The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945

by The New York Times

  For several months now the automobile industry has watched its production schedules being slashed. Throughout most of the industry it was accepted as inevitable that some such order as Mr. Henderson’s would eventually come through. Particularly has this been the feeling since the entry of the United States into the war with the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7.

  HOPED-FOR DELAY

  But while it was preparing to accept the inevitable, Detroit and that part of the industry which is located in and adjacent to the city had hoped that the total end to the sale and production of civilian cars would be delayed until the automobile factories could reabsorb their entire employment and shift their manufacturing facilities to war production.

  The immediate effect of Mr. Henderson’s order stopping all production on or about Feb. 1 will be large and accelerated lay-offs which will bring almost total unemployment to about 250,000 persons in this area.

  This, in turn, creates other problems. Governmental agencies have already begun a frantic search for revenues to carry the welfare loads and to handle the demand for unemployment compensation. War employment in the factories where the automobiles have been produced is gaining steadily, but it will be months before all the unemployment slack can be taken up in the production of war materials.

  THE JOBLESS WORKER

  To the jobless worker now or about to be on the streets there is small comfort in the statement at this time from some of the industry heads that a few months will not only find them all back at work but will see an acute labor shortage in the automobile plants at the same time.

  The new order has been accepted cheerfully and willingly by the industry. Alvan Macauley, chairman of the Packard Motor Car Company and president of the Automobile Manufacturers Association, spoke for the industry when he pledged its complete cooperation under the edict of the Office of Production Management which ended the manufacture of automobiles and trucks.

  “If that’s what the government wants, we’re going to be with it all the way,” Mr. Macauley said concerning the stop-production order.

  “But manufacturers must have more defense contracts which they can put into production on a mass scale,” he added.

  On the other hand, the United Automobile Workers (C.I.O.), while accepting the situation with patriotic good grace, criticized the fact that adjustment had not been made earlier in order to avert the mass layoffs which will come with the changeover from peace to war production.

  THOMAS’S STATEMENT

  “The automobile workers are ready to endure any hardship which will contribute to the victory of our nation,” said R. J. Thomas, president of the union. “However, we can’t see the sense in blacking out the country’s greatest reservoir of machinery and trained labor.

  “Most of the automobile industry machinery can be converted to production of armaments. We proposed that a year ago. We did not get far. Now that the industry knows it cannot make cars any longer, it is freely granting that its facilities can be changed over to make the materials of modern warfare.

  “The most important single task before the nation is the rapid conversion of the automobile industry to war production. It can and should be made the major production arm of the arsenal of democracy. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of unemployed automobile workers must have their needs and those of their families taken care of by adequate unemployment compensation allowances and WPA appropriations.”

  The factory floor of a former Chrysler automobile assembly plant after its wartime conversion to manufacturing tanks for the military, Detroit, 1942.

  One very real fear, affecting both management and labor, is what effect the possible shortage of private cars, coupled with the strict rationing of tires, will have on needed transportation in connection with war production in this area. A large part of the production facilities, notably the Chrysler tank arsenal, the Hudson arsenal and the Ford bomber plant, are on the outskirts of the city, unserved by existing bus or street car facilities.

  Private transportation is relied on in each instance to get the men to and from work.

  Although dealers report an adequate stock of used cars in this area, there has been the expression of belief that these may be commandeered to relieve shortages in other sections of the country, leaving Detroit with a serious new and used car shortage.

  The Willow Run bomber plant of the Ford Motor Company is located nearly twenty miles from Detroit. By early Summer the company contemplates employing 60,000 workers there. Nearly all of these will be drawn from Detroit and will be forced to use private transportation. Not only are there no present bus lines to the plant, but transportation officials here doubt that there will be sufficient equipment available to establish new lines.

  JANUARY 12, 1942

  NAZIS LIST CLOTHING GIFTS

  BERLIN, Jan. 11 (From German broadcast recorded by The United Press in New York)—D.N.B., official news agency, reported today that in the sixteen-day collection of clothing for German soldiers 56,325,930 items had been donated.

  The donations included 2,958,155 fur garments, 4,948,766 sweaters and other wool clothing, 7,781,711 pairs of hose, 104,841 pairs of fur-lined boots, 170,214 pairs of plain boots, 1,174,748 pairs of skis, 3,138,405 wool hoods, 3,854,064 pairs of gloves and 1,485,115 wool and fur blankets.

  The Prague radio was quoted by the London radio in a broadcast heard by the Columbia Broadcasting System as announcing that today was the forty-ninth birthday of Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering and that “the people of Czecho-Slovakia are expected to celebrate the occasion by contributing old clothes to the national rag bag now being assembled for troops on the Russian front.”

  JANUARY 13, 1942

  WAR INCREASES BICYCLE’S POPULARITY AMONG WOMEN

  Speculation on the influence on transportation of the recent tire rationing order has brought the bicycle industry into the forefront of discussion, especially among housewives in suburban areas, many of whom took up cycling some time ago. Investigation indicates that travel to market by bicycle will increase rather than diminish.

  Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt is among those who have acquired bicycles in the last few months. Her activities at Civilian Defense headquarters in Washington, however, have prevented her usual visits to Hyde Park, where the bicycle awaits her leisure. She has not yet had time to learn to ride.

  Although production of bicycle tires will remain under curtailment, those already manufactured may be sold. Additional reassurance may be forthcoming in the expected final approval of the industry’s scheduled program of production for 1942. A clearance signal is now awaited on the general lines of a tentative program drawn up at a meeting late in December of industry representatives and officials of the OPM. The plan calls for the manufacture of 1,000,000 bicycles this year, stipulating that a universal, simplified design of light-weight will be used.

  The return of the bicycle as a means of recreation has not yet given rise to a definite trend in feminine sports wear. Unlike the Gibson Girl bicyclists of another day, today’s women riders have been content with makeshift ensembles, often unsuitable. The most practical and becoming outfit yet evolved is the jupe-culotte, worn with a pullover, and a leather jacket or wind-breaker. A hood that ties securely under the chin, fleece-lined mittens and sturdy shoes complete a well-planned cycling costume for current months.

  Two-wheeled transport in upstate New York, 1942.

  JANUARY 13, 1942

  THE NAVY IN TWO SEAS

  One answer to the question of what the American Navy is doing in this war was given yesterday by Secretary Knox in a speech prepared for delivery at the annual Conference of Mayors in Washington. The Navy is achieving notable success in keeping open the most important highway in the world—the sea-lanes between the United States and the British Islands. It is because so large a force is engaged in this essential task that Mr. Knox warned his audience not to expect “full-scale naval engagements in the Pacific in the near future.” He asked for popular understanding and approval of the s
trategy that keeps so large a part of the Navy occupied in the Atlantic: “We know who our great enemy is—the enemy who, before all others, must be defeated first. It is not Japan; it is not Italy; it is Hitler and Hitler’s Nazis, Hitler’s Germany.”

  Fortunately Mr. Knox does not need to argue his point. The country accepted it from the moment we went to war. It is proof of the level-headedness of the American people that even in the first days after the infuriating attack at Pearl Harbor—in the days before Mr. Churchill came to this country and before the importance of the front against Hitler was emphasized by the organization of the grand alliance of twenty-six United Nations—the American public never lost sight of the real objective. On this point the evidence of the Gallup survey is convincing. During the period of Dec. 11–19, a period beginning immediately after Pearl Harbor, Dr. Gallup’s organization found that more than four times as many Americans regard Germany as a greater threat than Japan. Moreover, there was no sectional disagreement on this fundamental point. The opinion of the Far West coincided almost exactly with the opinion of the rest of the country.

  The average American knows that a victory over Japan would bring us no security whatever so long as Hitler remained unconquered, whereas the defeat of Hitler would enormously hasten, if it did not almost automatically accomplish, the defeat of his Eastern ally. But to beat Hitler we need production and still more production, and the sacrifice of every group interest to the national purpose.

  JANUARY 21, 1942

  ROOSEVELT SIGNS DAYLIGHT TIME ACT

  Clocks Are to Be Moved Ahead by One Hour At 2 o’Clock on Morning of Feb. 9

  LARGE SAVING OF POWER

  By The Associated Press.

  WASHINGTON, Jan. 20—President Roosevelt signed the Daylight-Saving Bill today and it becomes effective at 2 o’clock in the morning of Feb. 9 for all interstate commerce and Federal Government activities.

  During Congressional debate it was assumed that the new time, by which clocks are moved ahead one hour, would become general throughout the country.

  The measure will become inoperative six months after the war ends, unless Congress votes to terminate it before then.

  Stephen Early, Presidential secretary, said that the measure had the same objectives as the Daylight-Saving Act of the first World War, that is, “greater efficiency in our industrial war effort.”

  The Federal Power Commission estimated there would be a saving of 736,282,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually. It said the nation used 144,984,565,000 kilowatt-hours in 1940. The real benefit from the change, the F.P.C. said, would come from relieving the present peak demand for power between dark and bedtime. The commission estimated that the change would provide relief to the extent of 741,160 kilowatts of production capacity.

  Congressional action was necessary, Mr. Early pointed out, so that there would be a uniform system in all the States.

  President Roosevelt directed that the pen which he used in signing the bill should be sent to Robert Garland of Pittsburgh, who headed a national committee that appeared at hearings on the legislation and urged its enactment.

  Mr. Early said Mr. Garland also was active in advocating daylight saving for the first World War and had asked for no greater return than the pen used by President Woodrow Wilson in signing the act at that time.

  JANUARY 22, 1942

  Foe Hurled Back in Bataan; Guerrillas Kill 110 at Base

  Special to The New York Times.

  WASHINGTON, Jan 21—The small force holding the Bataan Peninsula on Luzon Island, in the Philippines, scored a new victory in “savage” fighting by throwing back with heavy losses Japanese attackers who had penetrated their lines, the War Department announced today. In addition to taking the initiative and sustaining it with “relatively moderate” losses to the United States– Philippine Army, General Douglas MacArthur reported to the War Department that one of the guerrilla bands cooperating with the defending army raided a hostile airdrome at Tuguegarao to the north, killed 110 Japanese and routed 300 others.

  ENDS DRAMATIC CHAPTER

  Today’s communiqué on fighting in the Philippines closed a chapter of operations made more dramatic by the fact that the communiqué of yesterday was issued while the end of the battle was a matter of grave doubt.

  For two days the augmented Japanese forces, supported by air bombers and strafing planes, had lunged at the center of the fifteen-mile line across the neck of the Bataan peninsula in an effort to force a break in the lines and open up the hilly country to raiding.

  “In particularly savage fighting,” the communiqué today said, “on the Bataan peninsula, American and Philippine troops drove back the enemy and reestablished lines which previously had been penetrated. The Japanese, by infiltrations and frontal attacks near the center of the lines, had gained some initial successes. Our troops then counterattacked and all positions were retaken. Enemy losses were very heavy. Our casualties were relatively moderate.”

  To military observers here, this report indicated a picture of fighting by which General MacArthur adapted frontier methods to his defense against an army which is overwhelming in size and which apparently has attempted to adapt German blitz methods to its campaign in mountains and swamps.

  When the Japanese have advanced, with tanks crashing through ground defenses and airplanes raining explosives from the sky, the MacArthur lines apparently have dissolved into nothing, while the defenders have fallen back into shelters prepared for this eventuality. Then, when the attack has spent itself, they fall on the advancing units in groups, catching them completely disorganized.

  These tactics have been indicated repeatedly by statements that the defending line is hardly a “line” at all but rather a series of prepared positions. In the heart of the small Bataan peninsula itself, the defenders have prepared countless positions carved out of stone mountains, which serve as bombproof shelters in air attacks and in which they have cached sufficient supplies to give them a long period of waiting.

  The guerrilla raid, the communiqué reported, occurred in the Cagayan Valley in Northern Luzon, which is far removed from the scene of the principal fighting. The mere fact that it occurred gave increasing evidence that the Filipinos had not been completely defeated by any means. Only yesterday, another report told how another band 500 miles southward on the island of Mindanao was engaging Japanese forces that hold the port of Davao.

  The guerrillas in Northern Luzon were said to have taken the Japanese “completely by surprise” and to have “scored a brilliant local success.”

  Members of the first class of black pilots in the history of the U.S. Army Air Corps who were graduated at the advanced flying school at Tuskeegee, Ala., as second lieutenants by Major General George E. Stratemeyer.

  JANUARY 23, 1942

  ALL-NEGRO DIVISION FORMING FOR ARMY

  MANY IN OFFICER COURSES

  Special to The New York Times.

  WASHINGTON, Jan. 22—A Sixth Armored Division will be added to the Army’s battle force of tank troops Feb. 15, Secretary Stimson said today at a press conference in which he described plans for expediting the work of expanding the Army this year to a force of 3,600,000 men.

  The Secretary said that four-week training programs in special operations would be given to all officers to be assigned to the thirty-two new “triangular” divisions and a new Negro division and a second Negro aviation squadron would be set up.

  The Army expects to have its new Negro division in final shape by May, on station at Fort Huachuca, Ariz. This division, a triangular one, will be built up around various Negro units already in existence.

  The squadron, to be known as the 100th Pursuit Squadron, will be trained at Tuskegee, Ala., site of the Negro institute, where the first organized Negro pursuit squadron, known as the Ninety-ninth, is completing its training.

  NEGROES TRAINING TO BE OFFICERS

  Coincident with this announcement of new Negro organizations, Secretary Stimson stated that Negroes were attend
ing officer candidate schools for men selected from among draftees. In addition he noted that the main parade ground at Fort Knox recently was named Brooks Field, in honor of Private Robert H. Brooks, a Negro who was the first casualty in the armored force in the Philippines.

  The new armored division will undertake training at a time when part of the armored force has already matured in training and achieved the goal of 100 per cent equipment, fitting it for duty anywhere in the world, Secretary Stimson said. Some units are less than fully equipped, but he asserted that they had sufficient arms for thorough training of the officers and men.

  Each armored division consists of more than 10,000 officers and men, is composed of two tank regiments, three separate field artillery battalions, an infantry regiment, a reconnaissance battalion, an anti-tank battalion of motorized artillery, an engineer battalion, observation aircraft and the usual units to provide for the men and service the vehicles.

  DIVISIONS ARE MINIATURE ARMIES

  Each division, therefore, is a miniature army of extraordinary striking force, so composed that it may be divided into two or more independent arms. The new division, like those already formed, will be trained at Fort Knox, Ky.

  The new training programs for officers are designed to send these men into their new commands completely equipped to teach their units the specialties of modern warfare required of each type of fighting unit. The first group to take the course will include 500 officers assigned to the three new triangular divisions to be formed within the next few weeks in the start toward a goal of thirty-two new divisions.