Army to train job-changers
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Japs concerned over Reds’ plans
WASHINGTON (UP) – Jap propagandists speculated uneasily today that Russia may have decided at the recent Big Three conference to join the United States and Great Britain in war against Japan.
A Singapore radio broadcast voiced Tokyo’s growing concern over the situation, linking the Big Three meeting with the fact that the Russo-Jap neutrality pact becomes subject to revocation in the next two months.
The commentator also suggested that President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill may have brought pressure on Marsha! Stalin to attack the Jap Army in Manchuria.
Nazis to use new weapons, Goebbels hints
Germans called on for ruthless fight
LONDON, England – Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, hinting that Germany will use new and secret ‘Weapons in her last-ditch resistance, told the world today that the Reich will take the “boldest and most daring methods” to defend itself.
Goebbels made his threat in his weekly dispatch in Das Reich, which was summarized by the German radio. It was the first official comment reported for him since the Big Three Crimea conference disclosed Allied plans for a future Germany.
“Our salvation lies in arms,” Goebbels said. “Let us forge them and use them in the last battle which will decide everything. This, today, is our great chance.”
Urges desperate means
Since Tuesday, when a German Foreign Office spokesman asserted that the Big Three conference had freed Germany to conduct a war by all suitable means, German propagandists have been exhorting their people to a ruthless battle.
This was the theme of Goebbels’ dispatch: He said that Germans prefer to use desperate means rather than mortgage the lives of German children, and that unrelenting warfare would keep the Germans from losing the war.
“A nation which is determined to use all means, even the most daring ones, in defense of its life cannot be really defeated,” Goebbels was quoted as saying.
Cites Allied strength
Apparently attempting io reassure the German people that the closeness of the Russians to Berlin was not really too important, Goebbels said that “it is not alone decisive at what spot the fighting occurs at this moment.”
“It is, of course, a fact that the enemy has a bigger war potential at his disposal, and particularly so at this time, but only from a material and not from a moral viewpoint,” Goebbels asserted. He said that the development of the war is “still fluid and will remain so until one of the belligerent powers lays down its arms.”
“We alone have to decide whether we or our enemies will do this.”
Editorial: Not even Dresden escapes
When the Russians started moving on Dresden, we breathed a sigh of relief because here, at last, was a name that the radio announcers would have to pronounce so that American listeners could understand it. But we were too fast. Some of the weisenheimers of the airwaves are struggling to give even Dresden a high-falutin’ pronunciation.
It may be Dresden china to you – but it’s Drai-ess-dain to the ether experts. Probably even “china” wouldn’t sound that way if one of those behind-the-scenes-inside-information lads got hold of it.
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
HONOLULU, Hawaii (delayed) – Covering this Pacific war is, for me, going to be like learning to live in a new city.
The methods of war, the attitude toward it, the homesickness, the distances, the climate – everything is different from what we have known in the European war.
Here in the beginning. I can’t seem to get my mind around it, or get my fingers on it. I suspect it will take months to get adjusted and get the “feel” of this war.
Distance is the main thing. I don’t mean distance from America so much, for our war in Europe is a long way from home too. I mean distances after you get right on the battlefield.
For the whole western Pacific is our battlefield now, and whereas distances in Europe are hundreds of miles at most, out here they are thousands. And there’s nothing in between but water.
You can be on an island battlefield, and the next thing behind you is a thousand miles away. One soldier told me the worst sinking feeling he ever had was when they had landed on an island and were fighting, and on the morning of D-3 he looked out to sea and it was completely empty. Our entire convoy had unloaded and left for more, and boy, did it leave you with a lonesome and deserted feeling.
Like slow-motion movies
As one admiral said, directing this war is like watching a slow-motion picture. You plan something for months, and then finally the great day comes when you launch your plans, and then it is days or weeks before the attack happens, because it takes that long to get there.
As an example of how they feel, the Navy gives you a slick sheet of paper as you go through here, entitled “Airline Distances in Pacific.” And at the bottom of it is printed “Our Enemy, Geography.” Logistics out there is more than a word; it’s a nightmare.
Here’s another example of their attitude toward distances in the Pacific–
At Anzio in Italy just a year ago, the Third Division set up a rest camp for its exhausted infantrymen. The rest camp was less than five miles from the front line, within constant enemy artillery range.
But in the Pacific, they bring men clear back from the western islands to Pearl Harbor to rest camps – the equivalent of bringing an Anzio Beachhead fighter all the way back to Kansas City for his two-weeks rest.
It’s 3,500 miles from Pearl Harbor to the Marianas, all over water, yet hundreds of people travel it daily by air as casually as you’d go to work in the morning.
Another enemy
And there is another enemy out here that we did not know so well in Europe – and that is monotony. Oh sure, war everywhere is monotonous in its dreadfulness. But out here even the niceness of life gets monotonous.
The days are warm and on our established island bases the food is good and the mail service is fast and there’s little danger from the enemy and the days go by in their endless sameness and they drive you nuts. They sometimes call it going “pineapple crazy.”
Our high rate of returning mental cases is discussed frankly in the island and service newspapers. A man doesn’t have to be under fire in the front lines finally to have more than he can take without breaking.
He can, when isolated and homesick, have more than he can take of nothing but warmth and sunshine and good food and safety – when there’s nothing else to go with it, and no prospect of anything else.
Japs are different
And another adjustment I’ll have to make is the attitude toward the enemy. In Europe, we felt our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people.
But out here I’ve already gathered the feeling that the Japanese are looked upon as something unhuman and squirmy – like some people feel about cockroaches or mice.
I’ve seen one group of Japanese prisoners in a wire-fenced courtyard, and they were wrestling and laughing and talking just as humanly as anybody. And yet they gave me a creepy feeling, and I felt in need of a mental bath after looking at them.
I’ve not yet got to the front, or anywhere near it, to find out how the average soldier or sailor or Marine feels about the thing he’s fighting. But I’ll bet he doesn’t feel the same way our men in Europe feel.
Superhuman exploit –
Musmanno tells of hero who killed 10, captured 74 Nazis in ‘suicide’ raid
By Cmdr. Michael A. Musmanno
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Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
If you ask me, Jack Benny and Bob Hope need never worry where their next comedy writers are coming from, as long as the Japs keep up their standards of humor.
The leading laugh-getter among them is Gen. Yamashita. He’s the one who said: “The enemy, retreating northward, has advanced south.”
But his latest bon mot is what my husband George, an employed radio personality, calls a belly-laugh.
Now the general says: “I have pursued Douglas MacArthur all over the South Seas. Now I have him in my iron trap.”
George says the enemy propaganda boys remind him of the prize-fight manager, whose man was taking a big heating. Said the manager between rounds: “You’re doing fine. Think how his hands must hurt.”