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Show ; WEEKLY NEWS ANALYSIS By Edward C. Wayne Greeks Continue to Push Back Italians As British Seize New African Bases; Laval Loses French Government Post; Knudsen Claims Defense Industry Lags i Released by Western Newspaper Union. , ! DEBACLE : Italian Version Unquestioned was the fact that Italy had been kicked wholeheartedly wholeheart-edly out of the war by Britain, Greece and the Free French, together to-gether with other sundry allies such as Polish, Czech and other hands that had joined into the Battle of Greece and the Battle of Egypt The invader, who stepped briskly into the war just at the moment of France's collapse, shot forces along the Mediterranean coast from the border of Libya to Sidi Barrani, and who sailed across mountains for Athens from an Albanian take-off, had become the invaded on both fronts. As the British and Greeks summed up huge supplies of war materials captured, and enormous inventories of prisoners in hand and still coming in, 'the Vesuvian rumbles rum-bles began sounding through vari- took Laval into custody, thus putting put-ting into at least a momentary decline de-cline the man on whose shoulders rested considerable of the onus of France's surrender. Rumor Boated double - barreled around the French overturn. Rumor No. 1 had it that Old Man Petain, realizing that revolt was stirring beneath be-neath him, charged Laval with plotting plot-ting to get France into the war against England, and had summarily ousted him. Rumor No. 2 was to the effect that Laval had plotted to overthrow Petain and create a new government govern-ment with himself as dictator. Whichever 'might be true, watchers agreed that the aged general acted with much the same speed as the younger Hitler in slapping down a "purge" which shot Laval's feet from under him with dispatch. The upheaval met the same view in most circles, that it was another evidence of the general European unrest that was moving through all the conquered territories, an unrest that might find no directional force for a long, long time. SIX DAYS: Shalt Thou Labor Pointing toward the six-day, perhaps per-haps seven-day week in defense industry, in-dustry, Defense Council Chairman Knudsen belabored American industry indus-try for lagging, and declared the United States was "not getting the spirit" of defense work. Knudsen' told the manufacturers many things, but one of these was outstanding, and had to do with airplane ' manufacture. U. S. goal, declared Knudsen, had been 1,000 warplanes a month by January 1. He said at the rate things were going, we'll be lucky if we are getting 650 a month by that time. The reason for the lag is lack of comprehension by manufacturer, by laborer, of the meaning of the national na-tional defense program. U. S. is supposed to be getting ready to protect pro-tect the nation in case of aggression and to help England hold things in status quo until that time. Knudsen pulled no punches and told the manufacturers that they were spending too much time figuring fig-uring what to do with their profits and earnings, and not enough getting get-ting out the material. This was a double-barreled blow at the employers employ-ers for temporizing with employees' demands for higher pay, and with L PRESIDENT: And Flying Duke President Roosevelt returned to his White House desk to face tremendous tre-mendous problems, behind him a 4,000-mile trip on U. S. S. Tuscaloosa Tusca-loosa which was shrouded in secrecy secre-cy before it began, turned out just what had been predicted a junket throughout prospective naval-air bases in the Antilles and wound up in a blaze of front-page articles when the duke of Windsor flew out to sea to confer with the Chief Executive. Ex-ecutive. It all began when Duchess Wallis, who had to have an infected tooth out (translated in royal language into a "major dental operation") decided to have the surgery performed per-formed in a Miami hospital. She and the duke went thither in the yacht of a Swedish friend who oddly was a pal of Goering's. The day after the death of Lord Lothian, the operation was safely over, with the duchess convalescing bewitchingly, and the duke with a considerable amount of time on his hands. Suddenly it was announced that President Roosevelt wanted to talk to him. A navy bomber soared down onto the blue Biscayne waters, a motor-boat motor-boat met the duke, and off he went, shrouded with more secrecy than the President himself had been when he started out. He was back the same day, and the next day tb Tuscaloosa came in and the cruise was over. The public, prepared by all this for something monumental, had to satisfy itself with the story that the duke and the President had -talked about the unsuitability of pint-sized Mayaguana island for a naval-air base, and asking the duke if he couldn't arrange a better one. It was the biggest anticlimax in months. CITY: Anxious Strangest public health story, in years "broke" in Rochester, N. V., with a whole city of 300,000 souls rushing to be inoculated against typhoid. First in sharp sequence of dramatic dra-matic events was the "firing" of two city officials when a public health officer, "on his toes," discovered the city's water supply had been contaminated con-taminated with water from the Genesee Gen-esee river, infested with sewage. Rochester's population, most of them modernly health conscious, rushed to have themselves inoculated inocu-lated against typhoid, a job which takes three injections with an interval in-terval between. First day, the health officers distributed dis-tributed 8,000 "shots" of the serum, which were promptly gobbled up by private physicians and shot into 8,000 anxious arms. LOTHIAN: Predicts, Then Dies The notable, blunt-spoken British bachelor Marquess of Lothian, ambassador am-bassador from Britain to the United States, lay dying in his Washington home from uremic poisoning at the very moment when his written words, spoken by proxy at nearby Baltimore, were predicting what the war in Europe will be. Lothian's "deathbed" prediction was that Britain, with the help already al-ready promised and under way from fy"einiC1942.mWinUleWar "dcCisive-Whatever "dcCisive-Whatever toe facts may be, the shocking news of his death gave his anal utterance unusual prominence m the news, editors tearing their to put the largest headlines on what had happened to Lothian, or on wha Lothian had said. thfn PaS!Tg WaS tension for toe press here and abroad to ex-Press ex-Press genuine sorrow and shock at his untimely death. adhs w nTSin Vh 1'" a gaping ho m Britain s diplomatic body. Lothian was a worker, his speech Ti.r.r qun"; weight in Washlneton " theVaMnf"0"0' th pnd 'twar-?rcudc,rwor b dying utterance PU''P0SCS' hU Persistent rumors current in Europe Eu-rope say that Bruno Mussolini (above), eldest son of II Duce, was shot down and killed during an air raid on Salonika, Greece. Official Italian circles have denied this report re-port and say he is serving at an airport air-port in southern Italy. ous parts of Italy, but more particularly par-ticularly in the north, and about the industrial cities of Turin and Milan. Despite all efforts of censorship to keep the true situation from becoming be-coming generally known, the debacle deba-cle was too enormous to be hidden longer, and Mussolini's aides had to take to the radio and to the Italian press to prevent a spread of the disaster to home fronts. Dismissal of leaders, disaffection in the Dodecanese islands, riots in the streets of the two big factory towns had leaked out, and then the Fascist party line editors and commentators com-mentators began dishing out orders to the populace from the higher-ups, higher-ups, at the same time issuing warnings warn-ings to Britain and the Hellenes as to what they might expect from the Italian troops when "they get really mad." While there was some news of sporadic increased resistance at certain points in the fronts, the general gen-eral words were two retreat and evacuation all along the line. And the press' articles about the might of the British enemy and the "unfair" "un-fair" bayonets of the Greeks were just a foretaste of what was to come, with Tirana full of wounded and dying dy-ing soldiers back from the front lines. UNREST: French Version Britain was getting little comfort, according to her own sources, from France's governmental upheaval which sent Pierre Laval, pro-Fascist foreign minister, flying out- of the Petain cabinet presumably into confinement, con-finement, and put Flandin, pro-Nazi, into his place. In fact, British circles frankly doubted the authenticity of anyin-ternal anyin-ternal disturbance to amount to anything, any-thing, and laid the whole change to orders direct from Hitler. However, it was a notable occurrence, occur-rence, and accompanied by a scurrying scur-rying about the streets of Vichy, and presumably Paris of a body of GP-men GP-men France's new Gestapo or GPU. In Italy they were calling them "action squads." but they are all the same sort of strong-arm governmental gov-ernmental police. France called them "Groupe de protection," hence the GP on the arm-band. It was a GP band that WILLIAM KNUDSEN Pictured as he urged a "wartime basis" for industry to speed production of vital defense needs. employees for threatening and carrying car-rying out strikes. He introduced the longer workweek work-week idea by stating that employers employ-ers should find a way to use machines ma-chines on Saturdays and Sundays, making the obvious point that use of these two days on a full-time sched-ule sched-ule would automatically speed up production about 30 per cent, or the amount it is lagging. In advance he answered the manufacturers' man-ufacturers' plaint that they lacked the trained men to do this. Knudsen Knud-sen told them to get more men and train more men. He told them to stagger" their trained men through the extra shifts, thus swiftly train-ing train-ing the less-able to catch up to full, time production. His address to the manufacturers was an air-clearer. like the first lightning flashes before a storm tha he hopes wrll rain airplanes and ot er defense material. |