Williams: Jack a little Joe Louis in beating Davis
By Joe Williams
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Italy – (by wireless)
One of the most fabulous characters in this war theater is Lt. Rudolph Charles von Ripper. He is so fabulous you might be justified in thinking him a phony until you got to know him.
I’ve known him since last summer in Algeria. Most of the other correspondents know him. One whole fighting infantry division knows him. He’s no phony.
Von Ripper is the kind they write books about. He was born in Austria. His father was a general in the Imperial Austrian Army, his mother a baroness. They had money. He could have had a rich, formal, royal type of existence.
Instead, he ran away from home at 15, worked in the sawmills, collected garbage, was a coalminer for a while, and then a clown in a small traveling circus.
At 19, he went into the French Foreign Legion, served two years, and was wounded in action. After that, he went back to Europe and studied art. He is fundamentally an artist.
He traveled continuously. He lived in London and Paris. He lived in Shanghai during 1928. Then he returned to Berlin, joined liberal groups, and did occasional cartoons. Because he helped friends hiding from the Nazis, he was arrested in 1933, accused of high treason, and sent to a concentration camp.
A life of extremes
Dollfuss of Austria got him out after seven months. Then he went to the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain and hibernated for a year, doing political, satirical drawing.
All his life has been a fluctuation between these violent extremes of saloon intellectualism and the hard, steady reality of personal participation in war. You don’t think of an artist as being tough or worldly, yet Von Ripper has been shot in battle more than 20 times.
In 1936, he went to Spain as an aerial gunner in the Loyalist Air Force. He got 16 slugs in his leg during that adventure, and barely came out alive.
Back in Austria in 1938, he saw there was no possibility of organizing even a token resistance against Hitler, so he left for America. He became an American citizen five years later. By that time, he was a private in the United States Army.
His Army career has been a curious one. At first, he was a hospital laboratory technician. Then he was transferred to the newly-formed Army Arts Corps, and left for North Africa last May to paint battle pictures for the War Department.
Doesn’t mind being shot at
I happened to meet him a few days after he arrived on this side. He had hardly got started on his artwork when Congress abolished the whole program. So, he went back to being a regular soldier again, this time an infantryman. He was transferred to the 34th Division.
Last fall, he was put in a frontline regiment, and in October, he was wounded by shell splinters. He doesn’t seem to mind being shot at all. A month later, while leading a night patrol, he got four machine-pistol slugs in him.
All this time overseas, he had been a sergeant, but after his November wounding, he was given a battlefield commission as second lieutenant, and transferred to the division’s engineers. Later, it was possible for him to resume his artwork in his spare time.
Right now, Lt. Von Ripper has a nice little room on the top floor of an apartment building in Naples taken over by the Army. Here he works at a huge drawing board, doing watercolors and pen-and-ink sketches of war. He sleeps on a cot in the same room. Around the walls are tacked dozens of his sketches.
Now and then he returns to the front with his old outfit. Whenever he does, he’s out in front getting shot at before you can say scat. He’s quite a guy.
Vermillion: Pyle’s leap from bed saves life
By Robert Vermillion, United Press staff writer
Anzio Beachhead, Italy –
Two German glider bombs yesterday wrecked the “Villa Virtue,” waterfront home of the correspondents covering this beachhead and injured five American newspapermen, none seriously.
One bomb struck the beach 10 yards from the building, blowing out windows and showering the occupants with shatter glass, bomb fragments and plaster. Another bomb landed three seconds later beside the villa, blasting in the walls and sending the plaster ceiling tumbling down on the cots.
Roving war reporter and Scripps-Howard columnist Ernie Pyle had a narrow escape. He leaped from bed to watch the attack and was blown across the room by the first blast. He got up and was in a corner when the blast of the second bomb blew slabs of heavy tile wall down on the bed in which he had been sleeping. Mr. Pyle’s right cheek was cut slightly by flying glass.
The injured were:
- Mr. Pyle
- George “Slim” Aarons (correspondent for Army weekly Yank; cuts on right hand and forehead)
- William Strand, 32 (of The Chicago Tribune; injuries to left arm)
- Wick Fowler (cut on neck, bruised right shoulder, and both knees skinned)
- George Tucker (of the Associated Press; injured right foot).
Other occupants of the building were shaken but did not require hospitalization or treatment.
Other reporters in the villa were Wade Jones of The Stars and Stripes, William Allen of the Associated Press, Eric Barrow of Universal Newsreel, Wynford V. Thomas of BBC, Basil Gingel of the Exchange Telegraph, and myself.
I was sleeping in a small kitchenette. The bomb blast caved in the wall and I was covered with hollow Italian fire bricks, jarred but uninjured. Messrs. Aarons, Strand, Fowler and Tucker received Purple Hearts for their wounds after they had been treated in dressing stations and hospitals.
Poll: Maine GOP gives Willkie lead of 2–1
Dewey is second in ‘safe’ state
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
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War’s most shocking book is woman photographer’s
Therese Bonney’s pictures show children in wake of Nazi floodtide
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Heinzen: Younger Nazis biggest part of casualties
Men 25–29 now almost erased
By Ralph E. Heinzen, United Press staff writer
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Völkischer Beobachter (March 19, 1944)
Antisemitismus in USA –
Ein ‚beunruhigendes‘ Lied
dnb. Lissabon, 18. März –
„Wir Christen werden ausgeschickt, um die Japaner zu bekämpfen, aber die Juden bleiben in der sicheren Heimat.“ Das ist der Text eines jetzt an vielen amerikanischen Universitäten gesungenen Liedes, berichtet die katholische Neuyorker Zeitschrift America.
Die Zeitschrift zeigt sich „außerordentlich beunruhigt“ über das weitere Ansteigen des Antisemitismus in den USA und erklärt, daß alle jüdischen Gegenmaßnahmen keinen Erfolg gehabt hätten. Die Massenversammlungen, die von den Juden einberufen wurden, würden von den Kommunisten benutzt, um dort eine „kommunistische politische Erziehung zu betreiben.“
U.S. Navy Department (March 19, 1944)
CINCPAC Press Release No. 317
For Immediate Release
March 19, 1944
Paramushiru Island in the Kurils was bombed by Ventura search planes of Fleet Air Wing Four on March 13 (West Longitude Date). Several fires were started. Light anti-aircraft fire was encountered. None of our planes was damaged.
Liberator bombers of the 7th Army Air Force bombed Ponape and Kusaie in the Caroline Islands on March 17 causing explosions and fires. Three enemy bases in the Eastern Marshalls were bombed by 7th Army Air Force Liberator and Mitchell bombers, 4th Marine Air Wing, Dauntless dive bombers, and Ventura search planes of Fleet Air Wing Two. A dive bomber was lost in these operations.
The Pittsburgh Press (March 19, 1944)
2,000 YANK PLANES POUND NAZIS
Five cities hit; RAF in attack on Frankfurt
43 U.S. bombers, 10 fighters missing
By Walter Cronkite, United Press staff writer
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American raid on Kurils strikes closer to Japan
Island midway in chain hit with others; Marshalls, Carolines bases attacked
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Cassino in hands of Allied troops
Fliers hammer Nazi lines at Anzio
By Reynolds Packard, United Press staff writer
Allied HQ, Naples, Italy – (March 18)
Hundreds of Allied dive and fighter-bombers smashed at German positions facing the Anzio beachhead today in what appeared to be the preliminary of an all-out bombardment to pave the way for resumption of Lt. Gen. Mark W. Clark’s march on Rome.
Sixty miles to the south, ruined Cassino was now firmly in possession of New Zealand troops who were methodically blasting to pieces the last German pockets of bitter resistance just off the southern and western fringes of the town.
Heaviest Allied attack
Thundering over the coast below Rome at high attitudes, Allied planes hurtled low over the German lines and released tons of bombs on defense posts, gun positions and supply dumps, Robert Vermillion of the United Press reported in a beachhead dispatch.
All around the perimeter, rolling clouds of black smoke, interspersed with flames, billowed into the clear blue sky as more waves continued the heaviest attacks of the entire beachhead campaign, eight weeks old today.
There was no news of a ground attack, but the advent of clear weather after weeks of cold and rain, coinciding with the aerial saturation blows, indicated strongly that Gen. Clark was about to resume his long-delayed advance.
Five airdromes blasted
Meanwhile, Liberators and Flying Fortress bombers, escorted by fighters, blasted five airdromes in the Udine plains at the head of the Adriatic today, fighting off about 80 German fighters. First reports indicated that many enemy planes were destroyed both aloft and aground.
The Rome radio said that Allied planes bombed Rome Saturday afternoon. The German-controlled broadcast said that the raid caused many casualties and inflicted damage on several buildings of the Polytechnic Institute.
The lack of a formal announcement of the capture of Cassino was due to a technicality posed by the fact that German troops were still fighting desperately around the Mount Cassino Abbey.
A New Zealand column of tanks and infantry had captured the Cassino rail station a half-mile south of the town and was exchanging shells with German tanks massed in the old Roman amphitheater just to the west. A German attempt to infiltrate the rail station area was beaten back.
Resistance ends in town
The New Zealanders, after a laborious drive through the rubble cast up by the Allies’ bombs in Wednesday’s all-time record saturation attack, had ended all resistance inside Cassino proper.
A force of only 400 Germans was disclosed to have sweated out the bombing in elevator-serviced burrows in Cassino 40 feet below the ground where they even had anti-tank guns.
These were hauled up when the bombardment ceased and as a result, the 400 were able to hold the town until reinforcements arrived from the hills, forcing the New Zealanders to battle for every inch of the city.
Hundreds wiped out
The Allies made prisoners of 39 of these bomb-dazed Germans and they revealed that hundreds of their comrades had been wiped out in the bombardment.
The Germans made two dive-bomber assaults on Allied positions in and around Cassino yesterday while, over the beachhead, their most concentrated attacks on Allied land operations in many days were cut short today by the appearance in force of Allied aircraft.
Allied artillery and small arms broke up a threatened attack on the beachhead yesterday in the center of the line.
B-26 Marauders bombed the railroad bridge at Cecina, between Leghorn and Piombino on the northwest Italian coast, destroying or severely damaging the important span.
Two U.S. subs and 150 men lost
Washington (UP) – (March 18)
The Navy today announced the loss of the submarines USS Capelin and USS Sculpin with appropriately 150 men, including a submarine division commander.
These losses raised to 22 the number of U.S. submarines lost in this war. They also increased to 145 the total of U.S. naval vessels of all types which have been lost.
The commanding officer of the Capelin was Cdr. Elliott E. Marshall, whose wife lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. The Sculpin’s skipper was Cdr. Fred Connaway, whose wife lives in Helena, Arkansas. On board one of the submarines, the Navy revealed, was Capt. John P. Cromwell, a submarine division commander. His wife lives in Palo Alto, California.
The Capelin (a craft of 1,525 tons) was the newer of the two. It was commissioned on June 4 last. The Sculpin (of 1,475 tons) was commissioned on Jan. 16, 1939.
The losses raised to six the number of submarines announced as lost since the first of the year.