America at war! (1941–) – Part 3

Deferments may be limited to 8 industries

WPB, services tentatively agree

americavotes1944

Next inauguration slated for television broadcast

Hollywood, California (UP) –
The next presidential inauguration and possibly the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions will be broadcast by television, Niles Trammell, president of NBC, said today.

He said:

Television is now definitely in the cards. Families will be able to buy television sets for $100 to $200 after the war.

NBC has invested $10 million in television research and will spend another $10 million in post-war expansion, Mr. Trammell said.

Hospital work sets record

15,374,698 patients treated in 1943

Editorial: Three-way jury

Editorial: Don’t discard your gun

Edson: World’s biggest ‘fire sale’ needs goldfish bowl

By Peter Edson

Ferguson: Congressional secretaries

By Mrs. Walter Ferguson

Background of news –
How peace came in 1918

By C. H. Woodring

Foster: Yep, soldiers may whistle at the Arabian cuties!

By Ernest Foster


Lucille Ball meets hero in hometown

Control of airline sold for $3 million

CANDIDLY SPEAKING —
For women only!

By Maxine Garrison

U.S. government biggest business

$100 billion spent annually

Jap destroyer, 2 cargo ships are sunk

New attempt to help Wewak frustrated

Roosevelt stays in study

Washington –
President Roosevelt’s cold was described as “decidedly better” today, but for the fourth successive day, he remained away from his office and worked in his White House study.

Myron Selznick, actor’s agent, dies

Veterans to get Civil Service aid

Simms: Hull statement helps to ease fears

People from occupied lands hail definition of war as a fight for freedom
By William Philip Simms, Scripps-Howard foreign editor


Hull gives Senators outline of foreign policy details

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With the Allied beachhead forces in Italy – (by wireless)
In order to report the war on the Anzio beachhead, it was first necessary to get to the beachhead. I got here by boat, as everybody else does.

Our troops up here are supplied and replaced by daily ship convoys. Since this is a very frontline kind of war up here, isolated and horny-handed like the early old days in Tunisia, there is little red tape about it.

A correspondent who wants to come to the beachhead simply drives to the dock where the ships are loading, tells the Army captain in charge he wants to get to Anzio, and the captain says, “Okay, get on this boat here.”

I came up on an LST (landing ship tank) – a type of vessel which is being considerably publicized at home now, and which is probably the outstanding ship of our amphibious forces.

It is a great big thing, bis as an ocean freighter. The engines and crew’s quarters and bridges are all on the back end. All the rest of the ship is just a big empty warehouse sort of thing, much like a long, rectangular garage without any pillars in it.

Two huge swinging doors open in the bow, and then a heavy steel ramp comes down so that trucks and tanks and jeeps can drive in. It can land at a beach for loading and unloading, or run nose first to a dock. We loaded at a dock.

Very same LST boat

This was the second time I had been on an LST. The first time was last June at Bizerte, a few days before we took off on the invasion of Sicily.

At that time, I was living on a warship, but took a run around the harbor one day going aboard various types of landing craft, just to see what they were like. I spent about half an hour on an LST that day, and never had been aboard one since.

So, imagine my surprise when I climbed aboard for the Anzio trip, checked in with the skipper, and suddenly realized this was the very same LST, still commanded by the same man. He is Capt. Joseph Kahrs of Newark, New Jersey. He is a 37-year-old bachelor, the product of two universities, and before the war was a lawyer in practice with his father in Newark.

After Pearl Harbor, he went into the Navy. His sum total of seafaring had been several trips in peacetime.

Exactly one year to the very day after he entered the Navy, Capt. Kahrs and a crew equally as landlubberish as himself took over this brand-new LST and pointed her bow toward Africa. Only two men of the crew of more than 60 had ever been to sea before.

Just the other day they celebrated this ship’s first birthday and everybody aboard had a turkey dinner. In that one year of existence this LST had crossed the Atlantic once, taken D-Day roles in three invasion, and made a total of 23 perilous trips between Africa, Sicily and the Anzio beachhead.

They were almost blown out of the water once, and had countless miracle escapes, but never were seriously damaged. Most of the original crew are still with it, and now instead of green landlubbers they are tried and true salts.

Carry new type of barracks bag

Long lines of soldiers loaded down with gear marched along the dock to enter adjoining ships. They were replacements to bolster the fighters at Anzio.

You could tell from their faces that they were brand-new from America. They carried a new-type of barracks bag, which few of us over here had seen before. The bags were terrifically heavy, and it was all the boys could do to handle them.

One of the passing replacements remarked:

Hell, I’ve got more clothes than I had when we left America. I don’t know how we accumulate so much.

Italian children scampered along with the marching soldiers, insisting on helping with the heavy bags.

One of the oddest sights I’ve ever seen was a frail little Italian girl, not more than 9 or 10, paddling along with a barracks bag, that must have weighed 75 pounds, slung across her tiny shoulders.

The big soldier who owned it was laughing at the incongruity of the thing, and we had to laugh too. So did the little girl.

americavotes1944

Stokes: Middle-of-road

By Thomas L. Stokes

With Willkie in Wisconsin –
Wendell L. Willkie is carefully building up, in his Wisconsin primary campaign, a middle-of-the-road philosophy designed to attract the large independent vote.

Upon this he is resting his chief claim for renomination as Republican presidential candidate.

Mr. Willkie is frank about his objective. As he describes it, the only way the party can win is to adopt a forward-looking program, both domestically and internationally, to appeal to the independent vote.

He estimates that vote as between 35 and 40 percent of the electorate. That seems high. But polls show a much larger percentage of voters undecided this year than usual, which indicates a greater degree of independence.

His is a difficult task. He is trying to show, on the one hand, that he is not a New Dealer, not still a Democrat, not “another Roosevelt” and, on the other, that he is not an old-line GOP-type Republican.

When he arrived here, he found the air full of talk that he is not a real Republican. He has been dangling these rumors before his audiences – rumors, as he describes them, that “I’m a carbon copy of Roosevelt,” that I’m in league with Roosevelt,” that “I’m trying to help the administration.”

He says:

I’ve never talked politics with President Roosevelt in my life.

Not Democrat or New Dealer

Then he reads his bill of particulars in proof that he’s not a Democrat or New Dealer.

On foreign policy, he specifies, he has disagreed in a number of instances with the administration, including most recently the Polish question. He even went so far as to accuse the administration of having no foreign policy.

On domestic policy, he charges the administration with poor administration and the President with having a Cabinet of “yes men.” Outstanding men are needed, he says. He holds up two Cabinet members as horrible examples – Secretary of Agriculture Wickard and Secretary of Labor Perkins.

The independent commissions in Washington, he says, should be more independent. They are too much under the executive thumb.

He saves his heaviest attack for the “power complex” which he attributes to President Roosevelt and the administration, and he describes the New Deal regime as being “tired and cynical,” with a supreme belief that they know what is good for everybody in the country. This, he concedes, is often a sincere belief, but the egotism of it he deplores as the result of people being too long in power.

Tempers criticism of New Deal

He tempers his criticism of the New Deal by admitting that it has achieved some worthwhile reforms. He speaks harshly of those who are against everything just to be against, who react adversely to everything the administration does.

He says:

They are not thinkers – they are just pathological.

On the other hand, he denounces stand-pat Republicanism as bitingly as any Democrat ever did, and, if he should get nominated, President Roosevelt, or any of his campaign speakers, would be able to quote him at length without bothering to coin any new phrases.

He tells time after time, here in Wisconsin where isolationism was so prevalent, how he fought for Lend-Lease and he takes credit for helping to get the bill through Congress, though 80% of the Republican Party leadership, he says, was against it.

In telling an audience at Manitowoc yesterday that they must “bear in mind always that the objective of the party is to advance social relations,” he said:

I’m anxious to remove the impression that the Republican Party is a brutal, cold party that does not recognize social obligations.

Maj. de Seversky: Paradox

By Maj. Alexander P. de Seversky