America at war! (1941–) – Part 3

941

Europe faces big actions in next 100 days

Allies and Axis clearing away obstacles to titanic clashes
By Robert Musel, United Press staff writer

London, England –
Military and political developments indicated today that the next 100 days will see the Allies and Germany poised for, if not engaged in, the battles that will decide the European war.

Both sides appeared equally intent on clearing away all obstacles barring the war to the titanic clashes that will be touched off by the climatic Allied offensives promised by the Tehran Conference “from the east, west and south.”

Balkans reinforced

Among the developments were:

  • Germany was replacing Junkers generals with political generals pledged to support Adolf Hitler to the end to guard against any repetition of the Prussian military clique’s surrender of 1918.

  • Germany reportedly dispatched 40,000 reserves from Austria and Finland and an air squadron intended for Italy to the Balkans in an attempt to wipe out Partisan forces in advance of an Allied invasion.

  • The Bulgarian Cabinet held a seven-hour meeting on “current affairs” yesterday.

  • Radio Vichy said the Romanian government was considering moving from Bucharest to Brașov, 90 miles to the north, because of the growing danger of air raids.

  • King Peter of Yugoslavia was reported ready to make peace with Marshal Josip “Tito” Broz, Partisan leader.

  • British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was believed about to take over the job of convincing the Polish government-in-exile of the wisdom of resuming relations with Russia.

A Hungarian MTI Agency dispatch said Count Anton Sigray told the Hungarian Parliament that Hungary had always pursued a “democratic policy” and “invoked Providence in securing an honorable peace.”

The German tendency to replace Junkers generals with those known to be loyal to Hitler was first seen in the replacement of Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commander in France, by Marshal Erwin Rommel as chief of the defense of Western Europe against invasion.

Peace moves rumored

Later reports reaching London said Gen. Richard Jungclaus, an SS leader and intimate friend of Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, had taken over the Belgian command from Gen. Alexander von Falkenhausen, a career officer.

The London Daily News relayed a rumor that Rundstedt had gone to Lisbon in an attempt to establish contact with Allied diplomats for peace feeler purposes while reports were published elsewhere that Falkenhausen’s aide-de-camp, Maj. Hertzberg-Harbou, had gone to Portugal on a similar mission.

None of the peace feeler rumors were confirmed and it appeared certain that Germany would disown the peace feelers and that the Allies would hold out for unconditional surrender.

942

Poll: Army method of punishing Patton upheld

Large majority wants general to continue with troops
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion

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943

Editorial: The people’s rights come first

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944

Editorial: Balance-of-power vs. peace

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945

Editorial: Don’t get the flu

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946

In Washington –
Taft takes his compromise on subsidy to Senate floor

Committee that spurned Ohioan’s plan agrees to end deadlock tomorrow over farm bloc objections

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947

Simms: Finland again pays quota on war debt to America

There’s reason to believe war with Russia could be settled on basis of Czech pact
By William Philip Simms, Scripps-Howard staff writer

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948

All-out smash at Nazis near, Eden declares

Tehran plans to utilize full Allied resources, Secretary says
By Joseph W. Grigg, United Press staff writer

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949

Administration said to favor air monopoly

Competition is supported as post-war policy in Congress
By Charles T. Lucey, Scripps-Howard staff writer

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950

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

At the frontline in Italy – (by wireless)
It had been my intention to work back into the war gradually by doing maybe a couple of weeks’ columns about how things were in Naples, what Italian women looked like, and whether the island of Capri was as pretty as they say.

But I don’t know what happened. I hadn’t been in Naples two hours before I felt I couldn’t stand it, and by the next evening there I was – up in the mud again, sleeping on some straw and awakening throughout the night with the old familiar crash and thunder of the big guns in my ears.

It was the artillery for me this time. I went with an outfit I had known in England a year ago last fall, made up largely of men from the Carolinas and Eastern Tennessee.

This regiment shoots 155mm howitzers. They are terrifically big guns and, Lordy, do they make a noise! The gun weighs six tons, and the shell itself is so big it’s all an ammunition carrier can do to lug one up to the gun pit.

The regiment has all new guns now. I can’t tell you how far they shoot, but as the Carolina boys said, “It’s awful fur.”

The colonel is pleased

This retirement’s commander is a good-natured former textile-plant executive who fought all through the last war and has already spent nearly a year in the frontlines in this one.

He is humorous, as Southern as magnolia, and he loves being alive. He calls every soldier around him by his first name.

He lives in a two-man tent with his executive officer. Right now, it’s pitched on a hillside, and they have put big rocks under the lower legs of their cot to make it level. They wash from gasoline tins, and slog a quarter of a mile through deep mud for their meals.

Both are men of refinement and accustomed to fine living back home.

When I came pulling up the muddy hillside late one afternoon between showers, the colonel was sitting in a canvas chair in the door of his tent, reading a magazine. When I got within about 50 yards he looked up, let out a yell, and called out:

Well, I’ll be damned if it ain’t my old friend Ernie Pyle! Goshamighty, am I glad to see you! Ansel, this calls for a drink.

He reached under his cot and brought out a square bottle of some white Italian fluid all full of what looked like sugar Christmas trees. It was a very thick, sweetish substance, which shows what a Southerner can come to who’s been without mint juleps for a year.

Conversation valued

This colonel’s tentmate is Lt. Col. Ansel Godfrey, who used to be principal of the high school at Abbeville, South Carolina, and now calls Clinton his home. He and I and the colonel sat for two hours while they pumped me about America and told me about Italy.

The colonel said:

Boy, are you a welcome sight! You don’t know how wonderful it is to have somebody new to talk to. Ansel and I have been boring each other to death for months. Today we tell each other what we are going to do tomorrow, and then tomorrow we tell each other we did it. That’s what we’ve been driven to for conversation.

After supper and a couple of hours with these friends I told them I wanted to go live with one of their gun crews. They said all right, but since it was raining again there might not be much shooting. They said if they did get any orders during the night, they’d have whatever battery I was with do the firing.

So, I went down and introduced myself to a gun crew and warned them I probably was going to cause them to overwork, for which I apologized. Then I settled gradually in mud up to my knees.

It wound up that I stayed three days and three nights with these boys and got so I felt like a cannoneer myself.

Only once did I hear anybody singing the famous artillery song about the caissons rolling along. One cannoneer hummed it one day during a lull. You could recreate the words in your mind as he was humming:

Over hill, over dale, as we hit the dusty trail…

What a sardonic line that is in Italy, with our guns hub-deep in black, sloshy, gooey, all-encompassing mud.

951

Clapper: Negroes’ jobs

By Raymond Clapper

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952

Transportation crisis due, Truman report warns

Nation has coasted on reserves to the limit and replacements now are must

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953

alwilliams

Maj. Williams: Tactics

By Maj. Al Williams

With 1943 nearing its end, some observations on the tactics of modern warfare are appropriate.

Thus far, no hostile forces have breached the final Nazi eastern line within hundreds of miles of Germany proper. Huge armies are not pounding Germany from a west front. There is a front in Italy, but that’s not near enough to Germany to make its pressure felt within that nation.

In other wars, with an enemy nation surrounded, and cut off from sea traffic, it would have been possible to starve out the belligerents by sea and land blockage. But unlike the last war where blockage was steadily and inexorably starving the German war effort while great Allied armies pounded and hacked at its heart, we now find the combat fronts far from Nazi boundaries. And the Germans apparently have sufficient food and supplies.

Nevertheless, we are told – and rightly – that affairs within Germany are bad. What has upset the carefully regimented and planned Nazi war strength? Day and night hammering from the air. There’s not a spot within Germany that cannot be and is not reached and stabbed by Allied bombers – night and day.

There’s no way of estimating just what the constant air threat represents in the loss of man hours of labor to German war production. It’s true that the Nazis, in anticipation of being bombed, scattered their production units. Against this safety precaution must be debited the extraordinary transportation burden of carrying the products of each factory to some common center for assembly. Naturally, the Allied airmen, keenly aware of this transportation problem, have been persistently hammering away at the German railroads. This air pressure on the German rail transportation system must represent a vital faction in the eventual breakdown.

Occasionally we hear complaints about the shortage of rail passenger accommodations in this country with our roadbeds and rolling stock untouched by explosives. Just imagine what the general rail situation must be in Germany.

Then, too, consider the constant threat of air bombardment and its effect upon the dislocation of factory routine. Just assume for a moment what would happen to the grand totals of planes and engines produced by Pratt & Whitney, Grumman, Republic and Wright Aeronautical if these factories were being systemically bombed day and night. I think it would be safe to assume that none of them would be attaining better than one-half their current production. The cities of the Ruhr are no longer places conductive to the all-essential rest and eight-hour sleep of war workers. And now as the air-raid network is expanded, the same can be said for almost all important German cities. Many one-time important Nazi cities are nothing but shells, unfit for normal habitation. And, remember, sleep is equally important as food for physical fitness and wellbeing. Deficiency in food or sleep has its direct reflection in depreciated morale.

These are the things the Allied air arms are doing to the German war effort and German morale. By no means do I mean to infer that air bombardment alone will win this war and force surrender of the Nazi outfit. But I do maintain that the day-and-night bombardment of Naziland will be the pressure that will finally break the backbone of the Germans in this war, as the sea blockade broke them in the last war.

954

Pressure hits steel plants on rush items

Heavy demand reported for plates, sheets and pipes

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955

Völkischer Beobachter (December 16, 1943)

Rosenberg: Churchill, der Kriegsverbrecher

Entlarvt an seinen eigenen Bekenntnissen
Von Alfred Rosenberg

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956

Auseinandersetzungen und Sorgen erwarten Roosevelt –
Harmonie in Teheran – Dissonanzen in der Heimat

Drahtbericht unseres Lissaboner Berichterstatters

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957

U.S. Navy Department (December 16, 1943)

CINCPAC Press Release No. 196

Army heavy bombers of the 7th Army Air Force which bombed the enemy airdrome on Taroa Island on December 14 (West Longitude Date) started fires in the hangar area. They were intercepted by 15 fighters. One fighter was shot down, four were probably shot down and five were damaged.

Three of our planes were slightly damaged. Enemy bombers made nuisance raids at Tarawa on December 12 and 13, and at Makin on December 13 and 14. No damage resulted from the Tarawa attacks. Four men were wounded at Makin by a bomb dropped in the raid on December 13.

CINCPAC Press Release No. 197

Heavy bombers of the 7th Army Air Force struck Taroa and Wotje, in the Marshalls, on December 15 (West Longitude Date) dropping more than 40 tons of bombs, damaging installations on both islands.

At Taroa, where damage was inflicted on buildings and storage spaces our bombers were attacked by 30 enemy fighters. Two Zeros were shot down, eight were probably shot down, and eight others were damaged. One of our planes was lost and several others suffered damage. One crew member of another of our planes was killed.

At Wotje, where fires were observed as result of the bombings, none of our planes was damaged.

958

The Pittsburgh Press (December 16, 1943)

NAZI BOMBERS SINK 17 ALLIED SHIPS
Losses heavy in attack on Italian port

3,000 casualties at Bari; five U.S. merchant vessels destroyed

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959

Raid smashes Brenner Pass railroad line

Airmada of 300 planes cuts German supply route to Italy

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960

FLORIDA TRAINS CRASH; 50 DIE
Broken rail tosses cars in flier’s path

Many servicemen listed among the injured; cold slows aid

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