Cognac Airdrome is hit; Calais area blasted again – Americans wage running fight with Nazis
By David Anderson
…
Troops land above Garigliano mouth and stab to Minturno – 8th Army nearer Pescara
By Milton Bracker
…
Wholesale removal policy hits ‘reformed’ Fascists working under Allies
…
Others bar arbitration; non-operating workers insist overtime is only point remaining unsettled
By Louis Stark
…
Washington – (Dec. 31)
President Roosevelt was in bed with a slight case of gripped today following two days of confinement to his quarters with a head cold.
William D. Hassett, a White House secretary, told correspondents this morning:
I am sorry to inform you now that the President has the grippe. Dr. McIntire [Adm. Ross T. McIntire] reports he has about a half degree of temperature and that he has ordered him to stay in bed today, and probably will keep him in bed tomorrow.
As a result of the President’s illness, the Cabinet meeting, as well as the Friday morning press conference, was canceled.
Sentenced to 10 years while 7th goes to prison for 7 – each fined $10,000
…
New Year messages are read as premier appeals for unity among guerillas
By A. C. Sedgwick
…
3-month figure unconfirmed – Bougainville push seen
…
Took part in attack on enemy bivouac night before victory
…
Countries unable to pay will get meats, finished goods – Hendrickson named
…
Washington – (Dec. 31)
Secretary of State Cordell Hull called for “the unremitting and all-embracing efforts of every man and woman” for victory in a New Year’s message to the American people today.
He said:
We have just ended a year which shook our Axis enemies to their very foundations and which witnessed on our side an upsurge of united power that will carry us to victory. Our confidence in victory must, however, be dependent on the unremitting and all-embracing efforts of every man and woman.
Navy says he is first Marine to attain rank – Vandegrift takes command today
…
Declares 1944 will produce decisive victories for us in many quarters
…
Smash Japanese counterblows at Cape Gloucester as enemy dead rises above 900
…
Intensive courses at the new Hawaiian center turn out thousands every week
By George F. Horne
…
London, England (AP) – (Dec. 31)
Adolf Hitler, in a grim New Year’s message to the German people today, offered them only hope of dogged resistance for their very lives and, anticipating invasion from the west, boasted that wherever they landed, the Allies would receive an appropriate welcome.
In a long written message distributed by DNB to German newspapers and recorded from a Berlin broadcast by the Associated Press, Hitler again sounded the German propaganda note that:
In this war there will be no victors and losers, but merely survivors and annihilated.
A separate New Year Order of the Day to the Army called 1943 “a second year of great crisis” initiated by the Russian winter offensive of 1941-42.
In this message, Hitler announced that “the apparent slackening of the U-boat war is based only on one single technical invention of our enemies” and added:
We are not only about to remove it, but we are convinced that we shall succeed in this within a short period.
He did not disclose what the new Allied invention was.
Even as the Russians, in one of their greatest victories of the war, were driving toward pre-war Poland’s borders and drawing near Romania’s frontiers, Hitler said:
A Napoleonic catastrophe seemed imminent for the German front, yet we were able to master the situation.
The Russian front had also been weakened because of the Allied threat in the West, he said.
He declared:
Garrisoning of positions that are absolutely essential for the defense of Europe demanded a shift in the balance of services in the rear and of traffic installations, a process that went on at the expense of the East.
Many reinforcements destined for the East have now been tied down and must assist in protecting the rest of the European living space. This is a cause of many worries and sufferings for you, my comrades at the Eastern Front.
Germany, he said, was fighting with a “fanatical hatred,” and was inspired by the old biblical saying:
An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
To the home front, he promised that “retaliation will come” for the Allied bombings.
He blamed setbacks on “Italian treason” and the breach of faith of French admirals and generals which permitted Allied landings in North Africa, but he claimed that “the balancing of our forces is now achieved.”
His dominant theme in the long message was that times were heard but that worse was to come if Germany lost.
Hitler had a propaganda message for the British – that Britain had now lost the balance-of-power position and was at the mercy of her allies, Russia and America.
The year 1943 “brought us our heaviest reverses,” Hitler admitted, but he also contended that after more than four years of war, the German Reich had not lost one square kilometer of its soil.
Discussing what he called the attempt of Britain and the United States to destroy Europe and Germany with Bolshevism, and discipline the German nation through the “Moscow garrotters,” Hitler said:
The necessity of preserving Europe against the Bolshevist danger depends exclusively on the existence of one dominating continental power.
Other Nazi Party leaders also issued New Year messages.
Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister, said:
Nobody who has even lived through 1943, the most difficult year of war, will ever forget it.
We have suffered setbacks and had to shoulder too great burdens, but they have not been decisive.
Murray of CIO says demands in steel negotiations will be pushed in politics
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – (Dec. 31)
A minimum annual wage for industrial workers, to be paid and guaranteed by employers, is being built up by the Congress of Industrial Organizations as a major issue for the 1944 elections, Philip Murray, CIO president, disclosed here.
Such a guaranteed wage is one of the principal proposals now being urged upon Carnegie-Illinois Steel and other U.S. Steel Corporation subsidiaries through direct negotiations by the CIO United Steel Workers of America. The steel workers are also contending for a 17¢ hourly wager increase and other concessions.
Going several steps further than in previous declarations, Mr. Murray said that the CIO’s political action committee would be directed to enlist all possible labor and liberal support for the minimum annual wage plan as they only feasible means of protecting the nation’s workers from destructive economic post-war jolts.
Appeal to WLB planned
The CIO chief also made known that he would shortly ask the National War Labor Board to “impose, if necessary, a guaranteed annual wage for steel workers” if the steel corporations refuse to adopt this program.
The weekly wage guarantee, Mr. Murray explained, would be computed on the basis of a 40-hour workweek. That section of the contract proposal reads in part:
Such minimum weekly wage shall be computed on the straight time average hourly earnings for the year preceding the effective date of this contract, or such portion during which the employee may have been employed, plus the general wage adjustments included in the new contract, multiplied by 40 hours.
Another proviso says:
For each week during the life of this contract that the employee for reasons beyond his control does not receive a sum equal to this minimum, the company shall make up the difference.
First movement of kind
Mr. Murray said:
So far as we know, this is the first time that a labor organization anywhere has undertaken to seek the establishment of an annual minimum guaranteed wage through collective bargaining.
He pointed out that industry in the United States, through the tax laws, has guaranteed itself post-war protection. Provisions have been made, he added, “though these various measures, to afford security for American business after the war is over.”
He went on:
That may be a good thing but certainly the same thing should be done to protect the interests of American workers.
The annual wage is a sensible way of combating widespread unemployment. If we’re going to spread income and afford workers a just share of the national income, it can be done only through this proposal.
Under the proposal as submitted, if a worker’s average hourly rate has been $1, his guaranteed weekly pay would be $40, the year around, or annual pay of $2,080.
Other demands by the union include one week’s paid vacation for employee with three years or less service, and two weeks for those over three years; time-and-a-half pay for overtime learners not to receive less than the common labor rate; all employees who are in the Armed Forces or Merchant Marine to receive vacation pay while in service.
By Bosley Crowther
…
Bibeault excels in nets; checks 33 shots as Rangers press to win on Patrick’s 60th birthday
By Joseph C. Nichols
…
Tells Spangler City has more Pullmans for convention travel
Washington (AP) – (Dec. 31)
The Office of Defense Transportation has reinforced its proposal that both major political parties hold their 1944 conventions in Chicago with a statement that more than three times as many sleeping cars arrive daily at the Illinois city than at any other Midwest point.
In reply to an inquiry from Harrison E. Spangler, chairman of the Republican National Committee, seeking a “list of other cities which might be used with the least interference with our transportation problem,” H. F. McCarthy, director of the ODT’s Division of Traffic Movement, said:
Indicative of Chicago’s dominance is the following table showing the number of beds in regular-line sleeping cars terminating at various favorably located cities:
Chicago 11,368 New York 7,129 St. Louis 3,240 Detroit 1,528 Kansas City 1,279 Cleveland 1,235
McCarthy added that:
The supply of sleeping cars is extremely limited, all available extra cars being dedicated to troop train service.
Wherever the English tongue is known, the words of the Ayrshire plowman were sung last night. They were heard in the wardrooms of ships in dangerous waters, in quarters within sound of the frontline, and probably in prison camps. Like Burns himself, the old song had a humble origin. The music was a tavern ditty, the first line, at least, Allan Ramsay’s. But it is out of humble things, out of the earth, out of taverns, out of the hearts of rough men deeply moved, that greatness often comes.
This is a song of going-away, of the anguish of empire, a song for soldiers, sailors and pioneers. It is a song of the brae and the burn whose sons know them no more, of playmates long since scattered, of hands that were soft as children’s once and now are red and gnarled with toil.
It is a song of friendship, too, and one that will never die. Last night, amid all the uproar – the uproar of merriment in safe cities and of guns and pounding waters and high winds elsewhere – it seemed to have a special meaning.
For the most important fact about the new year is the friendship of the two great nations whose people sing this song and of the nations with which they are united in the battle for justice and of peace. In more than one sense in past times, the “seas between us braid hae roar’d.” We have known suspicions and estrangements. The old friends were scattered when the enemy took up his march. Almost too late they joined against him. The old cry went down the glens, the old call was heard beyond the mountains and the seas. By bitter lessons we have all learned that only by “auld acquaintance” standing firm together can freedom be kept safe.
In the midst of war, we can still drink “a cup o’ kindness:” to the infantry of the line, to whom this day brings no rest, no comfort and no surcease from peril; to the seamen who sent the Scharnhorst down, who covered the South Sea landings and who take the cargoes into port; to the men in the air, steadying the plane for the target run, with maybe an engine shot out and maybe a gunner dead. We can lift our cup to all who speak the English tongue, from Adelaide to Charing Cross, from Sioux City to Land’s End.
We can lift it, the goodwill and sober hope, to others who may yet learn this song and whose songs we may yet learn: to the Russians, who have broken the German armies; to the Chinese, ragged, underfed, under-armed, who have not learned the word surrender in any language; to Frenchmen of the breed that stood so stoutly at Bir Hakeim; to all the unconquered peoples of the conquered nations. For all of them and all of us these days, too, will sometime be Auld Lang Syne.
If we go forward in that spirit, victory is ours – and the year is ours, and all the years.