Indianapolis Times, Indianapolis, Marion County, 19 May 1943 — Page 9

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WEDNESDAY, MAY 19, 1943

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Hoosier Vagabond

IN TUNISIA (By Wireless.)—Sgt. Eugene Box of Babylon, L. I., is an infantryman. He is one of these lighthearted blonds. He is always grinning, and he has a tooth out in front. He has been through {our big battles, had his bookful of close shaves, and Liiled his share ‘of Germans. Yet he is just the same when it is all over. Sgt. Box is an expert with the dice and the cards. He has already sent $1200 home to be banked since arriving in North Africa. That's in addition to a $25-a-month allotment. Furthermore, he’s got another $700 ready to send off any day. When his last battle started he gave his wallet to a friend back of the lines to keep for him, just in case. He wears a diamond ring, and before every battle he takes it off his third finger, which it fits, and forces it onto his middle finger, where it is terribly tight. That's so if he gets captured or wounded the Gernans can't steal the ring without cutting off his finger, which he apparently thinks they wouldn't do.

Life of a Stretcher-Bearer

PFC. William Smith of Decota, W. Va, is an infantryman who sometimes doubles as a stretcher. bearer. He has had a couple of unusual experiences. One day they found a badly wounded German soldier, so they put him on a litter and started back to an aid station with him. But he was almost gone, gic he died after they had walked only a few minutes. They kept on with him anyhow. Then suddenly the German batteries started dropping 88s right around them, so Pvt. Smith finished the episode by this means—to use his words: “I just dumped him in a crick and took off from there.” Another time he and another soldier were carryfing a wounded American back from a battle area. They had got about halfway back when those familiar 88s started falling. But they didn't dump this guy in any crick. No sir. the wounded man took off from that stretcher all alone and lit out on a dead

Inside Indianapolis By Lowell Nussbaum

THE CURRENT FLOOD brings’ bad news to fishermen. It came at the worst possible time—right after most of the game fish had spawned their eggs for the season. And undoubtedly most of these eggs have been smothered with silt, according to Harrell Mosbaugh, state director of fish and game. That means millions of future fish lost. To make matters worse, tiny Crooked creek overflowed its banks and washed game fish out of all but two of the rearing ponds in the Riverside hatchery. The overflow also destroyed the fish eggs in the hatchery and washed undesirable species—carp and catfish—into the ponds. The ponds can be drained and cleaned in a couple of weeks, and they can be restocked from gome of the other hatcheries, but the production of the hatchery has been cut probably 70 per cent for the year. The effect won't be apparent this year, nor next. But along about 1946 or 1947, fishermen throughout the state will be complaining that: “They aren't biting this vear like they used to.”

Around the Town

FOR SEVERAL DAYS, a youth in Miss Katherine* JParrish’s botany class at Howe high school took her ja bouquet of tulips daily. The other day he handed "her just one tulip, remarking that she couldn't expect any more. Asked why, he replied: “That's the last one there was in the man’s garden.” . . . Two gmall boys were conversing earnestly in front of the Circle. Said one: “He went out to the fort and in a few days he was promoted from a private to a major.” ‘Tain’t the way we heard it! . . . Lt. Richard McGarrah Helms, of The Times advertising department, has been promoted to lieutenant, senior grade. He's stationed on the Eastern seaboard. ... A reader phones Inside to inquire about a rumor her brother-in-law, over in India, heard but couldn't check. The rumor was that soldiers in service overseas a year

Sweden

STOCKHOLM, May 19 (By Wireless.)—Good information is received here about Denmark. It indicates that even when the Nazis are on their best behavior they simply can't make a subject people accept their new order. The Nazis have been making a real effort to win the Danes with sugar instead of using the brutality they have practiced in Holland, Norway and Poland. Denmark did not resist invasion in 1940, so the Germans undertook to reward the Danes with what, for the Nazis, was generous treatment. For an occupation, it was a lenient, tolerant job. But even so the Nazis have had a dismal failure in their effort to win over the people of Denmark. King Christian's appeal to the Danes to stop sabotage is conclusive proof that the Nazis have failed: It is fairly clear now that even if the Nazis had won the war they would never have been able to win the co-operation of the subject peoples for their new prder. That is the significance Denmark has in the picture that one sees, looking out through this closeup window onto Nazi Europe.

Danish Sabotage Grows

AMONG THE occupied countries Denmark is the nly one which still has a government elected by its own people, the only one where there has been no open conflict between the people and the Nazi conquerors. Yet there has been a considerable increase in sabotage. In recent months there has been scarcely 8 day without attempted explosions or planted fires. The Germans have made threats of death penalties, but the Danes are not cowed, and now the king has been induced to make an appeal to help out the German authorities in preserving order.

My Day

WASHINGTON, Tuesday —Yesterday afternoon, at 4 o'clock, the ladies of the cabinet and I gave our first party for a group of congressional ladies. We Shad a short movie arid then went out on the lawn for some very light refreshments. The air was delicious, neither too cold nor too warm. I only hope that every one of the parties planned for the garden will be as pleasant as this one was. We were shown another in a series of films in the evening, prepared by the special services divicion of the army, to be shown in the camps. It is one of the best chronologies of the development of the war that I have seen and I hope that, like “Prelude to Victory,” it will be released to the ‘general public, as well as to the soldiers in the camps. For the benefit of the Greek war relief,

the radio

By Ernie Pyle

run. He beat the two panting litter-bearers back to the aid station. On one night march we stopped about midnight and were told to find ourselves places among the rocks on a nearby hillside. This hillside was practically a cliff. You could barely stand on it. And it was covered with big rocks and an especially vicious brand of thistle that grew between the rocks. It was pitch dark. and we had to find our little places to lie down—several hundred of us—largely by feel.

Dive-Bombing at Dawn

I CLIMBED almost to the top of the cliff, and luckily found a sloping place without bumps, just long enough for my body. I tromped down the thistles, thought a few trembling thoughts about snakes and lizards, then lay down and put one shelter-half on the ground, wrapped my one blanket around me, and drew the other shelter-half over me. The thistles had such a strong and repugnant odor that I thought I couldn't go to sleep, but I was dead to the world in two seconds. In fact I never slept better in my life. : The next thing I knew the entire universe seemed to be exploding. Guns were going off everywhere, and planes screaming right down on top of us. It was a dawn dive-bombing. I thought to myself, “Oh, my God, they've got us this time!” I didn't even look out from under the sheiter-half. I just reached out one arm to where I knew my steel helmet was lying, and put it on my head under the covers. And I remember lying on my side and getting my knees up around my chin so there wouldn't be so much of me to hit. What happened was this—the planes had bombed some vehicles in the valley below us, and pulled out of their dives right over our hill. They just barely cleared the crest as they went over. They couldn't have been more than a hundred feet above us. We were all lying there in the open, perfect targets for machine-gunning. They never did shoot. but it was my worst divebombing scare of the war, and I felt mighty glad that the whole Tunisian business was about over.

were entitled to a furlough hom». We checked with Ft. Harrison and find that, unfortunataly, the rumor is merely a rumor, that there aren't any such army rules and regulations.

Hold These, Mister

PASSENGERS ON a N. Meridian st.

startled the other day when a io-vesccold voy 501 | @X S Checker-Boa rded With War Plants, Camps,

aboard and thrust two ice cream buckets into the hands of a surprised man in the fron! seat, saying: “Hold these a minute, mister. One of them’s having babies.” While he was fumbling in his pocket for his fare, he explained he had had two tropical fish, one in each bucket. “But when I looked at one of them a minute ago, I could see some little fish swimming around the big one.” A count revealed 21

offspring. . . . The phone rang. A woman told the city editor: “The water's all over our house and sy)

anything about it.” , . . A prominent semi-public! downtown spot has renewed its offer to its em-| ployees of a bounty of 20 cents a mouse. Only mice caught or killed on the premises count—no ringers. ! Several months ago when the bounty first was offered, | employees collected something like $20.

The Jinx Job

THE JINX JOB at the statehouse is the $4200 a vear post of public service cdmmission secretary. Harcld Mull, a Townsend appointee, held over for a time after Governor Schricker took office. A little later he was replaced by George Durgan, former mayor of Lafayette and long time friend of the governor. Mr. Durgan died a few months after he took the job.! His successor, S. Hugh Dillin, former state represen. | tative from Petersburg, wasn't on the job long until the draft threatened and he enlisted in the V. O. C. Next, the governor appointed Glen L. Steckiey who had lost cut as a deputy attorney general in January. Mr. Steckley suffered a stroke only a couple of wesks ago and he's still in the hospital. And that's how it stands at present.

By Raymond Clapper

Since the heavy British bombardment around Copenhagen toward the end of January, there has been a notable increase in sabotage. The Danes took this bombing as an indication that the allies were beginning to come to their rescue, and their new hope was reflected in bolder sabotage activity. They have damaged communication such as railroads, depots, German barracks, and industries contributing to the Nazi war machine. The German commander-in-chief in Denmark, Gen. Von Hanneken, announced that if trouble did not end he would introduce death penalties, would apply the hostage system which has been used so brutally in other countries, and would levy collective fines on communities in which sabotage occurred. He called the press to his headquarters in Copenhagen and asked them to warn the population that sabotage must stop, although up to that time the Germans had forbidden the press to mention sabotage.

People Well Informed

THE DANES keep fairly well informed about the outside world, in contrast to other German-occupied territory. The press is controlled, yet it is allowed some latitude. There are at least 20 secret Danish papers which circulate with comparative ease, Just before the recent parliamentary election one underground publication issued 60,000 copies. There is no prohibition in Denmark against listening to foreign radios, and British Broadcasting Corp. news is widely heard, although the Germans do a good deal of jamming so reception is not always good. There were many involved circumstances in the recent elections, but the net is that all parties got together toward the end and passed the word that they must pile up a combined vote for democracy, even though the Germans might try to construe it as a vote of confidence in the puppet government. The result was a 90 per cent turnout with the Nazis polling 3000 fewer votes than in the 1939 elections.

By Eleanor Roosevelt

atlas of world war 2, which was arranged as a program for the Greek war relief benefit. Many people all over this country must be reading the casualty lists with great anxiety these days. There is one thing which impresses me each time I go through them. I have always known it, but it is something good to bear in mind. There are the names of the men who have given all they had to give for the couniry in which you and I live, and the names—why they are Russian, British, German, French, Dutch, Jewish, Czech, Hungarian, Chinese, Italian, Irish, Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish, and from all the rest of the nations of the world! As you read the stories of heroic deeds, you find again that whether it is Meyer Levin or Jimmy Doolittle, the name, the race, the religion does not seem to make any difference. Courage belongs to no cne race or no one religion, but it does seem to be in all our koys, for where one is recognized a hundred g0 unnoticed. Sm J At 5 o'clock this afternoon f start visi

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‘Red Balls’ Its Freight

One of the biggest ingredients of success in war is transporfaiion. far there hasnt been a photographer here to do] Trained soldiers, newly forged weapons, stacks of ammunition and food are useless until they are’ moved and moved again to points where they are needed. Charles Lucey, who wrote “Smashing the Axis,” the description of industry at war, reveals in a new series, of which this article is the third, how the railroads are rolling the nation to victory.

By CHARLES T. LUCEY

Times Staff

Writer

HOUSTON, May 19.—"Red ball,” the Santa Fe freight traffic manager said. “Seems everything is red ball today. Time was when we put the red ball sign only on those freight cars which had to be railroaded through fast

from shipper to destination.

That told everyone on the

line it was high-class stuff and should get special handling

ahead of ordinary freight. But today it's all that way. “There's gravel, now. In the old days we just ran it in for filler in our lumber and cotton trains. Now it's one of the hottest things on the tracks. We've been handling 100 cars a day out to one of the big airports there.” That's Texas today—a red-ball state. They're building a new empire here, and over plains where once all talk was of longhorns, oil and cotton, now men sing of - the magic of butadiene and magnesium, of ships and steel and munitions. Old Texas lives, but a new world rises beside her. Good climate for year ‘round military training has checkerboarded Texas with airfields and camps from the Panhandle to the Rio Grande. Influential Washington representation has given her a sweep of industry unseen before. Far more than most sections of the United States, Texas is a war state. = 2 ”

Brave New World

IT'S A BRAVE new world that railroads have paced and helped make possible. A remote little station which has been closed for lack of husiness may be hitting $1,000 000 a month now in war freight traffic. Thousands of miles of spurs and sidings have been built to carry the war load. Switchmen “only a year out of the cotton patch” werk in sprawl ing rail yards, recruited and trained by railroads hard-pressed for manpower. Rolling down t6 Dallas, Ft. Worth, Houston, Beaumont and Corpus Christi, mile-long freigihts have carried to immense new war industries the materials to build plants and run them, then have highballed back across the plains with partly processed goods for other factories or with finished war tools for training camps or embarkation ports. They've rolled down to the open spaces, from Ft. Worth to San Antonio and on out toward El Paso, millions of feet of lumber, carloads of concrete, roofing material and other building supplies to build vast camps. They’ve brought in armies of raw recruits, helped supply. and equip them, and have hundreds of special trains in transporting trained young Amer‘icans to other camps or to wait ing ships at the seaports. = = »

0il for the East

BUT OUT of Texas, also, as perhaps the greatest single burden the rails ever have been asked to carry, has gone fuel oil for un Eastern seabbard suffering from

an, enemy submarine blockade - .

oil ‘moving in volume no one, in-

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Crawling like single-file chains of black beetles, the oil cargoes are moving north out of Houston, Beaumont, Port Arthur, Texas City and other refining centers as so-called symbol trains, each given special identification, its route charted railroad by railroad, terminal by terminal, across the country, its time scheduled down to minutes. Back of all this, again, the railroads continue to do much of the regular job they always did— cotton to big terminals, huge green vegetable movements out of the Rio Grande Valley, cattle and wheat out of west Texas and’the Panhandle. Talk to H. M. Lull, executive vice president of the Southern Pacific at Houston, and you see how Texas railroads are performing. On the 8. P. Texas-Louisiana division they were handling about 900,000,000 gross ton miles of freight monthly in 1829. Now it's at 2,000,000,000 a month. In January S. P. passenger trains rolled up 100,000,000 passenger miles, three times the passenger volume of a year earlier, 12 times that of the middle +’30s. 4.58 a

Moving Them Faster

ALL THIS nieans moving longer and heavier trains faster; this in turn must be translated into longer passing tracks and vastly extended yards. In 1929 the S. P. in Texas was rolling its freights 14’: miles an hour; today, with much longer trains, it's 18 miles an hour. Then its gross tons per freight train mile were 1353; last December the figure was 1838. In other days S. P. freight cars weighing 45,000 pounds were carrying just about that, 46,000 pounds in cargo; now pay load has been boosted to 60,000 pounds. That's the equivalent of adding 25 per cent to the number of available cars at a time when every car in the country must be pulled into service. These records are being made, Mr. Lull points out, because of co-

Your Blood’ Is Needed

May quota for Red Cross Blood Plasma Center — 5800 donors. Donors so far this month— 1949.

Yesterday's quota—200. Yesterday's donors—113.

You can help meet the quota by calling LI-1441 for an appointment or going to the center, second floor, Chamber, of ' Commeérce building,” N. Mehidiah sb fc

! every hour;

operation between shippers and the railroads. In other days a block of five cars rolled into a shippers’ siding on a Friday night might remain untouched until unloading began on Monday. Now the cars are unloaded on Saturday and the shippers work into Sunday if necessary. Those cars are needed in western Kansas for wheat, in Detroit for airplane enginés or in New Mexico for potash —and using cars for storage could cripple the war effort. If a shipper is reluctant—maybe he has to pay overtime to get cars unloaded-—members of a sort of shippers’ “vigilance commiitee” may call on him and’ tell nim what the delay is costing. In Texas, as elsewhere, + freight speedup efforts. of the office of defense transportation and the Association of American Railroads have been singularly successful. ” » ”

Designed for Speed

WHEN THE war came along, the Texas & Pacific railroad had 70 huge locomotives built for heavy, 40 - miles - an - hour drag freight, Ideal for other days, they couldn't make the pace demanded by huge military and war production loads in Texas. Replacing common steel driving rods with rods of nickel steel might do it. A steel company took on supply of metal and design of .iew rods. The metal came through, but the steel company couldn't ineet its agreement on designs. T. & P. engineers made their own designs, produced the lighter rods, pulled

the big engines into their huge.

shops and yards at Ft. Worth and did the job themselves—probably the first time any railroad had done it, Now T. & P. freights highball close to 60, carrying loads that couldn't have been handled otherwise. When the government built a bomber. plant near Ft. Worth it had to have rail tracks and sidings —and fast. In five weeks the T. & P. had built five miles of track, had moved 67,000 cubic yards of earth, including 4000 yards of solid rock, laid big culvert drain pipes, installed trestle bridging at four different points. Time and again the S, P., Santa Fe and other roads have done the same thing before the urgent demands of army and war plants, The army built an air base at a Santa Fe point in Texas where the railroad had no business— and the contractor had 90 days for the job. That meant hauling 65 or 70 cars a day into the middle of a busy division—actually it meant having 65 cars on the way there, 65 cars unloading and 65 empties returning. It was a heavy strain on limited track facilities, another squeeze on manpower and equipment pools. But it was done. = » ”

Taking Tanker’s Place

ORDINARILY sulphur from New Gulf and, Orchard, Tex, moved out of Galveston by boat. Submarines stopped that and the Santa Fe had to find 20,000 cars in 1942 to haul this supply all over the nation. And thousands more cars for cotton, which formerly was shipped from Galveston but which now goes by rail to New England and Southeastern textile mills, ‘and for potash dumped onto rail axles in the same pattern. ‘ Before enemy submarine war-

" fare closed in, an oil tanker left a

gulf port for the eastern seaboard 1,500,000 . "of

oil:a day folie water:

chiefly special products, such as asphalt or liquefied petroleum gases—went by rail. More than 900,000 barrels now arrive on the eastern seaboard daily. When this huge burden was dumped on the railroads there began a drive to round up 70,000 tank cars. Most of them were nearly 20 years old. Thousands had to be conditioned before they could be used.

Here in Texas the Southern Pacific had to put more than 2000 new pairs of wheels on its gars before they could get rolling, and the Sante Fe, Burlington & Rock Island, Missouri Pacific, T. & P. and other lines had much the same task. Thousands of tank cars were taken from storage yards on Galveston island and elsewhere for full-speed repairs. In the first big push, tank cars moved in ordinary freight trains, making it necessary to send them to “hump” classification yards in the north to be broken out of these trains and put in new ones bound for their. destinations. Now they move chiefly in solid oil trains of 90 or 100 cars and highball from one railroad to another --the Missouri, Kansas & Texas, the Frisco, the Burlington, the Southern, the Erie, the New York Central, the Pennsylvania. Fifty

Troops file into the finest Pullmans: tank cars march through Beaumont, Tex., with oil, the life blood of war. Over them all is the hand of the train dispatcher, keeping them moving.

railroads and 66 routes are involved: if one gets congested the ODT moves immediately to shift part of the load to another route.

” n nn Moving a Division AT THE big refineries trainloads of empty tankers are backed into loading trucks by the Houston Belt & Terminal and the Port Terminal roads, loading goes on night and day, cars are turned about in seven hours or less and speeded away. Along the ship canal from Houston to Galveston is rising one of the greatest of America’s new industrial areas—steel mills, shipyards, synthetic rubber plants and ordnance plants, in addition to huge refineries there previously. Railroads serving these areas have been carrying an unprecedented burden. Houston Belt & Terminal freight receipts last year, for example, were $34,000,000, or two and one-half times the 1927 peak. “If we hadn't enlarged our yards, laid new steel, built new switching leads and bridges,” an official says, “we'd have blocked the whole South.” Off to the west in Texas there is an unceasing flow of troops in and out of camps. Not long ago the railroads moved a whole division, some 15,000 men, in 52 trains, rolling them out of camp like clockwork, just two hours apart. Sleepers, kitchen cars, flat cars with guns and equipment moved so perfectly that only four of 52 trains reached the destination late—the latest of these only 12 minutes behind schedule. Just one more huge assignment for a transportation system loaded to the car eaves. Only in volume + does the Texas story differ from the rest of the U, S.—the tempo is bullet-fast everywhere.

NEXT~The California Story.

here

Frenchmen Foil German Party

TUNIS, May 16 (U. P.) (Delayed) —French coffizers told today how two French mechanics in a' Tunis garage foiled a Nazi plan for celebrating a victory over the 3d regiment of the French foreign legion last January. The 3d regiment, which has won both the croix de guerre and the legion: of honor, suffered a setback by Germans who captured the regimental flag and sent it to Tunis in the hands of two Nazi officers, who were to celebrate the occasion at headquarters. The officers’ car was taken fo a Tunis gardge for a repair job and the two mechanics found the flag still'in it. They hid the flag in the bottom of a potited palm.. Gestapo agents later searched the garage and questioned all mechanics there without finding the flag, which was presented to Gén. Henri Giraud when he urrived here last week. He immediately returned it to the 3d regiment. ,

G. A. R. TO HAVE OPEN HOUSE An open. house will he sponsored |

at 2 p. m. tomorrow oy T. Bennett Circle 23, G. A. R,, at Ft. Friendly, 512 N. Illinois st.

HOLD: EVERYTHING

GIGANTIC ‘SHOE REPAIR

JAP PLANES AGAIN RAID WAU AIRPORT

MacARTHUR'S HEADQUAR« TERS, Australia, May 19 (U. P.).— The Japanese, in a sustained effort to halt the allied gains up the New Guinea northeast coast, bombed the Wau airdrome yesterday for the third time in four days, a com-« munique reported today. Results were negligible, ‘ Saturday, 34 planes raided Wau and Monday 43 more followed up with a bombing attack. Their apparent purpose was to cripple allied outposts to divert air support from the allied ground forces working up the coast and currently threatening the Japanese around Salamaua. Allied planes made their seventh straight raid on the enemy airdrome at Gasmata, New Britain, Braving bad flying weather, Libe erators made a before-dawn attack on the big base at Rabaul, starting fires at Vunakanau airdrome. The communique announced that a recheck set the loss of life in the torpedoing of the Australian hose pital ship Centaur at 268 instead of 299 as previously reported.

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LABRADOR AIR BASE IS WORLD'S LARGEST

LONDON, May. 19 (U. P.).—An air field in Labrador described as “the largest air base in the world” has been used jointly by Canadian, British and American fliers as a jumping off place for transporting planes to: Great Britain, it was an« nounced today. The airdrome cost $12,000,000 and has not been completed. It is ex= pected to be used after the war for air traffic from Europe to the

' |Orient and Australia by way of the

Atlantic and Alaska.

WPB BANS USE OF ~ HORSE-MANE HAIR

WASHINGTON, May 19 (U. P.) The home front felt the impact of war again today when the WPB stricted use of horse-mane hair manufacture of mattresses, p chute pads and saddle’ packs the armed services. Ho

[hair will supplement the supply ®