Cut to $25 a week proposed –
Showdown due on $35 pay for reconversion jobless
Sponsor of measure refuses to compromise as vote nears in Senate
…
Cut to $25 a week proposed –
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
On the Western Front, France – (by wireless)
I know that all of us correspondents have tried time and again to describe to you what this weird hedgerow fighting in northwestern France has been like.
But I’m going to go over it once more, for we’ve been in it two months and some of us feel that this is the two months that broke the German Army in the west.
This type of fighting is always in small groups, so let’s take as an example one company of men. Let’s say they are working forward on both sides of a country lane, and this company is responsible for clearing the two fields on either side of the road as it advances.
That means you have only about one platoon to a field. And with the company’s understrength from casualties, you might have no more than 25 or 30 men in field.
Over here the fields are usually not more than 50 yards across and a couple of hundred yards long. They may have grain in them, or apple trees, but mostly they are just pastures of green grass, full of beautiful cows.
The fields are surrounded on all sides by Immense hedgerows which consist of an ancient earthen bank, waist high, all matted with roots, and out of which grow weeds, bushes, and trees up to 20 feet high.
The Germans have used these barriers well. They put snipers in the trees. They dig deep trenches behind the hedgerows and cover them with timber, so that it is almost impossible for artillery to get at them.
Sometimes they will prop up machine guns with strings attached, so they can fire over the hedge without getting out of their holes. They even cut out a section of the hedgerow and hide a big gun or a tank in it, covering it, with brush.
Also they tunnel under the hedgerows from the back and make the opening on the forward side just large enough to stick a machine gun through.
But mostly the hedgerow pattern is this: a heavy machine gun hidden at each end of the field and infantrymen hidden all along the hedgerow with rifles and machine pistols.
It’s a slow and cautious business
Now it’s up to us to dig them out of there. It’s a slow and cautious business, and there is nothing very dashing about it. Our men don’t go across the open fields in dramatic charges such as you see in the movies. They did at first, but they learned better.
They go in tiny groups, a squad or less, moving yards apart and sticking close to the hedgerows on either end of the field. They creep a few yards, squat, wait, then creep again.
If you could be right up there between the Germans and the Americans you wouldn’t see very many men at any one time – just a few here and there, always trying to keep hidden. But you would hear an awful lot of noise.
Our men were taught in training not to fire until they saw something to fire at. But that hasn’t worked in this country, because, you see so little. So, the alternative is to keep shooting constantly at the hedgerows. That pins the Germans in their holes while we sneak up on them.
The attacking squads sneak up the side of the hedgerows while the rest of the platoon stay back in their own hedgerow and keep the forward hedge saturated with bullets. They shoot rifle grenades too, and a mortar squad a little farther back keeps lobbing mortar shells over onto the Germans.
The little advance groups get up to the far ends of the hedgerows at the corners of the field. They first try to knock out the machine guns at each corner. They do this with hand grenades, rifle grenades and machine guns.
Fighting is very close
Usually, when the pressure gets on, the German defenders of the hedgerow start pulling back. They’ll take their heavier guns and most of the men back a couple of fields and start digging in for a new line.
They leave about two machine guns and a few riflemen scattered through the hedge, to do a lot of shooting and hold up the Americans as long as they can.
Our men now sneak along the front side of the hedgerow, throwing grenades over onto the other side and spraying the hedges with their guns. The fighting is very close – only a few yards apart – but it is seldom actual hand-to-hand stuff.
Sometimes the remaining Germans come out of their holes with their hands up. Sometimes they try to run for it and are mowed down. Sometimes they won’t come out at all, and a hand grenade thrown into their hole, finishes them off.
And so, we’ve taken another hedgerow and are ready to start on the one beyond.
This hedgerow business is a series of little skirmishes like that clear across the front, thousands and thousands of little skirmishes. No single one of them is very big. But add them all up over the days and weeks and you’ve got a man-sized war, with thousands on both sides being killed.
Pegler: Pay raise issue
By Westbrook Pegler
New York –
To the proposal that the salaries of Congressmen and Senators be raised from $10,000 to $25,000 comes a quick retort that many of them are overpaid, even now, an unfortunate truth encountered also in many of our factories and, as the law says, “facilities.” However, having adopted the principle that a monkey is as good as a man, we now have to consider whether we should be kind to those who make our laws, or brusquely refuse to consider their problems and necessities. We might also bear in mind that, if we treat them so, they could be real mean to us.
This small group of about 600 men is one of the very few elements of the American people having no collective bargaining, rights or agent. Although, with questionable wisdom, they provided these boons for others, with special benefit to the bargaining agents, themselves, our lawmakers bashfully neglected to improve their own position and, meanwhile, have been compelled to raise their own income taxes. They, almost alone among us, have held the line along their own little sector against inflationary wages.
Long before the CIO was even a mischievous gleam in the brooding eye of John L. Lewis, Congress was operating on that basis which is sometimes called levelism in the jargon of the night-school economist. The best was like the worst, and so remains today; for we pay the intelligent, diligent man no more for his long hours and superior work than we pay the clowns, loafers, nonentities and frauds. Like many sluggish, unskilled and highly overpaid hands employed in the war industries, some members of both houses are little better than useless and, in some spectacular cases, are a little worse if you insist.
Can’t treat people that way
But surely, they have not thought things through, as our horn-rimmed essayists say, nor weighed the implications, who would turn off this proposal in this highhanded way. I should like to get the word “impact” in here somewhere and a casual use of “pattern” to show that I am up on my reading, but tomorrow is another day.
Certainly, experience should have taught us that if you arrogantly refuse to sit down and bargain in good faith you cause explosions. And certainly, the American people, who are the boss in this case, have been insincere in their approval of the right to bargain if at the first test we rudely say that these servants are a lot of bums who are getting too much now.
You just can’t treat people that way, these days. You have to open your books and explain your financial position; you have to be polite and, above all, even if you are running at a loss at the time being, you sometimes have to raise their pay so that they can catch up with the advanced cost of living.
Demand too much servility
There is another point or two in our popular treatment of Congress which should be reconsidered. We demand altogether too much servility. In private industry even the president, or the chairman of the board in his plug hat and plush weskit, spanned, as the Alger books used to say, by a heavy gold watchchain, cannot fire a sweeper in the plant for calling him any of the popular simple or compound names.
That is the sweeper’s human right and the situation is one to be met man-fashion or in the courts. Yet, no Congressman dares call his employers by any of the names that he might have good reason to apply to them and we, in our inconsistency, would fire anyone who did.
We do demand high respect from the people, however little we try to deserve it; and the very fact that we get it should make us suspicious or their honesty. But if an honest candidate told us his real opinion of us, would we elect him?
We might question, too, our employer-espionage on these, our hired help. For, while Congress has provided that employers are guilty of intimidation and provocation who snoop and peer in the shop, and after hours, it is our own practice to check the Congressman’s votes on current issues, to mark down how much time he spent in his seat; and if he is seen with certain people that news is quickly spread. We don’t even grant him the right to select his own social company and he, like as not, if challenged for what we consider to be evil companionship, instead of telling us to go to hell, explains that he was investigating something for some committee.
Congressmen are human and can be driven too far. Goaded just so much, they might get good and sore and pass a pension law giving everybody $1,000 a week from the cradle to the grave. It would be cheaper to grant that raise and keep them in a good mood.
Roosevelt to report –
Plans for new drive on Japs may be given
Gains in Pacific exceed hopes
Washington (UP) –
President Roosevelt, in his promised report to the American people, may reveal the broad outlines of the Beat-Japan strategy he drafted in conferences with Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. Chester W. Nimitz.
Dispatches released yesterday, telling of Mr. Roosevelt’s visit to Hawaii to inspect the men and munitions fighting the Japs and to confer with military chieftains, said he planned to report soon on his trip, probably in a radio speech. No other indication was given as to time or place.
To quicken pace
The Pacific War has been going better recently than even the most optimistic had dared hope while the grand smash at Germany was in progress.
Mr. Roosevelt’s optimism in Honolulu seemed to reflect belief that the pace against the Japs can be quickened even more.
No details of any new strategy will be permitted to leak out until after it has been put into effect, of course.
But it was recalled that Adm. Nimitz has spoken previously about driving straight across the Pacific to the China coast and establishing a beachhead there, while Gen. MacArthur’s oft-stated aim is to lead conquering Allied forces back into the Philippines and to proceed thence with defeating Japan. The two plans have doubtless been fitted hand-in-glove.
To emphasize Pacific
In Washington, members of Congress who have long charged that the Pacific War was not being accorded proper relative importance, viewed Mr. Roosevelt’s Hawaiian trip as portending increased emphasis on and speedier prosecution of that phase of the global conflict.
In general, Congressional comment was divided pretty much along party lines. Acting House Democratic Leader Robert Ramspeck (D-GA) hailed the trip as indicating “that even bigger blows are to be struck against the Japs in the future.”
But Rep. Paul W. Shafer (R-MI) viewed it as strictly a vote-getting move. He said:
The President knows the war in Europe is about to collapse but he needs a war to direct so he can win the election.
Has good news
If Mr. Roosevelt does take the occasion of his forthcoming report to review the Pacific War, he will have much good news to report. He can recall the mighty Superfortress raids in Japan’s homeland, the latest carried out only yesterday; the speedy contest of Saipan, Tinian, Guam and other islands, and Gen. MacArthur’s steady march back toward the islands where Jap forces beat down his handful of men at the start of the war.
Meeting reports on July 29 – the day he completed his visit to the mighty base built up where U.S. forces suffered disaster on Dec. 7, 1941 – the President personally renewed his pledge that Gen. MacArthur would return to the Philippines leading triumphant U.S. forces.
Warning recalled
Since Mr. Roosevelt’s anticipated report is apparently to tell the people about what he found in the Pacific, if was not believed likely that it would need to involve many, if any, of the corrections of “misrepresentations” which he has promised to deliver.
In his fourth term nomination acceptance speech, delivered to the Democratic National Convention by radio from San Diego, California, just before he left for Hawaii, the President said that because of the war “I shall not campaign in the usual sense.”
But he added that:
I shall feel free to report to the people the facts about matters of concern to them and especially to correct any misrepresentations.
Willkie invited to White House
Washington (UP) –
President Roosevelt has invited Wendell L. Willkie to a White House conference.
The conference, a responsible source said, will be non-political at Mr. Willkie’s request and will deal solely with the nation’s policies.
In New York, the 1940 Republican presidential candidate refused to comment on reports that he had received the invitation.
The President’s letter of invitation was sent after Mr. Willkie had been sounded out on the subject of a meeting with Mr. Roosevelt. The letter was sent just before the President left on his Hawaiian trip and suggested a meeting after his return.
Mr. Willkie, who withdrew from the 1944 Republican presidential campaign after his defeat in the Wisconsin primaries, has remained silent thus far on what role, if any, he will play in the election campaign. He has not indicated whether he will support the GOP nominee, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York.
Dewey studies Roosevelt trip
Governor confers with GOP chairman
Albany, New York (UP) –
Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Republican presidential candidate, and GOP National Chairman Herbert Brownell Jr. today plotted the next move in their campaign to put the GOP back in the White House.
Fresh from conferences with Republican leaders of 11 Midwestern states, Mr. Brownell said he carried an optimistic report. He told the Governor, however, that “plenty of hard work” has to be done between now and November and party followers are ready for action.
In long conference
Mr. Brownell was an overnight guest at the executive mansion and he and Mr. Dewey talked until after midnight. One of the principal topics was reportedly President Roosevelt’s inspection trip to Honolulu.
On his last visit to Albany, Mr. Brownell charged that Mr. Roosevelt was the first of 32 Presidents to claim that the title of Commander-in-Chief made him a soldier and that he was using the title to “perpetuate himself in public office.”
At that time, Mr. Dewey heard reports the President would deliver his speech accepting the Democratic nomination from foreign shores and he said if Mr. Roosevelt did, “I might have something to say about it.”
Concerned about trips
Republican leaders are concerned over Mr. Roosevelt’s inspection trips to the war fronts during the campaign. They are attempting to determine when such trips are necessary.
The Governor is expected to remain silent on the President’s Honolulu trip until Mr. Roosevelt has made his “report to the nation.”
Army censors at work –
Aviation guide also banned
Roosevelt’s picture cause for action
Washington (UP) –
An edition of the Official Guide to the Army Air Forces is the latest publication to be banned from sale at post exchanges because the War Department fears it might violate the Soldier Voting Act’s prohibition against official distribution of political propaganda.
The banned edition bears a picture of President Roosevelt with the caption “Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy.” A department spokesman said it was feared the picture and the caption might be interpreted as political propaganda.
Some not affected
Other editions of the guide, which do not have the picture and caption, are not affected by the order and may be sold at post exchanges. The copyright to the guide is held by the Army Air Forces Aid Society, which receives all royalties from its sale.
War Department officials conceded that they were interpreting the Soldier Voting Act’s censorship clause in a strict sense, but said that if any change in policy is necessary, it would have to be effected by changing the law.
The clause bans Army distribution of any publication “containing political argument or political propaganda of any kind designed or calculated to affect the result of any election.”
Beard’s book banned
Under it, the War Department has banned, in addition to the Air Forces Guide, British newspapers, and various other books.
Congressional sentiment for relaxation of the ban was growing. Senator Robert A. Taft (R-OH), author of the restrictive amendment to the Soldier Voting Act, said he expected satisfactory legislation to this effect would be worked out in conferences between himself and Senator Theodore F. Green (D-RI), co-sponsor of the Voting Act.
I DARE SAY —
Boomerang
By Florence Fisher Parry
The War Department Library Committee, established to interpret the new law which forbids the circulation, at government expense, of any reading or picture material which contains political propaganda, is certainly going literal in a big way!
The sale of British newspapers has now been forbidden our American Army camps, and the motion picture Wilson has been banned from them. All of which is providing a genuine surprise to the man responsible for the rider to the Soldiers’ Vote Law, Senator Taft of Ohio, who protests that the Army is going to extremes in its interpretation of his law.
Now it looks as though the Senator’s provision, intended to prevent patent political rackets, is going to prove a boomerang. The United States Army, in scrupulously observing the new law, is demonstrating with stunning success how dangerous to our liberties is ANY attempt, however well intentioned, to legislate free speech and a free press.
The Army’s position is strictly correct, in prohibiting ANY AND ALL politically-biased literature or other such material from Army circulation at government expense. However intense its disapproval of the new law, its observance must be scrupulous.
Lesser of two evils
On the other hand, it is quite understandable why Senator Taft pressed legislation against the opposing party’s prevailing habit, so patently indulged, of using government money to pay for its own political propaganda. This practice has begun to assume sinister proportions, extending not only to printed matter, but to the screen as well. Documentary films glorifying the pet projects of the administration, even full-length movies like Government Girl, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and such hysterical propaganda as Gabriel Over the White House, had been enjoying an unchallenged field day. But Senator Taft’s ambiguous rider to the Soldier Vote Act permits too broad an interpretation.
Any law becomes a menace when it deprives our fighting men a FREE PRESS. And when we say a free press, we mean free, in the sense that opinion, assertive, aggressive and unafraid, must be expressed, however much downright PROPAGANDA it may contain.
Every newspaper in America is a propaganda organ. The majority are sharply partisan, politically belligerent and humanly prejudiced. Private ownership and a free press make this inevitable; and we would not have it otherwise. The evils of its alternative, a subsidized and government-instrumented press, are known to all.
Then how can newspapers fall under the ax of the U.S. Army in its effort to observe the strict letter of the new Soldier Vote Act? OF COURSE, the British press is pro-Roosevelt! Why should it not be? President Roosevelt, to the British people, is a name synonymous with largesse and a perpetual Lend-Lease.
That fact, however, should not present to the U.S. Army any more insoluble problem than that which it can find in the soldiers’ (at present) incontestable right to read their hometown newspapers, which are just as biased.
What next?
The banning of the motion picture Wilson shows, too, the inherent evil of suppression of suspected “propaganda.” I’m afraid I would have been all too quick to pounce upon this picture had I discerned in it the slightest Democratic propaganda.
But I saw no such evidence. It is a faithful historical motion picture and can be invidious only as history itself can be invidious. Nor does its hero Wilson propound any foreign policy which BOTH our presidential candidates do not acknowledge and endorse.
What a kettle of fish! No British newspapers to our U.S. Armed Forces. No Wilson. No Charles and Mary Beard’s Republic. What next? No home paper? No magazine? Because its owner or “editorial policy” is either Democratic or Republican?
Manifestly, the cure is far more killing than the malady! The unfortunate thing is that such a rider to the Soldier Vote Act should have been considered necessary in the first place. For it did rise out of a patent abuse which for 12 long years has been functioning unrestrained.
That the needed remedy should have turned into a boomerang is unfortunate; but if it only serves to illustrate TO BOTH PARTIES the folly of meddling with the machinations of a free press, it may succeed in effecting some good.
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‘Nothing to unload,’ candidate declares
Omaha, Nebraska (UP) –
George W. Olsen of Plattsmouth, Democratic nominee for governor, appeared before the state convention last night and said:
I feel just like I did when I was 16 and took a load of apples to Nebraska City and got stuck in the mud. I decided to unload, but the end gate was gone and so were the apples. There I was, stuck and with nothing to unload.
I feel the same way here tonight.
Thank you for what you are still going to do for me. Goodbye.
Dewey gets plea of doomed woman
Albany, New York (UP) –
For the first time since he became head of the state, Governor Thomas Dewey must decide whether to give executive clemency to a woman convicted of first-degree murder.
The case of Mrs. Helen Fowler and George F. Knight, Niagara Falls Negroes, convicted jointly of the robbery-slaying of a 63-year-old white man last October, was heard by the Governor yesterday.
Earl W. Brydges, counsel for Mrs. Fowler (the mother of five children), charged that she was not given a fair trial when she was tried jointly with Knight.
Niagara County District Attorney John Marsh maintained that both defendants took part in the crime and charged Mrs. Fowler with acting as “lookout” during both the robbery and killing.
40,000 Japs die in 8 weeks in Marianas
U.S. dead total 4,453
By Frank Tremaine, United Press staff writer
…
He’s a Stalingrad survivor –
Saint-Malo madman rallies motley crew, defies Yanks
Americans try everything to get him out but he keeps cooks, dishwashers fighting
By James McGlincy, United Press staff writer
…
Völkischer Beobachter (August 12, 1944)
Der US-Meuchelmord an deutschen Gefangenen –
Deutsche Protestnote an Washington
dnb. Berlin, 11. August –
Vor einigen Tagen erhielt das deutsche Volk durch Pressemeldungen Kenntnis von einem unerhörten Kriegsverbrechen amerikanischer Soldaten an der Italienfront.
Sechs deutsche Soldaten, darunter ein Schwerverwundeter, die bei Cattelin Marittima nach Verschuss ihrer letzten Munition in amerikanische Gefangenschaft geraten waren, wurden von Angehörigen einer amerikanischen Infanteriedivision in einen Stall getrieben und dort mit Handgranaten und Karabinerschüssen meuchlings gemordet.
Nach gründlicher Untersuchung des Falles, die den Bericht in allen Einzelheiten bestätigte, hat das Auswärtige Amt diesen unglaublichen Völkerrechtsbruch nunmehr zum Gegenstand einer Note gemacht, die dem eidgenössischen politischen Departement in Bern zur Weiterleitung an die Regierung der USA übergeben wurde. Nach einer genauen Wiedergabe des barbarischen Verbrechens schließt die Mitteilung mit den Worten:
Dieser Vorgang, der durch die eidliche kriegsgerichtliche Vernehmung des überlebenden deutschen Gefreiten einwandfrei erwiesen ist, stellt eine unerhörte Verletzung des Völkerrechts durch die amerikanische Wehrmacht dar. Die Reichsregierung erwartet, daß die schuldigen amerikanischen Soldaten wegen dieses nackten Mordes bestraft werden und daß die nordamerikanische Regierung Maßnahmen trifft, die eine Wiederholung derartiger Mordtaten ausschließen.
US-Verluste in China
Tokio, 11. August –
Die japanischen Luftstreitkräfte, die an der Hunanfront eingesetzt sind, haben vom 27. Mai bis 9. August insgesamt 869 Flugzeuge der in China stationierten amerikanischen Luftflotte vernichtet. Von diesen wurden in Luftkämpfen 654 Maschinen abgeschossen, während japanische Flakbatterien die übrigen 215 Feindflugzeuge vernichteten.