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Show WEEKLY NEWS ANALYSIS By Edward C. Wayne Navy Reveals Damage to Jap Isles; Senate Again Acts on Price Control; LaGuardia Quits, Landis OCD Head; Normandie Creates Problem for Navy (EDITOR'S NOTE When opinions are expressed in these columns, they are thoe of the news analyst and not necesar'ly of this newspaper.) ( RplcasAH by Western Newspaper t'ninn l RAID: On Japs After two weeks of censorship the Pacific fleet command allowed news men to disclose the amount of damage dam-age inflicted by the U. S. navy in their spectacular attack on the Japanese Jap-anese Marshall and Gilbert islands. These reports indicated that with the loss of only 11 U. S. aircraft, plus a minor bomb hit on one cruiser, cruis-er, and with a small loss of life units of the American fleet accomplished the following: Destroyed four military air bases. Destroyed two military villages. Destroyed four radio stations. Sank at least 16 Jap ships, including includ-ing a modern cruiser, two submarines subma-rines and a 17,000-ton liner. ( Damaged at least eight other Jap ships. In addition to an undetermined number destroyed on the ground, the Japs lost 38 aircraft, including fighters and bombers. Described as almost perfect timing tim-ing and executed with speed and daring the raid was the first big answer an-swer to the often asked question, "Where is the fleet?" CONSUMERS: Face Living Costs It was apparent that the price control bill, which had prevented inflation in-flation of certain farm prices, was going to be subject to changes that might bring a big rise in the cost of some items. The senate agriculture committee had unanimously approved a bill : I :;f J'T I ; , C - ' j CLAUDE R. WICKARD Making use of surpluses . . . which sought to prevent Secretary of Agriculture Wickard from using surpluses to keep certain prices down. Passage of this bill had been predicted, pre-dicted, and it would prevent Wickard Wick-ard from taking action with surpluses sur-pluses unless the price of wheat, cotton cot-ton and corn had reached 10 per cent above parity. It had been the President's plan to hold these prices down to encourage encour-age livestock production. The bill sought to prevent this action. OCD LANDIS: Result of Protest The resignation of LaGuardia as head of OCD and the succession to the high command of civilian defense de-fense of James M. Landis, onetime one-time dean of Harvard law school and former head of the Securities and Exchange commission, had closely followed nation-wide . criticism of "boondoggling" in the organization. Focal point of the objections to the OCD management had been rather centered on the division headed head-ed by Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt than on LaGuardia's civilian defense activities, ac-tivities, but the resignation of the "Little Flower" had long been expected. ex-pected. LaGuardia was supposed to have plenty to do organizing the defense of New York city, let alone saddling himself with the problems of an entire en-tire nation. He announced that he would devote de-vote his full time to these problems in the future. Criticism, as Landis took charge of OCD, continued chiefly leveled at the health, entertainment and social uplift activities of the organization. It had crystallized into the adoption by the house of an amendment specifically spe-cifically forbidding the spending of government funds for "fan-dancing, street shows, theatrical prformances or other public entertainment in the program of civilian defense." MISCELLANY: Washington: All silk processors were ordered within 48 hours to sell their entire stocks of silk to the government, on penalty of having them commandeered. Washington: Congress was frankly frank-ly to!d that the reason for the short j American surnlv of scrap metal ! ... ! could be traced to extremely heavy j shipments to Jnpnn before the dec- ! laration of war ' The amendment had been tacked onto a bill passed which provided $100,000,000 for the purchase of gasmasks, gas-masks, auxiliary fire-fighting equipment equip-ment and other protective goods to be used in the protection of the population against air raids. The senate had been expected to go along with the house in its effort f ' 1 . t i ! : - : I I j ; I v JAMES M. LANDIS Succeeding Little Flower . . . to weed the "frills' and furbelows" out of the program. Senator Byrd, Virginia, keynoted this move by demanding that the OCD send his committee a list of all OCD employees ' getting over $3,000 a year, and outlining their specific duties. ' LUZON: 163 Planes Continued efforts by the Japanese to land on Bataan had been turned back by General MacArthur's highly high-ly mobile artillery forces in the general's gen-eral's "last ditch" fight to keep the American flag flying over the Philippines. Phil-ippines. The anti-aircraft fire of MacArthur's MacAr-thur's men had continued good, the bag of seven planes in one day comparing favorably with other fronts where the United Nations had many more serviceable aircraft than did the defenders of Luzon. Captured prisoners and other methods of gaining information revealed re-vealed that five Japanese divisions had been identified as taking part in the battle, which would bring the estimated strength of the Japs actually ac-tually on the front battle-line at close to 100,000 men. Other divisions were on the island, keeping communications open, and it had been reported that reinforcements reinforce-ments for the Japs were constantly arriving, thus steadily increasing the pressure on the American-Filipino army. NORMANDIE: $80,000,000 Job Whether carelessness, sabotage or Fate was responsible, the 83,000-ton Normandie, former luxury liner and now the naval auxiliary Lafayette, lay on her enormous beam-ends in 40 feet of water and 12 feet of mud at her dock in New York, an $80,-000,000 $80,-000,000 salvage job for the U. S. navy. Twenty-two hundred men were at work inside of her, changing her over from peacetime to wartime uses when a welder's torch started a fire. Within minutes it was out of control. SINGAPORE: Water-Pincers A new tactic in warfare, the "water-pincers" movement, utilized by the Japanese in Malaya, had brought Singapore to her knees, spreading gloom in Britain, and making the defense of the East Indies In-dies a nearly superhuman job. General Yamashita, commander of the Jap forces in Malaya, had won the Order of the Golden Kite and the Order of the Rising Sun for his success in driving the defenders out of Malaya, for smashing into the island of Singapore, first time in history that the historic port had been tested in battle. The long, narrow peninsula of Malaya, difficult terrain, had apparently appar-ently presented enormous invasion inva-sion problems. The Japs had solved these by using small boats, many of them commandeered or captured, and sending small, well-armed and highly mobile detachments, first down the east coast, then down the west, making landings by night, and infiltrating behind the defenders. Each time the British were able to make a swift withdrawal, and to salvage their main forces, but each time they lost ground, until they were finally driven back across the Johore causeway onto the Singapore island. Literally scores of "bites" had been taken out of each coastline by this Japanese technique during their advance southward. At the same t.me the Japs had sent another large force to drive westward from tlie top of the penir.sula in an efTort to cji ciT the Burma road. but. mere im- ! porlant. to prot3ct t' 'r wti riar. ! SPY RAIDS: On West Coast t i tl t IMH ,11 I'l flMnl HiatAfMA., Mi,', a.Mill-i TWO BUDDHIST PRIESTS TAKEN W eren't always praying . . . More and more Japanese continued contin-ued to be caught in the nets spread along the West coast by the FBI. The spy raids were being carried out almost daily by the G-men, who in one raid got 20 alleged spies and saboteurs and a truckload of ammunition ammu-nition and weapons. Chief concentration of the raids was in Pacific coast counties where there were large military establishments. establish-ments. At Salinas, Calif., following the questioning of several Japs taken into custody at a large lettuce farm, one of them turned out to be a former for-mer chief of police in Tokyo. Another An-other was formerly a high official in the same police force. A raid on a Buddhist temple in Monterey county yielded three priests. All of them had been in this country only a few months. In a sporting goods store, about to purchase firearms, a former Japanese Jap-anese bootlegger with a police record rec-ord was taken into custody. It was here that a whole truckload of ammunition, rifles, shotguns, etc., was seized, together with the proprietor, propri-etor, a Japanese. In 45 places searched, the yield was, among other things, 60,845 rounds of ammunition. TEA: Panic Buying A new U. S. agency had been formed to handle the tea situation which developed after grocers were apalled to find customers ordering tea in five-pound lots. . The panic in buying followed similar simi-lar lines to that in sugar, and which had resulted in the setting up of a sugar rationing plan. As more or less a natural outcome out-come of the news from the tea-growing areas, WPB began to get reports re-ports of "five-pound tea buying" from all sections of the country, and it was regarded as essential that rationing be adopted if the buying buy-ing panic had not been stopped voluntarily. vol-untarily. In the sugar situation, cases of prosecution began to pop up, one chain store manager, trying to make a sales record for himself, having disposed of 31,000 pounds of sugar, allegedly to illicit still operators. He was fined $500. DUTCH: Under Pressure Complaints from the Netherlands East Indies command that too much of the naval force of the United Nations Na-tions was engaged in "non-combatant work" came as the Dutch faced a pincers movement against Soura-baya Soura-baya and the fear of a frontal attack at-tack on Java generally. It was evident, said the Dutch leaders, that a giant pincers move was being directed at Java when the Japs landed in force on Celebes island, which formed the tip of the right flank of the Javanese defense line. At the same time Axis sources had reported that the Japanese were demanding de-manding the surrender by the Dutch of all the East Indies, together with their oil supplies, in return for which the islands would be technically left as Dutch possessions. Dutch sources said, however, that no Japanese proposal would be entertained, en-tertained, and they continued their "scorched earth" policy of destroying destroy-ing all oil installations before abandoning aban-doning any property to the Japs. Despite the costly losses inflicted on the enemy in Macassar strait last month, the Japs evidently had been able to make successful landings land-ings there. Chief hope at present of the Dutch in captured territory was the report re-port of successful guerrilla action which had really been the answer to the loss by Japan of any real victory vic-tory in the war with China. One Dutch authority had said: "Nowhere do the Japs feel safe. Our men behind their lines are picking pick-ing them off, two today, ten tomorrow, tomor-row, and the toll is mounting and steady. This guerrilla war is being fought in an incessant downpour of rain." CLOSER: Draw Lines of War Though there was little evidence of a slackening of the general Japanese Japa-nese advance through the island empire em-pire of the Southwest Pacific, it seemed that as the days wore on, the main battle lines were drawing closer together. Arrival in New Zealand of the first units cf Admiral Leary's naval forces heralded, according to newsmen news-men who accorr.panied the fleet, the establishment pf a supply line fc r the United States. |
