British eight miles from Florence
Yanks mass for final assault on Pisa
By Eleanor Packard, United Press staff writer
…
Kirkpatrick: Nazis tighten restrictions on Parisians
Food situation worse, refugees say
By Helen Kirkpatrick
Bayeux, France – (July 24, delayed)
Daily, the German occupiers tighten restrictions on Paris; daily, the food situation worsens. And daily, the enemy intensifies its search for transport of any and every kind.
This is the story of Paris since D-Day, brought out by two young women who left there last week.
The Germans seized all buses in the early days of the invasion. At that time their military vehicles used to go through the city. But since, troops and supplies have been going through in civilian trucks and cars, the women said. On their way here, though they traveled entirely by road, they saw no German convoys. And all railway bridges had been cut.
Parisians were elated tremendously on D-Day but they concealed their excitement to avoid German reprisals. During invasion week, virtually every young man who had escaped forced labor or deportation disappeared into the bush.
Evacuate women
The German occupational authorities began the evacuation of women and children from the working-class districts of the city almost immediately after the Allied invasion began. Almost all etchers were taken into Germany for forced labor, only a few being allowed to remain to feed the children at lunchtime.
From June 6 on, the food situation became increasingly acute. No food shipments had arrived in the city up until the women left. For two months, they said, there had been no meat, though some vegetables and a little bread had been obtainable.
The Germans seized stocks which the French had gathered for emergency use. Only enough food remained in the whole of Paris to open 40 soup kitchens. Restaurants had had to close because of the gas restrictions. Since May, gas had been turned on only between 11:00 a.m. and noon, and between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m., while electricity had been permitted only between 10:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m.
Districts lack water
Some districts of Paris were without water because of insufficient pressure.
Paris had an average of eight alerts daily. Theaters and movies opened only on Saturday and Sunday. Fire services had been prohibited by the Germans from going to the scenes of air raids unless there was fire and, since all tools such as picks and shovels had been seized, it was impossible to dig victims from ruins.
The Le Chapelle district of Paris has been damaged extensively, the women said, but bodies were allowed to remain under the debris for more than two months. Many people, unhurt but buried in cellars, died from starvation. In factories during air raids the Germans closed the shelters and would not allow workers to leave what might well be a target.
Few stations open
At no time, both young women, said, did any Allied prisoners pass through Paris streets. The Germans were afraid of the reception they would have gotten from the French.
Only Gare de Lest and Gare de Lyon were open with the former station reserved for incoming German military personnel at the time the women left the city. Civilians were permitted to use the Gare de Lyon to go to southern or central France but otherwise were forbidden to leave Paris.
These two enterprising young women, who will join the French Women’s Volunteer Army, say that all Germans look sour. There is no doubt in their minds that the enemy knows it has lost the war.
231 hostages released as Nazis flee monastery
Italian civilians have narrow escape after serving as shield for German outpost
By Robert Vermillion, United Press staff writer
…
Just back from fronts –
Stimson: Keep pressure on enemies
Report carries appeal not to slow down
…
Jap-held port off Sumatra shelled, Tokyo announces
Sabang in East Indies target of attack
…
Editorial: Mild reproof
Some London newspapers have chided the liberated Norman French for shaving the heads of women collaborationists. One called the practice the “despicable technique of the Fascists.”
But we have always understood that the Fascists, or rather the Nazis in France and Italy, had not contented themselves with such mild reproof when the collaboration was with Germany’s enemies. Weren’t the concentration camp and the firing squad more typical of their technique?
The hair of the “collaboratrices” will grow back. The patriot victims of the Nazi technique will not return. We do not think that a haircut for those women who fraternized with an enemy is too severe a punishment.
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Normandy, France – (by wireless)
Let’s go to what the Ordnance branch calls one of its “mobile maintenance companies.”
This type company repairs jeeps, light trucks, small arms and light artillery. It does not take tanks, heavy trucks or big guns.
The company is bivouacked around the hedgerows of a large, grassy L-shaped pasture. There are no trees in the pasture. There is nothing in the center except some grazing horses. No man or vehicle walks or drives across the pasture. Always they stick to the tree-high hedgerows.
It is hard to conceive that here in the thin, invisible line around the edges of this empty pasture there is a great machine shop with nearly 200 men working with wrenches and welding torches, that six teams of auto mechanics are busy, that the buzz of urgent labor goes on through all the daylight hours.
Actually, there is little need for such perfect camouflages for this company is perhaps 10 miles behind the lines, and German planes never appear in the daytime. But it’s a good policy to keep in practice on camouflage.
This is a proud company. It was the first one to land in France – first, that is, behind the companies actually attached to divisions. It landed on D+2 and lost three men killed and seven wounded when a shell hit their ship as they were unloading.
Proud record in two years
For five days it was the only Ordnance company of its type ashore. Its small complement whose job in theory is to back up only one division in medium repair work carried all repair work for four divisions until help arrived.
The company had a proud record in the last war, being in nine major engagements. And it has a sentimental little coincidence in its history, too. In 1917 and in 1943, it left America for France on the same date, Dec. 12.
In one corner of the pasture is the command post tent where two sergeants and two officers work at folding tables and keep the records so necessary in ordnance.
A first lieutenant is in command of the company, assisted by five other lieutenants. Their standby is Warrant Officer Ernest Pike of Savoy, Texas, who has been in the Army 15 years, 13 of them with this very company. What he doesn’t know about practical ordnance you could put in a dead German’s eye.
In another corner of the pasture is a mess truck with its field kitchens under some trees. Here the men of the company line up for meals with mess kits, officers as well as men, and eat sitting on the grass.
The officers lounge on the grass in a little group apart and when they finish eating, they light cigarettes and play a while with some cute little French puppies they found in German strongpoints, or traded soap and cigarettes for. The officers know the men intimately and if they are in a hurry and have left their mess kits behind, they just borrow one from some soldier who has finished eating.
Unit is highly mobile
A company of this kind is highly mobile. It can pack up and be underway in probably less than an hour.
Yet ordnance figures as a basic policy that its companies must not move oftener than every six days if they are to work successfully. They figure one day for moving, one for settling down and four days of fulltime work, then move forward again.
If at any time the fighting army ahead of them gets rolling faster than this rate, the Ordnance companies begin leapfrogging each other, one working while another of the same type moves around it and sets up.
Once set up the men sleep on the ground in pup tents along the hedge with foxholes dug deep and handy. But usually, their greatest enemy is the hordes of mosquitoes that infest the hedgerows at night.
The more skilled men work at their benches and instruments inside the shop trucks. The bulk of the work outside is done under dark green canvas canopies stretched outward from the hedgerows and held taut on upright poles, their walls formed of camouflage nets.
Nothing but a vague blur is visible from a couple of hundred yards away. you have to make a long tour clear around the big pasture, nosing in under the hedge and camouflage nets to realize anything is going on at all.
In the far distance, you can hear a faint rumble of big guns, and overhead all day our own planes roar comfortingly.
But outside those fringes of war, it is as peaceful in this Normandy field as it would be in a pasture in Ohio. Why even the three liberated horses graze contentedly on the ankle-high grass, quite indifferent to the fact that this peaceful field is a part of a great war machine that will destroy their recent masters.
Editorial: Campaign corn
Right now is the time for the two national political chairmen to get together and take a stand against puns on the Republican challenger’s name and the Democratic titleholder’s terms in office. Otherwise, we shall be subjected to such bright items as “glorious Fourth,” “safe and sane Fourth,” “Dewey-eyed supporters,” “Dewey or don’t we,” and so on, ad nauseum.
So let’s have a nonpartisan embargo, quickly. Otherwise, the 1944 campaign may be remembered not as one of the most crucial campaigns in American history, but as the corniest.
Heath: Soldier vote issue tackled by Governor Dewey
By S. Burton Heath
S. Burton Heath, writing a series of articles from Albany, is substituting for Peter Edson, regular conductor of the Washington Column, who is absent from Washington.
Albany, New York –
When Governor Dewey denounced the CIO Political Action Committee the other day, without naming it, for criticizing the New York soldier vote law, he was striking at one phase of what many Democrats think may reelect President Roosevelt – the Commander-in-Chief issue.
Democrats claim and Republicans fear that the great bulk of the uniformed vote will go to the President because his war leadership is considered a known quantity while that of Mr. Dewey would have to be taken on faith and hope. Similar considerations may influence the votes of many stay-at-homes who have men in the Armed Forces.
The Democratic campaign will play that issue to the limit in every ramification Chairman Hannegan and his fellow strategists can discover or devise in hope of confirming servicemen and their relatives in their supposed pro-Rooseveltism.
As one approach, Governor Dewey’s refusal to go along on the federal ballot for servicemen is being exploited. Here, thus far, the CIO left-wing pro-Roosevelt organization appears to be doing most of the ball carrying. It is Governor Dewey’s contention that the “Citizens Non-Partisan Committee for the Servicemen’s Vote” is a CIO left-wing front with a thin window-dressing of Democrats and anti-Dewey Republicans.
Method in New York
New York State has 1,100,000 men and women in the Armed Forces. For them, contending that the federal ballot could not legally be counted under the state constitution. Governor Dewey and the Republican Legislature provided a simple method of voting.
All that the serviceman need for is send to Albany, direct or through family or friends, his name, his pre-service street address (to determine his election district) and his service address to which the ballot is to be mailed.
He will be sent exactly the same ballot he would use if he were voting at home, which he is to mark and mail back to Albany, whence it will be sent to the voter’s home election district for counting.
Last year, 62,000 New York servicemen asked for ballots and 42,000 of them actually voted – two out of three. The State War Ballot Commission estimates that 250,000 of New York’s absent servicemen are underage; some are aliens and others will not trouble to apply. If 350,000 should ask for ballots, the commission would expect, on the basis of last year’s result, about 200,000 votes.
In a close election, that number could easily decide whether New York’s 47 electoral votes shall go to President Roosevelt or Governor Dewey. Mr. Dewey lost the governorship in 1938 by 64,394, and Herbert Hoover carried New York in 1928 by only 103,481 votes.
It’s dynamite
What is considered more important – if the Democratic CIO coalition could persuade all servicemen and their families and friends that Governor Dewey, fearing the service vote, is trying to keep soldiers and sailors from voting, their action might easily decide the result in several other states.
For that reason, Governor Dewey is trying to get across his contention that it is as easy for New York servicemen to vote under his law as under the federal; and that whereas there can be no question about the legality of votes cast under his law, federal ballots might be tossed out.
He claims that, for the sake of embarrassing him, the CIO-PAC, through a front, is perpetuating a fraud upon the soldiers and sailors by trying to hand them the federal ballot.
In time of war a court might hesitate to toss our soldiers’ ballots because they did not include every office at stake in the soldiers’ home districts, but only the four officers for which the federal ballot provides.
The CIO says, “Take a chance.”
Governor Dewey says:
Let’s be sure that those who do vote shall have their ballots counted.
Background of news –
Vice Presidency to the fore
By Bertram Benedict
The vice-presidential nominations as both major party conventions this year attracted more than usual attention. The selection of Governor Bricker, one of the principal contenders for first place on the Republican ticket – and the only active one – following the refusal of Governor Warren to be considered, first focused attention on the Vice President in our government.
Then came the Democratic Convention, in which Vice President Wallace made a spirited bid for renomination, only to be rejected on the second ballot when the convention named Senator Truman (D-MO) – with the support of Southern delegations and the city bosses. Interest in the Democratic contest was high, too, because of the fact that President Roosevelt has already served more than 11 arduous years in the Presidency, and will be almost 67 years old by Jan. 20, 1949.
Under the original Constitution, the runner-up for the Presidency became Vice President. Any man who received the second largest number of votes for President would obviously be a person of parts. After a term or more as Vice President, he would have to be seriously considered for the Presidency itself when the incumbent President passed out of the picture.
Adams and Jefferson cited
And for a time that expectation was realized. The first Vice President, John Adams, was elected President when the first President retired. The second Vice President, Thomas Jefferson, became the third President. And although the next five Vice Presidents did not achieve the Presidency, each of them was quite a fellow:
- Aaron Burr (ran a tie with Jefferson for the Presidency).
- George Clinton (seven times Governor of New York).
- Elbridge Gerry (commissioner to France; twice Governor of Massachusetts).
- Daniel D. Tompkins (four times Governor of New York).
- John C. Calhoun (Secretary of War; later Secretary of State).
Then came Martin Van Buren, elected President in 1836 on Jackson’s retirement, and so far, the last Vice President promoted to the Presidency except through the death of a President.
After Van Buren came a series of undistinguished Vice Presidents, nominated in most cases to heal party wounds or give geographical balance to the ticket.
Who today knows even the names of Richard M. Johnson, William R. King, George M. Dallas, Henry Wilson of New Hampshire, William A. Wheeler? Yet these were all Vice Presidents of the United States in the four decades after 1837. For that matter, how many of the voters who actually cast their ballots for him could recall today that Charles W. Bryan (brother of William Jennings Bryan) was the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 1924?
Garner restores prestige
But with the John Nance Garner in 1933, the Vice Presidency resumed the role of important which it had played in the earlier days of the Republic. For years, Mr. Garner had been the Democratic leader of the House of Representatives and later Speaker, and as presiding officer of the Senate, he continued to be extremely potent in shaping legislation and putting it through, as long as he adhered to the New Deal.
After he broke with the Roosevelt program, Mr. Garner was potent in heading off or weakening certain New Deal measurers to which he was opposed, and he was a candidate for the presidential nomination against Mr. Roosevelt in 1940.
The defeated candidates for the Vice Presidency of late have also been men of stature. Senator Charles L. McNary (1940) was the Republican leader of the Senate, and Frank Knox (1936) later showed his abilities as Secretary of the Navy.
Fortune: Going My Way gets new high for Penn
Crosby picture’s gross amazes movie men; news of show business
By Dick Fortune
…
Tolerance and restraint needed –
Stokes: 1944 campaign may be bitterest in history
Need for safeguarding American ideals puts extra responsibility on everybody
By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer
Washington –
Evidence is accumulating that this presidential campaign is going to be one of the bitterest in history unless there is a vigilant exercise of tolerance and restraint all around.
It would seem to put an extra responsibility on everybody – on political leaders and civic leaders, on business leaders and labor leaders, on newspapers and radio, and on the individual voter, himself. For much is at stake, much precious to democracy and its ideals and forms, in the way this campaign is conducted.
The Chicago Democratic Convention has come in for much panning on various counts.
The usual spectacle
It was the usual spectacle, with its bright and its shabby aspects, its hysterics and his histrionics, its political trickery and its higher moments such as that when Vice President Henry A. Wallace stepped to the platform. It was very much like the 11 other national conventions observed by this writer since 1924. It was the same noisy, stumbling, hilarious performance that American political conventions always have been. We take our democracy that way. We like it, and it works.
There was much talk of one-man domination of the convention by President Roosevelt. After all, he is the leader of his party, and a President in office seeking renomination usually dominates the convention, as did Mr. Coolidge and Mr. Hoover in my time.
One man dominated the Republican Convention in Chicago a few weeks ago, too. Governor Thomas E. Dewey sat at the telephone in Albany to direct his own nomination for an office for which he had never acknowledged his candidacy, which is acceptable procedure in American politics.
Picked running mate
He had his handpicked candidate for the vice-presidential nomination, California Governor Earl Warren, and the convention would have taken him in a minute, except that he didn’t want the job. Ohio Governor John W. Bricker, who took it, had to have Mr. Dewey’s approval before the convention took him.
Each party got the candidate for President that the rank-and-file party members wanted overwhelmingly, according to the polls, and it has not always been that way. Democrats did not get the vice-presidential candidate who led in the polls, but the selection was thrown open to the convention, as so many had advocated, and went for more than one ballot – one of the few times it had done so in modern history.
Everybody had a run for his money, though the party leaders exercised pressure in the end, as so often happens.
GOP also has bosses
Much has been made of the big-city Democratic bosses, and few would defend them. They always have been a sordid phase of our democracy. Republicans also have their bosses, the Pews and the Grundys, representing wealth, and the Creagers and the other Southern losses with their “kept” delegations at national conventions. They once had big city bosses, too, but they haven’t been able to carry the big cities in recent years.
No party has a monopoly of virtue or villainy.
A great uproar has been raised over the attempt of labor to have a voice at the Democratic Convention through its CIO Political Action Committee directed by Sidney Hillman. Farmers and other groups have always been around conventions, and I saw embattled farmers try to storm the 1932 Republican Convention, but without success. The Grundys and the Pews have been around, too.
Mr. Hillman has been held up to opprobrium because he was born in Lithuania though this country had advertised as one of its cardinal tenets that it is a refuge for people from everywhere.
The foreign names in the CIO-PAC are recited. They read about the same as the all-American football team, or the roster of a company of American boys fighting in Normandy or the South Pacific, and like the casualty list of G.I. Jims that Clare Boothe Luce read to the Republican Convention…
Smith, Martof, Johnston, Chang, Novak, Leblanc, Konstantakis, Yamada, O’Toole, Svendsen, Sanchez, Potavin, Goldstein, Rossi, Nodal, Wroblewski, McGregor, Schneider, Jones–