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Show WEEKLY NEWS ANALYSIS German Spearheads Across Don River Are Established After Heavy Losses; Nazis 'Dig In' Along Egyptian Front; Gandhi to Japs: 'You're Not Welcome' (EDITOR'S NOTE: When opinions art expressrd In these columns, they are those of Western Newspaper Union s news analysts and not necessarily of this newspaper. 1 I Released by Western Newspaper Union. T"r V , ! I j Hi r i ' i -1 1 In answer to a call from President Roosevelt, representatives of labor and capital meet in Washington to discuss anti-inflation measures. Front row, left to right: W. Witherow, president, National Association of Manufacturers; Philip Murray, president of the CIO; Erik Johnson, president of the chamber of commerce; William Green, president of the AFL; and George Heany of the AFL. Back row, left to right: Walter Weisenburger, National Association of Manufacturers; James B. Carey of the CIO; and Joyce O'Hara of the TJ. S. Chamber of Commerce. NEXT JAP MOVE: 'Fool's Paradise' ". . .1 say we are living in a fool's paradise. It is only absolute fear that will awaken the people to a realization of what they must face in the immediate future." With those words Premier Mitchell Mitch-ell Hepburn of Ontario emphasized the peril which faces the United Nations particularly Great Britain and the United States. Hepburn predicted that Japan's next major move would be an attack at-tack on Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Aleu-tian islands. From Dutch Harbor long range bombers could attack the United States production centers on the West coast and a considerable distance inland. "Untold difficulties" may be in store for Britain because of the desperate des-perate situation of the Russian army, the premier said. Nazi subjugation sub-jugation of the entire Mediterranean area "will mean Germany will occupy oc-cupy the whole of France and take the French fleet." SHIPPING: Highest Level One week last month merchant ship sinkings rose to the highest level since the beginning of the war and also "greatly exceeded new construction." con-struction." This brought from the War Shipping Ship-ping administration a limit on shipping ship-ping space to "cargo essential to the prosecution of the war." This action was expected to increase substantially substan-tially the cargo space for the United Nations' military requirements. WSA also reported "the several different fleets of the United Nations are combining their operations as complements to each other for war purposes" with the Combined Shipping Ship-ping Adjustment board directing shipping in the various pools. A definite shortage of trained seamen sea-men is reported because of the "tremendous "tre-mendous wartime expansion of our merchant shipping." PRODUCTION: Greater Increases While the Joint War Production Committee of the U. S. and Canada was reporting that the annual rate of munitions production in the U. S. for the second quarter of 1942 was nearly four times that of 1941, it was also announced that Canadian production was almost three times the 1941 rate, and even greater increases in-creases are scheduled. A report covering the first half year of the board's activity in coordinating co-ordinating joint production outlined steps taken to increase war output by eliminating duplications, increasing increas-ing the number of common type weapons, arranging more rapid exchange ex-change of supplies, breaking transportation trans-portation bottlenecks, eliminating tariff and other barriers and promoting pro-moting full exchange of information on production methods and designs. Technical subcommittees maintain main-tain constant contacts with those in charge of production in each country. RUSSIA: Desperate Battles Bridging the lower Don river, Nazi troops continued to press on in their steady drive into the Caucasus. Russian Rus-sian infantrymen, battling desperately desper-ately from the southern bank of the Don, 120 miles east of Rostov, threw tons of explosives at the Nazis, but two German spearheads were established. es-tablished. A Soviet bulletin announced that nine pontoon bridges were smashed, throwing Nazi troops and equipment into the Don. But new reserves were ready to take the place of the drowned men, whose bodies were left to float down the river. Despite German successes at Rostov, Ros-tov, Soviet troops made the Nazis pay dearly for their gains. In part, a Russian communique announced that "One small group of Soviet infantry in-fantry alone in one day with antitank anti-tank guns, machine guns and incendiary in-cendiary bottles destroyed nine German Ger-man tanks and killed hundreds of Hitlerites." The communique said that the Red army still was fighting stubbornly stub-bornly at Novocherkassk and at Tsimlyansk. Soviet airmen were credited with destroying 299 German planes during dur-ing the week. Russian losses for the same period were placed at 137. In one sector of the front Russian soldiers were said to have wiped out more than four Nazi regiments in three weeks' fighting, capturing large military stores, including 400 machine guns, 560 automatic rifles, 46 mortars and 20,000 shells. In addition, they destroyed 328 tanks. EGYPT'S WAR: Nazis Dig In A lull in the desert war saw German Ger-man troops digging in on the front 75 miles west of Alexandria, from El Alamein to the Quattara depression. de-pression. A communique from Cairo announced an-nounced that heavy British and United States bombers continued to sweep across the Mediterranean to attack Crete and that another force struck at Tobruk again. Light bombers continued to hammer ham-mer Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's sea and air bases, troop and vehicle concentrations. Additional information informa-tion said that fires and explosions occurred when the big bombers struck at airdromes in Canada and Tympakion in Crete. BOMBS: On Wide Fronts On several widespread battle-fronts battle-fronts the thud of United Nations' bombs and shells jarred the Axis into realizing that all offensives in this war were not necessarily theirs. Six times in ten days warships of the British navy bombarded Matruh, the enemy's most advanced sea base in Egypt. British reports said that the Axis held city had been knocked "flatter than a pancake" as a result of the some 2,000 shells blasted into the vital harbor facilities. facili-ties. Use of the harbor by the Axis was believed to be out of the question ques-tion for practically every shore fcuilding had been blown into debris. Meanwhile from Cairo came word that the Germans and Italians based at El Daba, west of El Alamein, had been heavily bombed from the air and U. S. planes were reported to have caused immense damage to the Axis ports of Bengasi and Tobruk, To-bruk, still further to the west. Allied ground forces were kept busy consolidating their positions as a dispatch out of London said that while the Axis appeared to be on the defensive in Africa, the safe arrival ar-rival of a single enemy convoy might swing the balance the other way. OPEN LETTER: To the Japs "Tokyo papers please copy" . . . It didn't actually read that way but the idea was the same, for the open letter by Mohandas K. Gandhi which appeared in his magazine, Harijan, was aimed directly at the Japanese. And if Tokyo bothered to read it, this is what they learned: "Make no mistake about the fact that you (meaning Japan) will be sadly disillusioned if you believe you will receive a willing welcome from India." Further, the Japs were told that they had "been gravely misinformed misin-formed that we have chosen this particular moment to embarrass the Allies when your attack is imminent. If. we wanted to turn Britain's difficulty dif-ficulty into our opportunity, we should have done it as soon as the war broke out." Also for the benefit of the Japanese, Japa-nese, the Indian leader outlined the aims of his All-India Congress party par-ty 'with respect to their objective of independence, as preparation "to resist re-sist all militarist and imperialist ambition, whether it be British imperialism, im-perialism, German Naziism, or your pattern." CASUALTIES: In tl. S. Forces From the Office of War Information Informa-tion came the latest check-up of total to-tal casualties in the U. S. armed forces to date. This report showed these casualties casual-ties to be 44,143, including killed, wounded, and missing of the army, navy, marine corps, coast guard and Philippine Scouts, exclusive of 1,022 known navy prisoners of and casualties casual-ties of the Philippine Commonwealth army. Here is the breakdown by the various vari-ous branches of the service: (1) U. S. army killed, 902; wounded, 1,413; missing, 17,452. (2) Philippine Scouts killed, 479; wounded, 754; missing, 11,000. (3) U. S. navy killed, 3,420; wounded, 11,501; missing, 7,672. SYNTHETIC RUBBER: Congress Takes a Hand In a congressional effort to solve the synthetic rubber production tangle, tan-gle, members of the house and senate sen-ate passed the Gillette bill creating the Rubber Supply agency, which would control that portion of the program dealing with agricultural or forest products. Rubber production from petroleum petro-leum would remain under direction of the War Production board. Under Un-der provisions of the bill all authority author-ity over synthetic rubber plants using agricultural commodities as raw material would be taken away from Donald M. Nelson, WPB chairman. chair-man. In its final form, the bill requires WPB, the army, navy or any other agency to deliver critical materials for use in constructing or operating alcohol rubber plants upon certification certifica-tion from the director of the Rubber Rub-ber Supply agency, and grants the agency blanket priority "over all deliveries of similar articles or materials ma-terials for private account." WAGES: Shoiv Increase Figures released by Frances Perkins, Per-kins, secretary of labor, disclosed that the average hourly earnings of workers in manufacturing industries rose 1.5 per cent from April to May, and the May average of 83.1 cents per hour was 14.5 per cent higher than a year ago. The increase was held due to overtime, expansion of working forces in high wage scale industries and to wage-rate increases. in-creases. , i |