Indianapolis Times, Indianapolis, Marion County, 3 September 1942 — Page 15

THURSDAY, SEPT. 3, 1942

Hoosier Vagabond Sateag 1 oid has STOW ars ot Nery tea \

DUBLIN, Sept. 3—~The other day. an Irish newspaper friend said to me, “I don’t know what it is, ‘but any place in the world people would know you 2 an. American, just by your looks.” - He said % wasn’t my clothes, nor my face, nor my walk—it was just something general that was American and couldn't be anything else. And I know he’s right, for as I walk along the street I can sense that people know I am American. And that seems very odd to me here, because actually I believe you could take 90 per cent of the people in Dublin and walk them along the sidewalks in New York or San Francisco, and nobody would know they weren't born and raised in America. Irishmen have been a. big disappointment to me’ —in their looks. Just as most foreigners think all Americans are either cowboys or ‘millionaires, so I thought all Irishmen had pug noses, chin whiskers, smoked clay pipes and. kept saying *“begorra.” I have yet to see a chin whisked or a clay pipe in Ireland, and I've seen only a few pug noses. An Irish friend says he’s never in his life heard anybody say “begorra” or “bejabers.” If I don't at least see somebody carrying a hod before I leave here, I'm going to quit.

Go Ahead, Go to Galway

PEOPLE TALK ALMOST like the British. The “only people I can’t understand are the newsboys on the street. Even in the rural districts where I've traveled, - Bou can understand people all right. They do say,

By Ernie Pyle

day I'll go there, and maybe I can hear somebody say “begorra.” ~ Everybody in Ireland can speak English. Some also speak Gaelic. The English government forbade the teachmg of Gaelic more than 100 years ago, and only in the last two. generations has Gaelic been| taught again. Now it is a matter of pride among the people to learn Gaelic. I have one friend here, a middle-aged man in a high government position, who goes twice a week to a private tutor to learn Gaelic, his longforgotten native tongue. Practically all public signs, and many advertisements, are in both English“ and

Gaelic.

A Sad Ending Indeed, Mr. Pyle

SINCE I'VE GONE this far in a column of disillusionments, we might as ‘well make it the subject for today. I've been badly let down by finding the Irish outwardly so solemn. After a lifetime of listening to Irish stories, I expected to find the streets packed with hilariously laughing people, and sidewalks knotted with little groups telling ‘jokes. But actually, I believe the crowds on the sidewalks of Ireland are more somber than in America. People seem to talk to each other less as they walk along. You hardly ever see anybody laughing. And it isn’t caused by war-worry, it's simply that Irish people don’t go around howling over their jokes all the time. . As a result of intensive study of Irish humor, 1 have come to the conclusion that I myself am probably the funniest person in Ireland today. Tis a sad ending“to a column, bejabers.

Inside Indianapolis By Lowell Nussbaum

FRED HOKE, the manufacturer and state welfare rd member, is a pretty regular attender at Rotary club meetings and always wears the customary lapel badge—about four inches in diameter—with his name on it. Tuesday, he forgot to remove the badge as he left the Claypool Riley room and for a time he couldn't make out why people were craning their necks at him and grinning. . . . Harry Morrison Jr., the former sports writer for The Times, now is an instructor in meteorology at Chanute field. He gets home most . every week-end to visit the Mrs, . +» « Mary Bostwick, veteran newspaper woman and the Star's poet laureatess, has mooched hundreds of airplane rides, and even a bale lcon ride’ (if memory serves core rectly) during her career, all without a single injury. The other day, her .co-workers report, she slipped in the bath tub and -was crippled up for several days. It's funny she hasn't written a jingle about it.

A Bang-Up Mystery : ‘ SOME OF THE FOLKS living in the general vicinity of the Riviera club are a bit curious about thegshots heard there nightly. Each evening about 10:30, eight or nine shots are heard. They. sound like .a shotgun and seem to be coming from Crow's Nest. Probably someone gunning for crows. . . . Bill Evans who is superintending the school safety patrol

camp session fook everything. td.camp. with him bub. a tle. Yesterday he was called into town unexpectedly

and had to borrow a tie from Sergt. A. C. Magenheimer. It was a nice blue and white polkadot. . . . Vi Seiter, the dollar-watching controller of the

Washingtc WASHINGTON, Sept. 3. — Without doubt the largest obstacle to the American war effort is the cumbersome, sluggish bureaucracy here at Washing‘ton. ' It is a disease which afflicts so many after they ? get into government service, At first they try, then gradually they succumb to the ball .and chain of bureaucratic methods and must slow down to the snail's pace at which the machine moves. Anyone around Washington sees countless instances. An ambassador of one of the united nations writes himself a patriotic speech and as a courtesy turns it over to one of the government agencies just to be sure he is in line with policy. He is in line all right but his speech is censored in several irrelevant details, through a purely mechanical application of rules svhich in this instance make no sense whatever. #The ambassador described the size of the German force which attacked his country in the early part of the ¥ war—many, many months ago. - It was ancient history. The Germans probably have forgotten what they used in that campaign but they could look it up if they were interested any longer, which is not likely. Nobody but a historian would care. Yet the detail was stricken out.

Ickes Is the Only Doer

ANOTHER REPRESENTATIVE of a nation on our gide has been here five weeks trying to clear a relatively minor matter with one of the government agencies. He has been run around from one person to another and hasn't been able to get a definite answer yes or no. . So our friends in other united nations wonder if their experiences are typical and if so how we can out up with such ineficiency. ‘An American, representing American - interests, tells me there is only one office in town where he can get a prompt yes or no answer. That is from the organization run by Secretary Ickes. You may not

My Day,

he WASHINGTON, Wednesday.—Taday at noon Mrs. ST Alma Kitchell -and Mrs. Henry Morgenthau Jr, together with mothers of men in the armed forces, were ¢ air, popularizing a slogan which all women will to remember—“A stamp a day for the son who is away.” Many a woman . may not have a son, but she may

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gas company, Has become quite a color film fan. And he manages to get 21 pictures an an 18-eaposure roll of Kodachrome. He would.

Brand New Veterans

A HIGH EXECUTIVE of a large downtown store was talking to a friend the other day, telling him about a problem that had arisen in the store, and the settlement of it. Said he: “I talked it over with some of the older employees in the department. You know, the ones that have been with us. four or five days.” . . . For the boys who were worrying about the failure to salvage signal towers and other metal on the abandoned Indiana Railroad line between here and Seymour, we have good news. A repre-

. sentative of a salvage firm says his company is re- ; moving all metal from the right-of-way, even bridges, | SS

under the supervision of the government. Uncle Sam tells them what to take first and what part of

the right-of-way to work on. It'll all be delivered to 3 3

the Japs, via bombs, one of the days.

Sore Arm Epidemic

FOR THE NEXT FEW weeks, 1% woilld be o.gted idea to refrain from greeting your friends by grabbing them up the upper arms. Lots of folks are get-

ting their annual cold shots now, and gosh how;

sore those .arms do get. . . . Floyd Hunter of the Council of Social Agencies, is back from Petoskey, Mich, where he went to get away from the hay fever. He had it worse when he got back than when he left. . The wind was mostly from the south, he says, blowing the tortuous pollen into the ordinary pollen free. territory. . . . Curley Ash, the eminent

“publicist, is eating regularly once more, now that

his family ‘is back from vacation. He spent almost a whole day washing dishes and otherwise cleaning up the house before Mrs. Ash’s return.

By Raymond Clapper

like some of the things Secretary Ickes says, but he can make decisions, which seems to be an increasingly rare thing around here. This arsenal of bureaucracy has grown so big that it may be suffering from elejhantiasis. When there are too many people around, they get in each other's way. Not counting the armed forces, the federal government has almost two and a quarter million employees. I am convinced that a lot of them just have to try to make work for themselves.

Yes, Let's Change Human Nature!

‘WHAT ARE ALL these people doing around here? We know things they are not doing. Nobody took the trouble to find out what Russia was doing with synthetic rubber. Nobody took the trouble—before war started and when we knew it was coming—to find out anything about Germany's synthetic industry. We are panting for nickel. Our government has information of deposits in one friendly South American| country. I am told nothing is being done about .it. Then there is personality trouble. You always have it everywhere. But we are fighting Hitler now and have to make sacrifices. It does seem as though there could be some easing up on personal feuds. Old man Kaiser is coming back here in a few days for a showdown. He is walking into a den of lions. By this time so much bitter personal feeling has grown up around old man Kaiser that it is a question whether this town is big enough to hold him and some of the key men who dislike him intensely. One important WPB official simply refuses to have any part of anything old man Kaiser is connected with. Other WPB officials are conscientiously trying to find some way of utilizing Kaiser's talents, but the personal antagonism of some of their associates makes that very difficult. J Perhaps that is asking human nature to change. Well, why not? You can’t have human nature as usual in a war any more than you can have anything else as usual. You can't have bureaucracy as usual This arsenal of bureaucracy is big enough all right.

But like the guns of Singapore, it is pein in the wrong direction too much of the time. tine

By Eleanor Roosevelt

without. Of course, we may sell Evins Shall. be hep the future, as well

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Huge Tanks, ‘Chutists in

. By ROBERT J. CASEY Copyright, M 1942 3 The Indianapolis Tim

ERT FRONT, Sept. 8.— The parachute troops came with the dawn and floated down like windlike weed over the Needles, Cal., airport. Hidden machine guns blasted them in midair and land mines, grenades and rifle fire exterminated what was left of them as they hit the ground, although you

know much about it in fact until you heard the umpires arguing with a couple of the companies of air-borne zombies a little while later.

avalanche of tanks with which the enemy hoped to push on the surprise attack. -

units, sappers, engineers and what not roared out to meet him—and the incredible backstairs commonfolk of destruction traveling in peeps and jeeps and things that looked like school busses . . . sO began the U. S. army's desert maneuvers; the only show of its sort this country has ever seen. The parachute assault on the airport was a magnificent show— not so large perhaps as the rain of men from the sky that broke the resistance of similar posts in - Holland and Belgium, definitely on the ‘largest scale our army has so_far attempted even in. training, and it w a §s perfectly executed. Rven though half of them may have been technically dead before they hit the ground the technique of the parachutists was beyond the criticism of even

the umpires. » 8 »

Sky Seemed Filled

THE PLANES had come over the mauve-and-chocolate mountains of the San Bernardino range While the airport's green beacon was still swinging through what was left of the night. They swung about on a wide loop and came low across the field in par-

es cago Daily News, Inc.

THE bi hid DES-

didn’t see the slaughter, or .

Mechanized artillery, anti-tank

but

Desert Fight

Up from the desert rumbled the ;

_ The parachute troops floated down like windlike weed . . . a magnificent show.

allel ‘columns and the parachute shock troops popped out of them, split seconds apart, until the sky seemed filled with them. - That the home-folks should turn out to have a. defense against’ them, even technically, was a surprise to neutral observers as it was no doubt to them. The skill and audacity of their attempt gives some hint of what these maneuvers are and why they differ from, say, last year's big war-play in Louisiana, as the big leagues are different from the sand lots. The desert maneuvers, which had been in preparation for a week before the attack began to strew the hot wastes with tanks, will occupy several thousand men and hundreds upon hundreds of wheeled vehicles for about two months—or. well on toward the end of what the desert rats call the seasonable weather. The cataclysmic struggles of 25-ton tanks and their fantastic entourage will spread all across this end of the Colorado valley and perhaps spread out into Ari-

gona.

2 » ” THE BATTLE LINE in three phases of the maneuvers will be laid across térrain in each case differing in contour and surface .from that of the first problem, but never varying in heat and dust and awesome. desolation. The troops will struggle for such forlorn bits of escarpments like those along the road to To-

bruk, dried marshes like those about Benghazi, loose sand like that of the Qattara depression, and a coarse covered duneland like that south of Derna. And when the show is over and the baked warriors go back to permanent camp in another part of the desert, a lgt of us technicians will know. more about the construction and purpose of tanks and a lot of army strategists: will know quite a lot of what has been going on in Libya. The most important part of this show to an American—and the most encouraging—is that it could be held at all It is violating no 'confidence—and certainly telling nothing to the enemy that he hasn't known all along—to mention that our tank strength a year ago was chiefly conversational and that it wasn't much better at the time of Pearl Harbor. * * Voice of the Pessimist

ONE ACQUAINTED with press agents and promisers may be excused a healthy piety about announcements of great progress in the production of these rolling fortresses, and in the evening as the staff car boiled its tedious way to this fantastic mesa from the shimmering oasis of Indio one thought not of the promised show or what, if anything, it might signify in our vague war effort

but of a voice of doom that was sounding unheard across the country a year ago. + An American soldier of fortune had come home after a long absence and after close and empensive experience with wars and he had been terrified at what he saw. We are going just the way France went, he said: “The signs are unmistakable, we talk and we do nothing. We brag about the number of. tanks we are making—and all the totals refer to 10-ton tanks that aren't good for anything except to be melted up to make other os + The boys promise us three 35-ton tanks in "1942. , . . Maybe theyll give use 25 or 50 25-ton tanks by that time. They're building these things like they build a battleship—one ‘ piece at a time and most of it by hand . . . and will never have any tanks when trouble comes—and it’s not far away, we'll have to defend ourselves with statistics. . , .” 2 8 = IT WAS, the

were going to ‘do about it was something you were almost afraid to find out for yourself. Then the car swung off the main road— which is to say the sand fringed ripple of asphalt across this dusty, flint - studded wilderness — and turned into a hard-packed trail and there suddenly was the answer, for five miles or more in neat, close drawn companies ranged a convincing display of

America’s new mechanized army, | Like a tremendously amplified revival of the old circus pageant, “the field of the cloth of gold. How many there were of them is . probably a military secret—but | it's safe to say there were as |

many of them as were involved |

in the first: Libyan campaign. And the regimental markers showed | that only a part of the new U. S. | armored force was represented here. From some place while our back was turned America had got the tanks—plenty of tanks. Soon after dark this formation broke up. Thin metallic sounds came up to the observers’ camp to give brief hint of its move=

ment. This morning before the !'

parachute troops came down on!

whether a “Red army” or a “Blue ' :

army will ithis © Gode |

WELL, HERE control tt © trouble had (Soise and what we “forsaken "Hump between Death |

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valley and the Salton sea, and |=

tactically, of course, it will be a

very important affair and Sh i=

whole conduct of our war with

machines may be decided by it '

« « + Maybe . . . but somehow at the moment that doesn’t seem so important that whatever the boys

are doing up here they are doing

with a professional . finish with the tools in-their hands vee so help us.

PRAYER BEGINS ATH WAR YEAR

British, on Anniversary, Are Confident Victory Is Nearer.

LONDON, Sept. 3 (U. P.)—Millions. of Britons joined the king in

observing a national day of prayer today at the opening of the fourth

and united nations leaders here generally, anxious over critical sit-

increasingly confident of victory.

before the fourth year of the war} ended, the allies would be on the definitive offensive which ‘would break Germany and Italy and leave Japan alone to deal with, if it elected to fight on.

U. 8. Troops Join Prayers

‘A parade through the London streets yesterday of a small force of United States troops was taken as a sign of things to come and the

year of a war which found them,|

uations in Russia and Egypt, but There seemed conviction that}

HOLD EVERYTHING

“What am I doing? Why—er—I was just applying a little of the: scorched earth policy, sir!” :

DON'T BE NICE, GOEBBELS SAYS

“Get Hot and Hate The Allies.

GERMANY STILL IS ENGIRCLED

The Foe at Her Back .Is|gl

“More Menacing Than Ever, Writer Says.

By HUBERT UXKULL United Press Staff Correspondent STOCKHOLM, Sept. = 3.—After three years of military effort hardly paralleled in history, Germany: still is encircled. The circle has become wider and stronger. The front has turned around 180 degrees. The foe in Germany's back is still ‘undefeated, and today is more menacing than’ ever, Thus Germany, entering her fourth war year, is a vastly changed nation from that which was informed by Britain in 1939 that aggression would not be tolerated, and she is confronted by the nightmare

Today’

s War Moves

By LOUIS F. KEEMLE United Press Was Anslyst

As the war enters its fourth year, the ering i

dark spots.

Egypt, and the picture on this anniversary

Hite 1s throwing such: mas weight in his diye “for Stalingrad and the Volga that there appears to be a strong possibility he will achieve his goal and estabe ter line along the Volga. This had been foreseen and in itself

IH

the northern and fronts throughout the winthat way, 1942

ve been enrely cut off from the rest of Rusbut supply line 11 stands. The Caucasus should be - through the winter,

[vie brother of the _a0-milimeter

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and comparatively safe from

reaches Makhach Kala on the Case . The threat in Egypt may be. of even greater importance, in the long run, than the drive for Stalingrad, The action there has not progressed far enough, nor has enough detailed information been given out, to ine dicate whether Marshal Erwin Rom mel hag ‘enough ‘strength to crash

Alr Power Growing: id

i overy prospect tat Une Russians wll be abe to hold Him.

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