Editorial: Strikes against delay
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Senator Davis backs Richberg on labor plan
Tripartite boards called bid to long squabbles; asks public rule
By Senator James J. Davis (R-PA)
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Holiday buying hits new high in November
Necessity for early mailing, merchandise shortage spur demand
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
At the frontlines in Italy – (by wireless)
There is an old stone building sitting on the bare mountainside at the top of the mule trail. It is used as a medical-aid station, but even so the Germans put a few score shells around it every day.
While I was there one day back during the holiday season, we were standing around outside – a dozen or more medics, telephone linemen, packers and slightly injured men – when all of a sudden came that familiar and rapid whine and we all ducked.
The shell exploded with a terrific blast about a hundred yards away, and for 20 seconds afterwards we had a very weird Christmas atmosphere indeed as big and little pieces of shrapnel tinkled and clattered down upon the rocks around us with a ringing metallic sound.
No package for him
Practically everybody I’ve run into in the Army got Christmas packages. I know of one captain – Frank Knebel of Pottsville, Pennsylvania – who got 24 boxes from home.
Nearly every soldier’s package had at least one ironic item in it, such as brushless shaving cream or lifesavers which we’re saturated with. But most of them were pretty nice collections.
It sounds like a burlesque joke, but there were boys who actually got cans of Spam from home. Others got fancy straw house slippers, and some got black silk socks as though they were going to a nightclub this evening in full dress. But the finniest gift I saw was a beautiful blue polka-dot necktie.
I didn’t get any Christmas packages, but then I came from America very recently; now that I think of it, maybe that is the reason. But I didn’t get any last year either, and last Christmas I had already been out of America for seven months.
Cleanliness stands out
One day, when I was on the mountain trail, a wounded paratrooper captain walked into the aid station in the old stone building. He was Francis Sheehan of Indianapolis.
Capt. Sheehan is a man with a finely sensitive face, who almost seemed out of place in such a rugged outfit as the paratroops. He stood out among the other wounded because he was cleanly shaven, and although his face was dirty it was recent dirt, and not the basic grime that comes of not having washed for weeks and weeks.
The reason was that he had gone up the mountain only the day before, to relieve a battalion medical officer who had been wounded. Capt. Sheehan was on the mountain only a few hours when he, too, was wounded.
His family will have received notice from the War Department before they read this, and they may be relieved to know that the wound was not serious. He got a machine-gun bullet in his right shoulder, but it apparently missed the bones.
An old reader
Capt. Sheehan graduated from Indiana University Medical School in 1938, and had a residency at City Hospital in Indianapolis before he went into the paratroops. We happened to get together because he used to read this column in The Indianapolis Times.
The captain walked on down the mountain without help, and said that actually the wound didn’t even hurt much.
There is an Army hospital where I go occasionally to see another wounded friend, and I have got acquainted with several of the patients. One of those is Walter Jentzen of Carlsbad, New Mexico.
Jentzen, of course, was in hospital pajamas, and I though all the time he was a private, he seemed so quiet and humble. When I went to write down his name, it turned out he was a lieutenant. He has a two-month-old baby in Carlsbad that he would sure like to see.
Tortures himself, too
This is the second time he has been wounded. In Sicily, he was shot when a German tank let loose on him. And here, very early in the Italian campaign, he got a shell fragment in his chest. A notebook which he always carries in his left shirt pocket was all that saved him. He’s been in the hospital more than a month now and is just about ready to go back to duty.
Jentzen used to manage creamery plants in Albuquerque Portales and Las Cruces. So, having come from Albuquerque so recently, I tortured him by telling him what the New Mexico sun felt like, how the air smelled, and how beautiful the Sandias were at present.
The only trouble with torturing a guy that way is that you torture yourself at the same time.
Maj de Seversky: Men like Tedder, Spaatz and Eisenhower will insist on air control for invasion
By Maj. Alexander P. de Seversky
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Williams: War tactics, Noel make weird mixture
Young soldier spends Christmas with brutal details of killing art accompanied by strains of ‘Holy Night’
By Joe Williams
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President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chat 28
On the State of the Union
January 11, 1944, 9:00 p.m. ET
Broadcast audio:
Ladies and gentlemen:
Today I sent my annual message to the Congress, as required by the Constitution. It has been my custom to deliver these annual messages in person, and they have been broadcast to the nation. I intended to follow this same custom this year.
But, like a great many other people, I have had the flu and, although I am practically recovered, my doctor simply would not permit me to leave the White House to go up to the Capitol.
Only a few of the newspapers of the United States can print the message in full, and I am anxious that the American people be given an opportunity to hear what I have recommended to the Congress for this very fateful year in our history – and the reasons for those recommendations. Here is what I said:
This nation in the past two years has become an active partner in the world’s greatest war against human slavery.
We have joined with like-minded people in order to defend ourselves in a world that has been gravely threatened with gangster rule.
But I do not think that any of us Americans can be content with mere survival. Sacrifices that we and our allies are making impose upon us all a sacred obligation to see to it that out of this war we and our children will gain something better than mere survival.
We are united in determination that this war shall not be followed by another interim which leads to new disaster – that we shall not repeat the tragic errors of ostrich isolationism – that we shall not repeat the excesses of the wild twenties when this nation went for a joyride on a rollercoaster which ended in a tragic crash.
When Mr. Hull went to Moscow in October, and when I went to Cairo and Tehran in November, we knew that we were in agreement with our allies in our common determination to fight and win this war. But there were many vital questions concerning the future peace, and they were discussed in an atmosphere of complete candor and harmony.
In the last war, such discussions, such meetings, did not even begin until the shooting had stopped and the delegates began to assemble at the peace table. There had been no previous opportunities for man-to-man discussions which lead to meetings of minds. The result was a peace which was not a peace.
That was a mistake which we are not repeating in this war.
And right here I want to address a word or two to some suspicious souls who are fearful that Mr. Hull or I have made “commitments” for the future which might pledge this nation to secret treaties or to enacting the role of Santa Claus.
To such suspicious souls – using a polite terminology – I wish to say that Mr. Churchill, and Marshal Stalin, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek are all thoroughly conversant with the provisions of our Constitution. And so is Mr. Hull. And so am I.
Of course, we made some commitments. We most certainly committed ourselves to very large and very specific military plans which require the use of all Allied forces to bring about the defeat of our enemies at the earliest possible time. But there were no secret treaties or political or financial commitments.
The one supreme objective for the future, which we discussed for each nation individually, and for all the United Nations, can be summed up in one word: Security.
And that means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by aggressors. It means also economic security, social security, moral security in a family of nations.
In the plain down-to-earth talks that I had with the Generalissimo and Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill, it was abundantly clear that they are all most deeply interested in the resumption of peaceful progress by their own peoples – progress toward a better life. All our allies want freedom to develop their lands and resources, to build up industry, to increase education and individual opportunity, and to raise standards of living.
All our allies have learned by bitter experience that real development will not be possible if they are to be diverted from their purpose by repeated wars – or even threats of war.
China and Russia are truly united with Britain and America in recognition of this essential fact:
The best interests of each nation, large and small, demand that all freedom-loving nations shall join together in a just and durable system of peace. In the present world situation, evidenced by the actions of Germany, Italy, and Japan, unquestioned military control over disturbers of the peace is as necessary among nations as it is among citizens in a community. And an equally basic essential to peace is a decent standard of living for all individual men and women and children in all nations. Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want.
There are people who burrow through our nation like unseeing moles, and attempt to spread the suspicion that if other nations are encouraged to raise their standards of living, our own American standard of living must of necessity be depressed.
The fact is the very contrary. It has been shown time and again that if the standard of living of any country goes up, so does its purchasing power – and that such a rise encourages a better standard of living in neighboring countries with whom it trades. That is just plain common sense – and it is the kind of plain common sense that provided the basis for our discussions at Moscow, Cairo, and Tehran.
Returning from my journeyings, I must confess to a sense of “letdown” when I found many evidences of faulty perspectives here in Washington. The faulty perspective consists in overemphasizing lesser problems and thereby underemphasizing the first and greatest problem.
The overwhelming majority of our people have met the demands of this war with magnificent courage and understanding. They have accepted inconveniences; they have accepted hardships; they have accepted tragic sacrifices. And they are ready and eager to make whatever further contributions are needed to win the war as quickly as possible – if only they are given the chance to know what is required of them.
However, while the majority goes on about its great work without complaint, a noisy minority maintains an uproar of demands for special favors for special groups. There are pests who swarm through the lobbies of the Congress and the cocktail bars of Washington, representing these special groups as opposed to the basic interests of the nation as a whole. They have come to look upon the war primarily as a chance to make profits for themselves at the expense of their neighbors – profits in money or in terms of political or social preferment.
Such selfish agitation can be highly dangerous in wartime. It creates confusion. It damages morale. It hampers our national effort. It muddies the waters and therefore prolongs the war.
If we analyze American history impartially, we cannot escape the fact that in our past we have not always forgotten individual and selfish and partisan interests in time of war – we have not always been united in purpose and direction. We cannot overlook the serious dissensions and the lack of unity in our War of the Revolution, in our War of 1812, or in our War between the States, when the survival of the Union itself was at stake.
In the First World War we came closer to national unity than in any previous war. But that war lasted only a year and a half, and increasing signs of disunity began to appear during the final months of the conflict.
In this war we have been compelled to learn how interdependent upon each other are all groups and sections of the population of America.
Increased food costs, for example, will bring new demands for wage increases from all war workers, which will in turn raise all prices of all things including those things which the farmers themselves have to buy. Increased wages or prices will each in turn produce the same results. They all have a particularly disastrous result on all fixed income groups.
And I hope you will remember that all of us in this government represent the fixed-income group just as much as we represent business owners, workers, and farmers. This group of fixed-income people include teachers, clergy, policemen, firemen, widows, and minors on fixed incomes, wives and dependents of our soldiers and sailors, and old-age pensioners. They and their families add up to one-quarter of our 130 million people. They have few or no high-pressure representatives at the Capitol. In a period of gross inflation, they would be the worst sufferers.
If ever there was a time to subordinate individual or group selfishness to the national good, that time is now. Disunity at home – bickerings, self-seeking partisanship, stoppages of work, inflation, business as usual, politics as usual, luxury as usual – these are the influences which can undermine the morale of the brave men ready to die at the front for us here.
Those who are doing most of the complaining are not deliberately striving to sabotage the national war effort. They are laboring under the delusion that the time is past when we must make prodigious sacrifices – that the war is already won and we can begin to slacken off. But the dangerous folly of that point of view can be measured by the distance that separates our troops from their ultimate objectives in Berlin and Tokyo – and by the sum of all the perils that lie along the way.
Overconfidence and complacency are among our deadliest enemies. Last spring – after notable victories at Stalingrad and in Tunisia and against the U-boats on the high seas – overconfidence became so pronounced that war production fell off. In two months, June and July 1943, more than a thousand airplanes that could have been made and should have been made were not made. Those who failed to make them were not on strike. They were merely saying, “The war’s in the bag – so let’s relax.”
That attitude on the part of anyone – government or management or labor – can lengthen this war. It can kill American boys.
Let us remember the lessons of 1918. In the summer of that year the tide turned in favor of the Allies. But this government did not relax. In fact, our national effort was stepped up. In August 1918, the draft-age limits were broadened from 21-31 to 18-45. The President called for “force to the utmost,” and his call was heeded. And in November, only three months later, Germany surrendered.
That is the way to fight and win a war – all-out – and not with half-an-eye on the battlefronts abroad and the other eye-and-a-half on personal, selfish, or political interests here at home.
Therefore, in order to concentrate all our energies and resources on winning the war, and to maintain a fair and stable economy at home, I recommend that the Congress adopt:
A realistic tax law – which will tax all unreasonable profits, both individual and corporate, and reduce the ultimate cost of the war to our sons and daughters. The tax bill now under consideration by the Congress does not begin to meet this test.
A continuation of the law for the renegotiation of war contracts – which will prevent exorbitant profits and assure fair prices to the government. For two long years I have pleaded with the Congress to take undue profits out of war.
A cost-of-food law – which will enable the government (a) to place a reasonable floor under the prices the farmer may expect for his production; and (b) to place a ceiling on the prices a consumer will have to pay for the food he buys. This should apply to necessities only; and will require public funds to carry out. It will cost in appropriations about 1 percent of the present annual cost of the war.
Early reenactment of the stabilization statute of October 1942. This expires June 30, 1944, and if it is not extended well in advance, the country might just as well expect price chaos by summer.
We cannot have stabilization by wishful thinking. We must take positive action to maintain the integrity of the American dollar.
- A national service law – which, for the duration of the war, will prevent strikes, and, with certain appropriate exceptions, will make available for war production or for any other essential services every able-bodied adult in this nation.
These five measures together form a just and equitable whole. I would not recommend a national service law unless the other laws were passed to keep down the cost of living, to share equitably the burdens of taxation, to hold the stabilization line, and to prevent undue profits.
The federal government already has the basic power to draft capital and property of all kinds for war purposes on a basis of just compensation.
As you know, I have for three years hesitated to recommend a national service act. Today, however, I am convinced of its necessity. Although I believe that we and our allies can win the war without such a measure, I am certain that nothing less than total mobilization of all our resources of manpower and capital will guarantee an earlier victory, and reduce the toll of suffering and sorrow and blood.
I have received a joint recommendation for this law from the heads of the War Department, the Navy Department, and the Maritime Commission. These are the men who bear responsibility for the procurement of the necessary arms and equipment, and for the successful prosecution of the war in the field. They say:
When the very life of the nation is in peril the responsibility for service is common to all men and women. In such a time there can be no discrimination between the men and women who are assigned by the government to its defense at the battlefront and the men and women assigned to producing the vital materials essential to successful military operations. A prompt enactment of a national service law would be merely an expression of the universality of this responsibility.
I believe the country will agree that those statements are the solemn truth.
National service is the most democratic way to wage a war. Like selective service for the Armed Forces, it rests on the obligation of each citizen to serve his nation to his utmost where he is best qualified.
It does not mean reduction in wages. It does not mean loss of retirement and seniority rights and benefits. It does not mean that any substantial numbers of war workers will be disturbed in their present jobs. Let these facts be wholly clear.
Experience in other democratic nations at war – Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – has shown that the very existence of national service makes unnecessary the widespread use of compulsory power. National service has proven to be a unifying moral force – based on an equal and comprehensive legal obligation of all people in a nation at war.
There are millions of American men and women who are not in this war at all. It is not because they do not want to be in it. But they want to know where they can best do their share. National service provides that direction. It will be a means by which every man and woman can find that inner satisfaction which comes from making the fullest possible contribution to victory.
I know that all civilian war workers will be glad to be able to say many years hence to their grandchildren:
Yes, I, too, was in service in the great war. I was on duty in an airplane factory, and I helped make hundreds of fighting planes. The government told me that in doing that I was performing my most useful work in the service of my country.
It is argued that we have passed the stage in the war where national service is necessary. But our soldiers and sailors know that this is not true. We are going forward on a long, rough road – and, in all journeys, the last miles are the hardest. And it is for that final effort – for the total defeat of our enemies – that we must mobilize our total resources. The national war program calls for the employment of more people in 1944 than in 1943.
It is my conviction that the American people will welcome this win-the-war measure which is based on the eternally just principle of “fair for one, fair for all.”
It will give our people at home the assurance that they are standing foursquare behind our soldiers and sailors. And it will give our enemies demoralizing assurance that we mean business – that we, 130 million Americans, are on the march to Rome, Berlin, and Tokyo.
I hope that the Congress will recognize that, although this is a political year, national service is an issue which transcends politics. Great power must be used for great purposes.
As to the machinery for this measure, the Congress itself should determine its nature – but it should be wholly non-partisan in its makeup.
Our Armed Forces are valiantly fulfilling their responsibilities to our country and our people. Now the Congress faces the responsibility for taking those measures which are essential to national security in this the most decisive phase of the nation’s greatest war.
Several alleged reasons have prevented the enactment of legislation which would preserve for our soldiers and sailors and Marines the fundamental prerogative of citizenship – the right to vote. No amount of legalistic argument can becloud this issue in the eyes of these ten million American citizens. Surely the signers of the Constitution did not intend a document which, even in wartime, would be construed to take away the franchise of any of those who are fighting to preserve the Constitution itself.
Our soldiers and sailors and Marines know that the overwhelming majority of them will be deprived of the opportunity to vote, if the voting machinery is left exclusively to the states under existing state laws – and that there is no likelihood of these laws being changed in time to enable them to vote at the next election. The Army and Navy have reported that it will be impossible effectively to administer 48 different soldier voting laws. It is the duty of the Congress to remove this unjustifiable discrimination against the men and women in our Armed Forces – and to do it as quickly as possible.
It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people – whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth – is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights – among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our nation has grown in size and stature, however – as our industrial economy expanded – these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all – regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won, we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and wellbeing.
America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.
One of the great American industrialists of our day – a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis – recently emphasized the grave dangers of rightist reaction in this nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop – if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called “normalcy” of the 1920s – then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.
I ask the Congress to explore the means for implementing this economic Bill of Rights – for it is definitely the responsibility of the Congress so to do. Many of these problems are already before committees of the Congress in the form of proposed legislation. I shall from time to time communicate with the Congress with respect to these and further proposals. In the event that no adequate program of progress is evolved, I am certain that the nation will be conscious of the fact.
Our fighting men abroad – and their families at home – expect such a program and have the right to insist upon it. It is to their demands that this government should pay heed rather than to the whining demands of selfish pressure groups who seek to feather their nests while young Americans are dying.
The foreign policy that we have been following – the policy that guided us at Moscow, Cairo, and Tehran – is based on the common-sense principle which was best expressed by Benjamin Franklin on July 4, 1776:
We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
I have often said that there are no two fronts for America in this war. There is only one front. There is one line of unity which extends from the hearts of the people at home to the men of our attacking forces in our farthest outposts. When we speak of our total effort, we speak of the factory and the field, and the mine as well as of the battleground – we speak of the soldier and the civilian, the citizen and his government.
Each and every one of us has a solemn obligation under God to serve this nation in its most critical hour – to keep this nation great – to make this nation greater in a better world.
U.S. State Department (January 12, 1944)
Minutes of a meeting of the Pacific War Council
Washington, January 12, 1944
Secret
Memorandum
The thirty-sixth meeting of the Pacific War Council was held in the Cabinet Room of the Executive Offices, the White House, Washington, DC, at 12:30 p.m., on Wednesday, January 12, 1944.
| Present: | The President. |
| The Netherlands Ambassador, Dr. A. Loudon. | |
| The Chinese Ambassador, Dr. Wei Tao-ming. | |
| The Canadian Ambassador, Hon. Leighton McCarthy. | |
| Vice President Sergio Osmena, representing Hon. Manuel Quezon, President of the Philippine Commonwealth. | |
| The New Zealand Minister, Dr. Walter Nash. | |
| The Australian Minister, Sir Owen Dixon. | |
| Sir Ronald Campbell, EE and MP, representing Viscount Halifax, the British Ambassador. |
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
… President Roosevelt informed the Council that his discussions with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and with Marshal Stalin were highly satisfactory – in that both had agreed that Japan should be stripped of her island possessions and that the civil control of the islands north of the equator should be taken over by the United Nations, while the policing of the Western Pacific and, therefore, the necessary air and naval bases should be taken over by those powers capable of exercising effective military control. Marshal Stalin had specifically agreed to the idea that Manchuria, Formosa and the Pescadores should be returned to China; that the Koreans are not yet capable of exercising and maintaining independent government and that they should be placed under a 40-year tutelage; that Russia, having no ice-free port in Siberia, is desirous of getting one and that Marshal Stalin looks with favor upon making Dairen a free port for all the world, with the idea that Siberian exports and imports could be sent through the port of Dairen and carried to Siberian territory over the Manchurian Railroad in bond. He agrees that the Manchurian Railway should become the property of the Chinese Government. He wishes all of Sakhalin to be returned to Russia and to have the Kurile Islands turned over to Russia in order that they may exercise control of the straits leading to Siberia.
President Roosevelt stated that it was extremely gratifying to him to find that the Generalissimo and Marshal Stalin saw “eye to eye” with him on all major problems of the Pacific and that he felt that there would be no difficulty in reaching agreements about the control of the Pacific once Japan had been completely conquered.
President Roosevelt stated that he thinks the Pacific War Council is the body that should work out preliminary studies about the final solution of the Pacific problems as all interested powers are represented in the Council except Russia, whose agreement might be expected in view of the discussions the President had already had with Marshal Stalin.
President Roosevelt also recalled that Stalin is familiar with the history of the Liuchiu Islands and that he is in complete agreement that they belong to China and should be returned to her and further that the civil administration of all islands now controlled by Japan should be taken over by the United Nations with, as stated before, military control of specific strongpoints assigned as necessary to maintain the peace. President Roosevelt stated that he believed that everyone agreed that the civil administration of the Pacific Islands is a responsibility that should be carried out for the benefit of the populations and that their administration will always be a source of expense rather than profit.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
WILSON BROWN
Rear Admiral, USN
U.S. Navy Department (January 12, 1944)
CINCPAC Press Release No. 224
For Immediate Release
January 12, 1944
Navy search Liberators of Fleet Air Wing Two made a low-altitude daylight attack on shipping and shore installations at Kwajalein Island on January 11 (West Longitude Date). Six small cargo ships were bombed; two of these were sunk and the remainder damaged. Several buildings and other installations were set afire on shore, and two planes were damaged on the airfield. No fighter interception was encountered.
Army heavy bombers of the 7th Army Air Force bombed Taroa Island in the Maloelap Atoll on the night of January 10, setting a number of fires and wrecking two planes on the ground. Another group of 7th Army Air Force Liberators bombed Mille Atoll in the evening of January 10.
All of our planes returned without damage.
Enemy bombers carried out nuisance raids at Tarawa in the evening of January 9, and at Makin and Apamama the night of January 10, causing no damage.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 12, 1944)
700 ‘Fortresses’ raid Germany, 59 lost in air battle
At least 100 Nazi fighters downed, but toll may be much higher
By Walter Cronkite, United Press staff writer
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From Italian bases –
Allies hammer port of Athens
5th Army drives slowly toward Cassino
By C. R. Cunningham, United Press staff writer
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Yanks and Germans fall dead together in grim hill battle
They lie on top one another as struggle still rages; Nazi ‘Kamerad’ trick fails; victory called worth cost
By William H. Stoneman
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Mountbatten strikes –
Allies launch push on Burma
Key port taken in drive toward Akyab
By Robert Dowson, United Press staff writer
…