War progress increases U.S. optimism
Feeling suppressed but it’s there
By Hal O’Flaherty
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McNair death blamed on mistake bombing by U.S. planes
Former ground force chief killed at start of U.S. offensive west of Saint-Lô, France
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British seize mount south of Florence
Eighth Army battling hard near city
By Reynolds Packard, United Press staff writer
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Editorial: How can they do it?
Republican voters in the 29th New York Congressional district, we suppose, know their own minds.
And they have a free right to nominate whomsoever they may choose to represent them in Congress.
But for the life of us we can’t comprehend how, with any feeling of pride or conscience, they can keep on sending Ham Fish to Washington.
However, Mr. Fish’s margin of victory was the smallest in his career. So there is still hope for the voters of that district.
Fish sorry Dewey disagrees on vote stand
Newburgh, New York (UP) –
Rep. Hamilton Fish Jr., winner of Tuesday’s primary fight for the Republican nomination in New York’s 29th district, said today he was “exceedingly sorry” Governor Thomas E. Dewey had found fault with his statement that Jewish voters favored the New Deal.
Calling his remarks “merely a political prediction and a truthful one,” Fish said as a “loyal Republican supporting the party ticket” he was against a fourth term for President Roosevelt and favored the election of the Dewey-Bricker ticket. He said he thought Governor Dewey had made a “serious political mistake.”
In answer to accusations by Gerald L. K. Smith, leader of the America First Party, that Governor Dewey and the Communist leader, Earl Browder, were supporting the same candidate when they attacked Mr. Fish’s candidacy, the veteran legislator said:
This is a free country and everyone, including Gerald Smith, is entitled to free speech, but I wish he would keep out of the fight in my district.
Johnson: Gee-gee giving trouble – so may be all alone on witness stand!
Garbo balking on role in war movie
By Erskine Johnson
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‘Commandments’ for tranquil living –
Couple reconciled on basis of wife’s 10 ‘simple’ rules
‘Thou shalt not beat thy spouse’ leads list; husband gets chance to add six amendments
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Pistol packin’ parson round up ‘iron bandits’
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How G.I. Bill of Rights works –
If veterans can’t find jobs it won’t be for lack of bureaus
By Robert Taylor, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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In Washington –
House speeds legislation on reconversion
Entire membership may be called Aug. 14
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Politics fills the air
Washington (UP) –
Congressmen, back just two days from vacations, were off to a flying start on the election campaign today with Senator Harold H. Burton (R-OH) asserting that a Republican President can work better with the next Congress and Senator Guy M. Gillette (D-IA) declaring that “Dewey simply hasn’t clicked in the Midwest.”
Assuming that the Republicans will capture the House, Senator Burton said a “deadlock” would ensue if President Roosevelt were reelected because the House could block appropriations needed to carry out presidential commitments to other nations.
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Normandy, France – (by wireless)
Mosquitoes are pretty bad in the swampy parts of Normandy. Especially along the hedgerows at night, they are ferocious.
Here in Normandy, they have something I’ve never seen before even in Alaska, the mosquito capital of the world.
When you drive along a Normandy road just before dusk, you’ll see dark columns extending 200 and 300 feet straight up into the air above a treetop. These are columns of mosquitoes swarming like bees, each column composed of millions of them.
At first, I thought they were gnats, but old mosquito people assure me they are genuine, all-wool mosquitoes. In a half-mile drive just before dusk you’ll see 20 of these columns. This is no cock and bull story; it’s the truth.
Our troops are not equipped with mosquito nets, so they just have to scratch and scratch. The mosquitoes, fortunately, don’t you give malaria, they merely drive you crazy.
One day at an ordnance company, I was talking with a soldier scrubbing rusted rifle barrels in a washtub of gasoline. His sleeves were relied up and his arms were covered with great red bumps. They were mosquito bites.
As we talked this man said, “Look at them mosquitoes hit that gasoline.”
Mosquitoes die beautifully
And sure enough, the mosquitoes were diving just like dive bombers, but once they hit the gasoline they just folded up and died beautifully and floated on the surface.
In one small-arms repair section that I visited, the only man who knew or cared anything about guns before the war was a professional gun collector.
He was Sgt. Joseph Toth of Mansfield, Ohio. He was stripped down to bit undershirt as the day was warm for a change. He was washing the walnut stocks of damaged rifles in a tub of water with a sponge. Toth used to work at the Westinghouse Electric plant in Mansfield and he spent all his extra money collecting guns. He belongs to the Ohio Gun Collectors Association. He says each one of the gun collectors back in Ohio has a different specialty. Some collect pistols; some muzzleloaders. His own hobby was machine pistols. He has 35 in his collection, some of them very expensive ones.
Ironically enough, he has not collected any guns over here at all, even though he’s in a world of machine pistols and many pass through his hands.
He says:
It isn’t so much the collecting. I just like to take them down. When I monkey with a gun, I like to take it clear down and put it back together again.
Toth also likes to talk. He’ll talk all day. As the other boys say, if he could always have a new type machine pistol to take down and somebody to listen to him at the same time, he’d constantly be the happiest man on earth.
Eggs are not plentiful enough in Normandy to supply the whole army, but a good scavenger can dig up a few each day. We buy them from farmers’ wives for six and eight cents apiece. We’re hoping someday to buy some from a farmer’s daughter.
These Normandy eggs are fine eggs, and about every fourth one is as big as a duck egg. The five men in our tent are all egg conscious, so we make it a practice to shop for eggs as we go about the country.
Ernie slaves over hot stove
We pass up regular breakfast in the Army mess and have our breakfast in our own tent every morning. By some inexplicable evolution of cruel fate, I have become the chef or this four-man crew of breakfast gargantuans.
Those four plutocrats lie in their cots and snore while I get out at the crack of dawn and slave over two Coleman stoves, cooking their oeufs in real Normandy butter – fried, scrambled, boiled or poached, as suits the whims of their respective majesties.
Except when I’m away with troops, I’ve been at this despicable occupation now for two months. And although my clients are, smart enough to keep me always graciously flattered about my culinary genius, I’m getting damn sick of the job.
So someday I’m going to carry out the most diabolical scheme. I’ll prepare, with the greatest of care, the most delicious breakfast ever known in France – I’ll have shirred hummingbird eggs and crisp French-fried potatoes and corn-fed bacon, done to a turn, and grape jelly and autumn-brown toast and gallons and gallons of thick, luscious coffee.
Then I’ll wake them up and I’ll serve it to all four of them on a red platter. I’ll serve it with a bow to Mr. Whitehead, and a curtesy to Mr. Liebling, and a “Good morning to you, sir,” to Mr. Brandt, and a long salute to Mr. Gorrell. And after I’ve served it, I’ll walk out casually as though I’m going up the hedgerow a little ways.
But instead, I’ll go on away and I’ll never come back again as long as I live, never, not even if they put an ad in the paper, and they will all wither away to nothing from lack of sustenance, and eventually they will starve plumb to death in this faraway and strangely beautiful land. Ha, ha.
Pegler: GOP conference
By Westbrook Pegler
St. Louis, Missouri –
This contribution to American literary treasure and political wisdom is being written under the same roof which covers the deliberations of the 26 Republican governors who are pondering a supplementary party platform under Tom Dewey’s general supervision.
Serious men all, of varying degrees of intelligence and statesmanship, they are meeting in defensive spirit, handcuffed, as it were by the prestige that Frank Roosevelt has assured for himself as a personal chum and easy confidant of Stalin and Churchill, and hushed by their own awe of a native American politician certainly no better than themselves.
This is a political fight between two American candidates for one office. If that office were mayor, sheriff or coroner, the Republicans would be at ease and ready to throw the record at Roosevelt.
If an incumbent sheriff, elected on a crime-must-go platform, had established a flagrant and mocking alliance with the very same sordid gangs, comparable to Ed Kelly’s and Frank Hague’s, that he had affected to despise and promised to destroy, the opposition would disgrace him with proof of his own hypocrisy.
Timid GOP disowns Fish
Yet, these Republicans speak softly and with a respect for the presidential office which no more belongs to Roosevelt as a candidate than it belongs to Dewey in the same status. They have been so dazzled, awed and humbled by Roosevelt’s own propaganda that when Congressman Ham Fish, a Republican, states an indisputable fact, Dewey and the rest of the party disown him.
The truth is that it wasn’t Ham Fish who injected issues of clannishness, religion and race into this campaign but Mr. Roosevelt’s own Communist auxiliary which went underground a few months ago and emerged as the Political Action Committee of the CIO.
Poles, Irish, Catholics, anti-Catholics, Jews, Masons, Protestants and units of labor and business all have voted as blocks in this country, off and on, according to the heat of the moment, for generations.
Mr. Roosevelt, himself, appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court a man of such miserable character that, just to win a cheap, local job as county prosecutor in Birmingham, Alabama, he joined an oath-bound gang of night-riding terrorists whose guiding creed was hatred and persecution of Jews, Catholics and Negroes.
Yet, such is the power of the Roosevelt propaganda and the spell of his New Deal cynicism, that today, there are even Republicans who disown Mr. Fish, not for his infallible oafishness but merely because he remarked that Mr. Roosevelt would command the Jewish vote.
Communists arouse prejudice
Every honest politician and political writer in the United States knows that religious and racial prejudice are political implements of the Communists as well as of the true bigots. Where the bigots arouse such issues in plain, stupid hatred and superstition, the Communists do it for the calculated purpose of causing bloody disorders.
They do it by selecting despicable characters to commit outrageous attacks on the dignity and character of honest, tolerant Americans. For years the Communists of Mr. Roosevelt’s own political auxiliary have been trying the souls of exemplary patriotic men who shed their blood in France in the purest devotion to American ideals, by subjecting them to loathsome abuse.
They call them Nazis and Fascists and, thus, traitors to their country and, for the delivery of these trying provocations they have selected ingrate refugees who not only scuttled out of the American draft in the last war but employed their time in soapbox exhortations to other immigrants to make a revolution here in the absence of the nation’s best fighting men.
That is the Communist way. The Communists all will vote for Mr. Roosevelt.
Yet the Republicans cringe and repudiate Mr. Fish on the very day that Vito Marcantonio, the Communist candidate is renominated for Congress in New York.
Marcantonio openly preaches Communist doctrine and is loyal at once, both to Mr. Roosevelt and to Joseph Stalin who slaughtered more human beings, his fellow Russians, is cold-blooded butchery and calculated famine than the United States has lost in all our wars from the Revolution down to this very day.
Mr. Fish fought bravely in World War I. Marcantonio has never worn a uniform or heard a shot and resisted every effort to arm this nation for its own defense until Hitler attacked Stalin.
And while the Republicans, in pallid voices, dissociate themselves from Mr. Fish, what says Roosevelt about the nomination of Marcantonio? He doesn’t even bother to deny that the Communists are his. The American people don’t even know where he is.