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Show PHI AA PPBaiis III A SERIES OF MSPECIAL ARTICLES " fej by the leading hyi rWAg CORRESPONDcITs ...J Hundred Percent War Work By Robert St. John (WNU Feature Through special arrangement arrange-ment with Collier's Weekly) One day several months ago, in London. I got a letter from Chicago. A member of my family was missing miss-ing in action in the Philippines. The same day, word came by grape vine from eastern Europe that a close ' friend of mine in Rumania had been , executed by order of the Gestapo, and that a girl journalist I knew in the Balkans had been sent up to Poland, for the pleasure of ,Nazi soldiers on leave. That night I wanted to volunteer in somebody's army or air force. That night I suddenly got disgusted with the soft life which some of us continue to lead In this, the most critical year of the most important war in all history. When I say "us" I mean people in America as well as Britain. But ; a twinge in my right leg made me realize that the Nazis had limited my field of activity. The Messer-schmitt Messer-schmitt which shot up a troop train I was on in Greece last year took care of that. . So the next morning I went around to the ministry of labor and begged for a job, without compensation, in a munitions factory. I explained that I do all my broadcasting to America in the early hours of the morning and that I could gather my news and do the rest of my regular work after I came home from a factory in the evening. At Work on a War Job. . Within a week I was at work in a vast shop full of machines that were grinding out vital instruments of war. I was given a job inspecting the minute parts of a gadget designed de-signed to save the lives of British, American, Russian and Chinese pilots pi-lots when they go off on flights against the enemy. Some of the parts are as delicate as the wheels inside a Swiss wrist watch. They have to be true to a fraction of a thousandth of an inch an interesting job, and it seemed to me to be an important one. So I joined up with that army of men and women who work eleven or twelve hours a day, sometimes seven sev-en days a week, and never get their pictures in the papers or any medals med-als pinned on their chest that army of unsung heroes who man the factories fac-tories of Britain. The first week at the factory left me tired of muscle and mighty weary when the day's work was done, but I soon got hardened to the new life. In addition to this factory work I spend a full eight hours out of every twenty-four gathering news, attending attend-ing press conferences, pounding a typewriter and talking into a microphone. micro-phone. On Sundays I travel into the country coun-try to lecture to British troops in their camps and to wounded airmen air-men in their hospitals, or I go into the tenement districts of London to talk to clubs of Cockney youngsters. I mention these activities to show that I was as busy as the average man with a job before I took on the additional factory work. What Is 100 Per Cent Production? Much is written about how Britain and America are now up to 60 or 70 or 80 per cent war production. I've often wondered what that means. What is the 100 per cent basis for the calculations? In England as well as America there are millions of men who could do at least a part-time shift a few nights a week in war factories. Only when all the people are working work-ing as many hours a week as they are physically able, can either Britain Brit-ain or America talk about approaching approach-ing 100 per cent production. There are still many people in our democracies who prefer to knit socks and sell government bonds, and let others do the dirty work of war. The conflict still hasn't come close enough to home, even here in Britain Brit-ain with its bombed buildings, to jar some people into making it a total war from their point of view. Yet before these words get into print, the time may have arrived when the survival of our entire way of life will depend on whether enough people have been willing to forego the pleasant paths of normal existence and sacrifice every ounce of their energies to defeat enemies who long ago abandoned business-as-usual. Excuse the preaching. But after you've felt Nazi bullets and seen Nazi savagery, it's difficult to remain re-main "just a reporter." My weeks in a munitions factory, close to the workers and their everyday every-day problems, have given me a profound respect for the Little People Peo-ple of Britain. Some of them haven't had a very good deal in the past. Between the two wars, their wages and working conditions were far from what they ought to have been. Most of the working class just took it during that quarter of a century. |