Japs strike at Tarawa –
Yank planes rip Marshalls
Army, Navy fliers join in attacks on atolls
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From Italy and Africa –
50,000 V-mail greetings delivered in day here!
Postmaster says office now handles 211,000 more parcels than last year
A shipment of 50,000 V-mail Christmas greetings from North Africa and Italy was delivered in a single day this week in Pittsburgh.
But the V-mail is only a small part of the exchange of greetings that has added to the burden of employees at the Pittsburgh Post Office.
Postmaster S. A. Bodkin said today that while parcel post has been reduced slightly this year over last year, letter mail is considerably heavier.
He said:
Last year at this time, very few men were working on soldier mail. Now there are about 120 regular employees working on soldier mail alone.
This is about three times the normal complement needed to sort the mail and prepare it for shipment to the Armed Forces in camps at home and on the active front abroad.
Mr. Bodkin estimated that letter mail is already 1,300,000 pieces more than at the corresponding time last year. The deficit in parcel post is about 211,000 parcels as compared with last year.
Observing that “some response” has been felt in the appeal to mail early, Mr. Bodkin points out that mail of all sorts to be sent to soldiers within the United States must not be delayed if it is to be handled before Christmas.
Dec. 10 was the deadline for mailing gifts to members of the Armed Forces overseas.
Transfer near for Marshall
General expected to get invasion post soon
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Senator Langer: Did Patton use his revolver?
Question said to be raised by man’s relatives
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I DARE SAY —
That man Willkie
By Florence Fisher Parry
I came upon a souvenir. It was a little white button lettered in black. “We Want Willkie,” it said. How it survived these last four years, I don’t know. But there it was, a relic of the past.
And looking at it, I find myself wondering, will we wear it again? We will still want Willkie, but will our will have its way? Is it strong enough? Importunate enough? I wonder.
Remember how it started? Remember that convention? Remember how he just wasn’t to be? Remember what a short time it was before the convention, that we’d even heard the man’s name?
There he was, at that historic convention, in his hotel room reaching for his hat and coat, saying: “Come on, let’s go home.”
That was when the galleries began to chant, remember that strong, stubborn chant, deep, rhythmic, insistent, like the pounding of a spiritual “We want Willkie” – “We Want Willkie” – “WE WANT WILLKIE.”
Not to be
We wanted him so bad that we got him. And for a while it looked as though we were going to put him right in the White House. It was a crazy thing to believe, now that we look back on it. No man, no man alone, even with more than 22 million crusaders behind him, could pass that miracle. But while we were campaigning for him, we believe we could.
Even later, when the fact of his defeat hit us bang between the eyes, we still shook our heads and blinked and stared and said to each other, “It can’t be.” And even when we heard his voice, tired and hoarse, calming the then-shrill and fanatical screams of those who were still yelling “We Want Willkie,” there in the Commodore Hotel, he said:
They say I’m licked, but they don’t know me.
They may not have known him then but they’ve had plenty of chance to get acquainted with him since. Defeat, technical defeat, does one of two things to a man. It breaks him or it adds to his stature.
And could anyone say that defeat has broken this Mr. Willkie, that it even knocked him out for a day?
His stature has increased; his character enlarged; his humanity deepened beyond the improvement that we can discern in any other single individual on earth with perhaps the exception of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who, a great man in 1940, is infinitely greater today.
And this growth in both these men has been influenced by the same force; the force of defeat. At the moment of what looked like Wendell Willkie’s political extinction, he defied the conventional prescription of defeat and imbibed it as though it were elixir. And in the same year, when England was facing annihilation from the air, Winston Churchill shook his fist at the darkening Heavens and changed from a man into a Messiah.
Time to grow
Four years ago, nearly half of the nation placed its faith in an untried man and believed that he was fit to govern the greatest country on earth. And we failed to elect him. But in our very hour of political defeat, many of us found comfort in the conviction that the next four years would give our candidate time to grow; time to prepare; time to rise to the circumstance of an even mightier challenge.
The entire career of Wendell Willkie since 1940 has been a triumph of preparation. He has traveled the world over and has met with the greatest leaders of this planet. He has won their confidence. Their esteem and their affection. He has proved himself a peerless ambassador of goodwill. In a book of inspired philosophy, he has captured the imagination of the reading world.
And even now with the entire party-in-power harnessed to defeat him, and with every orthodox political leader in his own professed party working in close and frenzied teamwork to throw him out, he is defying defeat.
‘Unconditional surrender’ decreed for paralysis war
President appeals for support of fund campaign, rules our armistice with crippler
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Church’s task today outlined
Roosevelt, Willkie write of world’s needs
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Europe faces big actions in next 100 days
Allies and Axis clearing away obstacles to titanic clashes
By Robert Musel, United Press staff writer
London, England –
Military and political developments indicated today that the next 100 days will see the Allies and Germany poised for, if not engaged in, the battles that will decide the European war.
Both sides appeared equally intent on clearing away all obstacles barring the war to the titanic clashes that will be touched off by the climatic Allied offensives promised by the Tehran Conference “from the east, west and south.”
Balkans reinforced
Among the developments were:
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Germany was replacing Junkers generals with political generals pledged to support Adolf Hitler to the end to guard against any repetition of the Prussian military clique’s surrender of 1918.
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Germany reportedly dispatched 40,000 reserves from Austria and Finland and an air squadron intended for Italy to the Balkans in an attempt to wipe out Partisan forces in advance of an Allied invasion.
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The Bulgarian Cabinet held a seven-hour meeting on “current affairs” yesterday.
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Radio Vichy said the Romanian government was considering moving from Bucharest to Brașov, 90 miles to the north, because of the growing danger of air raids.
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King Peter of Yugoslavia was reported ready to make peace with Marshal Josip “Tito” Broz, Partisan leader.
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British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was believed about to take over the job of convincing the Polish government-in-exile of the wisdom of resuming relations with Russia.
A Hungarian MTI Agency dispatch said Count Anton Sigray told the Hungarian Parliament that Hungary had always pursued a “democratic policy” and “invoked Providence in securing an honorable peace.”
The German tendency to replace Junkers generals with those known to be loyal to Hitler was first seen in the replacement of Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commander in France, by Marshal Erwin Rommel as chief of the defense of Western Europe against invasion.
Peace moves rumored
Later reports reaching London said Gen. Richard Jungclaus, an SS leader and intimate friend of Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, had taken over the Belgian command from Gen. Alexander von Falkenhausen, a career officer.
The London Daily News relayed a rumor that Rundstedt had gone to Lisbon in an attempt to establish contact with Allied diplomats for peace feeler purposes while reports were published elsewhere that Falkenhausen’s aide-de-camp, Maj. Hertzberg-Harbou, had gone to Portugal on a similar mission.
None of the peace feeler rumors were confirmed and it appeared certain that Germany would disown the peace feelers and that the Allies would hold out for unconditional surrender.
Poll: Army method of punishing Patton upheld
Large majority wants general to continue with troops
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
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In Washington –
Taft takes his compromise on subsidy to Senate floor
Committee that spurned Ohioan’s plan agrees to end deadlock tomorrow over farm bloc objections
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Simms: Finland again pays quota on war debt to America
There’s reason to believe war with Russia could be settled on basis of Czech pact
By William Philip Simms, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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All-out smash at Nazis near, Eden declares
Tehran plans to utilize full Allied resources, Secretary says
By Joseph W. Grigg, United Press staff writer
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Administration said to favor air monopoly
Competition is supported as post-war policy in Congress
By Charles T. Lucey, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
At the frontline in Italy – (by wireless)
It had been my intention to work back into the war gradually by doing maybe a couple of weeks’ columns about how things were in Naples, what Italian women looked like, and whether the island of Capri was as pretty as they say.
But I don’t know what happened. I hadn’t been in Naples two hours before I felt I couldn’t stand it, and by the next evening there I was – up in the mud again, sleeping on some straw and awakening throughout the night with the old familiar crash and thunder of the big guns in my ears.
It was the artillery for me this time. I went with an outfit I had known in England a year ago last fall, made up largely of men from the Carolinas and Eastern Tennessee.
This regiment shoots 155mm howitzers. They are terrifically big guns and, Lordy, do they make a noise! The gun weighs six tons, and the shell itself is so big it’s all an ammunition carrier can do to lug one up to the gun pit.
The regiment has all new guns now. I can’t tell you how far they shoot, but as the Carolina boys said, “It’s awful fur.”
The colonel is pleased
This retirement’s commander is a good-natured former textile-plant executive who fought all through the last war and has already spent nearly a year in the frontlines in this one.
He is humorous, as Southern as magnolia, and he loves being alive. He calls every soldier around him by his first name.
He lives in a two-man tent with his executive officer. Right now, it’s pitched on a hillside, and they have put big rocks under the lower legs of their cot to make it level. They wash from gasoline tins, and slog a quarter of a mile through deep mud for their meals.
Both are men of refinement and accustomed to fine living back home.
When I came pulling up the muddy hillside late one afternoon between showers, the colonel was sitting in a canvas chair in the door of his tent, reading a magazine. When I got within about 50 yards he looked up, let out a yell, and called out:
Well, I’ll be damned if it ain’t my old friend Ernie Pyle! Goshamighty, am I glad to see you! Ansel, this calls for a drink.
He reached under his cot and brought out a square bottle of some white Italian fluid all full of what looked like sugar Christmas trees. It was a very thick, sweetish substance, which shows what a Southerner can come to who’s been without mint juleps for a year.
Conversation valued
This colonel’s tentmate is Lt. Col. Ansel Godfrey, who used to be principal of the high school at Abbeville, South Carolina, and now calls Clinton his home. He and I and the colonel sat for two hours while they pumped me about America and told me about Italy.
The colonel said:
Boy, are you a welcome sight! You don’t know how wonderful it is to have somebody new to talk to. Ansel and I have been boring each other to death for months. Today we tell each other what we are going to do tomorrow, and then tomorrow we tell each other we did it. That’s what we’ve been driven to for conversation.
After supper and a couple of hours with these friends I told them I wanted to go live with one of their gun crews. They said all right, but since it was raining again there might not be much shooting. They said if they did get any orders during the night, they’d have whatever battery I was with do the firing.
So, I went down and introduced myself to a gun crew and warned them I probably was going to cause them to overwork, for which I apologized. Then I settled gradually in mud up to my knees.
It wound up that I stayed three days and three nights with these boys and got so I felt like a cannoneer myself.
Only once did I hear anybody singing the famous artillery song about the caissons rolling along. One cannoneer hummed it one day during a lull. You could recreate the words in your mind as he was humming:
Over hill, over dale, as we hit the dusty trail…
What a sardonic line that is in Italy, with our guns hub-deep in black, sloshy, gooey, all-encompassing mud.