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Show WEEKLY NEWS ANALYSIS BY ROGER SHAW Nazis Solidify Norwegian Gains As Fierce Fighting Is Reported; Britain Claims Sinking 30 Ships (EDITOR'S NOTE When opinions are expressed in these columns, they are those of the news analyst and not necessarily of this newspaper.) RpIo acH by Western Newspaper n"'"" II GERMAN WAR: Nordic Phase And still the Nordics fought among themselves up north Norsemen, Germans, English, Anglo-Canadians and an occasional Norman peasant from Quebec. As some of the smoke and propaganda clouds lifted a bit, interesting news items revealed themselves to the American public. The Germans had captured Oslo, Norse capital, with an air-wafted force of 2,000 men. They had captured cap-tured Narvik with a few hundred men. They had taken Bergen, second sec-ond city of Norway, with a corporal's corpo-ral's guard of 100. They had occupied occu-pied Trondheim without firing a shot. So much for expert Trojan horsemanship. It appeared, further, that many of the English troops dumped from the transports into Norway, were ill-equipped ill-equipped "territorial" militia, or half-trained regulars, without proper aerial support, heavy artillery, tanks, or even automatic rifles. The Germans facing them, had plenty of good, new automatic weapons, air bombers and fighters, anti-aircraft, tanks, and considerable knowledge of the Norwegian language. Accord- HAIL COLUMBIA: Term It looked more than ever like a Third Term effort by the White House white father. The President let out tentative plans for a three-weeks three-weeks junket around the country in June, to counteract the Republican national convention at Philadelphia that month. Some of the political railbirds thought that Franklin would keep the Populus Americanus guessing until the very opening of the Democratic convention, at Chicago, Chi-cago, in mid-July. Anti-duodecimals continued to yammer loudly against the President's seeming indecision. Pro-Rooses smiled sagely. Republican Republi-can Publisher Frank Gannett of Rochester, N. Y., declared that four more Rooseveltian years might spell some great national calamity. Mr. Gannett seemed to indicate that there was a fiery Trojan Horse (of purest Norse breed) in the White House back-room. But Democratic Senator Guffey was renominated in Pennsylvania on the ticket of a man who was a totalitarian for Roosevelt. Taussig Tempest Rear Admiral Joe Taussig, assistant assist-ant chief of American naval operations, opera-tions, stuck his neck out, when he testified on the navy expansion bill to a senatorial committee. He said we needed badly an independent China; that we better fight Japan with the help of England, France and Holland; and added that it would be, strictly, a naval war as the Yankee buffalo and the Nippon whale could hardly get at one another anoth-er by land. Everybody scrambled around disavowing dis-avowing Mr. Taussig, "Cromwell" of the navy department. Secretary Hull, Secretary Edison, admirals, and "burocrats" all talked in worried, wor-ried, unhappy circles. Senator Clark of Missouri suggested a court-martial, to the open approval of masses of plain American citizens. Japanese spokesmen took the incident in-cident with remarkable tact and good manners, considering that they are often labeled as Far Eastern "Prussians." They merely reminded remind-ed their public that this was a Yan- YANKEE OGPU: Doctor Dies A sensational New York subway worker, and union leader, told the Dies committee that reds, on the up-and-up in labor organizations, were all set to shut down industry and public services, and to tie up Manhattan, Man-hattan, while they practiced with firearms in gun clubs. Lots of people peo-ple seemed much impressed by all this. Others decried the testimony, and its talkative source. Another witness declared that Mervyn Rathborne, president of the American Communications association, associa-tion, was a dangerous red. Roosevelt Roose-velt had put him on the board of the National Youth administration, and Mrs. Roosevelt had praised him in her news column. This witness said that 150 red radio men, on U. S. ships, planned to tie up the whole Yankee marine in case of war. Here was another thrill. An ex-communist said he feared a red general strike, and a second American civil war. Mr. Dies, himself, him-self, feared Trojan Horsemanship; but Mrs. Roosevelt, perhaps better informed in these matters, said Americans had better be calm. Mr. Dies and Mrs. R. are not keen about one another. Dies also feared herds of red and brown Trojan Horses, grazing allegedly on the pampas, if any, of Mexico. ADMIRAL LINDSTROM "Promises" made his nation shaky. ing to the military critics, the German Ger-man leadership and staff work, too, seemed superior. As the German invaders worked their militant way along portions of the Swedish frontier, fron-tier, Sweden recoiled in terror, although al-though German "promises" offered to soothe them. German "promises" make shaky Swedes. Under leadership of Admiral Lind-strom, Lind-strom, Sweden's small but powerful power-ful navy is being tuned to full wartime war-time strength. Sea Losses London claimed the loss of 30 German Ger-man ships in two weeks: most of them troop transports. Four, said England, were captured; the rest were destroyed. Sinking transports is always a hideous process, and English sources reported 3,000 German Ger-man bodies washed ashore on the eastern rocks of Oslo inlet. In the Skaggerak, the usually optimistic French reported the sinking of a couple of German patrol boats, at the hands of a flotilla of Gallic destroyers. de-stroyers. Rumors from Berlin and elsewhere continued to whisper that more than half of England's 15 big capital warships were down or :;r'V - - j MISSOURI'S SENATOR CLARK He suggested a court-martial. kee election year, with plenty of "free" talk to which they were too polite to add "cheap." Nevertheless, in service circles, Mr. Taussig ("would he were tongue-tied") is considered a good man. out. But the English countered with the announcement of five coming new sea mammoths, an effort to fill up the decimated ranks. These water wa-ter monsters would be payed for out of the coming fiscal year's budget of $9,000,000,000, including sales tax, "for the sake of victory." Excluding Exclud-ing marines, sailors, deck hands, and flyers, England announced that its armed and armored man-total was now 2,000,000. Norse Notations Two Norse flyers stole a big German Ger-man seaplane, painted out its insignia insig-nia crosses, and flew it to England, where they joined the royal air force. The incident shows the evils of drink: the Nazi pilots had been beering. C. J. Hambro, president of the Norwegian parliament, issued a statement that his country has definite defi-nite proof that Germany planned its invasion of Norway for months. He also said that the night before the invasion a German whaling boat, crowded with hidden troops and supplies, sailed into the port of Narvik flying the American flag. Enterprising German troops, dropped by parachute behind the Norse lines, eddied down to earth carrying collapsible bicycles, machine-guns, radio-transmitting sets, cameras, saws, other tools, and gas-welding gas-welding equipment. President Roosevelt recognized officially of-ficially the still undeclared Nordic war, and put Norway, like other belligerents, on a strictly cash-and-carry basis. Germany set up a puppet pup-pet government in German-occupied Norway, modelled on that of German-occupied Czecho-Moravia-Slo- vakia. PROPAGANDA: Anglo & Teuto The Germans brought out still another an-other propaganda job (White Book), to prove that the English had issued orders the first week in April, to seize Norse strategic points. According Accord-ing to the "plan,' Norse defense against England, was to be phoney. Anglo-Norse "connivance" was the keynote of this masterpiece, ceremoniously cere-moniously distributed to the faithful, faith-ful, and to the press. The London press tried turning on the pessimistic faucet, to explain ex-plain Norse reverses, and English trimmings in Norway. The newspapers news-papers told their readers it would be a long, hard war up north, and appealed primarily a clever propaganda prop-aganda dodge in England to native na-tive Briton bulldoggery.- On Germans, Ger-mans, French, and Americans, this type of gloom-spreading has been proved disastrous; in Russia, as in England, it works! It's a strange fact, but Americans I know more about their war than ! Europeans themselves. SUPREME COURT: Pro-Picketeering The nine, not-so-old any more, men stood up for labor again. They ruled as unconstitutional the anti-picketing anti-picketing legislation of Alabama and California, and said that free discussion dis-cussion of laborile lapses was a basic ba-sic part of democratic government. Roosevelt-appointed Justice Murphy, Mur-phy, now a "sophomore" on the court, wrote the opinions. Justice McReynolds, Wilson-appointed, hardly hard-ly popular at any time, dissented. |