1,000 stay out in 4 strikes – two settled
5,500 back on job at Ambridge yards
…
In Washington –
Bigger meat subsidies demanded by senators
Amendments to price control extension threatened as committee cracks whip
…
Pittsburgh girl singer kills Jap
But she was merely trying out machine gun for thrill while entertaining in Pacific
…
Crashed plane’s gas supply probed
…
SUICIDE OF HITLER NEAR, CAPTURED SPOKESMAN SAYS
End of war few days off, Dittmar claims
Reports Goebbels also in Berlin
By Clinton B. Conger, United Press staff writer
MAGDEBURG, Germany – Adolf Hitler will kill himself or be killed in Berlin within a few hours or days and the war will end, Lt. Gen. Kurt Dittmar, German High Command spokesman, said in his final war commentary – in American custody.
Dittmar, who surrendered to the Ninth Army on the Elbe River Wednesday, told his captors that Hitler and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels were in Berlin and will die there.
Dittmar said:
The war will end in a few days. Hitler will either be killed or he will commit suicide. One of three generals – von Brauchitsch, Guderian, or von Rundstedt – will take control and will make peace immediately on almost any terms.
Talks of redoubts
The elegantly-uniformed general outlined the war situation for correspondents, just as he used to do for Radio Berlin listeners when the Nazi Army was overrunning Europe.
Asked about the Bavarian redoubt, he said, there’s talk about it and the map will now you that to pockets are being formed, one in the north including Norway and Denmark and one in the south in the Alps and Italy. But that is probably less by intention than by force of circumstance.
Al any rate, he thought, the war could not last after the fall of Berlin.
Fears reprisals
Dittmar first crossed the Elbe with a white flag of truce at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday with a major and two enlisted men, who rowed his boat. He tried to arrange for the evacuation of civilians and wounded soldiers in the path of the Russian advance, and when he was refused, he returned to the river bank.
Two and a half hours later, Dittmar returned to surrender accompanied by his 16-year-old son, Bernhardt.
“It occurred to me the highest command might learn I had been here and I was worried about reprisals,” he explained.
Rome awaits return of Duce
ROME, Italy (UP) – The Italian capital today eagerly awaited the return of its chief balcony performer Benito Mussolini whom patriots claimed to have captured in Northern Italy.
Confirmation of Mussolini’s arrest was still lacking, but the Italians were already planning his swansong performance in Rome – a trial for collaboration for which the penalty is death.
The Rome radio said that Mussolini and his cohorts captured with him would be tried by a people’s court. However, it was believed the United Nations War Crimes Commission might have something to say about that.
Editorial: ‘So long’
He squatted at his typewriter, struggling again to array a troop of sturdy words that would serve his mood.
There were many words in his mind; but the ones he wanted had to come from his heart. And his heart was brooding, for another of his friends was dead. As man to man, he wanted to call out, “So long,” in an hour when so many were dying, so many that anything less than death was beginning to seem incredible.
The words came from his typewriter, slowly, but firmly and sincerely. They spoke of the terror of death and the way it can grip a man; and at the end they said: “I know that he, like myself, had come to feel that terror.”
Ernie Pyle snapped shut the lid on his typewriter. His story was done. It proved to be his last. Ernie had said: “So long.”
And so, with great sorrow, we print Ernie Pyle’s final column today.
Monahan: Playing card drive gets underway
100,000 decks for servicemen is goal set by Local ‘40&8’
By Kaspar Monahan
…
Staggering Bucs easy prey for Cubs
Paul Derringer gets third win in comeback – unearned runs blast Sewell in 7-3 loss
…
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
This is Ernie Pyle’s last column. It is a beautiful tribute to Fred Painton, war correspondent who died of natural causes on Guam a few weeks ago. Ernie was on Okinawa when he was informed of Mr. Painton’s death. Ernie took time out from covering the war to write this touching story about his friend. Only a few days later, Ernie was killed.
OKINAWA (by Navy radio) – This is a column about Fred Painton, the war correspondent who dropped dead on Guam a short time ago.
Fred wrote war articles for Reader’s Digest and many other magazines. He even gambled his future once writing a piece for the Saturday Evening Post about me.
Fred was one of the little group of real old-timers in the European war. He was past 49 and an overseas veteran of the last war. His son is grown and in the Army. Fred had seen a great deal of war for a man his age.
He was just about to start back to America when he died. He had grown pretty weary of war. He was anxious to get home to have some time with his family.
But I’m sure he had no inkling of death, for he told me in Guam of his post-war plans to take his family and start on an ideal and easy life of six months in Europe, six in America. He had reached the point where life was nice.
Fred Painton was one of the modest people; I mean real down-deep modest. He had no side whatever, no ax to grind, no coy ambition.
He loved to talk and his words bore the authority of sound common sense. He had no intellectualisms. His philosophy was the practical kind. He was too old and experienced and too wise in the ways of human nature to belittle his fellow man for the failures that go with trying hard.
Prided self on production
Fred didn’t pretend to literary genius but he did pride himself on a facility for production. He could get a thousand dollars apiece for his articles and he wrote a score of them a year. And his pieces, like himself, were always honest. I’ve known him to decline to do an assignment when he felt the subject prohibited his doing it with complete honesty.
Fred’s balding head and crooked nose, his loud and friendly nasal voice, his British Army trousers and short leggings were familiar in every campaign in Europe.
He took rough life as it came and complained about nothing, except for an occasional bout with the censors. And even there he made no enemies for he was always sincere.
There were a lot of people Fred didn’t like, and being no introvert everybody within earshot knew whom he didn’t like and why. And I have never known him to dislike anyone who wasn’t a phony.
Fred and I have traveled through lots of war together. We did those bitter cold days, early in Tunisia, and we were the last stragglers out of Sicily.
We both came home for short furloughs after Sicily. The Army provided me with a powerful No. 2 air priority, while Fred had only the routine No. 3.
We left the airport at Algiers within four hours of each other on the same morning. I promised Fred I would call his wife and tell her he would be home within a week.
When I got to New York I called the Painton home at Westport, Connecticut. Fred answered the phone himself. He had beat me home by three days on his measly little priority! He never got over kidding me about that.
Natural death seems incongruous
As the war years rolled by, we have become so indoctrinated into sudden and artificially imposed death that natural death in a combat zone seems incongruous, and almost as though the one who died had been cheated.
Fred had been through the mill. His ship was torpedoed out from under him in the Mediterranean. Anti-aircraft fire killed a man beside him in a plane over Morocco.
He had gone on many invasions. He was in Cassino. He was ashore at Iwo Jima. He was certainly living on borrowed time. To many it seems unfair for him to die prosaically. And yet…
The wear and the weariness of war is cumulative. To many a man in the line today fear is not so much of death itself, but fear of the terror and anguish and utter horror that precedes death in battle.
I have no idea how Fred Painton would have liked to die. But somehow, I’m glad he didn’t have to go through the unnatural terror of dying on the battlefield. For he was one of my dear friends and I know that he, like myself, had come to feel that terror.
This is Ernie Pyle’s last column. The Press has printed all the stories written before he was killed by Jap machine-gun bullets on Ie Island, off Okinawa.
For the second time in little more than a year, we publish with sadness and deep regret the final column of a great reporter and a splendid human being. In February 1944, we printed the last column of Raymond Clapper who, like Ernie, met death covering the Pacific warfare.
It has been suggested that The Press publish some of Ernie’s former columns. But we have done this in the past when he was on vacations, and another publication of those columns would, we believe, probably be something of a letdown after the stories which led to his death.
Hence, this is goodbye to Ernie. As he, himself, wrote in the concluding sentence of his book Here Is Your War:
“When we leave here for the next shore, there is nothing we can do for the ones beneath the wooden crosses, except perhaps to pause and murmur: ‘Thanks, pal.’”