World War II Chronicle: June 22, 1943
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Tough news for the last-place St. Louis Browns today: not only are star shortstop Vern Stephens and first baseman George McQuinn out with injuries, they could be putting on a uniform for Uncle Sam very soon. McQuinn, whom we wrote about on Saturday, is boarding a train for Arlington, Va. to be inducted into the Armed Forces. Stephens is about to undergo a medical examination to determine his suitability for service…
Rioting in Detroit is now so bad that the baseball game between the Tigers and the Cleveland Indians was postponed (page two). 23 people have died and 700 are injured in the violence so far. The report states that our troops were ordered to “fix your bayonets, load your guns and don’t take anything from anybody.”
What a difference between then and now, right? We deploy the National Guard to places like St. Louis, Mo. or Washington, D.C. and they are allowed to do little to stop the mob. It would be hard to convince someone in 1943 that in just a few decades American society would decay to the point that racial division, crime, and chaos served the Democrat Party’s political interests. Many people could see back then that Franklin D. Roosevelt was a tyrant, but he was at least on our side and he wanted to keep Detroit and its factories from becoming a combat zone. The president had accumulated near-dictatorial power, which meant that by the time his authority had trickled down through the chain of command that officers felt confident that they could send out their men with bayonets and loaded weapons. Hell, our chain of command has become so emasculated that officers send American units on patrol with unloaded weapons in war zones…
George Fielding Eliot writes about how the Germans are faring on the Eastern Front on the two-year anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union (page 10)… Sports starts on page 16… Grantland Rice interviews a former British soccer player who is now serving in the military about how important sports was to the United Kingdom on page 17…
Czechoslovakian ace Karel M. Kuttelwascher is featured on page 21. He originally flew for the Czech Air Force until it was dissolved by the invading Germans. He joined the French Air Force and flew for them until they too folded to Germany. Kuttelwascher claims 18 official victories and is now touring American air bases to discuss “intruder” tactics. He is one of the RAF’s most successful night fighters, despite not having flown with radar.
Roving Reporter by Ernie Pyle
(One of a series on a 13,000-mile flight made before Tunisia fell).
SOMEWHERE IN NORTH AFRICA — There wasn’t any real reason for me to go to the Belgian Congo, since we have only a handful of troops in that area now, but when I got to a spot only 1500 miles away, I said to myself, “Gee I hate to be this close and not see the Congo.”
So I just got in a plane and flew an extra 3000 miles and saw the Congo. Just as I had expected, the Congo looks like a river, that being what it is. It is wide and pretty muddy. It looks a good bit like the Mississippi, only it’s darker. It didn’t look either very dangerous or very romantic where I saw it.
I stayed down there for a week. We planned to take a launch and go upriver about a hundred miles to see some flora and fauna, but at the last minute the launch broke down and we didn’t get to go. But I did ride across the Congo twice in a motorboat, and I saw the mast out of Stanley’s ship which they have planted on the shore at Leopoldville. We spent ten minutes walking around and around the mast, looking at it from a sense of duty, but it was just another mast to me.
Leopoldville was a big surprise. It expected to find just a large village with a few tin-roofed trading posts, such as you see in tropical movies. But actually “Leo” is a beautiful city of 50,000. It has shipyards, big river docks, and a modern textile factory with 4000 workers. It has 3,00 white inhabitants and scores of homes as beautiful as you would find in Pasadena. Its streets are of macadam. It has fine big stores in buildings of brick and stone and concrete. Huge trees like maples line the streets. There are many parks, and lovely statues.
There are movies and a zoo and a big tropical museum. Bougainvilleas and other flowers of all kinds splash the city with color. People sit and drink in sidewalk cafes. Autos dash along the streets at astonishing speed. You are suddenly amazed to see so many white women again.
A big ell-shaped hotel sits in the center of town, with its lovely garden right on the river bank. You could sit in your room at the hotel and throw an inkbottle out of the window and it would go kerplunk right into the Congo.
The city is always referred to by the shortened term “Leo,” just as Elizabethville is almost always called “Eville.”
The very words Belgian Congo have always suggested the most insufferable kind of tropics, where white people sit and rot with the heat. Yet when I was there it was not as hot as Washington in summertime, and during half of my week it was almost chilly, with frequent cloudbursting rains.
If you are careful it need not be an especially unhealthy place, although the climate is energy-sapping and people work with probably half of their normal efficiency.
The war seems pretty far away at Leo. The Belgian Congo did send an army up to help the British retake Ethiopia, and Congo troops were with General Jacques LeClerc’s army when it marched up from Lake Chad, and the Congo is producing to the limit of its natural resources — tin, rubber, cotton and other goods — for the war effort. But still the war seems pretty far away.
They don’t ration gasoline or tires in Leo. I saw some new-looking autos there. There is plenty to eat. There is liquor to drink. The stores have nearly everything you want. And all the physical labor is still done by natives.
The Belgian people have been grand to our troops, inviting them into their homes, and turning over to them the one big club in town. But the Belgians are strict about their women, and a soldier can’t have a date unless the whole family sits around. And if it gets to the point where you are trusted alone with a girl, then you’re practically married.
At one time there were quite a lot of American soldiers in Leo, but the need for them has ceased and they have moved out. When I was there about three dozen men were living in a camp built to hold thousands. It was like living with a couple of friends in the Empire State building.
They don’t ration gasoline or tires nor jeeps, so for personal transportation they gave me a two-and-a-half-ton truck, in which I noisily whisked back and forth between the camp and the town and was the cynosure of all eyes, I assure you.
Evening star. (Washington, D.C.), 22 June 1943. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1943-06-22/ed-1/