St. Louis gal who felt sorry for ‘nice Nazis’ said Fascists were ‘just having fun’
By Carleton Kent, North American Newspaper Alliance
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1,000 hit oil plants in Austria, Hungary
By Walter Cronkite, United Press staff writer
SHAEF, London, England –
More than 4,000 Allied planes roared over the flaming Norman battlefields yesterday and laid a shattering barrage across the German frontlines around Caen, while a mighty sky fleet of well over 1,000 Italian-based raiders bombed Nazi oil refineries and airfields in Austria and Hungary.
Headquarters announced that the overall number of sorties would total more than 4,000, including 1,200 flown from Normandy airfields in close support of U.S. and British ground attacks.
Wireless station set afire
Headquarters announced that Normandy-based fighters shot down two German planes against a loss of one. Meanwhile, Spitfires of the air defenses of Great Britain set fire to a wireless station at Combourg, 20 miles southeast of Saint-Malo, and strafed various targets from Brittany to Laon.
Wave upon wave of U.S. Marauders thundered over the heads of the charging British troops throughout the morning, splattering their bombloads upon enemy gun batteries and strongpoints in the Caen sector, many of which were still smoldering from a savage, 2,500-ton night bombardment by the RAF’s heavyweights.
Thunderbolt fighters covered the Marauders and raked the enemy lines with machine-gun and cannon fire. Nearly 100 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers, attacking from treetop height walked their bombs across German defenses. Not a single German plane attempted to interfere with the raid, and the Nazis threw up only a feeble anti-aircraft barrage that caught one Marauder.
Smash rail bridge
Simultaneously, other Marauder formations reached inland to smash a railway bridge across the Eure River at Nogent-le-Roi, 70 miles southwest of Paris, and another across the Loire at Saumur.
At midafternoon, another force of thunderbolts and Lightnings bombed the network of railway lines feeding into the battle area, hitting 40 points between La Chapelle and Combourg, between Craon and Laval, and in the neighborhood of Rennes and Alençon.
The Nazi robot bomb bases along the Pas-de-Calais area were attacked by medium-sized forces of U.S. 8th Air Force Liberators and Flying Fortresses.
Swarms of U.S. fighters covered the four-engined giants and, meeting no enemy opposition in the air, they fanned out over northern France to bomb and strafe targets of opportunity on the ground.
Wreck 20 planes
One Mustang formation commanded by Col. William J. “Wild Bill” Cummings Jr. of Lawrence, Kansas, and led today by Maj. Henry B. Kucheman Jr. of Richmond, Virginia, flushed a secret German airdrome in a forest southeast of Paris. Twenty enemy planes were destroyed on the ground at Dreux Airfield, south of Paris. Another Lightning fighter group shot up 11 locomotives, 50 freight cars and a flak tower, all without meeting a single enemy fighter. German anti-aircraft gunners, however, shot down 10 heavy bombers and one fighter.
Between 500 and 750 Flying Fortresses and Liberators, accompanied by probably as many fighters, swarmed up from their Italian bases to join in the assault on Axis Europe, blasting three oil refineries and three airfields in the Vienna area and another airdrome at Veszprém, 65 miles southwest of Budapest.
Returning crewmen said only weak enemy fighter opposition was encountered over Vienna, where the bombers touched off huge fires and explosions in the Floridsdorf Creditul Minier and Fanto Vösendorf refineries. The Floridsdorf refinery, in the northern suburbs of Vienna, is Austria’s largest crude oil distillation plant.
Blast airfields
Widespread damage was also inflicted on the nearby Zwölfaxing Markersdorf and Münchendorf airfields, all fighter bases covering Vienna, and on the Hungarian field.
The RAF was out in force last night, hurling 450 four-engined Lancasters and Halifaxes into a 2,500-ton raid on the German battlelines at Caen, while other raiding formations hit enemy communications lines in northern France and a force of Mosquito borders stabbed at Berlin. Other warplanes ranged over in France, Belgium and Holland on intruder patrols, shooting down at least nine enemy planes.
Thirty-three British planes were lost in the night operations.
Army cook loses all sense of time until rescued from building basement
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May make speech nominating Roosevelt
Wallace to talk from Seattle tomorrow
Great Falls, Montana (UP) – (July 8)
Vice President Henry A. Wallace was here today en route from China to Washington, DC, where he will make a confidential report to President Roosevelt, Public Relations Officer Edward F. Carr of the Great Falls Army Air Base announced.Mr. Wallace is en route to Seattle, where he plans to make a radio address, tomorrow afternoon at 6:30 p.m. ET, telling of his tour.
Washington (UP) – (July 8)
Democratic circles, in the throes of fresh speculation over vice-presidential prospects at the party’s national convention, circulated a report tonight that Senator Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley (D-KY) would make the speech nominating President Roosevelt for a fourth term.
There were some who believed that the President would insist on the renomination of Vice President Henry A. Wallace. But there were others who felt that Mr. Roosevelt would not remain adamant if opposition threatened to destroy convention unity. All, however, eagerly awaited Wallace’s radio address from Seattle tomorrow in the hope that he might drop some hint as to his own future plans.
Meanwhile, new names were listed as added starters in the vice-presidential speculative sweepstakes – a game that was being played by Democrats and Republicans alike. These were War Mobilization Director James F. Byrnes and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Others previously mentioned include House Speaker Sam Rayburn (D-TX), Senator Harry S. Truman (D-MO) and Barkley.
Mr. Barkley was at his home in Paducah, Kentucky, and was not available for comment on the report that he would take the convention lead in calling for a fourth term. DNC officials here professed to have no knowledge of Barkley’s plan, but at least one of them said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the report were true that the Kentuckian would place Mr. Roosevelt in nomination.
Such an act by Senator Barkley would be final proof of his full reconciliation with the President following the Majority Leader’s angry reaction to the tax bill veto.
Democratic National Chairman Robert E. Hannegan, who conferred for an hour with the President last night, leaves for Chicago with his staff tomorrow to open headquarters and complete final plans for the convention July 19.
At Democratic headquarters here, it was indicated that this committee plans to draft a short platform in which emphasis will be placed on a clear, forthright foreign policy plank and on the past record of the administration.
Roanoke, Virginia (UP) – (July 8)
Senator Harry F. Byrd (D-VA) today called upon the Democratic Party to return to “the greatest Democratic declaration in existence” – the party’s 1932 platform – and to reinstate the two-thirds vote in national conventions.
In a surprise address before the Virginia State Democratic Convention, Mr. Byrd said that disunity is threatening the Democratic Party as never before, and that a “return to sound principles of government” would do much to reassure the American people.
The delegates, later in the day, adopted a unanimous resolution to oppose a renomination of Henry A. Wallace as Vice President. The resolution asserted that Mr. Wallace “has become a convert to doctrines and ideologies foreign to the faith and traditions of Virginia.”
Mentioned by some Southern Democrats as a possible anti-Roosevelt presidential candidate, Mr. Byrd said the present cleavage in Democratic ranks was one “of basic principles.”
He said the Party could never be destroyed by a defeat from the Republican Party, but only by “the infiltration of alien philosophies” into its ranks. He said that repeal of the two-thirds rule had “stripped the South of its real power and voice in Democratic councils.”
Mr. Byrd said:
Communist-dominated radicals, who seek to infiltrate our party, were working for the abandonment of the American Constitution and the propagation of class and racial discrimination.
GOP group charges ‘chaos, confusion’
Washington (UP) – (July 8)
The Republican Congressional Food Study Committee charged tonight that the administration’s handling of the nation’s food problems has resulted in “chaos and confusion” and demanded that the now-widely dispersed control over food production be placed in the hands of a single administrator.
The committee carried out studies of various phases of the food situation and held public meetings to hear the views of producers, processors, distributors and consumers.
The committee’s report said:
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the New Deal is that it seeks to regiment under federal and bureaucratic control all of the industrial and human activities of the nation.
At least 10 separate government agencies assumed jurisdiction over some phases of the producing, processing and distribution of food. These various agencies, functioning under widely different and sometimes contradictory directives and executive orders, duplicated their efforts and thereby harassed the public in many ways. The result was confusion and chaos everywhere.
Other phases of the report charged:
That the hearings developed a sordid story of the black market in poultry, beef and pork, onions, fish and other commodities: “The insidious illegal black markets are the unmistakable result of inefficiency in administration.”
That through poor administration, the government is wasting huge qualities of food and feed.
That rationing and price-fixing policies as exercised by the administration have placed a penalty on quality and incentive to produce the best, and placed a premium upon the lowering of quality.
Experience, bungling will be stressed
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
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Warning sounded that such action might serve to prolong the war
By Fred W. Parker, United Press staff writer
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Col. McCormick cables Lord Beaverbrook
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Military hubbies ‘marked men’
By Ruth Millett
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Shaft being cut into Ohio mine
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Chief of Air Forces Materiel Command says idea tested in U.S. as far back as 1918
By Henry Ward, Press aviation editor
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Senator is asked to explain reply
Washington (UP) – (July 8)
“The New Deal squad operates like skunks and dogs,” Senator W. Lee O’Daniel (D-TX) retorted today when informed that the War Production Board was asking how he got the newsprint to begin publication of an anti-New Deal newspaper July 4.
He asserted his paper, the W. Lee O’Daniel News, had been given a “clean bill of health” by the WPB Regional Board in Dallas, Texas, and added:
It clipped the New Deal’s ears back twice in Texas and it’s going to do it again. That’s what it’s for.
Letter awaited
Mr. O’Daniel said he had not yet received the letter which Arthur Treanor, director of WPB’s Printing and Publishing Division, addressed to him yesterday asking when and where O’Daniel bought a year’s supply of critically short newsprint to start publication of the News at 100,000 copies an issue.
He said:
It’s the New Deal fashion to turn news over to newspapers to start a smear campaign before an addressee receives his letter. The New Deal squad operates like skunks and dogs, you know that old game. The dog can run faster than the skunk but he can never catch up to it – and you know why.
Regional chief quoted
He said he had received a letter from George L. Noble Jr. of the WPB Regional Office in Dallas in which Mr. Noble, replying to a Fort Worth publisher, said inquiries by his office “failed to reveal any evidence of violation of the WPB limitation order” by Mr. O’Daniel’s newspaper.
The publisher, D. E. Weaver of the Fort Worth Press, had asked Mr. Noble to find out how Mr. O’Daniel obtained “several carloads” of newsprint and stored a year’s supply in a warehouse in Fort Worth.
Mr. O’Daniel quoted Mr. Noble’s reply to Mr. Weaver to the effect that “inquiries made failed to reveal any evidence of the violation of the WPB limitation order.”
Battle for rule of skies almost over
By E. C. Shepherd, North American Newspaper Alliance
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Disintegrated coral coats everything with gritty, yellow stucco
By Keith Wheeler, North American Newspaper Alliance
Saipan, Mariana Islands – (June 22, delayed)
I was born on the edge of the American Midwestern dust bowl and I’ve seen prairie gales lift the granulated top soil and draw it like a curtain across the sky.
But I’ve never seen anything like the dust of the Saipan beachhead.
Probably before we came, Saipan’s roads were no more dusty than coral-surfaced roads ever are – although that’s dusty enough. Now the narrow roads carry more traffic every 24 hours than they ever carried in any previous year.
Amphibious tractors, laden with men, ammunition, guns, water and barbed wire, claw into the coral with their steel-toothed treads. Tanks, halftracks and great track-laying prime movers churn through the dust. Jeeps, trailers, trucks, captured Jap vehicles, bicycles, oxcarts and tramping men crawl back and forth in an endless procession.
Under this pounding, the coral has disintegrated. The roads are eight inches deep in a fine yellow powder and the whole five miles of waterfront lies perpetually hidden under an opaque yellow pall.
“It’s like wading knee-deep in talcum powder,” one gasping Martine said. The dust permeates everything within 1,000 yards of the beach and dictates the life of the men that live there.
You plod 100 yards through the dust and your face is plastered in a gritty, yellow stucco so that not even your abundant sweat wets the outside later. It coats the palms, breadfruit, and papaya trees so thickly that they bend with its weight.
It blinds red-eyed drivers in rolling yellow clouds, picked up by their own vehicles, and all traffic moves at a crawl. It sifts down like a harsh unmalting snow into the faces of sleeping men, flavors their food, fills their clothing and packs and provides a thin burial shroud for the fetid Jap corpses that no one has yet had time to bury.
Neither dust nor bombs nor shells nor snipers can halt the great river of men and tools of war that flows painfully up from the sea to the land. Beach parties have contrived to land thousands of tons of food, water, ammunition, guns, wire, oil, gasoline, trucks and tractors each day. Hardly a day has passed that the pace has not been kept up. It is backbreaking, brutal, dangerous and utterly without glory.
Majority of French women await return of countrymen; others ostracized
By Gault MacGowan, North American Newspaper Alliance
Colombières, Normandy, France – (July 8)
The name of this place means dovecots in English, and the little church of the village has a popular matrimonial altar. But you will search in vain for records of weddings between Nazi soldiers and French girls.
An aged parish priest told me today:
We have had no weddings of that kind here or in any of our parishes. Civil weddings may have taken place, but I haven’t heard of any. There were some clandestine liaisons, of course, but none solemnized by the church. No self-respecting girl would have anything to do with the Germans.
I have been checking up on reports of French girls’ retreating with the Germans and on the invasion-day stories of French girls as snipers and roof-spotters, and have learned that those who became such collaborationists were few indeed. The priest’s story of Colombières is true, I feel sure, for most communities in Normandy. Tradition is strong in this region, and family life is even stronger. There is no sympathy for the scarlet woman.
Spoke to ‘pink sister’
I spoke to one pink sister today, discovering her hue only after I asked her opinion of why the Germans did not invade England in 1940 and she flashed back so aptly with her reply.
“Why should they?” she said. “They had everything they wanted here – wine, women and the best of cooking.”
In justice to French women in general, I should make clear that I have asked the same question of many others, and they have given me quite different answers.
It must be admitted that there has been a definite psychological problem involved with the occupation army. Young Frenchwomen, with their own young men far from them and only old men or comparative weaklings to choose from, could not keep from glancing occasionally at healthy, young German soldiers, looking very difference from the caricatures of them circulated before the fall of France. Not all were the strictly Nazi types. Large numbers of Saxons, Bavarians and Austrians. Some had been educated at the Sorbonne or in England or America. They spoke French well and their manners were cosmopolitan.
Germans frowned on unions
These more attractive ones were pushed forward in the early campaign to implant Hitler’s ideology in France. Parties, tennis and other games were organized for collaboration families; and it was difficult to refuse all German invitations without causing reprisals.
If any weddings resulted – genuine weddings – they took place in Paris or somewhere else far from local cognizance. Any weddings learned of here would have caused social ostracism. The girls involved would have been compelled by the pressure of public opinion to leave their families and go to Germany. Another side of the truth is that the Germans themselves frowned on such unions in their customary insistence on “racial purity.”
The comparatively few women of Normandy who lived openly with the Germans are targets of the scorn of their countrymen or are described bluntly as members of the world’s oldest profession. Norman instincts are too courteous to sanction dealing with them as the Corsicans did when I was there ands saw such women returned to their homes after camp life with the Nazis. Guerrilla patriots had cut off their hair and stripped them naked. Then they marched them to the top of the village street and turned them loose.
For four years, the great majority of Frenchwomen have drawn themselves into shells. they don’t come out easily even to greet the young men of the Allies. The German occupation of their country has made them more nationalistic than ever. They are reserving their welcomes for their imprisoned sweethearts and for those who come back with the Fighting French.
Normandy version like Hollywood’s; Yanks see him, turn autograph hounds
By L. S. B. Shapiro, North American Newspaper Alliance
With U.S. forces in Normandy, France – (July 8)
Every movie fan knows how David Niven looks in the role of a British officer fighting in France.
As a Hollywood actor, he played the part od a British officer in the 1914-18 war at least a dozen times. His realistic performance as Errol Flynn’s fighting pal in the picture Dawn Patrol sent him to stardom.
Niven looks no different as the real thing. He is a British officer on this Normandy bridgehead and is temporarily attached to a U.S. formation headquarters as British liaison officer.
I met him yesterday, and except for the fact that he is wearing battledress instead of the service dress uniforms officers wore in World War I. He is a same David Niven you’ve seen in so many Flanders pictures.
He was natty, his eyes had the same old twinkle and his grin had that quality of mischievous charm which made him so great a film favorite.
“I was honestly laughing with tears in my eyes when I landed in France the other day,” he said, chuckling.
We had a rough passage. You know how the Channel can be – and I was pretty shaky on my pins when I came ashore and dreadfully ill.
There were a lot of American troops working on the beach and the first thing I know they were rushing at me with bits of paper and pencils. I was awfully sick but I had to laugh. It was all too funny – and it is when you come to think of it. Here we are in the biggest, most dramatic operation of the war, and what happens? Autograph hounds!
As though to emphasize the truth of Niven’s dilemma, some British troops moving up to the front paused as they passed our roadside rendezvous and gave the movie star what is known in Hollywood as “the double take.” They looked curiously at first, as though searching their memories, then gave him a wide stare and a wave of the hand.
He looked up and down the muddy road filled with transport trucks and troops against the background of a shattered French village.
“It doesn’t look too different from a Hollywood set, what?” He remarked. Then Officer Niven climbed into a jeep and moved toward the battlefront.