Evening Star Newspaper, January 4, 1942, Page 30

THE SUNDAY B8TAR, WASHINGTON, D. C., JANUARY 4, 1942. Telling the Eye-Witness Story of the War By Don Whitehead. ‘Wide World News. ‘When the guns are spiked, the banners furled and the bombers are quiet aggin, threre still will be a thrilling tale to tell of the courage and high adventures of the men who are writing the history of the war in the news. Tt's a crazy, incredible pattern in the scarlet fabric of a world at war, follow- ing the blitzkrieg across Europe, through the Balkans, over the frozen wastes of Soviet ‘Russia, the parched sands of Libya and into the Pacific. For two years the war correspondents for the Associated Press have stayed on the heels of the marching armies, or else have been just one jump ahead fighting a day and night battle to get the news to the United States. They've lived out of suitcases and ruck- sacks for weeks at a time while skipping from one strategic point to another in an exhausting, nerve-racking race with time and censors. But they came through with the news from the bomb-battered capitals and shell-pocked villages despite some fan- tastic brushes with death along the way. Two were wounded and narrowly escaped the tragedy of Edward J. Neil, the A. P. correspondent who was Killed in the Bpanish Civil War. The conflict caught up with others finally when the Axis powers declared war on the United States, and now they are fretting in Berlin, Rome. Shanghai and Tokio waiting for rclease through an exchange of nationals among the belligerent nations. ! But on the Allied side, their fight still goes on. The cables and wireless mes- sages filed from the battle zones add new chapters to the story which already has become the unfinished saga of jour- nalism. Most of the war correspondents for the A. P. are smalltown boys from places like Chickasaw, Okla.; Selma, Ala.; Mount Savage, Md., or Mineola, Tex., although some come from large cities. Probably none of them ever dreamed that one day he would be sitting on the rim of a man-made hell watching an epic struggle between the world's military glants. Sometimes the vantage point is the deck of a mighty battleship blasting an enemy harbor or fighting off swarms of enemy bombers. Sometimes it's a sandy knoll overlooking a raging battle of stanks. It might be from a London roof- top as the incendiaries and explosives rain down or on the icy plains of Russia strewn with the wreckage of the re- treating Nazi armies. But wherever they might be, they're watching the greatest story of their lifetime unfold in an eruption of death and destruction on a scale of unbeliev- able proportions. Yarbrough at Honolulu Life was pretty placid for 31-year-old Tom Yarbrough until the day two years ago he set sail for England to become Tom Yarbrough. & war correspondent. A native of Chickasaw, Okla, he was graduated from the State University and served & hitch with the Oklahoma City Times before joining the A. P. in 1935. He worked in Kansas City, St. Louis and New York and grabbed at the chance to see this war for himself. He didn’t wait long. One night in London the sirens screamed an air-raid warning. The searchlights shot their beams into the skies seeking the Nazi planes dropping bombs on the city. And then it was that Tom Yarbrough saw death dealt from a cold geck. The calm voice of an official said “it is feared casualties may be heavier than recent nights.” But Tom wasn't calm. “I saw rescue workers bring the still forms of a baby and five women from the basement of a flaming bomb-shat- tered home in uortheastern London,” he says . .. and that was during just one ambulance ride to gather up the dead and injured. ¥ “Then I watched a woman ambulance driver pump faint signs of life into two of the women victims while the bombs still thuridered around us and anti-air- craft guns boomed in answer.” Tom rode through this carnage watch- ing the rescue work, and as a gray dawn began to dispel the ghostly gloom, the woman ambulance driver said to him: “Thank God. There's always hope with the dawn.” The A. P. decided to shift Yarbrough to Cairo. He was routed by way of Honolulu. His ship eased into the harbor one bright Sunday and Yarbrough had traveled half-way around the world in time to see the Japanese strike their Larru Allen. surprise blow against America’s Pacific outposts. He thought at first it was merely a big-scale war game until a bomb fell a few yards from the ship. Some one said this was the real McCoy. So Yarbrough pitched in to help report the battle of the Pacific. Middleton and Anderson Remember the “phony phase” of this war? That was way back in the early days of 1940 when the French and Ger- mans eved each other from the sup- posedly impregnable Maginot and Seig- fried lines. But the Germans struck through the lowlands and one May day Drew Mid- dleton sat in a dingy little bomb- shaken hotel somewhere in Belgium and wrote: “Allied troops, ready for a storm, found themselves in the path of a hurri- cane today . . . the hurricane rides on the wings of the German air force.” Confused, hopeless days followed as the French and British vainly tried to stem the first rush of the German assault that was to end at Dunkirk and Paris. Drew watched the terror mount among the people and this lad who once flunked an English course in college wrote some of the most moving stories to come out of the war. “There was two-way traffic on the roads,” he said, “moving toward the dis- tant sound of guns were British men, materials and munitions in trucks . moving painfully away from the guns was another army, the army of the homeless and stricken . . . their voices haunt you.” Ordered with other correspondents to leave Belgium, Drew returned to Lon- don. But London wasn't refuge becausé the bombers followed. On one occasion Middleton watched the Germans pour tons of explosives on Croydon Airport, but even among this destruction he noted that “one mother herded her brood of Louis P. Lochner. seven before her like a scene from a Mother Goose book.” During one particularly savage air rald, G. H. P. Anderson, a reporter for the A. P. of Great Britain, watched on the - rooftop while Middleton and the others worked below. “They're dropping a goodish bit of stuff,” Anderson called down. A few minutes later a bomb fell on the Asso- ciated Press Building. Operations were shifted to another previously prepared building and the work continued. The boys in the London bureau took a terrific pounding at the height of the assault on England. Bureau Chief Bob Bunnelle, late of Asheville and Atlanta, was knocked out of bed by a bomb and each of his mates hed similar experi- ences. Anderson later was transferred to the Libyan front and was captured by Axis forces. He is believed to be held in Rome. Middleton has transferred his opera- tions to Iceland. He was on hand to get the first eye-witness story of the U-boat attack on the U. S. destroyer Kearny. It's a lonely vigil, but things have a way of happening wherever Mid- dleton may be. Eddy Gilmore in Russia In a London apartment a phonograph was blaring “night and day” and Eddy Gilmore was drumming out the rhythm with his fingers when the Luftwaffe paid one nocturnal call. Eddy grabbed a tin hat and ran out in time to see all hell break loose. He got his story and rushed back to write: “If my heart would just get out of my mouth for a few minutes, perhaps I could write this story.” Eddy's a guy who finds something funny in everything, even war. He's given his a touch of the ridiculous. Fat and 34, he hadn’t been in England long before he reported that the R. A. F. Dpilots were making low altitude recon- naissance flights—over a nudist camp. A Selma, Ala, product, Eddy became a war correspondent after newspaper experience in Selma, Atlanta and Wash- ington. One day in London he listened respectfully to official warnings that a stranger wandering about England's blacked-out countryside was in danger from vigilant home guards, police, troops and other defenders of British soil. Eddy wasn't convinced. He had to see for himself. And one night he traveled 150 miles with a friend through England asking dozens of questions— and even visiting an anti-aircraft sta- tion—without getting a single challenge. Eddy's in Russia now where even a fat man can get cold, but the bets are that not even the sub-zero weather can freeze the Gilmore humor. Allen Follows Fleet For two years 33-year-old Larry Al- len of Mount Savage, Md., lived a charmed life riding the blue waters of the Mediterranean with the British fleet—but his luck almost played out a few days ago when he was wounded by a German bomb. They call Larry the “Darling of the Mediterranean Fleet” and when all the returns are in the story of Larry Al- len will be a volume by itself, for no other single war correspondent has watched the navhl warfare that Larry has seen. He saw the British shell Tripoll. He wes aboard a flagship when the fleet knocked a hole in Mussolini’s seapower by sinking three Italian warships in a day-long battle, He rode with the Brit- ish when they slipped past the heel of the Italian boot into the Adriatic and battered Valona in one of the most dar- ing naval adventures of the war. ¢+ Allen was on hand for thé Bardia siege which lasted for 18 days and he was aboard the Illustrious as she took. a terrific battering from the Nazi and Italian bombers. Wherever the fleet went, Allen was there. “This is the toughest in the world,” he once said, and told how it feels to watch a bombing attack on a battleship: “Now I lie flat on the deck and hope bombs won't come tap close. I cannot imagine any greater hell on earth than when the thousand-pound bombs hit the warship. My heart is beating like a heavy pendulum. ... " With Cassidy and O’Sullivan And there are many others ... Jd. Reilly O'Sullivan, who hails from Kan- sas City, seems to attract war like a magnet. . He was in Amsterdam when the Germans inveded the low- lands. . . . He went %o Budapest in time to see the Balkans aflame. . . . He ducked into Greece and helped write the story of Greece's fall. . . . And now he's in Ankara, another troubled spot. A Harvard vocational adviser told Henry C. Cassidy, 32-year-old Bos- tonian, that he was “too bashful” to be a newspaperman and advised him to take up a teaching career. . . . But Cassidy’'s the Associated Press veteran covering the Russian campaign. . . . He took the assignment after watehing France fall. . . . Lochner in German “Jug” One day last month a message came from Berlin over the Associated Press printer in Bern, Switzerland, saying: “We're being jugged. Gotta go now. Goodby.” It meant that Louis Lochner, dean of the Assoclated Press’ European Staff, and his men were being taken into cus- tody by the Germans pending an ex- Godfrey H. P. Anderson. change of nationals. The same thing had happened to correspondents in Rome, Tokio, 8hanghai and Saigon. Up in the hills of Massachusetts near the little town of Methuen lies the grave of Eddie Neil. Eddle was a big, blond, laughing giant of a man with a lusty love for life and the things that make it tick. He was one of the best known sports writers in the Nation—but that wasn't enough for Eddie. He wanted to be & war cor- respondent. He went to Ethiopia to see Signor Mussolini’s legions conquer the black tribes of the Lion of Judah. When the Spanish Civil War began he went to Spain. Wherever the action was heav- iest, Eddie was likely to be there. On the last day of 1937 a shell ex- ploded near his car. It was war's end for Eddie Neil—but the story he started in the desolate hills of Ethiopia Is still being written. It’s Open House for Men in Uniform By Amy Porter. ‘Wide World News. NEW YORK, Jan. 3—Never tell this o the admiral, but here’s what happened the other day: Two sailors went into 99 Park ave- nue, headquarters for the New York City Defense Recreation Committee, lugging three weighty objects—two big buckets and a good-sized market bas- ket, which they carried between them. One of them addressed the girl at the information desk: “will you please invite all the host- esses on duty today to come into the clubroom in 10 minutes? Come yourself and don’t forget to ask Betty.” The hostesses went along and found a tasty feast spread out on a table—a beautiful roast beef, a huge mound of potato salad. a gallon of coffee, pickles, bread and whatnot, with paper plates, cups, forks and spoons to match. Hostess Betty said, “It's wonderful, boys, but not in the rule book. Don't you know we're supposed to entertain you?” One sailor—let’s call him Jake, so the admiral won't find out his real name— placed his hand on his heart and orated: “Betty, the last time we were here on leave you fed us and gave us theater tickets. You danced with us and found us a room in a good hotel at a price we could pay. You listened to us talk. We thought you looked pale from do- ing so much for us. “So this one is on us. Eat hearty. Roast beef will put roses in your cheeks.” The girls ate heartily and never asked the question that hung in the air: “Where did all this food come from, scilors’ pay being what it is?” The next night and the next the sailors repeated their offering, with m-re and even better food. On the last night of leave Jake con- fessed—he was a chef, with easy access to Navy food supplies. He and his shipmates had formed a sort of bucket brigade, passing bundles and buckets of food from hand to hand until they got it safely smuggled from ship to shore. A [ “Maybe they shouldn't have done it,” said Betty, “but it was sweet of them and it made us love the Navy all the more.” - That's how it is at the recreation clubhouse. The people in charge there have a real affection for service men— and vice versa. Not the slightest whiff of “case worker” atmosphere lingers about the place. Instead smiling young women put life into the committee slogan: “New York Is a Friendly Town.” This committee, like many others in big cities throughout the country, out- did itself for the holidays. The man in uniform beloved at anytime, at holiday time is king. He hardly checks in at 99 Park be- fore he hears: “Which show would you like to see tonight? A musical? A play? We can give you two tickets to almost any- thing in town. What's that, you pre- fer 'opera? Opera it is.” “There’s a dance Tuesday night— Powers models are giving it. Want to go? What do they look like? They look wonderful. Youll like them.” “You're afraid you can't dance well enough? That's easy. Take a few les- sons at Arthur Murray’s. No, no charge.” “Your mother's in town? Here are tickets for a soup-to-nuts meal for you and her at the Waldorf.” Mrs, Julius Ochs Adler, committee co-chairman, says, “We do our best to make the boys on leave have a good time, and all of New York helps us— hotels, theaters, restaurants, individ- uals. New York really is a friendly town.” Since July 7, 485000 men have stopped at committee headquarters— and not one has left empty-handed. At present, 5000 men troop through 99 Park each day. For the holidays, the committee sur- veyed all possibilities for sports, meals, music, dancing, hotel accommodations. They gathered up about 50,000 free tickets to the best shows in town. “It gives these boys a great kick to see 8 Broadway show,” said Mrs. Adler. “About 35 per cent—including many boys from New York—never have seen a stage show before.” The committee makes no rules at all for service men. Not a single “don’t” sign disfigures the clubhouse walls. Service men can smoke where they please, put their feet on the table. They can even play the clubhouse juke box— oh, happiness!|—without putting a nicke] in the slot. But for volunteer hostesses, the girls the boys date at committee dances, there are several rules. To get her name on the list of 2,000 hostesses, s girl must be 31 or over, an American citizen, with two character references. For good measure the girls are gen- erally good looking, their average height is 8 feet 2; average weight 115 to 120; average disposition, fine. Danger and hardships follow the war correspondents wherever they go to cover the war raging today in Europe, Africa and the Pacific. Artist Clayton Knight has pictured here the Azis bombing attack on the British aircraft carrier Illustrious, which Associated Press Correspondent Larry Allen watched from the deck while, he said, his heart was “beating like a heavy pendulum.” Key to Chinese Pronunciation By J. D. White. Wide World News. PEIPING, North China.—Do you beat your wife when she asks you how to pronounce Shihchiechwang or Hu Shih? Then you may be glad to know that the common or garden variety of American can learn to pronounce Chi- nese names and live to tell the story. Pronouncing Chinese is freally quite simple. It just seems so hard to pro- nounce because foreigners have saddled the Chinese language with one of the world's wackiest systems of spelling. If your friends leugh when you sit down to pronounce a Chinese name, fol- low our easy method (this is it) and surprise them by rattling off words like Peiping, Tzehsien and Chengchow. ‘Want to try? Let's go. To begin with, here’s the background: Chinese was never designed to be writ- ten with an alphabet. It is written in pictographs, each representing an idea expressed verbally by an intect syllable. The idea of breaking these syllables down into consonants and vowels is en- tirely foreign and unnatural, which is why foreigners got into such deep water when they tried to spell Chinese words out. At first the confusion was appalling. There were as many systems of spell- ing as there were foreigners trying to spell Chinese words. Finally Sir Thomes Wade, famous British chief of the Chinese maritime customs, set up a system of spelling which is most generally used today. System Most Used If you think the Wade system fis eockeyed, you ought to see some that it replaced. And it is at least fairly con- sistent. Now, then, first we take the con- sonants. Get a grip on yourself or the consonants may take you first. Sir Thomas found & number of initial consonant sounds in Chinese which were not as “hard” as their nearest equivalent in English or European tongues. For instance, a D was really halfway between a T and a D. He therefore threw out altogether the hard initial consonants of G, D, B, and J. They do not appear in his alphabet at Marine F. J. Vernon, Sailor Leo T. Sienkiewicz and Soldier James Battaglia (left to right) receive free theater tickets from volunteer workers Miss Katharine Alexander (left) and Mrs. Buchten Kirk at the headquarters for the New York City D efense Recreation Committee. A ell. Instead he designated their sub- sounds in Chinese by K, T, P, and CH, respectfully. Thus Kan in Chinese is pronounced Gahn; TI is pronounced Dee; PU is pronounced Boo (we're coming to the vowels shortly, take it easy) and Chi is pronounced, believe it or ndt, Jee. What, you ask, will become of the consonants in Chinese which - sound like K, T, P, and CH? Well, these sounds are softer in Chi- nese and are more strongly aspirated (kindly note how we bandy these tech- nical terms around) so Sir Thomes fixed them up with apostrophes. Thus, K'an in Chinese is pronounced Kahn; T'1 is pronounced Tee; P'U is pronounced Poo, and Ch'i is pronounced Chee. That apostrophe is important. Un- fortunately it is a nuisance to typeset- ters, who frequently omit it. Let us now turn, temporarily, to the vowels. Italian values are given to A, I, and U. Therefore A is not the long or short A of English, but becomes AH. Wang, for instance, never rhymes with Bang or Clang. It's Wahng, and your friend Mr. Wang will be eternally appreciative if you get it right—that is, if he doesn't die of surprise. And Mr. Chang pro- nounces his name Jahng. (Remember that business about CH?) LI, correspondingly, comes out Lee when vou spell it in an American way; and Lung, the word for Dragon, never rhymes with Bung (as in barrel) but is pronounced Loong. Here's the Chinese vowel situation in & nutshell: A sounds like AH; Wang (King) is pronounced Wahng. E sounds like UH; Fen (cent) is pro- nounced Fun. 1 sounds like EE; Li (plum) is pro- nounced Lee. O sounds like OA; Wo (I, me) is pro- nounced Woah. U sounds like OO; Wu (five) is pro- nounced Woo. OW sounds like O; Chow seat) pronounced Jo. OU is the same as OW. IH sounds like IR; Shih (scholar) is pronounced Shirth. Then there are the diphthongs, or compound vowels, a merry lot if there ever was one. In the Wade version of Chinese there are EI, Al, IE, IA, UE, and AO. ERis never pronounced like the Ger- man EI, but has the value of a long A in English. Thus Pei, the word mean- ing North, is pronounced Bay. AT has the value of long I in English, so Lai rhymes with My. IE occurs. in such words as Tien (heaven) which is pronounced approxi- mately as T'ven. The E here has the value of a short E in English. IA has roughly the sound of Eeah, or Yah, so that Generalissimo Chiang Kai«- shek is pronounced Jeeahng Kye-shek. The E in Shek in this case is a normal English short E as in Pet, but that is only because the Generalissimo is a Southerner and the victim of both Wade and another system of spelling. UE is not a very common diphthong, but you run into it occasionally in such names as Chang Hsueh-Liang, the young Marshal of Manchuria. His name is properly pronounced Jahng Shooeh-Leeahng. Notice the way that Hsueth is spelled. HS, instead of SH, is just another of Sir Thomas' bright ideas. (county Jobs for Ex-Soldiers By Irving Perlmeter. ‘Wide World News. ‘The Nation was taking out $5,000,000,- 000 of insurance today to make sure Johnny has a job when he comes home from the Army. It's not really down in black and white, but everywhere from Sauk Cen- ter, Minn., to New York City, from Vir- ginia to California, governmental agencies—cities, counties, school dis- tricts, States and the Federal Govern- ment—are preparing a backlog of work to be done by them after the war. In Alabema, it's a series of State of- fice buildings. Detroit has some impor- tant street repaving on the list, Dallas an auditorium, Omaha & school build- ing, Sacramento a flock of projects. The idea is just catching on, but officials who are working overtime to put it across look for & “shelf” of $5,000,000,000 worth of needed public works ready for exe- cution when the war is over. And by having these projects ready, they mean that the plans and detailed specifications should be all drawn, that sites be determined, that the money should be in the bank, if possible. For instance, the Federal Administration is behind & bill pending in Congress to appropriate $50,000000 to do the blueprints, although it hopes the States and municipalities will pay for the ac- tual construction themselves. ' ‘The men doing these things remem- ber the disconsolate soldiers who looked in vain for jobs in 1919. They also re- member the hasty made-work projects of the W. P. A. in its early days. One of them said, “There is no limit to the work the Nation rezlly needs to have done. If we plan, we'll never go back to leaf-raking.” This theory of doing right by the men in the armed forces is just the more obvious part of what's going on. Saving materials and labor for defense industry is also important. Stemming inflation is another reason. The Federal Government, under the leadership of Budget Director Harold D. Smith, is fostering the movement, ) but the individual States and communi- ties are doing it on their own initiative. Politics is expected to defeat the idea here and there, but a large number of State and local governments are today putting millions of dollars in the bank for the coming rainy day, although the easy way to please the taxpayers would be to cut taxes. Official reports show the State of California recently beat off a tax-reduction move in spite of a $50,000,000 surplus. The State of Vir- ginia made a series of long-range ap- propriations to make sure a $6,000,000 surplus is kept for the purpose. New York State has adopted enabling legis- lation to make it legal for its cities to eccumulate such reserves. Salting this money away and keeping tax rates up is designed to help keep down the amount of money in circula- tion which might cause inflation. In- flation is high prices. High prices come only when people have a lot of money to bid higher and higher for the things they want. That's why, defying political conse- quences, the council of State govern=- ments end the conference of governors recently sent to all State and local gov- ernments this message: “Where tax rate reductions are considered it is im- portant to weigh the consequences that such a further release of purchasing power will have upon prices.” These organizations have no connec- tion with the Federal Government, but the Washington people are playing on the same team. New postoffices are out for the duration. Only defense proj- ects or other projects already in process of construction are being encouraged. In addition the Federal Works Agency and National Resources Planning Board have sent 500 engineers and other ex- perts out to help the cities and States prepare their long-range plans. “It is this consistent action by all governments—Federal, State and local”— said Budget Director Smith, “which I hope will successfully counteract the forces of unemployment and deflation in the post-defense period.” A