Indianapolis Times, Indianapolis, Marion County, 7 August 1945 — Page 11
M. R. POHLMEYER, examiner at the OPA rent. control office, never knows what's going to happen
- when he answers his phone. It rings between 150 and 26.9% 200 times a day and every once in 4 while something 62.2% amazing comes out. One morng he sot a very 10.9% hysterical lady who poured out is cone her troubles. “The floors of my reports living room and dining room are people hot, I smell smoke and I just know in the my house is on fire,” she said. Mr nly 18.5 Pohlmeyer helpfully gave her the ut, and number of the fire department and suggested she call there. Her ba answer was, “I never thought of OST —that!” Another sobbing lady (U. PD. asked him if her landlord could
evict her because she didn’t save her tin cans, Still another of the weaker sex called at the rush hour and asked if Mr.
Mr. Pohlmeyer
Pohlmeyer or another OPA man could come out to her house that evening and help
her figure ‘the interest on her mortgage. . . Just - about the most confused was.a, woman who asked for the A. P. O. man. Mr. Pohlmeyer said he was the OPA man and she said, “Well, Mr. OPA, my landlord's trying to excavate me. Can she do it?”
Pigeon Proofer Ran Short THE PIGEON proofér over the Meridian st. entrance to the Indianapolis Athletic club is turning out to be a success. Several people have claimed to see pigeons roosting on the triple row of wire prongs but there's an explanation, I. A. C. officials say the man who “pigeon proofed” the ledge ran out of wire before he finished. There’s one bare spot on the ledge where the birds can and do perch. From the street it looks as if they're practicing Yogi on the sharp prongs. . . . The I. A. C. hopes the “proofer” will end a 20-year search for a foolproof -anti-pigeon device, The rest of the building will be proofed when the material is available. ... Three teen-age girls clad in brief playsuits were having a “hen party” in one of the girls’ home at 3146 N. Delaware st. the other night. All of a sudden they heard a chorus of long
KUNMING.—You too can learn-to drive the Burma road. You, can, that is, if mud is your preferred habitat, if you can skirt a precipice by inches and not go over, if you can sleep in a rain-soaked bedroll, shave by a side mirror, and live off K rations, eaten sitting on the hood of an overheated motor? China needs more of everything, always more. That means you have to learn to drive with a trailer, The grades tilt up to 16 per cent at times. In 13 places you climb up over passes more than T7200 feet high. That means you must have a complete mastery of either the nine possible forward shifts of gear of a jeep or the 15 of a big truck. When you come to one of the half-mile Jong mud holes that are called camps, you have to be able to back your vehicle-trailer combination, as well as manage it in forward speeds. A trailer will jacknife seemingly without provocation, and be found ‘biting at your elbow when you think it is stretched out tailwise behind. ’
Double Reverse
FRONT WHEEL movements are reversed, as everyone knows, in going backward. But in going backward with a trailer, they are reverse-reversed for the first starting impetus, then they must be changed over to plain-reversed. A trailer that is asked to back at too sharp a curve begins to rise in the air on one wheel, making piteous sounds.” If these fail, it tries to turn over on its back. Every convoy on the Burma road goes armed,
Science
WASHINGTON, Aug. 7.—Atomic bombs herald a revolution in war such as hag not been seen. since the first use of gunpowder. Chemical energies heretofore. used, as in the explosion of TNT or the burning of coal, have originated only by ripping molecules apart and rearranging the atoms of which they are made up. This new physical development of power involves splitting open the atoms themselves and loosing the vastly greater energies that tie together their electrons and protons. The power development is new, but the idea back of it is as old as the alchemies of ancient China and Arabia. That it could be bought to realization now is due more. than anything else to the fact that researchers are no longer solitary. American, British and Canadian sclentists pooled resources, and enormous sums of money in their race against time-—and the enemy.
Enemy Played Into Our Hands
THE ENEMY, for his part, played into our hands, partly because he couldn't help himself, through his own blind prejudices. The enemy was R divided from the first: Japan was far from the rest of the axis and had relatively few scientists and not much in the way of equipment and raw material for the particular kind of production required. »
| -
Inside Indianapolis
“The sun porch which looks right in the front room
, the bottom of the mower and the man simply lowered
. who's had four novels published in his 18 years, has
"then sent the soldier a letter telling him to rest easy.
low ‘whistles from. outside the house. They looked out of the windows for the source of the jioise and were puzzled until they looked out toward Delaware. A Central bus had stalled right in front of the house.
was giving passengers an unobscured view and several young boys were: expressing their appreciation volubly.. The girls beat an embarrassed retreat until the bus moved on. . Another of our Central bus -line agents is intrigued with a step-saving device used by a man on 53d st. and Central ave. The man was seen cutting the grass on a steep hill with a lawn mower, to which a rope was tied. . . . The rope was tled to
it down the hill, then pulled it back up.
Wadelton Wins Another Laurel
PFC. TOMMY WADELTON, Indianapolis boy
won another laurel. He phoned his mother, Mrs. Maggie-Owen Wadelton, 160 Buckingham dr., last week to say he'd just won $100. A musician as well as a writer, Tommy won over 11 other contestants who led Sammy Kaye's band when it played in Detroit, Mich. ... Tommy got first prize after he led
the band in playing “Aléxander’s Ragtime Band.” He|
is stationed with an M. P. group near Detroit. . Postmaster Adolph Seidensticker played Cupid with musical accompaniment last week. He received a letter from a private first class from an A. P. O. out of Milwaukee, Wis. The soldier wanted some Indianapolis record store to send a record of Charlie] Spivak’s “Right as the Rain” to a certain WAC at Camp Atterbury. Mr. Seidensticker hurried out and hunted down the record, sent it to the WAC and
. Our morning mail included a letter containing three of those “Free Soap Coupons,” that used to be scattered on front porches before the soap shortage. One coupon says, “Your grocer is waiting to redeem this coupon.” If we tear it off and take it to our dealer, the coupon says, it’s worth 10 cents on a big box of a popular brand of soap flakes. An unsigned card with the coupons queries: “Remember the good old days?” a
The In
ianapolis
Times
SECOND SECTION
By JOSEPH L. MYLER United Press Staff Correspondent
VV ASHINGTON=For good or ill, man has unlocked the incalculable power of the atom. He has entered upon the atomic age. His first use of this power—the same that energizes the sun, the
stars, and the far galaxies—has x
* ‘Lbeen to-make a bomb.
It is the most terrible engine of destruction ever conceived. But when the bomb’s work is | done, its makers hope to convert | its power to the arts of peace. And to the enforcement of peace. » n o UPON realization of this hope hangs the fate of humanity. Atomic power could remake the world. It also could destroy it. The announcement on the atomic bomb by President Truman, $ecre=- , tary of War Henry L. Stimson, Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and former Prime Minister Winston Churchill signalized what the war department called “man’s entrance
Burma Road Convoy By George Weller
partly:
RB
even though bandit attacks have almost ceased. The | road camps do not provide any guards, and the tired drivers have to stand their own sentry duty. The military police control the camps and the hours of departure, which are usually from 4 to 7 in the morning. The style of thought of Americans on the Burma road is optimistic, but sardonic. Here, for example, is what the M. P.s have to say to their guests at Mong-Yu, the last stop in Burma before Wanting, the Chinese border station. Their placard reads:
Advice for Guests “TAKE A LOOK at the sidewalls of the tents you occupy tonight. The convoys before you have taken down the sidewalls and used them as rugs, mattresses and drapes. . . , Trash barrels will hold any trash or garbage you may have. They are empty when you arrive; we hope 3ney are full when you leave, “Don't get too fresh with the native guards in the area. They take orders from two men, one of whom takes orders from the other. We two are the bosses. “Villages are off-limits. The women may look good to you, but don’t let that fool you. The bugs are here if you are really looking for them. , . . Keep the villagers out of your convoy area. They will steal you blind when your back is turned. But any native you seé walking post is an American soldier, who has done more to lick the Japs than many of you will get to do or have done. Treat them with respect. Most ef them were given discharges from the army at an age when you were in high school. “Just holler for a bearer to carry your bags and see what happens. You know as well as I what will| happen.”
By Dr. Frank Thone
Germany, much better off in both respects, deliberately threw away some of her best brains because of a lunatic distaste for the owner’s racial or religious connections. The Germans even lost aid that they might have gained from scientists in neutral countries, through their ruthless military policy. Oné of the world’s leaders in the atom-splitting field, Prof. Néils Bohr of the University of Copenhagen, found it necessary to leave his country and take refuge in Sweden, later goirig to England and then to the United States.
Germans Declined Workshop
GERMAN SCIENTISTS called in by the Nazis to take over his laboratory declined to receive such stolen property. Only since the close of hostilities has Prof. Bohr returned to Copenhagen. When it was first found theoretically possible to free high intensities of energy by exploding unstable! atoms of uranium, there was considerable fear that the first successful experiment u the kind might be| the end of the world. One atom was expected to rip apart nearby atoms, and these in turn to set off their neighbors, regardless of what elements they belonged to. But the first laboratory experiments allayed that fear, and the present wartime application seems to indicate that the explosion will confine itself to the element contained in the bomb, and not spread to other kinds of atoms.
8! f
Atom Is One Fundamental Unit of Matter
By Science Service WASHINGTON, Aug. 7. — The atom is the one fundamental unit of matter in the universe. Everything is made of atoms. The only difference between the coal in your furnace, the phosphorus in the match that lights it and the oxygen that makes them hurn is that their atoms are made of slightly different arrangements of the same electrical forces. It 1s these electrical forces that
My Day -
disintegrate the atomic power.
systems, whose positive
largest known.
and that this
J
other day that Pastor Martin Niemoeller was being considered by some of our American officials to head the first post-war German government. And I was glad to see, under a later date, the report that the
Atoms are like miniature solar
electricity and whose planets aré electrons. The atoms of uranium are the
they are too large to hold together ‘ fact that this heavy metal is constantly breaking down in lighter
elements — thorium, radium and lead—giving off the strange gas,
NEW YORK, Monday.—I was surprised to see the
atom and give out radon, which is heavier than lead, and showing loss of energy by glowing in the dark. For nearly half a century the fact of afomic disintegration has . been known. But no one knew how to make use of the energy given off by the exploding atoms. This was the’ situation at the beginning of the war, Our scient-
suns are spots of
Scientists believe
accounts for the
The race has been won by our side, and just in time.
By Eleanor Roosevelt
Nazis. He said that ds a churchman he was not interested in politics, but that he was unable to accept any authority which clajmed the right to override that of the church. Pastor Niemoeller sounds to me like a gentleman who believes in the German doctrine of the superior
basic power of the universe, the power which binds the atom’'s in=initesimal “solar system” together, the power which is the source of all in a measure man’s.
are the Anglo-American allies. 000,000 of America’s wealth accom-
plished« in three intense years of
by the world’s greatest physicists had failed to achieve.
tracted its power, and placed it under restraint at man’s service.
by a matter of perhaps only a few months.
ists and Germany's were almost | on the verge of this discovery. |
into a new physical world.”
The new bomb, the war depart-
ment said, may be “the intrumen- won
ality to end all major wars.” » n ” IN ANY event, it means that the I
the sun's radiation—is now |j The present trustees of this power Their pooled science and $2,000,~
ecret research and herculean efort what- decades of previous effort
» ” ” THEY BROKE into the atom, éx-
In so doing they beat the axis
But the British and Americans
SO VAST opened up that use of atomic power to defeat Japan appears by comparison to be merely a short-range goal—although the paramount one for the present.
range goal as use of atomic energy for industrial power,
powerful and forceful influence toward peace.”
poh and use of atomic power.
_~ TUESDAY, AUGUST 7, 1345 CAN MAN BE TRUSTED WITH SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE?”
Peace...Or World Pesirucich
hs
A view of one of the production areas at the Hanford Engineer Works near Pasco, Wash., one of the
plants where atomic bombs are being manufactured, is shown above.
And so. long as they
only will himself make recommendations|ods of protecting us and the rest possess the key to the atom’s power- | for its wise employment. house, they are in a position to enforce the peace of the world.
0 s 8 n Ss STIMSON asserted that “we are!
8o long as they themselves cleave | ¢ tho threshold of a new industrial |
to peace, they are in a position to
ead ‘humanity into a golden age— 2
such as men have scarcely dared to|
magine. » n ” are the prospects now
President Truman saw the long-~
and as’ “a
the maintenance of world He will ask congress to establish
a commission to eontrol the producHe
committee which will make recommendations to the President for
control” of atomic power.
bént toward” assuring that this weapon and the new field of science that stands behind it will be employed wisely in the interests of the security of peace-loving nations— and the well-being of the world.”
was obvious. fateful question ever asked: Can man be trusted with it? Or will he use it to Sestroy his world?
said, science is searching for “mieth-
art” He announced appointment of Th
‘both national and international
“Every effort,” he said, is being
The” menace of such vast power It- poses the most
n 2 EVEN NOW, President - Truman
{ nature,
mind and conscience of every human being capable of comprehension.”
—for it will be years, Stimson and Truman power can be harnessed economically to replace the power now supplied by coal and water,
pressed by Fr. Thomas J. Love, head of Georgetown university. He said the| die was cast.
doesn’t learn to live "in peace with his fellows,” he said.
«
i}
4.
f the world from the danger of udden destruction.” : : Churchill, too, saw the menace. “This revelation of the secrets of long mercifully withheld rom man, should arouse,” he said, “the most solemn reflections in the
The test will come in years ahead
4
agreed, before atomic
» » » A SCIENTIST’S attitude was ex-
the physics department of
“Man will destroy himself if he
OMAHA.—From out here in the
| middle of America, William Martin |
Jeffers of the Union Pacific sized up tomorrow's railroading. He looked at its challenges, . difficulties and ' possibilities. : Railroadmen, he ¢ said, have the i- guts, intelligence | and imagination. : And, he said, they have the’ experi; ence to meet the tests of the new competitive era ahead. The railroad’s
Mr. Lucey
he remarked have survived a lot of « | tests.
In the depths of depression they produced streaniliners which helped change the country’s thinking on passenger transportation. « Pre-war {freight schedules had been clipped 30 or 40 per cent from earlier days. War had shown nothing could | take the place of rail transport. “The same kind of .imagination will be there after the war,” Big Bill ‘said.
#" ” . THE Union Pacific's boss isn't afraid of air transport. “The airplane is going to take some passenger business. But I don't anticipate it will carry much freight. And I think smart fellows in the aviation industry agree with that. “But the nearer you can bring the west coast—and that's the coming empire in this country—to the midwest and the east, the more rail business youre going to develop, too. ”
| fictitiously high by reason of their
demonstrated the kind of job railroadmen can do.
s ” » IF IT hadn't been for the rails, he says, war transport would have been flatter than a flounder. The railroads know how to do things, says he. Given a fair break, they will do them. But on that “given a fair break” issue, Bill Jeffers and most other top U. 8. railroaders boil over quickly. A fair break is what they think they're not getting. They're . hot * under the collar about subsidies given the airlines and—though it's an older story— to trucks and water carriers. They blast away at the justice department’s antitrust suit against the railroads. : They say federal tax .policies haven't given them proper consideration, » » ¥ THE RAILROADS say they've been paying taxes on earnings made
inability to get men and materials for adequate maintenance work. Instead of taxing this money away, they say, the government should allow them to establish a reserve fund. This could be used for deferred maintenance after the war, Rail unions are with the management on this
FRED G. GURLEY, president of the Santa Fe railroad—and one of the ablest men in the business— cites the tremendous wear and tear put on the railroads by wartime speeds and heavy loads. He comments:
The war, Mr. Jeffers thinks, has
“The railroads cannot do what
WILLIE and JOE—By Mauldin
—
| WAR PRICE AND RAT\ONING BOARD NO.200
United States army authorities had cancelled a speech by the same Rev. Niemoeller, which one of the Protestant chaplains had asked him to make, Pastor Niemoeller won great fame because of his opposition to the rise of the Nazis. A movie was made about him and he was heralded in this country as a hero for his resistance. We saw him portrayed as an example of what a Protestant minister of great courage could endure for the cause of freedom. He spent eight years in a concentration camp until he was liberated by the allied forces. After being freed, however, he made a statement which must have shocked many people in this country. In part, he said: “The German people like to be governed, not to mingle in politics. The greatest shortcoming of the Weimar republic ‘was that it pever could impose authority on the German people, which longed for such authority.” . | =" "That s nt sounds almost like a speech from Hitler. Later, also, Pastor Niemoeller admitted t, from his concentration a services ol any Sapasity. to
he had “offered
"ity of Tce.
It is easy to understand devotion to one's country when attacked from without, but Niemoeller's expressed ideas make him unfit to establish any kind of government which would train the German people in democracy. The object of the allies’ occupation of Germany is to eradicate Nazilsm and the beliefs which the Nazis held, and to make it impossible for them to build a new generation ready te go to war. One can understand the difficulties faced by our military authorities in finding Germans suited to take office in the country, but I should think they would hesitate to accept Niemoeller. . I have heard people who interviewed Niemoeller in an American camp, immediately after his liberation, say something like this: * “Niemoeller is a trouble maker of the first order. He claimed our camp
“was worse than a concentration camp, and told us
that we should not dare wiite: erated. . He is a dangerous pan-German, preaching adherence to God and his greatness ifi forgiving, lookAmericans as if he wanted to say: forget what has been, ou our and let's Jive together under
‘Niemoeller is lib-
OS
| i 7
.
-
Aw, Please dont. ery,
ra
/
RAILROADING TOMORROW (Second of a Series of Articles by Charles T. Lucey)
Subsidies to Airlines Stir Railway Ire
they have done and will have to|ences of railroad with “shipper are
do, and still come out of it in as good a state of maintenance as when they entered it.” Wartime maintenance expenditures Have been higher than ever, Mr. Gurley points out. But the dollar spent hasn’t produced what it did before the war when trained men and better materials were available. i " ” »” THE interstate commerce commission has agreed that the rails should be allowed to set aside funds for deferred maintenance. But the Treasury says no. Attempts are being made to get congress to do something about it. Then, subsidies. President Metzman of the New York Central says:
a famous passenger station, Grand Central Terminal—used by the N, Y. C. and New Haven railroads. We railroads pay our security holders a return on the capital invested in it, ” » Ed “THE terminal property and franchises are assessed for tax purposes at nearly $100 millions. Taxes for 1944 were $2,844,000. “A few miles away about $50 millions in public funds has been spent for a great air terminal (LaGuardia field). Even larger sums are being spent to serve New York City. “These air terminals are tax |free, In’ addition, the taxpayers will not get back their investment money; charges to users are too low to liquidate the public investment.” » tJ . THE AIRLINES cite the land grants the early railroads received. Railroadmen say these grants have been paid back to the government many times over in special rates on government shipping. And, they say it is one thing to give a new industry encouragement and another to keep it permanently | subsidized. Not alone does government provide airports, they argue, but radio beacon service, weather reporting and other services. » »
* *%e
| THE soveraments antitrust suit ‘against the railroads was argued recently in federal court in Lincoln, Neb. The government charges {that private financial, industrial and railroad interests have acted in collusion to maintain non-com-petitive rates for transportation.
improvements in service of the western railroads. The railroads contend all rates are set in accordance with principles established by law under the
Interstate Commerce Commission.
with it.
which,
reductions.
“The New York Central operates |
The suit claims they have “balked |
The justice department answers that the ICC in fact never gets around to really analyzing more than one per cent of the rates filed
THE JUSTICE dewriment has marshaled a long list of examples it claims, show how the railroads have balked freight-rate
The railroads say that conferences among railroads and confer-
basically necessary to rate-making. They claim no participating railroad is bound by decision of a railroads’ conference, and that any shipper can carry hi§ complaint to the ICC. Wide - open competition among railroads, they say, would be destructive. It would place at an immediate disadvantage the shipper or locality having small bargaining power compared with those with great bargaining power. s E J 2 3 IT'S A fight on an issue that is
PAGE 11 Atomic Plan Half Million Knew Just How To Keep Secret
By Scripps-Howard Newspapers KNOXVILLE, Tenn. Aug. T.— Nearly half a million people for nearly three years helped keep the nation’s No. 1 top secret of the war here in East Tennessee. No one knew until yesterday— except a handful of the army's men—that it was the atomic bomb that was being turned out at Clinton Engineer works near here. But it has net been possible to commandeer and condamn 59.000 acres comprising a sizable swath of two counties without people being aware that something big was up. J » ” NEWSPAPERS here and in the area neighborhood generally accepted a pledge under voluntary censorship neither to discuss nor speculate upon the purpose of the gigantic war plant. Security education is’ credited by the army authorities with having helped keep the big secret. Civilian workers were given lecture study courses and put on their honor not to speculate on nor discuss their work or its purpose. : Those who had to know were acquainted with such facts as were necessary. Draft boards, for instance, were urged to defer husky young men and were told that this project involved a race between us and the Germans to perfect a product that might even then swing victory to the winner, n ” ” AT OAK RIDGE today a barber said: “I've been here in this shop 17 months. And never once have I heard anybody who came even say what he believed. was being made here.” .
A brand’ new coal mine even
- was started to help serve the proj-
ect. The combined resources of an abundance of water, coal and - of hydroelectric energy from the TVA’s network, together with the inaccessibility of the terrain is believed to have led to choice of this section for the giant development. - And it helped a lot that the mountain people aren't the kind that do any loose talking especially to strangers. That may be one reason why the secret was kept so well,
We, the Women
Consideration Due Gl Wives
By the Army
By RUTH MILLETT A LETTER from a sergeant in Germany says of war wives: “Wives of servicemen overseas indeed have many problems, the largest of which is ‘getting that guy back.’ Wives continually write
fundamental, and the outcome is one of the things railroads must weigh in considering post-war prospects. President Ralph Budd of the Burlington has this to say: “There is no end of the things we can do, and we need only the encouragement of a stabilized policy toward the rails to bring them to fruition. “On our lines, we know how to build better and more attractive Burlington Zephyrs “We're experimenting with ‘pendulum’ cars of new-type spring suspension to give easier riding. “We've got the vista dome car coming up—with passengers able to see from raised domes in tops of cars,
» wo » “WE HAVE a brand-new kind -of track rail developed, we're putting disc brakes on cars to allow slowing down more quietly and more easily, and we're turning to radio for rail communications. “But the things we need to know, above all else, is that we're not going to have competition ‘favored with subsidies to take our traffic from us.” Regardless of these doubts and problems, the rails are loaded up with plans for the way they're going to meet tomorrow's new challenge. That gets us to streamliners— tomorrow.
{To Be Continued)
> HANNAH ¢
[The DOCTOR SAYS—
~
2
E
their husbands: Td do anything to get you home.” The ironic fact is that they have never used their most effective means of solving their problem. In brief, they have never let Washington know and used that great power, public opinion. “The things that seems peculiar to us over here is that wives who have sacrificed the company of their husbands for such unreasonable periods of time, as many have, never let their duly elected representatives in Washington know what is happening to the young homes of America, . . . “1 wonder if those homes are not being destroyed at this stage of the struggle by keeping soldier husbands overseas beyond any justifiable period. “There are thousands of mare ried men who have served at least two years overseas right now and the only hope they have of getting home is IF Japan is defeated soon.”
IT IS TRUE that the wives of men overseas haven't formed a pressure group to try to influence the policies of the war depart. ment. But isn’t that to their credit? There are already too many pressure groups in the coun= try today. Isn't it to the credit of war wives that they have been good soldiers, too—and have taken the attitude that their men would be returned home when they could ’ be spared.
faith with the patient wives is the Tact that in one day (the very day the sergeant's letter arrived from Germany) 35000 troops were returned to this country. ¢ wv ” » FURTHER PROOF is this re cent news item: “A War Depart
~~ Proot that “te urmy ts keeping