OCR Text |
Show Coast Shipping Losses May Bring Investigation Airing of Blanket Charges May Result From Nazi Torpedoing of American Vessels In Coastwise Trade. '' " " " SHj ' : By BAUKIIAGE Vetts Analyst and Commentator. WNU Service, 1343 II Street, N-W, Washington, D. C. "You commentators," said an earnest young lady to me recently, "talk about sinking ships and shooting shoot-ing down planes as if you were talking about somebody moving inanimate in-animate chessmen on a board." I hadn't thought of It that way. We do. We have to. And the people peo-ple take It that way. They are a long way oft from actual combat. You Just can't translate a war into personal experience until it hits you. That is why it has taken the reverberations re-verberations of the Nazi torpedoes that are sending down ships within eyesight of our coast so long to reach Washington, nut they have reached at last and there promises to he a resounding echo in the Maritime Mari-time commission and In the shipyards ship-yards of America. The need for ships is the greatest need the allied nations face today for the boats are going down faster than they are being built. They are not being built as fast as they might be. Those we have are not being used to best advantage. Those are the blanket charges soon to be aired, if certain people in Washington Washing-ton have their way. The details of these charges may appear before this reaches print. The story seems to be exactly the same story that lay behind the delay de-lay in the manufacture of tanks and planes and guns which resulted in overhauling of the OPM. The charges which were made in that case, you will recall, were: that industry in-dustry did not want to change over from the manufacture of civilian goods to war products', that labor refused to co-operate; that the government gov-ernment failed to crack down on industry and labor and, in the case of the OPM, retained dollar-a-year men in its service who put the business busi-ness they represented ahead of the two ships being torpedoed within sight of shore. The other one went down at midnight and there were so many flares from lifeboats that it looked like Greek fire on the Fourth of July. Small boats . . . brought them asnore . . . "The survivors of this ship (another (an-other one which was sunk in the same vicinity) said that the safest run in the world today is between New York and Liverpool. The worst stretch is ... (a portion of the Atlantic coast). This particular ship passed nine wrecks between . . . and . . . (a stretch of some 450 miles). The coast guard is doing a wonderful job around here but why the . . . (the rest deleted, for other than military reasons)." That is the picture which is staring star-ing in Washington's face today. Chicle Situation All Gummed Up My jaw dropped the other day when I learned that the United States government was carrying on negotiations which might interfere with the chicle importations to the United States. My jaw dropped and if I were in the habit of chewing chew-ing gum, the gum might have dropped, symbolically. For what would the millions of jaws of the millions of American gum chewers do if the chicle supply stopped? They would stop, too. and so would an industry which earned $61,000,000 the year of the last census and probably much, more since. Why should this trickle of chicle be stopped? Well, the answer is, it won't be stopped but it may be reduced slightly. It seems that a chiclero, one who makes the chicle trickle from the tree down in Central Cen-tral America and Mexico, could if he would, apply his art to the cas-tilla cas-tilla tree, as well. And the castilla tree produces a very good brand of rubber, something which we cannot Whether or not these charges can be made to stick and their causes removed in the case of the Maritime Mari-time commission and shipbuilding (management and labor) remains to be seen, but the chances are they will. These are the things you hear: More bananas were shipped to the United Slates in the first three months after Pearl Harbor than there were last year (before Pearl Harbor). Couldn't those boats have been put to better use? Why wasn't the pipeline, suggested suggest-ed a year ago, built so that necessary oil could be sent through it instead of aboard tankers that are being sunk at the rate of three a day? Couldn't the railroads have been forced to cut down on their passenger passen-ger traffic earlier to haul some of that oil? What was done about the men "loafing in the shipyards" after Admiral Ad-miral Land, head of the Maritime commission, made the public charge? Ditto concerning foremen who were said to have been instructed to tell the men to slow down? But nothing will be done until the smoke of those burning ships gets into the public's eyes. It has already al-ready gotten into some eyes and I am passing along that personal story exactly as it was told to me. Here it is in the worker's exact words except for deletions which are a military necessity: Eyewitness Story "I have just been watering my garden in the cool of the evening and, looking up from the petunias and carnations I was able to see the thick, greasy smoke billowing up from a ship that was torpedoed a few hours ago. A good many men were killed on this particular ship. The rest were brought into the coast guard station; some of them sent to the hotel and the rest to the local hospital, whose ward is again filled with shipwrecked survivors. "I have a special interest in that ship because ... I watched her lying off shore all through the moonlight moon-light night. She was three miles off shore and she got under way just at sunup steaming south in the presumed pre-sumed safety of daylight. We . . . quit watching her at 7 a. m. and half an hour later, off the . . . she was blown up. "It has been a comparatively quiet 24 hours in this vicinity only Do not chuckle at my tale of chicle. It is based on hard facts which are these: A large group of men called chicleros collect chicle from trees many of which are located in the forests of Central America and Mexico. They are experts. The chicle trees grow frequently near the castilla tree. If the chicleros were induced to do so they might tap the castilla as well as the chicle and thus obtain for America some of the raw material needed to make raw rubber. This might cut down the chicle supply. Nevertheless negotiations are about to be concluded to this end. If they are successful it will be another achievement of the Board of Economic Warfare with the aid of the state department. Rubber Classifications There are three classifications of rubber, all of which although allied in their uses are different. They are crude rubber, reclaimed rubber and synthetic rubber. Crude rubber comes from our fast diminishing stocks on hand, from the trickle that may come from the castilla, from the wild rubber and other similar trees of South America Amer-ica and from general plantings of trees and shrubs in the Western hemisphere. The most important source in this third classification is the guayule plantations which will be coming into yield in a year with more in succeeding years. The department of agriculture is supervising super-vising and helping with this production. produc-tion. Of reclaimed rubber the sources are the scrap piles. There is a certain cer-tain amount already collected. This is already in the hands of reclaimers and declarers. The third classification of rubber is synthetic rubber. The manufacture manufac-ture of synthetic rubber is the quickest quick-est potential source of supply. Its manufacture is in the period of development. de-velopment. There are various methods of obtaining it and recently Secretary of Agriculture Wickard urged a program for the making of synthetic rubber from alcohol made from corn and wheat. We have plenty of corn and wheat and a number of distilling plants. If these are supplemented with others oth-ers and we can start soon, the chicle supply may not be endangered endan-gered at all. |