Labor board defiance and no-contract-no-work plea follow successful pattern of UMW
By Fred W. Perkins, Pittsburgh Press staff writer
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Washington (UP) –
Senator James J. Davis (R-PA) today announced his willingness to run for reelection.
Mr. Davis said:
If the Republican Party leaders feel that by reason of my years of experience I can be of service to our country and Pennsylvania at this critical time, I am willing to be a candidate for reelection.
Mr. Davis was first elected to the Senate in 1932 and reelected in 1938.
Republican says rest of year will be spent simplifying levies
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Change in national policy is avowed purpose, he tells WLB
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264 captured; U.S. dead total 286; factors in victory cited
By Charles T. Lucey, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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Washington (UP) –
President Roosevelt today presented Congressional Medals of Honor to two fighting men, one of whom thereby became the first soldier in this war to win both the Congressional Medal and the Distinguished Service Cross.
Lt. Kisters
The soldier thus honored was 2nd Lt. Gerry H. Kisters, a 24-year-old ex-furrier of Bloomington, Indiana, who went to the White House from the War Department where Gen. George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, had presented him with the DSC.
Lt. Walsh
Sharing the White House ceremonies was Marine Lt. Kenneth A. Walsh, a 29-year-old native of Brooklyn officially credited with shooting down 20 Jap planes in the South Pacific. Lt. Walsh had previously been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Lt. Kisters’ feats were performed in the Tunisian and Sicilian campaigns. In Tunisia, he wiped out, single-handed, an enemy artillery crew, for that he received the DSC.
In Sicily, he helped to capture one enemy machine-gun crew and then, though wounded five times, went on alone to wipe out a second, that won him the Medal of Honor.
Present at both ceremonies were Kisters’ wife, Mrs. Nola J. Kisters, and his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Richard G. Kisters, all of Bloomington, Illinois. Gen. Marshall and Adm. Ernest J. King, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Fleet, led a parade of high military officials to the White House presentations. Lt. Walsh’s wife and sister-in-law, Jean Barinott, were present.
Lt. Walsh won the Medal of Honor for tearing into superior Jap formations on two occasions last August and shooting down three enemy planes in one fight and four in the second.
Four other ships left in flames in raids on New Guinea
By Don Caswell, United Press staff writer
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Increase in farm yield expected in 1944 will go for military and Lend-Lease needs
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Ida Lupino turns over yen and sen to group which will auction it off during campaign
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There is still hope that the Senate can work out some practicable compromise in the soldier-vote fight.
The so-called states’-rights measure passed by the House does not do the job. Under it, most servicemen abroad would be disfranchised, because not all states can or will make the necessary changes in their laws and constitutions to facilitate absentee voting. There should be a federal ballot as a substitute, leaving to the states their constitutional function of counting all ballots.
The issue will be determined chiefly by the Republicans. Their almost-solid party vote – more than 9 to 1 – put over the states’-rights bill in the House. Some Republican leaders in the Senate have been more farsighted in seeking a compromise. Such a compromise probably would become an amendment to the House bill, and would permit both state and federal ballots.
Why should Republicans in the House suddenly become the states’-rights party, and at the risk of alienating soldiers? There seem to be three reasons for this paradox:
One is the real constitutional difficulty in any federal ballot, and the possibility that this will invite contested elections. But some of the suggested compromises eliminate most, though not all, of this danger.
A second reason probably arises from the harsh language used by President Roosevelt in trying to force Congress to act. While what he said about the need for an adequate law and the descriptive terms he applied to the House bill were apropos, his statement was received by many as an unjust smear and as a partisan campaign blast.
The third reason is the Republican fear that the President is accurate in his guess that the soldier vote will be heavily pro-Roosevelt. Of course such partisan considerations do not touch the inalienable right of the eligible soldier to vote. But, unfortunately, both the President and House Republican leaders seem to be thinking more about party politics than about the soldiers’ rights.
There is probably no way to make soldier voting absolutely fair as between a Republican candidate and Mr. Roosevelt. As Commander-in-Chief, and as one far better known to the troops than any Republican candidate can be, Mr. Roosevelt will have an advantage.
That should force the drafters of any federal ballot law, and the War and Navy Departments in handling the ballots, and the states in facilitating absentee voting and counting the results, to lean over backward to prevent the result from being rigged.
But it does not provide reason for disfranchising servicemen.
By Col. Frederick Palmer, North American Newspaper Alliance
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By Raymond Clapper
Raymond Clapper, before setting out with a naval striking force which took him to his death, wirelessed a few columns in advance. Last Jan. 1, upon leaving the country for the Pacific, he had written that “some people in Washington feel there is no sufficient awareness at home of how much our men are doing and in what a living hell they must sometimes do it.” His mission was to help increase that awareness. Hence we feel that he would want us to print, posthumously, these columns written some days ago.
Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands – (by wireless)
In the evening after dinner, I sat on a wet front porch with Maj. Gen. Maxwell Murray, commander of the South Pacific forward area, right on the spot where the first Marines landed on Guadalcanal.
No longer is there any war here, for this is far to the rear. Guadalcanal is just a big supply dump. Yet it is not quite as peaceful and serene as most battlefields become when the war moves on and nature smiles again. This was a stormy night, and the wind lashed the surf up onto the little plot in front of Gen. Murray’s quarters. The rain blew in through the screened sides of his native thatched hut.
I wondered how the Marines ever landed here, but that was in August, in the dry season. Now it has rained every day since Christmas, as the first sailor I walked with said. I have found it depressing even in the short time I have been on the island.
Pacific War shrine
Guadalcanal has become a kind of shrine for the Pacific War in the minds of the American people as it was here we won the long jungle struggle with the Japs that stopped their advance and marked the beginning of our slow march toward Tokyo.
Nobody will ever live happily on this place. It is not unpleasant to the eye along the coast. Some spots in our military developments, which stretch for 30 or more miles along the north coast, are as neat and attractive as an outdoor summer colony, with little huts under neatly cleared coconut groves, and little white coral walks edged with stones or small tree trunks. But it is wet. The rain, or what a Californian might call the Guadalcanal mist, drips as it did on the stage for Somerset Maugham’s play, Rain.
The high surf broke two barges loose and they washed up on our beach. The tents were never dry. Everything becomes as wet as the outside of a beer bottle on a warm day.
RAdm. Theodore Wilkinson and I talked for a couple of hours in his office tent with the rain washing in onto the floor. But there is no use bothering about wet floors, nor about the mud that is carried in large cakes on everybody’s shoes.
Your foxhole will be complete full of water unless you cover it with canvas – in which case it will be only half full – although that is not so important here as at Munda, where two nights before I was there 20 men were injured because they stayed in bed instead of diving for their wet foxholes.
Mosquitoes dangerous foe
And when friendly little lizards run up your screen wire walls, you pay no attention. It’s the mosquitoes you must watch out for.
A heroic anti-malaria fight has worked wonders since the days when a high percentage of our men got the disease – and one admiral got it from spending just one night on the island.
Here, as at Munda, among the most conspicuous things you see when approaching by air are the white crosses in the cemeteries. Our vast airfields tell you at once that enormous developments have taken place under American occupation.
That always impresses me – the six of what we do – just as any downtown American business section is on a physical scale unapproached in any other country. Anything we do, we do it big. Great piles of ammunition, rations, and every other article of war are to be found all over the Pacific up to our frontlines. That is now true of Guadalcanal.
This is not an ideal base, for there is not protected anchorage, but it was the only place available at the time. And as Gen. Murray said, once you get your work table set up, with big repair shops and vast accumulations of reserve supplies, it is difficult to move very often. You wait until the line moves a long way up before making another jump.
Guadal isn’t anything like what it was when Dick Tregaskis was living through his Diary out here. For a while they called it a rest camp. But now the men are just as anxious to get away as they ever were. Gen. MacArthur is putting in an 18-month rotation scheme for some of his troops who have been in combat areas longest, and it is working out similarly in this South Pacific area.