Marseille, Toulon threatened
Big city, port reported virtually isolated by Allied drive
…
Air fleets closing in on Germans
Terrific toll taken; explosives rained upon Nazis held in trap on Seine River
…
Wallace denies Roosevelt offer
Houston, Texas (AP) – (Aug. 20)
Vice President Henry A. Wallace denied here today that he had been assured an important governmental position if President Roosevelt is reelected.
“No, I don’t know anything about it,” he replied when asked if he had been promised such a post.
Dewey’s agent to see Willkie
Albany, New York (AP) – (Aug. 20)
Governor Thomas E. Dewey arranged today for an exchange of foreign policy views between Wendell Willkie and John Foster Dulles, who has been designated by Dewey to consult with Secretary of State Hull on post-war plans.
In an exchange of telegrams, Willkie said that since both Dewey, Republican presidential nominee, and Hull had agreed that the discussions should be of a nonpartisan character, he would be glad to talk to Dulles.
Dulles, leaving Albany by automobile, said he expected to make an appointment in New York City tomorrow with Willkie before going Tuesday to Washington, where he will meet with Hull the following day.
In announcing the Willkie-Dulles conference, Dewey told reporters it was his intention to obtain all shades of views on foreign affairs so that the American people could be kept wholly informed on the progress of the work of building the peace.
It will be the first public announced meeting between a close representative of Dewey and the 1940 presidential nominee since Dewey became the party’s standard-bearer.
At a news conference, Dewey proposed the internationalization of the Ruhr Valley in Germany, chief mass production center of the Axis state, as one of the steps to be taken to prevent future wars.
Sgt. Cote: The Lost Battalion of World War II
Through four days and three nights of hell, Yank infantrymen battled against overwhelming odds
By Staff Sgt. Roland W. Cote
…
The Pittsburgh Press (August 21, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
On the Western Front, France – (by wireless)
We ran to the wrecked British plane, lying there upside down, and dropped on our hands and knees and peeked through a tiny hole in the side.
A man lay on his back in the small space of the upside cockpit. His feet disappeared somewhere in the jumble of dial and rubber pedals above him. His shirt was open and his chest was bare to the waist. He was smoking a cigarette.
He turned his eyes toward me when I peeked in, and he said in a typical British manner of offhand friendliness, “Oh, hello.”
“Are you alright?” I asked stupidly.
He answered, “Yes, quite. Now that you chaps are here.”
I asked him how long he had been trapped in the wrecked plane. He said he didn’t know for sure as he had got mixed up about the passage of time. But he did know the date of the month he was shot down. He told me the date. And I said, out loud, “Good God!”
For wounded and trapped, he had been lying there for eight days.
His left leg was broken and punctured by an ack-ack burst. His back was terribly burned by raw gasoline that had spilled. The fool of his injured leg was pinned rigidly under the rudder bar.
His space was so small he couldn’t squirm around to relieve his own weight from his paining back. He couldn’t straighten out his legs, which were bent above him. He couldn’t see out of his little prison. He had not had a bite to eat or a drop of water. All this for eight days and nights.
Yet when we found him, his physical condition was strong, and his mind was as calm and rational as though he were sitting in a London club. He was in agony, yet in his correct Oxford accent he even apologized for taking up our time to get him out.
The American soldiers of our rescue party cussed as they worked, cussed with open admiration for this British flier’s greatness of heart which had kept him alive and sane through his lonely and gradually hope-dimming ordeal.
One of them said, “God, but these limeys have got guts!”
It took us almost an hour to get him out. We don’t know whether he will live or not, but he has a chance. During the hour we were ripping the plane open to make a hole, he talked to us. And here, in the best nutshell I can devise from the conversation of a brave man whom you didn’t want to badger with trivial questions, is what happened…
He was an RAF flight lieutenant, piloting a night fighter. Over a certain area the Germans began letting him have it from the ground with machine-gun fire.
The first hit knocked out his motor. He was too low to jump, so – foolishly, he said – he turned on his lights to try a crash landing. Then they really poured it on him. The second hit got him in the leg. And a third bullet cut right across the balls of his right-hand forefingers, clipping every one of them to the bone.
He left his heels up, and the plane’s belly hit the ground going uphill on a slight slope. We could see the groove it had dug for about 50 yards. Then it flopped, tail over nose, onto its back. The pilot was absolutely sealed into the upside-down cockpit.
“That’s all I remember for a while,” he told us. “When I came to, they were shelling all around me.”
Thus began the eight days. He had crashed right between the Germans and Americans in a sort of pastoral no-man’s-land.
For days afterwards the field in which he lay surged back and forth between German hands and ours.
His pasture was pocked with hundreds of shell craters. Many of them were only yards away. One was right at the end of his wing. The metal sides of the plane were speckled with hundreds of shrapnel holes.
He lay there, trapped in the midst of this inferno of explosions. The fields around him gradually became littered with dead. At last American strength pushed the Germans back, and silence came. But no help. Because, you see, it was in that vacuum behind the battle, and only a few people were left.
The days passed. He thirsted terribly. He slept some; part of the time he was unconscious; part of the time he undoubtedly was delirious. But he never gave up hope.
After we had finally got him out, he said as he lay on the stretcher under a wing, “Is it possible that I’ve been out of this plane since I crashed?”
Everybody chuckled. The doctor who had arrived said:
Not the remotest possibility. You were sealed in there and it took men with tools half an hour to make an opening. And your leg was broken and your foot was pinned there. No, you haven’t been out.
“I didn’t think it was possible,” the pilot said, “and yet it seems in my mind that I was out once and back in again.”
That little memory of delirium was the only word said by that remarkable man in the whole hour of his rescue that wasn’t as dispassionate and matter-of-fact as though he had been sitting comfortably at the end of the day in front of his own fireplace.
Reading Eagle (August 22, 1944)
Pegler: Robot
By Westbrook Pegler
New York –
The word robot which we have applied to that German flying bomb is not pronounced roe-bot, as so many of us think. Nor roe-boe as though it might be French, but rubbut. It was introduced to this country in the early 1920s by the theater guild in a play presented at the Old Garrick, which has since burned down, called R.U.R., meaning Rossum’s Universal Robots.
The author was Karel Čapek, pronounced Chapek, of Prague, who later surpassed R.U.R. with another called, variously, The World We Live In and The Insect Play, in which the whole disgusting human race, reduced to the scale of insects, went to war because the red ants and the black ants got into a dispute over the pathway between two blades of grass.
Čapek, being himself a Czech, or anyway a citizen of Czechoslovakia, lived right in that very pathway, but when I suggested this to him during a call at his office, in a newspaper shop in Prague in the winter of 1936, he patronized my alarms in a lofty way. I believe he figured that Russia and France would prevent the Nazis from overrunning his country. Anyway, it was his good luck to die of natural causes before it happened.
R.U.R. was a little scant on logic but so noisy and exciting that it took a few days for our intelligentsia to get over their shudders and detect the little flaws.
Miss Theresa Helburn, the administrative director of the Guild, has filled me in with some offhand recollections of the story and with her own stab at the moral which Čapek was trying to make. The scene was an island where the Rossom Company was manufacturing a soulless, subhuman, flesh-and-blood creature roughly in the form of man and, generally very dumb, docile and durable, to take over the laborious tasks of the human race. Miss Helburn’s idea of the moral is that Čapek wanted to say that labor is necessary for the wellbeing of man. This seems inconsistent to me, however, if I am correct in my belief that Čapek was, if not a Communist, then anyway a great friend of their philosophy which constantly promises a world of longer and longer vacations, shorter working hours and increasing luxury. The ultimate goal would be a life of effortless ease never interrupted by toil. And here, if Miss Helburn is right, Čapek was warning the human race that man would degenerate and destroy himself if he quit work.
The robots were a great success. They were shipped all over the world to relieve the human race of physical work but Helena, the heroine of the piece, there on the island where she married the manager of the robot factory, felt sorry for them and wanted to give them souls. Her father was president of the company, incidentally.
Encouraged by Helena, a scientist in the plant continued to improve the robots who then began to have ambition and to resent their status in the world. However, the human beings were overconfident and slow to take alarm because about the nearest thing to an expression of emotion of which a robot was capable was a kind of fit. And when a robot got too temperamental, the practice was to send him to the stamping mill and pulp him, so to speak, as we melt down the scrap metal of an old car, and use the material over again. The girl thought this a very unprepossessing practice.
In the end, there was an awful uprising, with blood all over the sky and the people on the island wiped out, all but an old gardener. At his age, and in the absence of any human mate, he was in no position to get the human race off to a fresh start but, thanks to the scientist’s experiments, a couple of very tasty young robots, male and female, appeared who actually were human and he sent them forth at the close of the show, saying “go man, go woman” or something very close to that.
They might have found another human race, but, as I said, the logic was loose like an old union suit. They and their progeny wouldn’t stand much chance in a world of robots and the secret formula for the creation of the superior robot with a soul had been burned in the revolution.
It is Miss Helburn’s recollection that robot was a word that Čapek just made up, but it just happens that I asked him about that and was told that it was a Russian word meaning, approximately, a very low grade of serf with no rights whatever. A strong back and a weak mind, if any.
We have had a robot pilot or automatic flying device which relieves the human pilot of much of his strain and now this flying bomb, also called a robot. But, as you will see, the name is only roughly appropriate in either case.
Anyway, the pronunciation is not roe-bot nor roe-boe. This is official. It is rubbut.
U.S. State Department (August 21, 1944)
740.00119 EAC/8–2144: Telegram
The Ambassador in the United Kingdom to the Secretary of State
London, August 21, 1944 — 8 p.m.
[Received August 21 — 3:20 p.m.]
6763. Comea 75.
The Russian Ambassador just called and left me a letter stating that his Government has resolved to confirm the terms of unconditional surrender for Germany agreed and signed by the European Advisory Commission on July 25.
WINANT
U.S. State Department (August 22, 1944)
840.50/8–1444: Telegram
The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in the United Kingdom
Washington, August 22, 1944 — midnight
6711
Reurtel 6512, August 14, 6 p.m.
We share your doubts that rapid progress could be made on reparations through EAC and doubt the advisability of having them discussed by a subcommittee of the proposed European trade committee. We see certain definite advantages in having them discussed in Moscow but would first like to have an indication of the views of the Russians and Ambassador Harriman. As a first step would you please discuss the matter informally with Gousev without implying any commitment or views on the part of this Government.
HULL
Völkischer Beobachter (August 22, 1944)
Terrorflieger bombardierten deutsches Lazarettschiff –
Deutscher Protest in London und Washington
…
Innsbrucker Nachrichten (August 22, 1944)
Erbittertes Ringen im Westen und Osten
Über das Nordufer der Seine gesetzter Feind zum Stehen gebracht – Harte Kämpfe um Toulon – U-Boote versenkten 40.000 BRT
dnb. Aus dem Führerhauptquartier, 22. August –
Das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht gibt bekannt:
In der Normandie wurden weitere Teile unserer aus dem Raum nördlich Argentan durchgebrochenen Kampfgruppe hinter unserer Linie aufgenommen. Bei Lisieux und südlich Évreux griff der Feind mit starken Infanterie- und Panzerkräften an. Nach hartem Kampf gelang ihm im Raum westlich Lisieux ein Einbruch in unsere Abwehrfront, gegen den Gegenangriffe angesetzt sind. Westlich und nördlich Dreux konnte der Gegner erst nach erbitterten Kämpfen wenige Kilometer nach Norden Boden gewinnen.
Der bei Mantes auf das Nordufer der Seine übergesetzte Feind wurde durch unsere Gegenangriffe zum Stehen gebracht. Gegen den Seineabschnitt südlich Paris vorfühlende feindliche Kräfte wurden von unseren Sicherungskräften in den vorgeschobenen Stellungen abgewiesen.
In Südfrankreich drängt der Feind unseren Absetzbewegungen zwischen der Küste und der Durance nach Westen scharf nach. Um Toulon toben erbitterte Kämpfe. Bei Aix und im Tal der Durance wurden feindliche Kräfte im Gegenstoß geworfen.
Im französischen Raum wurden bei mehreren Säuberungsunternehmen 229 Terroristen im Kampf niedergemacht.
Schweres „V1“-Vergeltungsfeuer liegt auf London.
In Italien nahm der Feind seine Durchbruchsangriffe im adriatischen Küstenabschnitt in den gestrigen Mittagsstunden nach starker Artillerievorbereitung wieder auf und konnte sich in den Besitz einiger Höhenstellungen setzen.
Im Süden der Ostfront stehen deutsche und rumänische Truppen südwestlich Tiraspol sowie zwischen Pruth und Sereth in schwerem Ringen mit starken Infanterie- und Panzerkräften der Sowjets. Im Verlauf dieser Kämpfe wurden bisher 200 feindliche Panzer abgeschossen.
Südwestlich Mielec dauern erbitterte Kämpfe an.
In den Weichselbrückenköpfen sowie nordöstlich Warschau, beiderseits Wilkowischken und bei Raseinen wurden feindliche Angriffe zerschlagen.
Erneute Angriffe der Bolschewisten bei Bauske und im Einbruch westlich Modohn brachen am entschlossenen Widerstand unserer Divisionen zusammen.
Westlich des Pleskauer Sees setzten die Sowjets ihre heftigen Angriffe fort. In den wenigen Einbruchsstellen wird noch gekämpft.
Durch Jagdflieger und Flakartillerie der Luftwaffe wurden an der Ostfront 43 feindliche Flugzeuge abgeschossen.
Bei Angriffen feindlicher Bomber auf ungarisches Gebiet brachten deutsche und ungarische Luftverteidigungskräfte neun feindliche Flugzeuge zum Absturz.
Unterseeboote versenkten aus Geleitzügen und in Einzeljagd sieben feindliche Schiffe mit 40.000 BRT sowie drei Bewacher und ein Motorkanonenboot. Außerdem wurde ein feindliches Flugzeug abgeschossen.
Ergänzend wird zum heutigen OKW-Bericht mitgeteilt:
Bei den Kämpfen im Raum von Modohn zeichnete sich die rheinisch-westfälische 263. Infanteriedivision unter Führung von Oberst Hemmann durch besondere Standhaftigkeit aus. Westlich des Pleskauer Sees bewährte sich eine Kampfgruppe der SS-Sturmbrigade „Wallonien“ unter Führung des SS-Sturmbannführers Leon Degrelle durch Zähigkeit und Angriffsschwung in besonderem Maße.