Circus to resume its tour July 30
…
Army works out ballot details
Rome, Italy (UP) –
U.S. Army authorities have completed preparation for conducting a presidential election among the soldiers in all commands of the North African and Italian theaters of war.
Three hundred voting officers have been appointed and by Tuesday, it was said, there will be 500 commissioned officers prepared to handle the many complications of conducting an election more than 3,000 miles from home. Each officer will receive two days of special training in the soldier ballot and voting procedure.
Army authorities are maintaining the strictest of political neutrality in making certain that every soldier learns how to properly cast his ballot. In this connection, it was announce, “the first big job will be the distribution of postcard applications for state ballots during the first week of August.”
Editorial: Candidate Roosevelt accepts
Mr. Roosevelt can be either a wartime President and Commander-in-Chief above partisanship, or he can misuse that position as a candidate for a fourth term. Last night, he took advantage of his office to launch a political campaign from a naval base. For months the Republicans had predicted that he would do something like that. We did not believe he would be so crude. We were wrong.
Not that there was anything new in his formal acceptance speech. He used the same I-am-above-politics pose in his advance acceptance from the White House earlier this month, the same Commander-in-Chief excuse for his candidacy. But that he would time a military inspection trop for a partisan appeal to his party convention did not seem quite up to his protestations as expressed in his letter to Chairman Hannegan.
“I shall not campaign in the usual sense for the office,” he said last night. “In these days of tragic sorrow, I do not consider it fitting. In these days of global warfare, I shall not be able to find the time.”
But he found time to route his military train through Chicago for a secret conference with his political chief of staff. He found time to dictate the party platform. He found time from his naval base inspection to run the partisan convention by phone through his party henchmen. He found time to make a partisan campaign speech.
Fortunately, the conduct of the war will not suffer too much. For our real military commanders are forbidden to be political candidates and do not run parties for personal power.
Of course, Mr. Roosevelt does not think he is being partisan. Granted the indispensable idea, the only partisanship is opposition to him. If you vote for him, you transcend party. As he said last night, “in the last three elections the people of the United States have transcended party affiliation.” Or as his spokesman, Convention Chairman Jackson, put it in warning against a Roosevelt defeat: “We must not allow the American ballot box to be made Hitler’s secret weapon.”
Certainly, that is not a “campaign in the usual sense.”
Editorial: Playing politics with war
If you hadn’t heard or read it, you could hardly believe it.
Senator Samuel D. Jackson, Democratic Convention Chairman, went the full limit to make a party issue of the war. Here are his exact words:
A change in national administration in time of war… is frightening to contemplate. It is dangerous to make… [It] might well prove to be the tragedy of this generation… Our people will not gamble with the lives of their sons…
But how many battleships would a Democratic defeat be worth to Tōjō? How many Nazi legions would it be worth to Adolf Hitler? Frankly, could Goebbels himself do better to bolster Axis morale than the word that the American people had upset this administration… We must not allow the American ballot box to be made Hitler’s secret weapon!
There it is. If you dare vote against a fourth term, you “gamble with the lives” of our sons, you give aid to the enemy, you make the election “Hitler’s secret weapon.” Treason?
Isn’t that going just a little too far even for a spokesman of the indispensable Commander-in-Chief?
Editorial: Extermination camps
For many months, there has been little doubt that the Nazis have been operating extermination camps in Upper Silesia, but official confirmation has just come from two European relief committees with headquarters in Switzerland. They give figures showing that in the two years ending last April, more than 1,715,000 Jewish refugees were put to death.
In addition, hundreds of thousands have been executed elsewhere, and many have died under the inhuman conditions prevailing during their removal to the camps. Since April, at least 400,000 Hungarian Jews have been sent to the execution halls.
Extermination has been the prime weapon in Hitler’s feindish plot to control Europe. There has been little difference between the execution chambers using poison gas and the firing squads using bullets. Even famine has been promoted to decimate populations in the occupied lands.
In the darkest days of barbarism, centuries ago, more inhuman treatment of conquered populations would have been hard to find.
Jackson calls change now ‘dangerous’
Says enemies of U.S. would profit by it
Chicago, Illinois (UP) –
Senator Samuel D. Jackson, Democratic nominee for Governor of Indiana, told the Democratic National Convention yesterday that a change in national administration in time of war was “frightening to contemplate” and that it was “dangerous to make.”
Mr. Jackson said the Republican Party, “to counteract the disadvantage of having such an unusually young and unpracticed candidate” (New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey), was attempting to make “an asset of a liability” by stressing Mr. Dewey’s youth against the “decadence” of the present administration.
Mr. Jackson said:
That last word “decadence” is an indecent slander, if intended for the President. Roosevelt is in full vigor and in the flower of his energy. He has more rugged vitality in him today than any two men the opposition has to offer.
The opposition offered weak and unwholesome pap to the American voters three campaigns in succession. The American voters would not take it from Hoover in 1932. They would not take it from Landon in 1936. They would not take it in 1940, and they will not take it in 1944.
‘To carry New York’
Mr. Jackson asserted that Mr. Dewey was selected as a nominee in the hope that the 47 New York State electoral votes would carry the Old Guard back to the White House.
“What a fantastically vain hope that is,” he declared. “But in that hope, they are willing to take the risk of his obvious inexperience…”
‘Wisdom is needed’
He said:
What the Presidency demands now, is not so much a bright young man, as a man of wisdom and experience with depth and breadth of vision.
America will win this war finally and completely, no matter who is elected President of the United States next November.
But how many battleships would a Democratic defeat be worth to Tōjō? How many Nazi legions would it be worth to Adolf Hitler?
Frankly, could Goebbels himself do better to bolster Axis morale than the word that the American people had upset this administration – the administration that made it possible for the Russians to drive the Nazis back to the Prussian border?
We must not allow the American ballot box to be made Hitler’s secret weapon.
Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller wins equal rights fight
Constitutional amendment battle won against Mrs. Roosevelt’s, Frances Perkins’ opposition
By Robert Taylor, Pittsburgh Press staff writer
Chicago, Illinois –
Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller, sister of U.S. Senator Joseph F. Guffey and Democratic National Committeewoman for Pennsylvania, won a hard-fought victory in the drafting of the 1944 Democratic platform. She obtained the adoption by the Platform Committee and the ratification by the party convention late yesterday, of a plank advocating approval by Congress of a constitutional amendment on equal rights for women.
Her opposition included Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt (wife of the President), Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, half a dozen leading women’s organizations, and a sizable part of the Platform Committee itself, who preferred to duck the issue.
Mrs. Miller, however, had taken steps to see that she got a voice on the Platform Committee. The Pennsylvania delegation had designated Mrs. Miller and Senator Guffey as the state’s representatives on the committee.
Senator Guffey was busy handling details of Vice President Wallace’s campaign for renomination during most of the platform discussions, but Mrs. Miller sat in on committee discussions and also appeared as a witness before her own committee.
Mrs. Miller, active in political affairs for years, is a legislative chairman of the National Woman’s Party, chief proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment, but said she appeared in her witness role as a national committee member.
The National Woman’s Party contends that, despite legal guarantees, women still don’t have equal rights under many state laws in matters regarding property, employment, jury service and marital affairs, and that the way to correct the condition is by constitutional amendment.
Opponents objected that the amendment would sweep away laws for the protection of women in industry. Mrs. Roosevelt sent a message saying that, until they were more highly unionized, it would be a hardship on women in industry. Secretary Perkins called the proposed amendment “drastic and ill-considered.”
Mrs. Miller, however, pointed out that the Republican Convention last month adopted an equal-rights-for-women plank, and although other committee members tried to develop an acceptable substitute, she stood her ground.
“This is the happiest day for me,” she said as the convention approved the platform with her plank in it, saying:
We favor legislation assuring equal pay for equal work, regardless of sex. We recommend to Congress the submission of a constitutional amendment on equal rights for women.
Poll: Two-party system favored by South
Believes it could gain more attention
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
…
Helen Gahagan accuses GOP of doubletalk
Says Democrats are conservative party
Chicago, Illinois (UP) –
Mrs. Helen Gahagan Douglas, national committeewoman from California, said last night in an address to the Democratic Convention that the Democratic Party is “the true conservative party” and the Republican leaders “are the dreamers.”
Mrs. Douglas, actress wife of movie actor Melvin Douglas, accused the Republicans of “doubletalk” and said the Democratic Party had conserved hope and ambition “in the hearts of our people.”
She said:
We have conserved the skills of their hands. We have husbanded our national resources. We have saved millions of homes and farms from foreclosure and conserved the family stake and democracy.
Conserve faith in government
We have rescued banks and trust companies, insured crops and people’s savings. We have built schools. We have checked the flooding rivers and turned them into power.
We have replanted the forest, re-fertilize the soil. Ours is the conservative party. We have conserved the people’s faith in a people’s government – a democracy.
‘GOP leaders are dreamers’
Mrs. Douglas said that because they are the conservative party, the Democrats reject “the hazy Republican dream” that the nation can get along “with its government dismantled, its housing programs destroyed, its wage and price controls thrown out the window.”
“The Republican leaders are the dreamers,” she said. “They have no contact with the people or with the realities of their wants and needs.”
Mrs. Douglas said the Republican program is a dream, “a nightmare of muddle and confusion.” She said there are not enough Democrats to elect a President, nor enough Republicans.
Best friend of GOP
She said:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt has been elected President for three successive terms – and each time the Republicans have helped put him into office.
The last three elections have shown that the Democratic Party has been the best friend the Republican rank-and-file voter has ever had: He knows it, and he has voted accordingly.
‘It’s doubletalk’
Criticizing the Republican presidential nominee, New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, and the Republican platform, Mrs. Douglas said:
The Republican candidate has pledged himself to carry to Japan a defeat so crushing and complete that every last man among them will know that he has been beaten.
And at the same time, the Republican platform does not indicate by a single line – or a single word that there is any need for further sacrifice. That is doubletalk.
The Republican Party has pledged itself to reduce taxes to the normal expenditures of the government as soon as the war ends, and also has pledged itself to reduce the national debt. It has not explained how taxes and debts can be so reduced at the same time. That is doubletalk.
The Republican Party declares that it is the party of the Constitution, but its nominee declares that he will not participate in the active management of the war.
Argument called inept
This thoughtless and inept argument ignores the fact that our Founding Fathers carefully provided for civilian control of the military as the only possible safeguard of democratic life. The Constitution gave the people the right to elect a civilian Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.
Yet the Republican nominee runs for the office of Commander-in-Chief on the solemn pledge that, if elected, he will not fulfill his duties. That is doubletalk.
It’s no foreign war, Reynolds tells conclave
Correspondent replies to Clare Luce speech
Chicago, Illinois (UP) –
War correspondent Quentin Reynolds told the Democratic National Convention last night that American servicemen have learned “this was no foreign war,” and on foreign soils have discovered “an outpost of America where there are no barriers.”
“They learned this was no foreign war when they first landed in England,” he said.
There, he said, when American men saw the scars of war on the House of Commons, which “has always been the symbol of free speech in Britain,” and Westminster Abbey, which “has been the symbol of the Christian way of life,” they knew that Hitler was waging war against “our ideals and our way of life.”
Answer to Mrs. Luce
Apparently referring to Rep. Clare Boothe Luce’s “G.I. Jim” speech at the Republican Convention, Mr. Reynolds said:
I do not propose to speak for your son abroad, and I never would commit the unholy sacrilege of speaking for his dead brother who has been killed in combat. No man – or woman – can speak for him. We can only accept his sacrifice humbly and not presume to speak for him with our unworthy tongues.
No barriers at fronts
Mr. Reynolds, who has toured many of the battlefronts, said American men overseas had found out one thing about war… “There are no barriers at the front.”
He said:
Kids here at home grow up surrounded by barriers… all man-made.
Neighborhood barriers, city barriers, state barriers, social barriers, racial barriers, political barriers, barriers of wealth. You climb over one barrier only to find another ahead of you.
Then you find yourself at the front, thousands of miles from home. And suddenly, perhaps for the first time in your life, you realize that here on American soil, as an outpost of America, where there are no barriers. This was always the dream you’d had of America, a dream that never before has come quite true.
There are no Democrats or Republicans at the front; there are no Italian-Americans or Polish-Americans; there are no New Yorkers or Californians or Texans or New Englanders… Only Americans… Only Americans purged of the artificial barriers we still make so much of here at home.
A ‘G.I.’ has the answer
Mr. Reynolds warned that the nation’s fighting men abroad are so proud of their country they would “hate to see it tarnished by the sad spectacle of fellow Americans indulging in the childish pastime of name calling.” He said the reaction of men in uniform to a “smear campaign” by either party would be unfavorable.
Aboard a troopship on the way into Salerno last September, Mr. Reynolds said, a soldier best expressed what Americans are fighting for when he said:
“Added all together, and it means we’re fighting for the right to bawl out the umpire.”
GOP, Democratic platforms have great deal in common
Comparison shows that trend of times has put its mark on both parties’ policymakers
By Raymond Lahr, United Press staff writer
Chicago, Illinois –
The Democratic Party hopes to win the 1944 campaign on its record of 12 years in power during war and peace and on a terse platform of 1,200 words set against a 4,000-word Republican declaration.
The party platform, adopted by the National Convention yesterday, began:
The Democratic Party stands on its record in peace and in war. To speed victory, establish and maintain peace, guarantee full employment and provide prosperity – this is its platform. We do not here detail scores of planks. We cite action.
That contrasted with this paragraph of the Republican platform:
Four more years of New Deal policy would centralize all power in the President, and would daily subject every act of every citizen to regulation by his henchmen; and this country could remain a Republic only in name.
Contain common pledges
The two platforms contain some common pledges, some divergent ones and some in sharp conflict. Here is a comparison of some of the planks.
Foreign policy
DEMOCRATIC: The party pledged “to join with the other United Nations and the establishment of an international organization based on the principle of sovereign equality of all peace-loving states… to make all necessary and effective agreements through which the nations would maintain adequate forces to meet the needs of preventing war and of making impossible the preparation for war and which would have such forces available for joint action when necessary. Such organization must be endowed with power to employ armed forces when necessary to prevent aggression and preserve peace.”
REPUBLICAN:
We favor responsible participation by the United States in post-war cooperative organization among sovereign nations to prevent military aggression and to attain permanent peace with organized justice in a free world. Such organization should develop effective cooperative means to direct peace forces to prevent or repel military aggression.
Race problems
DEMOCRATIC:
We believe that racial and religious minorities have the right to live, develop and vote equally with all citizens and share the rights that are guaranteed by our Constitution. Congress should exert its full constitutional powers to protect those rights.
REPUBLICAN: The party endorsed a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee, anti-poll tax and anti-lynching legislation, and an inquiry into discrimination in the Armed Forces.
Agriculture
Both parties endorsed support prices and crop insurance. The Democrats promised “to foster the success of the small independent farmer” and “to aid the home ownership of the family-sized farm.” The Republicans endorsed measures “to make life more attractive” on the family farm. The Republicans condemned the Roosevelt administration for “confused, unreliable, impractical price and production” policy during the war and implicitly accused it of regimenting farmers.
Labor
DEMOCRATIC: The Democratic platform contained no specific plank on labor, but promised adequate compensation to demobilized war workers and enactment of additional legislation or the amendment or repeal of existing laws as experience indicated the need.
REPUBLICAN: The Republicans charged the administration with “selfish and partisan control” over government labor agencies, with perverting the National Labor Relations Act, emasculating the Labor Department and undermining collective bargaining. They “accepted the purposes” of the labor relations, wage-hour, Social Security and other laws for the protection of workers.
Miscellaneous
Both parties pledged to support submission of a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal rights for women; equal pay to women for equal work; free access to world news; encouragement for risk capital; liberal benefits for war veterans; reduction in wartime taxes as soon as possible; encouragement for little business; expansion of foreign trade through reciprocal agreements (with the Republicans adding a proviso requiring approval by Congress); development of self-government in Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, and the opening of Palestine to unrestricted Jewish immigration.
Defiant Texas delegates assail ‘power politics’
‘Regulars,’ pushed around in convention, say CIO and Communists ousted them
Chicago, Illinois (UP) –
“We ran into a buzzsaw of power politics,” members of the Texas delegation at the Democratic National Convention who walked out of the convention said today.
They made the comment in a statement addressed through Texas Democrats. A copy was sent to the Democratic National Committee. It was signed by the dissident members of the delegation who left the Chicago Stadium yesterday after the convention voted to split Texas’ votes between the “Regular” (anti-fourth-term) delegation and the rump delegation, which supported President Roosevelt.
Hot under the collar
The Texans said:
The bureaucrats, the CIO Political Action Committee, and a liberal sprinkling of Communists joined forces to tell Texas Democrats where they stand in national politics. The action of the Texas convention was thwarted by the Hillman, Tobin, and Browder followers who carried the ball behind the perfect interference of an army of bureaucrats.
The action of the Credentials Committee [which recommended splitting the state’s votes] was a deliberate slap at duly constituted authority. The trouble was the Regulars were not under the domination of the powerful elements that had control of the National Convention.
For this reason, it was necessary to discipline the Regulars and show Texas Democrats the consequence of disobedience to boss rule. That is exactly what the convention proceeded to do in a most arrogant and dictatorial manner.
A complaint was made that the convention’s Rules Committee turned “thumbs down” on the reinstatement of the two-thirds rule for nominations, and that the platform adopted by the convention was written “designed to secure the support of Negroes, the CIO, the Communists, and other radical groups.”
Texas planks turned down
Noting that every plank proposed by the Texas delegation was rejected, the statement complained specifically of refusal to recognize “reserved power of states to determine qualification of voters and to regulate public school attendance without interference from the federal government.”
“Worst of all,” it said, was refusal to approve passage of a law to prohibit management-labor contracts from requiring any war veteran to join an organization or pay a fee to get employment.
A special train leaving tomorrow will carry most of the Texas delegates from both Texas factions.
Chaplin’s first wife, silent film star, dies
Mildred Harris was attempting comeback; divorce from Charlie created storm
…
On the Normandy front –
Casey: ‘Forgotten soldiers’ keep war machine in motion
Unrecognized, engineers and Signal Corps fight battle of communications and supply
By Robert J. Casey
U.S. front in Normandy, France – (July 19, delayed)
You don’t have to look at this war very long to realize that the most important part of it, aside from the riflemen in the frontlines, is to be found in the roads behind. Actually, it is here that you get some cohesive idea of the purpose and extent of the Allied drive.
Impressions of a battle, where it is fought behind dikes and hedges, necessarily must be isolated – a tank working here, infantry crawling through an orchard against machine guns there. But in the backroads and sunken lanes, you can see the war, terrible in its power, rolling forward with all the strange gadgets and accoutrements with which modern military science has equipped it.
No one who has not been tangled in it can envision the traffic on these channels from the beaches to the front. The principal routes are still good auto roads, or had been until D-Day changed the face of Normandy. Now, literally thousands of trucks, jeeps, tanks, halftracks, command cars, tractors, bulldozers, self-propelled artillery, motorcycles, mobile derricks and tank carriers pour over them 24 hours a day.
Pavements holding up
The pavements are holding up better than you would think. If any of them could be closed, a mile or two at a time for a few hours, the road crews that did the miraculous job of constructing airplane runways in England could lay new broad pavements over the old at an astonishing rate. But they can’t be closed and engineers work in disheartening competition with traffic.
Nobody thinks much about these forgotten men of the war, these pick-and-shovel soldiers, but as you follow the highway over newly-built bridges and past blasted villages and watch it widening and straightening before your eyes, you wonder how this battle, dependent as it is on mechanized material, could have been fought without them.
Wars in civilized communities seem to leave roads with typical scars, most of them on telephone and transmission lines. You’d naturally think wires strung on poles well away from the blasts on the pavement would suffer little damage from artillery or mines, but from every pole, festoons of broken wire hang like jungle growth. Flying fragments have found these impossible targets, cut the cables and shattered the insulators.
Other forgotten soldiers
So along with the engineers march other forgotten soldiers, the never-sleeping men of the Signal Corps. Along even the most remote lanes you are constantly passing signal trucks from which new wire is being reeled out in staggering quantities, thousands of miles of it.
You run into these men under shellfire at artillery observation posts and advance CPs enmeshed in communication webs that seem always a hopeless tangle, lifting wire out of ditches onto tree branches, hunting for breaks, making spices with no apparent concern for the death whistling over them or exploding around them.
The highways of the beachhead are marked with signs put there before the war by French touring clubs or local departments, more legible German markers and directions to American units, in a variety of colors and a jargon of codenames.
MPs on the job
Despite all this, a messenger might still have to go home with his important communication were it not for the MPs, who stand at every crossroads in the entire area. They are a remarkable set of men, these. Most of them never saw France until D-Day, but they can tell you which is the shortest road to any town you may name, where you make your turnings, which roads are well-paved, which under shellfire, and they have memorized more unit codenames and locations than you would find in a transatlantic cable book.
This is remarkable enough in itself. When you consider that command posts and dressing stations and such are constantly moving, it is something close to miraculous.
Civilians mingle oddly with the traffic along the roads and caravans of war give them priority. After all, whose country is it? Their carts and cattle mingle with artillery columns and families in horse-drawn buggies ride along with halftracks and tanks. Church processions and funerals go on as if there were no constant avalanche of transport on the throbbing pavements. As far forward as artillery echelons it is no uncommon thing to see them in silent ranks with front-bound doughboys.
Flags welcome liberators
War hasn’t displaced these people. It has merely infiltrated through them and the strangely incongruous lives of military and peasantry go their independent ways side by aide but never touching.
Since long before Bastille Day, flags have been flying from houses along the battle routes – French, American, English – most of them homemade and all of them odd to look upon. Over some doors in towns are banners bearing strange devices “Hail Roosevelt and de Gaulle,” “Death to the Boche,” “Welcome Americans our Liberators.” And, of course, there are always the inevitable children at every doorstep, waving two uplifted fingers at the soiled G.I.’s.
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
When the now-famous Gen. Karl Wilhelm von Schlieben was captured, I happened to be at the 9th Division command post to which he was first brought.
Maj. Gen. Manton S. Eddy, division commander, had a long interview with him in his trailer. When he was about finished and ready to send the captured general on to higher headquarters, Gen. Eddy sent word that the photographers could come and take pictures.
So, they stood in a group in an orchard while the photographer snapped away. Von Schlieben was obviously sourpuss about being captured, and even more sourpuss at having his picture taken. He made no effort to look other than sullenly displeased.
Gen. Eddy was trying to be decent about it. He had an interpreter tell the prisoner that this was the price of being a general. Von Schlieben just snorted. And then Gen. Eddy said to the interpreter:
Tell the general that our country is a democracy and therefore I don’t have authority to forbid these photographers to take pictures.
Von Schlieben snorted again. And we chuckled behind our beards at one of the slickest examples of working democracy we had ever seen. And Gen. Eddy had the appearance of the traditional cat that swallowed something wonderful.
Normandy land of rabbits
Normandy is a land of rabbits. You see them in the fields and around the farmyards. Most of them are semi-tame. Apparently, the people eat a great deal of rabbit.
When we first moved in and began capturing permanent German bivouac areas, we found that nearly every little group of German soldiers had its own rabbit warren. They raised them for food.
One day my friend Pvt. William Bates Wescott of Culver City, California, found a mother rabbit that had been killed in the shelling, and nearby, in a nest near the hedge, he found six baby rabbits, only a few days old.
Wescott took them to his pup tent, got a ration box to put them in and spent the afternoon feeding them condensed cream through an eyedropper. They went for it like little babies. Next morning, five of them were dead.
The soldier said the concussion of bombs falling nearby during the night had killed them. I said undiluted condensed milk had killed them. At any rate, the sixth one thrived and became cute and gay.
He followed Westcott around everywhere, and if the distance got too far, he would go hopping back to the pup tent and snuggle up in Westcott’s blankets. He was quite a little rabbit. Everybody was crazy about him. Then, after about a week, we found him dead out on the grass one morning.
Which is a lousy way to end the story, but that’s all there was to it.
The town of Montebourg on the Cherbourg Peninsula is one of the worst wrecked of the towns that were fought over and shelled by both sides.
We stopped at Montebourg one day after it was all over. On one side of the city square, there was a large collection of rusted farm implements – all kinds of plows, planters, mowers and things.
On one wrecked mowing machine was the familiar name “McCormick.” And near the machine was stretched out in pathetic death a big white rabbit.
Sergeant cooks on electric iron
One night I crawled down into an ack-ack battery command post, in a dugout. It was about 2:00 a.m.
Only two people were there – a lieutenant, giving orders to the guns by telephone, and a sergeant, getting ready to fix some hot chocolate. He asked if I would have some, and following the old Army custom of never refusing anything, I said sure.
He was Sgt. Leopold Lamparty, the first sergeant of this battery, from 916 Franklin Street, Youngstown, Ohio. He used to be a bartender, and already in France he has picked up several little antique whisky glasses of old and beautiful design.
But the reason I’m writing about Lamparty is his electric iron. He made the hot chocolate on an electric iron turned upside down. Each ack-ack battery has a portable generator, so Lamparty just plugs it in.
His sister sent him the iron two years ago when he was in camp near Chicago, and he has carried it ever since. There was a long time ago when he pressed his pants with it, but a guy with pressed pants over here probably would be shot as a spy, so now Lamparty cooks with his iron.