allied invasion armies in France said:
Things are going very well, generally speaking. The great victories on the Russian front, with immense numbers of Germans being written off, are very excellent.
Everything is going well, yet you know as well as I do that the German who is fighting us is a very great fighter defensively.
Gen. Montgomery said that he visited a hospital recently where a badly wounded German prisoner was told that only a blood transfusion could save him.
“He saw the bottle of blood and asked: ‘Is that British blood?’” Gen. Montgomery said.
Told that it was and that he would die if he did not submit to the transfusion, the Nazi said, “All right I will die.” Gen. Montgomery said:
And he did. That will show you the sort of man we are fighting – fanatical Nazis who feel like that.
Yanks in black gang cheer as Nazis shell destroyer
U.S. Navy survivor camp, England (UP) –
Three members of a “black gang” below decks in the destroyer USS Glennon cheered while German shells pounded their sinking ship off the Normandy beaches.
They had not heard an order to “abandon ship” and thought the explosions were from their own guns returning the German fire.
They were rescued at the last moment by LtCdr. John D. Bulkeley, Pacific hero, who raced his PT boat through choppy waters under heavy German fire and took them off the sinking ship.
Petty Officers William Venable, 42, of Mayodan, North Carolina; Francis Dauber, 33, of Elizabeth, New Jersey; and John Valkenberg, 22, of Paterson, New Jersey, were below when an explosion damaged the Glennon in the early morning darkness.
The Glennon broke at the stern and propellers and settled into sand so firmly she could not be pulled off by tugs.
German shore batteries spotted the crippled destroyer at dawn and began sending 155mm shells across her decks.
Orders ship abandoned
Cdr. Cal Johnson of Baltimore, Maryland, ordered the ship abandoned except for a skeleton crew which was instructed to repel German raiders if they tried to board the ship. When the German barrage increased and all hope of saving the ship was abandoned, Cdr. Johnson ordered all hands off the vessel.
Down in the engine room, Petty Officers Venable, Dauber and Valkenberg, sweating to keep up steam and put out a fire in the aft section, did not hear the order.
“Give ‘em hell, boys,” shouted PO Venable above the roar of what he thought was his own ship returning the fire.
Finds ship deserted
Aboard a rescue ship, Cdr. Johnson discovered three of his men missing. Meanwhile, the “black gang” had discovered its plight when PO Valkenberg went to the galley for coffee and found the ship deserted and “all hell popping.”
The ship was barely afloat when Cdr. Bulkeley reached it. The missing “black gang” was standing calmly on deck.
Cdr. Johnson again gave the order to “abandon ship” and the three clambered down a ladder to the PT.
Dewey to visit GOP leaders in Pittsburgh
July 31 conference scheduled here
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Lewis aide asks for Dewey votes
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Editorial: Mr. Roosevelt’s convention
The Democratic National Convention opens tomorrow with all the suspense of a thrice-told thriller, and as much reality. Speakers will recite well-remembered lines, and delegates will arrive at their make-believe decisions written by an author who is not there. If some forget their cue, they will be prompted if they make faces at the stage manager or stick out their tongues at the audience, in revolt or boredom, that will not matter much – the end will be the same.
Mr. Roosevelt in effect has even accepted the nomination in advance. A bit hard, perhaps, on the dignity of delegates trying to give reality to the show, but effective withal. There is no other possible candidate – for 10 years he has killed off politically every potential successor as rapidly as one arose.
He has also written most of his own platform. So, the delegates will not have to bother with policy decisions. It is said to be a well-polished document, first outlined by his chief scribe, Judge Rosenman, and then rewritten by Mr. Roosevelt himself. Maybe room has been left here and there for lesser men to fill in the chinks, and a little argument may arise over that humble labor, but the completed product will have the symmetry which only a single architect can achieve. Compromises, to be sure, but his own.
Doubtless that is only fair to the candidate. For he has decided it is better politics for him to make few campaign speeches, thus denying to himself the customary candidate’s privilege of recasting the party’s platform as he goes along.
Anyway, the Democratic platform is singularly unimportant this year. Mr. Roosevelt’s record, for better or for worse, is the actual platform. His promises won’t count. The most naïve voter will not suppose that this candidate can provide more wisdom or efficiency, if returned to the White House, than he has already shown while in office. Being a fourth-term aspirant thus has its disadvantages. Whatever the platform verbiage or the nominee’s maneuvers, his candidacy perforce boils down to a four-word appeal: “More of the same.”
Whether that appeal will elect Mr. Roosevelt again depends less on him and his party than on Mr. Dewey and the Republicans. “More of the same” is not good enough for many independent voters – how many, will be determined chiefly by Mr. Dewey ability to convince the dissatisfied voters that a younger and freer administration would be more progressive and efficient than the same old bureaucracy under the same one-man rule.
Because that would-be indispensable man is not as young or as vigorous as he once was, which increases the possibility that he would not finish his fourth term if elected, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee must be picked consciously as a potential President. Hence the unusual public and party concern over the second man on the ticket, who may become first. Mr. Roosevelt, nothing loath, is taking care of that too. He gave Mr. Wallace a perfunctory pat on the back, but then said he was leaving the choice open to the delegates.
However, no running mate can be chosen without his approval. In 1940, he forced the unpopular Mr. Wallace on the unwilling convention. But his aides – who have to make the delegates take it and like it – are begging him to be more considerate of the convention’s pride this time. Apparently, he has agreed. But if he refrains from dictating his choice openly, he will OK the man in secret – hands-off gestures in public notwithstanding.
Even in the best-bossed convention – and there has never been one like this -* there is always a chance of minor revolt and a few delegates breaking away. Texas now threatens to do just that. But this would not upset the convention’s preordained decisions. For the Southern politicians as a whole have one thing at least in common with the other delegates, including the New Deal office-holders and the Kelly-Flynn-Hague machines: They must accept Roosevelt dictation or else.
Such is this command performance for the candidate who says: “I would accept and serve, but I would nor run in the usual partisan, political sense. But if the people command me…” Certainly there is nothing “usual” about this performance. Neither is that the kind of “command” Mr. Roosevelt says he craves from the American people.
Background of news –
Second invasion front Nazi’s chief worry
By Col. Frederick Palmer
A threat to the German defense of a more serious breakthrough than that of the Russian armies on the Eastern Front is that of a second invasion front in the west. It is this which may be the decisive front of the war in Europe and speed the end.
The haunting question for Hitler and his generals is not limited to an “if and when” a second front comes. They must prepare on the basis that it is bound to come while they wonder where.
In the very threat Gen. Eisenhower holds a master Allied trump card to play at the right moment on the offensive, while all Hitler’s trump cards on the defensive are already on the table. For Hitler in not having enough divisions in reserve to hold this second front in addition to enough to hold the Normandy front would invite disaster. The one which he could not pin down could make the breakthrough.
Of the 60 divisions the Germans are reported to have in France, 25 or 30 are already massed on the Normandy front. These are gradually losing ground, although yet far from any decisive extent.
Can’t draw on Russian front
Hitler can hardly afford to draw on his Russian front to reinforce the other divisions he has in France. These divisions are all he has to meet a second front and to suppress the growing patriot forces within France.
The present front in France is 100 miles long. The Gothic Line to which the Germans are withdrawing in Italy, back of Livorno and Florence, is the same length. The ground favors infantry tactics in defense. There are hedges, hills and walls for cover.
Compared to the 200-mile front the Germans are defending in France and Italy, they are already under Russian attack over a 1,000-mile front and may have to face it on an additional 500 miles. This is a patent reason why they should shorten their Eastern Front when they are in danger of having to meet another and possibly two more fronts in the west.
Counting that they have 20 divisions in Italy, 60 in France, and those in Yugoslavia and in home garrison and training, the Germans cannot possibly have more than 150 divisions on the 1,500-mile Eastern Front. Where they may have one division to every 10 miles in the east, they have one division to a mile and a half on the Normandy front.
Once the breakthrough comes
This can largely account, after they were outmaneuvered by the first impact of the Russian offensive, for their depending upon desperate resistance by strongpoints to protect their withdrawal. There were openings along that long, thinly-held German front in the east for free tactical movements in which Russian cavalry could follow through and even break through. The ground, the terrain, favors fluid warfare.
On the Normandy Front, the terrain helps to lock the door on fluid warfare and would exclude the use of cavalry as sheer suicidal insanity. The fight there remains as infantry grapple.
It is not unlikely that before our soldiers on the Normandy Front see Paris the Russian armies will have Warsaw and have swept across old Poland to the old German border in Silesia. But once the breakthrough comes in the west, we can move across France as swiftly as the German armies did in 1940.
Another D-Day in preparation may be worse news for Hitler than the first one.
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
One day while we were up on the Cherbourg Peninsula, I decided all of a sudden that I couldn’t face C rations that evening. And Bob Capa, the photographer, said he never could face C rations in the first place. So, we laid a plan.
We got a friendly mess sergeant to drum us up some cans of Vienna sausage, some sugar, canned peas, and whatnot, and we put them in a pasteboard box.
Then we walked around a couple of hedgerows to our motor pool and dug out Pvt. Lawrence Wedley Cogan from the comfortable lair he had prepared for himself in an oats field.
Pvt. Cogan drives a command car for the G-2 section of the 9th Infantry Division. When we can catch him not driving for G-2, we can talk him into driving us somewhere.
So, we piled in and dir4ected Chauffeur Cogan to set out for the nearby village of Les Pieux. When we got there, Capa, who speaks eight languages – and, as his friends say, “none of them well” – went into a restaurant to make his investigations.
Pretty soon he came to the door and motioned. So, Cogan parked the car behind a building, we took our box of canned stuff, and in we went.
C rations for a café dinner
It was a typical French village restaurant, with low ceilings, and floors that sagged, and it consisted of four or five rooms. It was crammed with French people, for we had only just taken Les Pieux and not many Americans had found the place yet.
The woman who ran the place took us to a long table. Pvt. Cogan was dirty with the grease and dust of his job and went off to wash before eating again in civilized fashion.
The cosmopolitan Capa made a deal and we traded our rations for the café’s regular dinner, in order not to take anything away from the French. We had expected to pay the full price anyhow, but when the bill came, they charged us only for the cooking, and wouldn’t take a bit more.
The restaurant had no small tables, only one long one in each room. Consequently, we were seated with French people. They seemed eager to be friendly, and pretty soon we were in the thick of conversation. That is, Capa and the French were in conversation, and occasionally he would relay the gist of it to Cogan and me, the hicks.
The people told us about the German occupation, but they didn’t have much bad to say about the Germans. Then we talked of the French underground, which had just been coming out in the open in the previous few days.
Throughout our dinner, Pvt. Cogan, in his soiled coveralls, listened and beamed and ate and took in eagerly the words he couldn’t understand and the scene so new and strange to him.
One middle-aged Frenchwoman made over him because he looked so young. Cogan isn’t bashful, but he couldn’t talk French so he just grinned. Pvt. Cogan joined the Army at 17. He was overseas before he was 18, and he is only 19 now. His home is Alexandria, Virginia. He is one of the nicest human beings you ever met.
Cogan wants to see action
No matter what you ask him to do, or what time of night it is, or in what weather you dig him out, he does it good-naturedly and without the silent surliness of some drivers.
When we left the restaurant, he was all a-bubble and said over and over again that he’d had the best time that evening he had ever had in the Army. Imagine him, he said, seeing foreign stuff like this as young as he is.
Next day, the international trio – Capa, Cogan and Pyle – went out again. But this time it was different. This was the trip I’ve been writing about the past several days, when we went into Cherbourg with am attacking infantry company of the 9th Division.
When we got to our forward battalion command post, we got out of the car and told Cogan to go back about a mile and wait for us, as it was too dangerous to wait up there. And do you know what Cogan did? Cogan looked at us almost pleadingly, and said: “Would you let me go with you?”
We said of course, if he wanted to. Cogan jumped out of the car like a jumping-jack, buckled n two big belts of ammunition, grabbed his rifle, and was ready to go.
He stayed with us clear through that afternoon. When Capa went farthest forward to get his pictures of surrendering Germans, Cogan hopped along behind him with his loaded rifle, as though to protect him.
Fine soldier, that Cogan
Of course, what he did will seem asinine to any combat soldier who would give a fortune to keep out of combat instead of seeking it. Yet the willingness to do anything that is asked of you, and the eagerness to experience things that aren’t asked of you, make a real trooper.
When we got to camp that night, Capa said: “That, Cogan, he’s one of the finest soldiers I’ve ever met in this Army.” Righto.
Wolfert: Yanks’ plea for surrender creates havoc in Nazi line
Men who made it in the dark describe how they connived to escape and give up
By Ira Wolfert, North American Newspaper Alliance
With the U.S. infantry outside Saint-Lô, France – (July 14, delayed)
The story of what happened in the German lines here as the result of what seemed to us an abortive propaganda broadcast was told by three German prisoners who gave themselves up on account of it.
One was a sergeant-major, a professional soldier with 15 years’ experience, whose tank calls for a regimental or at least a battalion command post but who has been serving as a platoon leader in place of second and first lieutenants lost by the Nazis in Russia. Another was a corporal of Carlsbad, a Nazi who was but eight years old when Hitler first came into power, and the third was a private who had also been educated only by Hitler.
The corporal and private were serving together at the time of the broadcast and the sergeant-major was commanding his platoon in another part of the lune. The corporal said his commanding officer, a Prussian about 25-year-old, kept shouting throughout the broadcast that anyone who listens to this broadcast will be shot. At the same time, the adjutant was on a telephone calling for artillery fire against the broadcasting van and loudspeakers.
Nazis fire on own men
As soon as the broadcast ended, eight men made a break for the American lines from foxholes and the commanding officer ordered machine guns to open up on them. The machine guns were fired and the eight men fell flat, whether to protect themselves or because they were killed is not yet known.
During the day, the corporal said the whole company took advantage of the times when their commanding officer was busy elsewhere to talk of the broadcast and of means of surrendering. It was suggested that somebody kill the commanding officer and then the whole outfit would walk over in body. But there was no one with the courage to start that kind of mutiny and, anyway, American fire on the position there was so heavy and fairly constant, that everybody was afraid to get out of his hole during the course of the day.
Men killed in holes
American sharpshooters killed three men in their holes and American mortars wounded three others.
The German corporal told only his buddy of his plans, he said. He was going to wait for darkness and then try to make it to the American lines.
The American broadcast had promised them good treatment if they came over, and they certainly were not getting good treatment from the Americans where they were. His buddy said he wouldn’t take the chance. If their own soldiers didn’t kill them in the darkness, then the Americans would.
Buddy follows along
About 1 o’clock in the morning the corporal lifted himself out of his foxhole and started running. His buddy, seeing him go three or four paces without being struck dead by the omnipotent Hitler, scuttled after him.
The corporal told me:
There was a burst from our machine guns, first once, then twice more, but I kept on running. I broke through a hedge then, and there was a little field ahead with dead animals in it and some dead soldiers. I fell over one but I don’t know whether it was German or American. It was too dark then to tell. There was another hedge and road, and still another hedge, then Americans.
They said, “Hends hop,” to me.
Story confirmed
His buddy confirmed the story in every detail. Every company has its diehard Nazis who can’t hope to live if they lose the war and these men will continue firing their weapons until they are killed.
The platoon leader hadn’t heard the broadcast. He has been busy in a hole with the wounded but he knew his men had had something to think about all day besides their duties, he said.
Finally, at 5 o’clock in the afternoon a friend, a sergeant, whispered to him cautiously about the broadcast. The sergeant-major agreed it might be a good idea to surrender but he did not confide his idea to the platoon. He seems to have been afraid the diehard Nazis in it might kill him, or even that some of the men who were afraid to surrender, would stay where they were and spoil his plans in order to ingratiate themselves with higher officers who would give them jobs in the rear.
The sergeant-major told only the sergeant what he wanted to do. The sergeant told another man he trusted, who told a third and so on down the line.
In all of the 35 men in the platoon, there were only seven who could be trusted. These seven said they would wait for the sergeant-major to make it and if he made it safely, then he should signal them and they would follow.
He made it safely but what happened to the seven others is not known here. If they responded to the signal, then perhaps they were killed doing so.
Shapiro: Strong men after battle weep like little children
Their hands shake, and they have to be aided to walk, but they will get all right
By L. S. B. Shapiro, North American Newspaper Alliance
With the British forces in Normandy, France – (July 26, delayed)
This is an ugly story. It may not make pleasant reading and yet it should be written because it is as much a part of the war as a great battle filled with brave incidents.
Indeed, you cannot know what until you have moved, as I did this morning, to a field clearing station behind out advancing battle line between the Odon and Orne Rivers.
The reception tent was empty when two British soldiers were brought in, bolstered by the arms of two ambulance drivers. They were ragged and all one could see on their mud-stained faces were saucer-like eyes staring straight ahead.
One was a slight man who wore spectacles and had blond hair. The other was a dark, rugged man with a fine head and a great pair of shoulders. They seemed not to be wounded, but somehow their legs weren’t working and they were almost carried to canvas chairs in opposite corners of the tent.
Weep like children
There they wept hysterically, and their choking sibs made them sound curiously like nursery children.
An orderly pulled up a chair beside the blond-haired soldier and talked rapidly into his ear, at the same time stroking his back. His sobbing ceased somewhat and the soldier rubbed his hands feverishly over his face, then turned to look at the orderly.
He opened his mouth, but nothing audible came to his lips. Then he put his face into his cupped hands and wept again.
The orderly lifted the soldier’s head and pushed a cigarette between his lips. But before a match could be applied, the cigarette fell to the ground.
Hands shake
Again, the orderly patted his back, lit the cigarette himself and placed it in the soldier’s mouth. The younger puffed feverishly, and smoke drifted out of his nostrils and made him cough. He mumbled some inaudible words and his hands shook so desperately that the orderly grasped them and held them tightly.
On the other side of the tent, the dark, rugged soldier was being helped to his feet by a doctor. Together they began walking toward the exit, the hefty soldier stumbling along like a baby learning how to walk.
The blond, slight man watched them pass and his eyes followed them across the tent and out into the open, and a flicker of a smile played on his quivering lips as though he were amused by such helplessness on the part of the other soldier.
He seemed normal for a moment, then suddenly the cigarette dropped from his lips and his hands pawed at his cheeks and eyes and he wept hysterically.
The doctor returned to the tent and looked at him.
He whispered to me:
Battle exhaustion. The boy has been under shell and mortar fire for six days in exposed positions. We will put them to sleep for a couple of days and they’ll be all right.
Quick-thinking saves outpost
Radioman on boat gets word through
By Sgt. Pete Zurlinden, USMC combat correspondent
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First year of peace will bring back nylons
Scientists promise nine pairs for each woman in America when war ends
By Gertrude Bailey
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