Evening Star Newspaper, February 6, 1942, Page 11

HOW JAPS THREATEN BURMA ROAD—The British admit Jap invaders of Burma have crossed Salween River above con- quered Moulmein in thrust apparently aimed at Thaton (arrow 1) to cut off British defenders of Martaban. Meanwhile, Axis sources claimed their planes had destroyed a station at Toungoo (arrow 2) and below Mandalay (arrow 3) had cut railway which leads to Burma road. British must retain control of shipping routes in Gulf of Martaban (A) to continue aid to China via the Burma road. —A. P. Wirephoto. Greatest Army Peril Is Venereal Disease, Parran Tells House Rate Increase Alarming, Many Local Situations Bad, He Asserts By the Associated Press. Surg. Gen. Thomas J. Parran to- day listed venereal disease as still the greatest cause of non-effective- | ness in the Army, and declared tol- | eration of commercialized prostitu- | tion “has been traditional in the| South, the Southwest and the West Coast.” | He described it as the second greatest cause of nun-eflemveness; in the Nayy, and reported also that “in any boom town, with prosper- ous war industries, the venereal dis- ease rate also is increasing at a very | alarming rate, to a very sl;rmmg‘ degree.” The testimony of the veteran cam- ; paigner against the scourges of syphilis and .gonorrhea was made | public by the House Appropriations | Committee in sending to the floor & $160,500,611 deficiency lppl’oprilnonI bil} 1 Dr. Parran testified in behalf of & $2,500,000 request to further the work of the Public Health Service's | venereal disease division. 47,000 Per Million. " He said that under the Selective Service Att, physicians had found | 47,000 men suffering from -syphilis of every million examined. | “We know,” he added, “that these 47,000 men got their syphilis from some other source in the civilian population. Bexperience shows that for every Applicanis Found fo two persons infected and discovered, approximately three are in the population infected, but do not shov; | Have police Records up for treatment. Therefore, think we are safe in assuming at | least one other female is in the pop- ulation for every one of these males | whom we discover. Thus, for every | million men examined, ae find ap- proximately 90,000 people with syphilis.” He said the Army rate for 1941,| py tne Associated Press. despite the fact that no one was inducted who was found suffering from the disease, was about 40 per thousand—approximately half what it was in the World War—but said thta he was no more satisfied with the reduction “than I would be sat- isfied if the typhoid fever now were half what the typhoid fever rate was in the Spanish War.” A National Problem. “The disease is of importance, both from the standpoint of man- power on the production line as well as from the standpoint of men | in the Army,” Dr. Parran said. “It is a national problem.” He cited more than a dozen ex- amples of the prevalence of pros- titution. At Fayetteville, N. C., he said, “they had a prostitute popula- tion that is reported to have grown last year from around 200 women to around 4,000 to 5.000." “Prostitution,” he said, “became an expanded war industry in that area. The local authorities were given strong orders by the com- manding officer at Fort Bragg to clean-up by the 1st of January. It is a little early to say just how effective that action may be.” Discussing his_efforts to stamp | out the disease through clinics and education in co-operation with the States, he said' the Army, Navy and Federal Security Agency were “putting pressure” on non-co-op- erative communities regarded as *hot spots.” " Locations Named. “Progress,” he reported, “has been made in a number of towns: Until recently Bremerton, Wash., had a red-light district. * * * Seattle has a bad reputation. The condi- tions relative to prostitution there were apparently very bad. But more recently they have taken action in closing up those places. “Tacoma, Wash., took action last August in closing up its houses of prostitution. Last year the situa- tion at Salinas, Calif,, was rather bad, as was also the area around Mare Island. Up until last month the conditions at San Diego were particularly bad until the naval commandant gave orders that some- thing had to be done about it.” San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Houston and other Texas cities h-n‘\ae cleaned up bad situations, he " | fighter pilot likened the destruction Rangoon (Continued Prom First Page.) ualties, and British guns pounding the Japanese-held Paan area farther north. The Japanese attacked Rangoon with six waves totaling 44 planes by | moonlight and ran into the full fury | of the defense fighters when they came back at 9:30 am. for a daylight | try at the big port for the Burma | ; road to China. | | The heavy toll of the raiders was | taken by the hard-hitting American and British flyers only 24 hours after they scored heavily in an offensive smash of their own at Japanese po- sitions along the Salween River bat- tlefront. Destruction Like Coventry. In that attack the Allied bombers gave Japanese-held Paan such a | ruinous bombing that a Texas-born to that at Coventry. (A Japanese broadcast claimed that seven British and American’ planes—Spitfires and Curtiss P- 40's—were shot down in the day- light attack on Rangoon Airport.) Attack Renewed in Morning. In the air attack on Rangoon, six | waves of bombers struck at the city by moonlight and another wave at- tacked at 9:30 am. Fires were set in one suburban | residential district and heavy ex- plosions were heard to the north in| the night raids on Rangoon. Unofficially, R. A. F. fighters were reported to have driven off one wave of the night attackers, forc- ing them to jettison their bombs. One of the raiders was reported probably destroyed, since observers saw it pursued by a fighter and then saw a column of flame plunge east- ward in the moonlight. In the daylight raid, anti-aircraft guns got another Japanese plane as fighters rose to the defense. % of F%flob F. B. |. Head Discloses Bureau Gets 35,810 Fingerprints Daily | More than 4 per cent of the per- | sons who apply for Government | positions have police records. |~ J. Edgar Hoover, director of the | Federal Bureau of Investigation, made that disclosure to the House Appropriations Committee during | hearings on the first deficiency supply bill, reported today. Mr. Hoover said that of 499,085 | sets of fingerprints received from the Civil Service Commission last year, 22,466 were identified as from persons having previous police rec- ords. | “Those persons were applying for positions in the United States Gov- ernment service,” he told the com- mittee, “and if the service of the identification division had not been available, it «is possible that many persons unfit for Government ser- vice would have obtained such em- ployment.” Not Advised of Disposition. Mr. Hoover said he did not know whether any of them had received Government employment, since the Civil Service Commission did not advise him what final disposition | was made of the cases, most of | which he said involved miinor of- | fenses. Since the outbreak of war, Mr. Hoover said. an average of over 35,810 sets of fingerprints is received daily by the bureau, and on one day alone, January 26, over 50,000 came in. They stem from many sources, he explained, including the Army, the Navy, the civillan defense or- ganizations. plants handling defense contracts, the Civil Service Commis- sion and local law enforcement agencies. On January1 of this year. he said, the bureau had on fille 32308634 sets of fingerprints, an increase of over 17,000,000 in one year. In 1941 the bureau identified 696,432 persons as having criminal records. Pearl Harbor Dead Identified. Through the bureau's files, Mr. Hoover declared, some of the un- known dead in the Pearl Harbor | attack last December 7 have been identified. To date, Mr. Hoover said, the bureau has apprehended 1314 Ger- man ewemy aliens, 252 Italian enemy aliens and 1601 Japanese enemy aliens. Last year it obtained con- victions in 974 per cent of the criminal cases it handled for trial. ,‘. THE EVENING STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1942. 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