As America commemorates the two-year anniversary of the Japanese attack on Oahu, the Iowa-class “super” battleship USS Wisconsin was launched today at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. She costs a whopping $90 million, but accounting for 80 years of inflation that means $1.5 billion in 2023 dollars. Just 40 years ago Wisconsin would have cost a mere $500 million.
Why does the writer call it a super battleship? Look at this photo from 1944 of Wisconsin tied next to USS Oklahoma.
USS Wisconsin tied up outboard of the hulk of USS Oklahoma, at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, 11 November 1944. Note: anti-torpedo netting outboard of the ships.
An unidentified aide to Gen. Douglas MacArthur claims that a mainland invasion of Japan won’t be necessary. Given how fanatical the Japanese are, and their ability to concentrate their defenses as the Allies push Japan back that is a pretty bold statement. Their combat planes are outmatched and our submarines are taking a heavy toll on their merchant fleet, but the Japanese think very differently than Americans. Assuming nothing changes, like some new technology or some tide-turning battle, we can certainly put an end to their empire. But vanquishing a nation that has an incredible will to fight is entirely another.
George Fielding Eliot discusses the Teheran Conference on page eight and calls for a postwar United Nations. I wonder what he would think of what twisted and evil people did to the United Nations… Sports begin on page 12. On the following page we learn that former Southern Methodist University quarterback and captain John F. Sprague was killed in action on Italy. Captain Sprague was among the first soldiers to hit the beach at Salerno and earned the Silver Star for gallantry by exposing himself to enemy machinegun fire so friendly forces could locate and destroy the German guns. Sprague’s Mustangs went undefeated in 1935, beating out Slingin’ Sammy Baugh and Texas Christian University to earn a trip to the Rose Bowl1SMU went 13-0, outscoring opponents 288-39 and were declared national champions, but lost to Stanford in the 1936 Rose Bowl.
Roving Reporter by Ernie Pyle
ALLIED HEADQUARTERS, ALGIERS, Dec. 7 — All along the endless American ferry network that stretches in a dozen entwining lines around the globe there is one main worry obsessing our troops. And that is they feel they are not doing enough to help win the war.
At these posts, so far from enemy action, life becomes pleasantly routined and monotonous, and finally a sense of frustration sets in. The men live in usually excellent permanent quarters. They have good food and all the physical comforts — and nothing ever happens. Gradually they get a feeling of backwash.
They’re ashamed of fighting the war so comfortably and so many thousands of miles from danger. They are worrying about facing the homefolks after the war, and saying they served through the war in a place where they bathed every day, slept on mattresses and never missed a meal.
There’s a saying all along the route of the Air Transport Command which expresses their feelings about being where they are.
The saying goes, “Take down your Service Flag, mother, your boys is in the ATC.”
In one camp the boys felt this so keenly that the editor of the camp newspaper asked me if I could say something to sort of reassure them that they really were contributing their share. And I could say so honestly. Manning these fields that hand our flow of bombers and fighters on toward the combat zone is just as vital as manning a frontline field. Without it, the planes would never get there.
Soldiers aren’t sent; they aren’t asked. It’s not these boy’s choice or fault they happen to be where they are. And as for what the people at home think, I’ve found they don’t really distinguish much between frontline and some remote area. I’ve known soldiers stationed for a year in Morocco, nearly a thousand miles from the fighting, whose parents and friends thought they daily were bleeding and dying.
Just so long as you’re overseas the folks at home give you all the credit. Somebody has to man these remote outposts and it’s just the fall of the cards that brought some soldiers there instead of to the front lines. I see nothing shameful about living well as long as you’re not depriving somebody else. I see no virtue in suffering unless it helps somebody else.
Now and then you get a groucher who complains bitterly about the places he is, how tough life is there and how he’d like to be back home. One officer along the way said when he got a fellow like that, he just assigned him a job unloading hospital planes bringing wounded back from Africa, and the fellow soon was cured.
Other boys themselves usually shut up a groucher pretty quickly for it is their consensus that fighting monotony and sometimes malaria is still better than fighting bullets and bombs. And that although they’d rather be at the front, they’re actually mighty lucky to be where they are and should be grateful even though a little ashamed.
The mere fact that this worry and sense of shame is so universal throughout the ferry fields seems to be unarguable proof that the average American soldier is still an all right guy.
Actually, in many parts of the world where our troops are stationed, malaria is almost as great an enemy as the Germans or Japs. The wounded will not be the only aftermath of the war. Scores of thousands of our men will return home to be sick for years from disease picked up despite all medical precautions in these steaming, filthy corners of the globe.
On this trip we came into one field in the American tropics at the tall end of a malaria scourge. For some reason it has been much worse this fall than the previous year. Fifty-five per cent of the personnel had been down with malaria. Tropical Africa is swarming with medical sanitary specialists sent over from America to see it doesn’t happen again next year.
No the central African coast, soldiers who have been overseas a year are now getting 10-day furloughs. They are flown to rest camps in the north. It isn’t so much that they need rest as a change from the monotony. The rest camps are lovely places, but dull.
What the average American soldier wants on leave is female companionship and a little bottled stimulation, both of which are very limited in these parts. I’ve heard lots of soldiers overseas say they would rather not have a furlough or go to a rest camp if by not going they could get home that much sooner.
Evening star. (Washington, D.C.), 7 December 1943. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1943-12-07/ed-1/
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SMU went 13-0, outscoring opponents 288-39 and were declared national champions, but lost to Stanford in the 1936 Rose Bowl
