America at war! (1941–) – Part 4

3264

U.S. Navy Department (October 25, 1944)

CINCPAC Communiqué No. 165

On October 23 (West Longitude Date), searches from carriers of the Third Fleet located two enemy forces headed eastward through the Philippine Archipelago. The first force which consisted of three or four battleships, ten cruisers and about 13 destroyers was sighted south of Mindoro and later moved eastward through the Sibuyan Sea. It was attacked repeatedly by carrier aircraft and incomplete reports indicate that all battleships were damaged by bombs, at least one was hit by a torpedo, and one cruiser was torpedoed too. A second enemy force was sighted in the Sulu Sea southwest of Negros Island which consisted of two battleships, one cruiser and four destroyers. Both battleships were damaged by bombs and the light units were severely strafed.

In the late afternoon of October 23, a third enemy force was located southeast of Formosa approaching from Japanese home waters.

During the action on October 23, a strong force of shore-based aircraft attacked one of our Task Groups and succeeded in seriously damaging the USS PRINCETON (CVL-23). Subsequently the PRINCETON’s magazines exploded and the ship, badly crippled, was sunk.

Her Captain and 133 other officers and 1,227 enlisted men were saved.

Casualties among her personnel were light. Approximately 150 enemy aircraft were shot down during this attack.

On October 24, the enemy forces were brought to action. Reports which are as yet incomplete indicate that severe damage has been inflicted on the enemy, that at least one of his large carriers has been sunk and that two others have been severely damaged. General action is continuing.

3265

The Pittsburgh Press (October 25, 1944)

FOUR JAP WARSSHIPS SUNK IN PHILIPPINE SEA ATTACK
U.S. carrier lost

Dozen other enemy vessels are damaged by Halsey’s fleet
By Frank Tremaine, United Press staff writer

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3266

Yanks on Leyte free 28 towns, three airfields

First counterblows of Japs repulsed
By William B. Dickinson, United Press staff writer

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3267

Dutch transport city seized to clamp trap on 50,000 Germans

Entire West Holland front reported ‘moving’ as frantic Nazis fall back on Maas River
By J. Edward Murray, United Press staff writer

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3268

americavotes1944

Dewey: Peace force up to Congress

Governor to speak in Chicago tonight

Aboard Dewey campaign train (UP) –
Governor Thomas E. Dewey today left up to Congress the decision on committing U.S. forces in advance to preservation of world peace and promised that a Republican victory in November would provide the unity necessary to achieve that end.

The Republican presidential candidate charged that President Roosevelt’s own record of relationships with Congress, as well as the Roosevelt administration record in foreign relations, would fall short of that goal.

Speaks again tonight

Immediate after the speech, Mr. Dewey headed southward for stops at Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha, Wisconsin, and another major speech in Chicago tonight in which he proposes to discuss “The Moral Issues in This Election.”

WJAS will broadcast the speech at 10:00 p.m. EWT.

A spokesman said Mr. Dewey would take up, in the Chicago speech, “the use of government power, including spending and favors, by President Roosevelt to achieve perpetuation in office.”

At Milwaukee, Mr. Dewey said that post-war international collaboration was above partisan political considerations and that his speech last night in Minneapolis eliminated foreign policy as a campaign issue “as far as I am concerned.”

Mr. Dewey promised that if he is elected, there will be “the largest and finest housecleaning there ever was” in Washington.

‘Scuttling’ charged

In his Minneapolis speech, Mr. Dewey charged that Mr. Roosevelt “deliberately scuttled” the London Economic Conference of 1933 and thereby committed “the most completely isolationist action ever taken by an American President in our 150 years of history.”

He added the accusation that the Roosevelt administration “permitted” the sale of scrap iron and oil to Japan up until four months before the attack on Pearl Harbor which precipitated the United States into the war.

Mr. Dewey challenged:

Let those who claim to have exercised great foresight remember these lessons in history. And, let us as a nation never forget them.

Silent on Ball

The audience in Minneapolis’ Municipal Auditorium, estimated by Governor Edward J. Thye at “more than 12,000,” cheered wildly at the New York Governor’s response to Mr. Roosevelt’s own recitation of the history of foreign relations before the Foreign Policy Association in New York City last Saturday night.

Mr. Dewey chose the home state of Senator Joseph H. Ball (R-MN), ardent internationalist who bolted the Republican ticket because he was dissatisfied with the GOP nominee’s views on foreign policy, to deliver his third major speech on the question.

He never once mentioned the young Republican Senator but he paid high tribute to former Governor Harold E. Stassen, Mr. Ball’s mentor, as “a bold and courageous leader of opinion.”

Earlier speech recalled

In an obvious answer to Mr. Ball’s reasons for bolting the Republican ticket, Mr. Dewey insisted he has gone farther into the question of collaboration without reservations than has Mr. Roosevelt.

He recalled that in his speech before The New York Herald-Tribune Forum in New York City last week he came out for participation in a world organization without reservations which would nullify its power to halt future aggression.

Up to Congress

Mr. Dewey said:

That means, of course, that it must not be subject to a reservation that would require our representative to return to Congress for authority every time he had to make a decision.

Obviously, Congress, and only Congress, has the constitutional power to determine what quota of force it will make available, and what discretion it will give our representative to use that force.

I have not the slightest doubt that a Congress which is working in partnership with the President will achieve the result we all consider essential and grant adequate power for swift action to the American representative.

3269

americavotes1944

To correct ‘foes,’ Roosevelt says

Forced to campaign, President feels
By Lyle C. Wilson, United Press staff writer

Washington –
President Roosevelt will travel almost halfway across the continent and make three – possibly five – political speeches between now and Election Day, but he does not feel that he will be campaigning in the usual sense. He feels his speeches are necessary to correct misrepresentations.

The President will leave here tomorrow to speak in Philadelphia Friday. He will speak in Chicago Saturday and has a Boston date for Nov. 4. Between the Chicago and Boston appearances, it is reported that Cleveland and possibly Detroit speeches are under consideration.

Announced by Hannegan

Chairman Robert E. Hannegan of the Democratic National Committee announced in New York that the President would stop at Wilmington, Delaware, Friday en route to Philadelphia and would find time during that day to visit Camden, New Jersey. He said the presidential special would stop in Fort Wayne, Indiana, en route to Chicago.

A New York State Liberty Party delegation, headed by Alex Rose, administrative chairman of the party, conferred with Mr. Roosevelt today and represented the President as being “optimistic not only of carrying New York State but most of the other states.”

300,000 majority predicted

Mr. Rose said his party expected the President to carry New York City by 800.000 votes and the entire state by 300,000.

In 1940, Mr. Roosevelt carried the city by 720,000 and the state by 224,000.

Me. Hannegan’s was the first official word that the Chicago speech was definite.

With most of that in mind, correspondent Merwin H. Brown of the Buffalo Evening News, inquired at yesterday’s White House news conference whether the President was now campaigning “in the usual partisan sense.”

Idea rejected

Mr. Roosevelt instantly rejected the idea that he was doing as Mr. Brown suggested. He also rejected the idea that Mr. Brown had properly stated that proposition. On the contrary, the President said he had caught “all” the newspapers, even the reputable ones, at fault on the subject.

Then he explained that the newspapers had been guilty of quoting half a sentence from his July 20 acceptance speech as delivered by radio to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The President recalled that he had then made a statement about not campaigning in the usual sense but had continued the sentence with the word “except” to lead into the qualifying conditions under which he might make political speeches.

A look at the record

Correspondent Bert Andrews of the New York Herald-Tribune broke in to say that the qualification was not in the same sentence. Mr. Roosevelt said maybe his sentence was broken by a comma, but that it was the same sentence, all right, although some people pay no attention to a comma.

Right there a lot of people, including your correspondent, wished they had the documents in question before them. So before going further here is what the President did say last July:

  • In a letter to Mr. Hannegan prior to the convention, in which he agreed in advance to accept the presidential nomination, the President said: “I would accept and serve, but I would not run, in the usual partisan political sense.” That is the complete sentence and there is no qualification of it elsewhere in the letter to Mr. Hannegan. That is the phraseology that some Washington reporters have been using in recent weeks with respect to Mr. Roosevelt’s enlarging campaign activities.

  • In his radio acceptance speech delivered to the Chicago convention July 20, Mr. Roosevelt returned to the same line of thought, but with qualifications:

I shall not campaign in the usual sense for the office. In these days of tragic sorrow, I do not find it fitting. Besides, in these days of global warfare, I shall not be able to find the time. I shall, however, feel free to report to the people the facts about matters of concern to them and especially to correct any misrepresentation.

Enjoys discussion

The news conference had been a dull, monosyllabic business until the campaigning question came up. Mr. Roosevelt evidently enjoyed the discussion.

To show the ridiculous potentiality of quoting only half a sentence to avoid qualifying language, Mr. Roosevelt told Mr. Andrews he probably could ask him to remain in the presidential office after the conference and shoot him – except that he probably would go to the electric chair for that.

Why not quote it all, the President asked his conferees.

Mr. Brown, who is a hometown reporter first and a Washington correspondent second, kept plugging at a question whether the President would also speak in Buffalo and Mr. Roosevelt wouldn’t tell him. He refused, in fact, directly to confirm White House Secretary Stephen T. Early’s previous announcement that he would speak in Chicago and evidently did not know of Hannegan’s announcement.

The Chicago speech will probably be delivered before 190,000 or more persons in Soldiers’ Field. Mr. Hannegan has been almost precipitant in some of his announcements of presidential engagements and Mr. Brown, when last seen, was talking of asking Mr. Hannegan about Buffalo.

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americavotes1944

parry3

I DARE SAY —
For another kind of change

By Florence Fisher Parry

Surely none of us really took any satisfaction in the ordeal to which the President of the United States felt impelled to subject himself in the interest of his followers.

I refer, of course, to the President’s exposing himself to the bad weather which prevailed in New York on the day of his campaign tour of Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx. Unprotected from the rain and wind, our President for four hours endured exposure which easily could have exacted a serious penalty. Surely no one, friend or enemy, would ask our President to do this.

This is a bitter campaign, as campaigns usually have been before; perhaps a little more bitter than others because our feelings are abnormally near the surface.

But however personal has been the attack upon both candidates, only the contemptible and base have played up their physical attributes. Honest concern for our President’s health, which I do believe lies at the heart of any fair American, has been turned into a campaign implement to use against him.

For us to employ this concern contemptibly is shameful; and it seems to me unfortunate that our President would take chances with his health by feeling it necessary to go out on a miserable day and give a demonstration of robustness.

It is natural for us all to believe we possess more resistance than we do. It seems to me that there should be those close to him who could restrain our President from taking such chances.

Circus clowns

By the same token, it seems to me to be a sad commentary on our own intelligence to exact such public exhibitions of a younger and more vigorous candidate as well. When Mr. Dewey was in Pittsburgh, he rode bareheaded and in a light thin overcoat, through the streets of Pittsburgh on a raw and threatening day.

When he was in California, he had to appear without a topcoat at all, never mind how unseasonable the concession to California’s touchy native sons. It would have been, we are told, unthinkable for him to have insulted the California populace by wearing an overcoat, no matter how severely the need was indicated!

How long do our public figures have to put up with such circus performances? They are intelligent men and know all too well the folly and the danger of such recourse! Indeed, the more campaigns I live through, the more ashamed I become of the measures which we accept as a necessary part of electioneering.

And when they are reduced to the necessity of exposing themselves to illness in order to satisfy the public, it seems to me it is time to call a halt. Anyone who experienced any satisfaction in seeing the President rain-drenched and cold, ride for four hours through a soaky-cold rain, is a sadist and it is to our shame that such sadism is permitted.

Shame on us

Do you think for a minute that such ordeals do not exact their penalties? Anyone listening to the President in the first five minutes of his address Saturday night could not fail to detect in his voice the natural, overwhelming fatigue that he must have been suffering after such an ordeal. That he was able to rally and swing into his old waggish technique shows what kind of strength still resides in him.

But if he is elected, he will need every atom of that strength for far more important things than fighting the elements on cold and rainy days. And if the Republican candidate wins, young and vigorous though he may be, it will take all his vitality, too, to rise to the grave challenge of the Presidency.

Let us have less of this carnival spirit, this gladiator circus! If each one of us resolves to fight, with all the withering rebuke we can command, every nasty personal allusion that we hear about both candidates, we will go far in cleaning up the dirty innuendo of this campaign.

We are electing a President for these United States. Shall we then thus cheapen and disgrace this highest of offices?

Shame on us!

3271

Roosevelt orders Erie firm seized

Action follows dispute on prices

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1,357,000 men have left Army

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3272

One coal strike called off but six continue

2,000 idle, output cut 14,000 tons

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3273

americavotes1944

La Guardia: Roosevelt needed

New York’s Mayor speaks at rally here

New York’s Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia told a Democratic rally in North Side Carnegie Hall last night that the best interests of the nation require the reelection of President Roosevelt.

“This campaign is different,” he told a crowd of more than 1,500 Democrats. “We’ve never had anything like it before. This time, we just cannot make a mistake.”

Mr. La Guardia said the President won a war against hunger, poverty and disease at the start of his administration, is now engaged in a second war against Nazis and Japs and must win a third war for peace and the establishment of justice in the world and a fourth for economic security for every individual in the United States.

Can be no prejudices

He said:

When it comes to the peace conference, we must have someone there who loves folks. No one should go there who has prejudices against any people. The oppressed people, whose lands have been invaded, not only have admiration for our President, they have confidence in what he will do.

In a slap at John Foster Dulles, foreign affairs advisor to Governor Thomas E. Dewey and prospective appointee to succeed Secretary of State Cordell Hull in event of a Dewey victory, Mr. La Guardia said:

As between a Tennessee mountaineer with no axe to grind and a slick New York City international lawyer with private international clients, I’d pick the mountaineer.”

Security is objective

He advised:

Be fair to yourselves. Talk it over with your neighbors. This is not a matter of publicity, of how much time on the air, of which party will win – it’s a matter of what’s best for your family. your country and the happiness and security of the world.

The New York Mayor, a Republican elected on a Fusion ticket, said he wasn’t making a political speech.

He said:

I never lasted 15 minutes in any party. And I’ve been in public office 40 years. I just don’t get along with politicians.

He was sponsored by an Independents for Roosevelt Committee headed by James S. Crutchfield. Also on the program was Republican Mayor George W. Welsh of Grand Rapids, Michigan, who said he was a Willkie supporter four years ago.

This year, he said, Mr. Willkie couldn’t get a seat at the Republican convention, although former President Herbert Hoover had a place on the platform.

Mr. Welsh said:

There has been a lot of speculation about what Wendell Willkie would have done, if he had lived, about the present Republican candidate, but there need be no speculation about what the present Republican leaders did about Wendell Willkie – they didn’t want any part of him.

3274

Nazis seize first American woman

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americavotes1944

Murray and PAC ‘amuse’ Malone

CIO President Philip Murray’s recent statement that his union’s Political Action Committee was his idea and not Sidney Hillman’s was tagged as “amusing” today by Republican County Chairman James F. Malone Jr.

Mr. Malone declared that Mr. Murray’s “belated effort to assume responsibility for the formation of the PAC” is evidence of the New Deal’s desire to rid itself of the damaging effects “Sidney Hillman and his Communistic followers are having on the fourth-term drive."

Statement quoted

His statement reads:

Further evidence of the New Deal party’s desire to rid itself of the damaging effects that Sidney Hillman and his Communistic followers are having on the fourth-term drive is found in the statement of Philip Murray, president of the CIO.

Murray’s belated effort to assume responsibility for the formation of Hillman’s Political Action Committee is amusing in the face of a speech he made in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 10, with Hillman on the platform, in which he said:

Brother Hillman has undertaken the performance of a great task in organizing the thinking people throughout the United States of America and through the medium of his CIO Political Action Committee disseminating information of a nature designed to give to the people of the United States the facts concerning the major issues in the year 1944.

Vote for Dewey urged

Mr. Murray undoubtedly realizes that Hillman and his Communists are boring from within the CIO.

He further realizes that as this continues, Hillman and his fellow drivers will gain control of this labor organization. The reelection of President Roosevelt will make this certain. The only way the rank-and-file members of this great labor union can get rid of Hillman is by voting for Thomas E. Dewey and John W. Bricker.

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americavotes1944

Landon: Roosevelt retreating to isolationism

Sabetha, Kansas (UP) –
Alf M. Landon last night accused President Roosevelt of “retreating to isolationism,” and said it would be impossible for Governor Thomas E. Dewey to do worse in the field of foreign affairs than the President.

The 1936 Republican presidential nominee charged that the American people had been deluded regarding accomplishments of the Moscow and Tehran conferences, which he described as a “bitter disappointment.”

“Instead of a hard-boiled hoss trader,” he said, “Roosevelt is like the sap who is always grabbing for the check.”

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americavotes1944

Gracie Allen Reporting

By Gracie Allen

Hollywood, California –
Well, officially, Halloween is supposed to be next Tuesday, but if you ask me, it’s been here too long already. The Democrats have been trying to frighten the Republicans, the Republicans have been trying to frighten the Democrats, and the voters’ polls have been frightening both of them.

And another nice little Halloween touch is furnished by the politicians who run around putting soft-soap on people’s windows so they can’t see what’s really going on.

Of course, the most frightening thing is the booing at the newsreels these days. I wish they’d stop that. George and I were sitting in a theater the other night when the audiences started booing. Poor George – he jumped up and started into his old vaudeville act.

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americavotes1944

Eastman: Communists playing party politics now in hope of revolt later

10,000 conspirators against U.S. government digging in now for future crisis
By Max Eastman, written for the Scripps-Howard newspapers

EDITOR’S NOTE: Max Eastman, at present roving editor of Reader’s Digest, is perhaps best known as translator of Leon Trotsky’s mammoth History of the Russian Revolution and author of a study of humor, Enjoyment of Laughter. He taught philosophy at Columbia University before leaving to edit The Masses and later The Liberator. Well known as a poet and philosopher, Mr. Eastman, after spending several years in the Soviet Union, published the first accounts of the internal fight within the Russian Communist Party which ultimately led to the famous Moscow trials and purges.

Cambridge, Massachusetts –
It sounds like horse sense to say: “What do 100,000 Communists amount to in a country of 140 million? As long as they are working for the things we want, why not use them?

People who talk this way think they are hardheaded. They think they are realists. They think they have had too much experience to get excited over a bogey.

The fact is they are provincial. They lack the experience which would enable them to form an intelligent judgment about this subject.

The Communist movement is not a propaganda league, an electoral party, an effort of persuasion, a campaign to win 140 million people to Communism.

The Communist movement is a conspiracy to seize power.

Care only for power

Its purpose is to destroy by force, and with a bloody purge, the democratic form of government and the system of free enterprise on which it rests. The Communists have only an incidental interest in propaganda or persuasion. They don’t care whether the American people are won to Communism or not. They are opposing Communism themselves now because they find this the easiest way to get their members, accomplices and dupes into key positions. They care only about power. They are a mafia, not a political party – least of all an “educational association.”

The thing should be stated this way: 100,000 American citizens have been organized into a compact, disciplined, fanatical league to destroy the American Republic by any means, moral or immoral, that may come to hand. If a person had a hard knowledge of that fact, he would not be so glib about “using” these conspirators where they can be helpful.

John Wilkes Booth was a brilliant actor, but you wouldn’t have advocated using him in Ford’s Theater, if you had known his underlying purpose. There’s as little reason why any man loyal to the American Republic should employ a Communist, or an accomplice of Communists (a fellow traveler) in any governmental position, or any position of power or influence anywhere in the land.

Planning for crisis

Another thing our soft, ignorant and provincial “realists” don’t understand: Communists are not conspiring to seize power now. They know as well as you do the juvenile folly of that. They are planning to seize power in a nationwide crisis.

Everybody knows that crises will come. There are enough unsolved problems – economic, social, racial – even if the Communists were not busily stirring them up. The world is in a turbulent condition, and the United States is not immune to turbulence, Some of us forget this, but the Communists never forget it. They inherited from Karl Marx a long-range view of history. And, according to that view, trouble is about all there is to history. Periods of tranquility are illusions – at best they are transitions from one violent crisis of social struggle to another.

Communism is a conspiracy to seize power when we are in trouble.

Confront that fact, and you will no longer be casual about “using the Communists” where they can be used. We have passed through crises and we can pass through others with our free institutions intact, if their personnel is loyal.

Enemies of democracy

But if those institutions are rotten-spotted with people who have crawled in there with the express purpose of helping them to crumble when a crisis comes, then we will not survive. That is the hard fact. That is realism. That is horse sense.

Another way of saying it is this: You can’t back democracy and Communism. If you are loyal to one, you spurn the other. Every trained Communist has in mind the day of armed war against democracy. Every believer in democracy, if he has political intelligence, takes an attitude of militant resistance to Communism.

3279

Affidavit declares –
Consul had orders to pass Mrs. Browder

High-ups told him he must grant visa
By Ned Brooks, Scripps-Howard staff writer

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3280

americavotes1944

Bricker: Business must be freed of shackles

Fort Worth, Texas (UP) –
Ohio Governor John W. Bricker, charging the New Deal with dilatory tactics that delayed the war effort, today said if the government handled post-war production as it did war production American business would be “harnessed and hitched” with Sidney Hillman and Earl Browder giving orders.

Denying that industry had to be “thrown” into war “by the scruff of the neck” as Vice President Henry A. Wallace said in a recent Cleveland speech, Mr. Bricker charged that industry could not get on with the rearmament program until the “restraining hands of the Palace Guard” were lifted and expert industrialists took over.

Up to Dewey

The GOP vice presidential nominee, in his first Texas speech prepared for delivery here before departing for Dallas said Governor Thomas E. Dewey was the man “to cast off the harness of paternalistic control” and give business “the green light” to produce and make jobs.

Mr. Bricker said:

If the government steps into the post-war production as it did into war production, Mr. [presidential adviser Harry] Hopkins and Mr. [Secretary of the Treasury Henry] Morgenthau will be playing with the destiny of American labor and industrial management to tunes called by Sidney Hillman and Earl Browder. These gentlemen know exactly what they want. They want American business harnessed and hitched.

Answers Wallace

Attacking Mr. Wallace’s Cleveland speech in which the Vice President said, “You had to take industry by the scruff of the neck and throw it into the war,” Mr. Bricker retorted:

Henry Wallace ought to know better than that. The New Deal took industry by the scruff of the neck all right as early as 1932 but the New Deal didn’t throw industry into the war. American industry got into production just as soon as the administration took its hands off the scruff of its neck.

He added:

And what a job of production industry performed when the restraining hand of the Palace Guard let go and when the expert industrialists took over.

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americavotes1944

Truman attacks Dewey as evasive

Chicago, Illinois (UP) –
Senator Harry S. Truman, Democratic nominee for the Vice Presidency, said today that Governor Thomas E. Dewey was “hiding under the bed” in ignoring Mr. Truman’s challenge that he repudiate eight Republican Senators seeking reelection this year.

When he learned that Mr. Dewey had declined to comment on his demand, Mr. Truman issued a statement which said:

Just as I feared, Mr. Dewey has neither the courage nor the honesty to tell the American people what he intends to do about these eight Republican isolationists whose public utterances and voting records brand them as isolationists and untrustworthy on foreign affairs. Mr. Dewey is hiding under the bed, afraid to answer that question.

The statement said Mr. Dewey had resorted to “subterfuge” in getting telegrams from five Republican Senators and reading only one – from Senator Wallace H. White Jr. of Maine – in his address last night.

“Mr. Dewey did not read the telegrams from Senator [Robert A.] Taft, Republican isolationist from Ohio,” Mr. Truman said.

When I reach Akron, I am going to tell the people of Ohio about Senator Taft’s voting record on foreign affairs. It was a mighty bad one.

The other seven isolationists seeking reelection on the Republican ticket either were not asked or did not send even a meaningless telegram to Mr. Dewey. Why not? On Wednesday Mr. Dewey will follow me to Wisconsin, the home of Alexander Wiley, one of those seven, Let us ask Mr. Dewey whether he is for the reelection of Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin.

Mr. Truman said Mr. Wiley had voted against the Selective Service Act and its extension, the Lend-Lease Bill, defense appropriations, acquisition of merchant vessels, the arming of merchant vessels, and authorizing the requisitioning of plants and equipment for defense.

3282

New gains in Italy –
Yanks capture Mt. Grande near Bologna

Key to Po Valley may fall soon

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3283

U.S. bombers blast Hamm, Hamburg area

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Six million Yanks now overseas

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