OCR Text |
Show WEEKLY SEWS ANALYSIS BY ROGER SHAW Nazi Drive Into Low Countries Is Marked by Terrific Fighting; Churchill Replaces Chamberlain (KIJITOft'S NOTE When opinions are expressed In these columns, they are those of the news analyst and not necessarily of this newspaper.) . ReJeased by Western Newspaper Union I QUARTER .MILLION: F or Consolation Senator GufTey of Pennsylvania introduced in-troduced a bill into our upper house. The bilj concerned con-cerned itself with v no less a sum "" t& than $243,361. F This was to con- Q sole the American X ambassador to ' f j Poland, Anthony Drexel Biddle, for t J furniture, tapes- "TT" , tries, pictures, . jf and other odds aWf V i 1 and ends, lost V mtxim during the Polish Ambassador blitzkrieg of 18 Biddle days, lastfall. The Biddle villa, outside Warsaw, also was damaged by German bombs, and it seems that somebody took the Biddies' silver, too. Biddle now is attached at-tached to the makeshift Polish government-in-exile in France. SCIENCE: U-235 U.S. DEFENSE: Yankee Speedup No sooner had the Germans plunged ruthlessly into the low countries coun-tries than Washington was bombarded bombard-ed by demands for an American armament speedup. At the top. Secretary Sec-retary of War Woodring (after a cabinet meeting) asked for it. Plans included a congressional grant THE WAR: Bigger and Worses Domestic, presidential politics were driven, pro tern, into second place by the march of Mars. The Germans added Holland, Belgium, Bel-gium, and Luxembourg the three little Low Countries to their list of victims, which now includes Czechs, Poles, Norse, and (according to some) the Austrians. Against the Dutch and Belgians, Hitler used much of the Norse blitzkrieg blitz-krieg buildup. This included the big Junkers air transports (20 men per ship), parachute jumpers all armed to the teeth, aerial bombardment of "enemy" air fields and concentration concentra-tion centers, and mass movements of infantry, against the frontiers, by land. The French came to the assistance as-sistance of Belgium, as in 1914, and the English crossed the channel to Holland that same channel that Hitler himself would so much like to cross, for a poke at John Bull's midriff. U ( 1 With a name like a feared Nazi submarine, but with power which scientists believe to be vastly more than any other now known, a newly discovered natural substance has been discovered and named U-235. Physicists at the University of Minnesota Min-nesota and Columbia university are responsible for most of the progress prog-ress made in the isolation and extraction ex-traction of the substance. U-235 is a powerful source of radiation, radia-tion, resembling radium in this respect, re-spect, but it is tremendously more powerful than radium. A minute fraction of a gram of U-235 was obtained ob-tained last February by Prof. Alfred O. Nier in a University of Minnesota laboratory. He sent this to Columbia Colum-bia where scientists placed one ten-millionth ten-millionth of a gram in their atom smasher and brought out the substance's sub-stance's potentialities. Biggest difficulty confronting development de-velopment of U-235 is the work and cost involved in extracting it from uranium, a rare substance itself, 'Tou jours La Guerre!' Luxembourg did not resist (again like 1014). but Belgium and Holland did. The Belgian army was considered con-sidered fairly good, but the Dutch troops did not carry so high a ranking. rank-ing. Nevertheless, the Belgians and Dutch put up a stifT fight against the masses 29 divisions of oncoming oncom-ing Field Grays, and the aerial hit-and-run tactics up above. The Dutch anti-aircraft shot down close to a hundred Nazi airplanes, almost at the first volley, but poor, peaceful peace-ful Brussels took a bombing that killed or wounded more than five score citizens. Simultaneously with the German-Netherlands German-Netherlands invasion, came aerial bombing, by the Nazis, of French airdromes, railways, coal mines, and factories. The Dutch East Indies In-dies interned all Germans over 16 years old, and seized German ships there. Japan with surprising decencyannounced de-cencyannounced its respect for the oriental status quo at least, in that Dutch quarter. Dutch colonies include in-clude nearly a million square miles, SECRETARY WOODRING He ashed for a speedup. of perhaps $400,000,000 to equip a force of a million Yankee regulars and reservists. The aircraft factories were to be speeded up, by more shifts of workers, work-ers, for example. Instead of two shifts, three or more were proposed. pro-posed. Small manufacturers were to be stimulated. Some 25 S-class submarines, now at the Philadelphia navy yard, in fairly good condition, were (perhaps) to be reconditioned. But "there just is no change in the plans for the fleet." So spoke a high which first must be extracted from pitchblende, the dark mineral which is also the source of radium. It is reckoned that one pound of the new substance would be 30,000,-000 30,000,-000 times as powerful as the same amount of dynamite. Just what uses it could be put to depend upon its development, say engineers who estimate es-timate that it may be 10 years before be-fore 10 pounds of U-235 can be extracted ex-tracted from its source and put to practical use. HAWKEYE: He Never Missed Senator Lundeen, Farmer-Labor man of Minnesota, is a pacifist and an isolationist of p,jpSU.iijJn(!iJia the first water, g, But he outshot K crack military fX sharPshoters in I , - Washington, turn- m. i tag 111 Perfect pi-! f-m 1 scores with the O ' , army's new semi-W semi-W 'I automatic Garand W with its rival, the i-J Johnson rifle Senator Lundeen Senator Lundeen scored 28 bulls-eyes bulls-eyes without a miss, while the eyes of the U. S. regulars reg-ulars nearly popped out. The Garand fires eight shots, without reloading. re-loading. The Johnson fires H. dumirai. congressmen, too, called for quick action all along the arms front. Their comments ranged from the calm objectivity of Senator Thomas of Oklahoma to the florid blasts of New York's Representative Sol Bloom. Senator King of Utah talked about "foulest crimes" and "wickedest assaults" and "democratic "demo-cratic peoples." Roosevelt said in a speech that it was a "mistaken idea" to believe that we Americans were safe from would-be conquerors because of 3,000 miles of comfy goegraphical distance. dis-tance. Roosevelt surprised some of his listeners by calling himself a "pacifist." ENGLAND EXPECTS: Better Luck, Perhaps Nice old Chamberlain finally got the gate in England, umbrella and all, and the loud-speaking Winston Churchill, navy lord in the last war and this one, too, got the prime min- GENERAL GAMELIN Tor France . . . courage, energy, confidence!" and more than 60.000,000 natives, beautifully administered. Dutch East Indian Java and Sumatra are excessively rich in tin, rubber, oil, and other badly needed raw products. prod-ucts. SO THEY SAY: What They Said Hitler said, about it all: "The fight beginning today decides the fate of the German nation for the next 1,000 years. Do your duty now!" Gamclin, French generalissimo, said: "For France and all her allies: al-lies: Courage, energy, confidence!" Roosevelt said: "The American people are shocked and angered by the tragic news from Belgium and the Netherlands and Luxembourg." Sweden's leading newspaper said: "Highly civilized countries, whose love of peace is unquestionable, were brutally thrown upon the sacrificial sac-rificial altar." The Red Cross said: "?10,000,000 needed." The N. Y. World's fair said: "We ' feel that we will have a happy, carefree care-free crowd at the fair, on opening day." lOpening day was the second sec-ond day of Netherlands chaos.) istry. Chamberlain, highly capitalistic capital-istic in his outlook, never could get Labor support, in peace or war. Churchill, though a diehard Tory, for some reason has the affection of Laborites. Other Chamberlain men went into political "exile" as the Undertaker from Birmingham (supposedly (sup-posedly Churchill's quip) fell. In France, a couple of extreme conservatives, con-servatives, with semi-Fascist views, were taken into the Reynaud cabinet cab-inet to broaden the coverage and tighten things up. The British Labor La-bor party remains excessively important, im-portant, not because of its numbers in parliament, but because of its myriads of highly organized trade-unionists trade-unionists in the munitions factories, and in other war industries. British Liberals also endorsed Churchill. OUR YOUNG DEWEY: And His Rivals Tom Dewey, the young presidential presiden-tial go-getter, who sometimes seems to have few friends but many, many votes, got back home to New York from his transcontinental trip. He received Idaho's eight votes, and Maryland's 16 votes for the Republican Repub-lican national convention. Down in Maryland, Senator Tydings (whom Roosevelt once tried to purge) "gained an even stronger position of power in Maryland Democracy." Roosevelt beat Garner by six to one out in California, but Garner won down in Texas by something like 20 to 1. Speaker Bankhead got endorsed en-dorsed as the Alabama Democrats' favorite son! REORGANIZATION: W liere, the Air? j The President's reorganization plan, to transform the Civil Aeronautics Aero-nautics authority (o the department of commerce, was approved, 5-3, by a special senate committee on reorganization re-organization after two days' worth of hearings. Thereby, the CAA would lose its vaunted independence and become a mere bureau of the department of commerce, under Harry Hopkins. Flyers do not ap- pear to like this proposed setup. BIG ITEMS: Read 'Em and Weep . i Nearly 300.000.000 copies of Stalin's Sta-lin's works have been read in Russia, Rus-sia, it was announced in Moscow. Lenin's works have totaled only around 130.0C0.003. And the wage diftcrential in "communist" Russia now is 500 to 1, while in "capitalist" Germany it is only about 100 to 1. The Soviet differential was said to exceed ?ven that of our America. |