The spring of 1943 was full of bad news from the Battle of the Atlantic, a conflict that German Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was determined to fight to the finish. In 1942, 7.8 million tons had been sunk on the high seas, just a little less than the 8 million tons built in American shipyards. The submarine “wolf packs” were restricted now to the so-called Atlantic gap as air cover spread over the ocean. In March large convoys were heavily mauled, but in April Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox announced a sudden fall in sinkings. In May only 160,000 tons of shipping was lost at sea while forty-one German submarines were sunk. Thanks to breaking the German naval codes, the use of long-range aircraft, advanced new radar equipment and naval support groups, the submarine threat was finally defeated. At the end of May Dönitz admitted defeat and withdrew his force. The same month the operation of Allied submarines and aircraft against Axis shipping in the Mediterranean starved Axis forces in Tunisia of resources and oil. The naval war on all fronts had gone the Allied way.
The struggle in North Africa had nevertheless been longer and tougher than expected. For American forces it was a harsh learning environment as they pressed across Northwest Africa toward Tunis. On February 20 Rommel inflicted a sharp blow at the Kasserine Pass, but was unable to exploit the breakthrough once British and American reinforcements arrived. The Times observed that American soldiers had to learn in order to survive. “The Doughboy,” ran one headline, “is, in Turn, Cocky, Scared, Dazed, Damn Mad and Effective.” By mid-April Axis forces were bottled up and, on May 13, 240,000 German and Italian forces surrendered, a larger number than had been captured at Stalingrad. Far away from the action, American forces stationed in the Aleutian Islands began the difficult task, in appalling conditions, of dislodging the small Japanese force from the island of Attu. This was indeed war on all fronts.
The long years of war took their toll on domestic peace. In America there were grumbles about rationing. In April the National Negro Congress called for an end to race discrimination and the right of blacks to be hired for any job. In early May a major strike for higher wages was called in American coal and anthracite mines. The strike rocked the Roosevelt administration, and the president himself intervened to get the men back to work, while hard-liners in Congress demanded tough legislation against the right to strike in wartime.
In India the political challenge from Gandhi reached a new crisis. He went on a prolonged fast to protest his imprisonment and the British rejection of self-rule. The Times followed the drama closely. Readers were warned that “India Faces Violence If Gandhi Dies,” which was almost certainly the case. Gandhi gave up his fast in early March but the struggle for independence continued to challenge the British Empire’s war effort in Asia.
Resistance was also growing in German-controlled Europe, where efforts to recruit forced labor and the expropriation of property and artwork propelled more Europeans toward active opposition. On May 2 The Times announced that the Norwegian Norsk Hydro plant, which produced “heavy water” used in nuclear development programs, had been successfully sabotaged. The raid had taken place on February 27 and 28, but the details could not be revealed. The Times did suggest that the Germans were not yet at a stage to produce a weapon of “devastating power,” a judgment that was closer to the truth then they could have hoped.
FEBRUARY 1, 1943
Doenitz Pledges U-Boat Warfare Backed by Total Nazi Sea Power
By The Associated Press.
LONDON, Jan. 31—Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, Nazi Germany’s wily submarine warfare wizard, assumed command of the German Navy today with the prompt declaration that every ounce of German sea power was to be thrown into the submarine war against the Allies.
Raising his new Commander in Chief’s flag—a black cross on a white field—over his headquarters, Admiral Doenitz was quoted by the German radio in a broadcast recorded by The Associated Press as saying:
“I will put the entire concentrated strength of the navy into the submarine war, which will be waged with still greater vigor and determination than hitherto.
“The entire German Navy will henceforth be put into the service of inexorable U-boat warfare.
The German Navy will fight to a finish.”
The declaration was regarded here as a substantiation of views expressed previously that Admiral Doenitz’s appointment yesterday as successor to Grand Admiral Erich Raeder was a forecast of a greatly intensified U-boat campaign that already is causing marked concern in Allied war councils.
Stockholm dispatches said the elevation of Admiral Doenitz, originator of the “wolf pack” method of U-boat fighting, was regarded by observers there as a sign that Reichsfuehrer Hitler was pinning all his hopes of winning the war on the submarine weapon. Admiral Raeder, it was reported, would become a sort of honorary “first adviser on naval affairs” to Herr Hitler.
Even as Admiral Doenitz was assuming command, the German radio today announced, without verification from Allied sources, the sinking of 450,000 tons of Allied shipping in January. Included in this claim were nine Allied merchant ships of 45,000 tons which the German High Command said today had just been sunk in the North Atlantic, Arctic and Mediterranean.
Allied sources have estimated that the Germans have anywhere from 300 to 700 submarines available for duty, a third of which might be on the hunt at any one time.
FEBRUARY 2, 1943
YOUNG GIRLS FOUND MENACE TO TROOPS
Outnumber Prostitutes 4–1 in Spreading Venereal Disease, Health Officers Say
Girls of teen age picked up in this area by service men outnumber professional prostitutes by a ratio of 4 to 1 as spreaders of venereal diseases among our armed forces, a conference on wartime control of venereal disease was informed yesterday by representatives of the Army, Navy and the United States Public Health Service.
The meeting, held at the Hotel Astor, was one of three simultaneous sessions of the eleventh regional conference on social hygiene under the auspices of the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association’s Social Hygiene Committee and 116 other sponsoring organizations. The conference was attended by nearly 1,000 representatives of the Army, Navy, Public Health Service, New York State and City Departments of Health and by doctors, nurses, magistrates, and educational and social workers from the metropolitan area.
The annual meeting and conference on tuberculosis of the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association was also held yesterday at the Astor, jointly with the Tuberculosis Sanatorium Conference of metropolitan New York. All the various groups attending the sessions met jointly at a luncheon session.
‘LOCAL TALENT’ IS BLAMED
“In the present war,” said Dr. Robert E. Heering, past assistant surgeon, Public Health Service. “We find that local talent—so-called charity girls or ‘chip-pies’—is figuring more and more prominently in the spread of venereal diseases. This prominence is due in part, at least, to the fact that many communities, having finally come to the realization of their responsibilities, have made it uncomfortable for commercial prostitution, with the result that relatively fewer infections are acquired from this source.
“Professor John H. Stokes of the University of Pennsylvania has recently reported a loosening up of sex standards, citing as evidence a shift of the infection source from professional prostitute to casual.”
Quoting Professor Stokes, Dr. Heering continued:
“We find the girl-friend or pick-up performing her uncertain offices without cost, which confounds the police attack on prostitution; and we find among women and girls of the most unexpected types an almost avid desire to show the boys a good time.
“We are concentrating troops overwhelmingly in the South, in areas where both white and colored races have a phenomenally high incidence of venereal disease. The color-line is thinning, drawing on the Negro reservoir of infection, the highest in the country. The population as well as the armed forces is on the move, and civilians, equally with the soldier and sailor, are swept into the morale-wrecking effects of the
change. And now, scientific discovery, the one-day cure of the maligned but often effective fear-producing deterrents of disease, is knocking the props out from under our platform.”
FEBRUARY 4, 1943
ROMMEL’S FORCES BATTLE AMERICANS
Marshal’s Best Armored Units Thrown Into Struggles on Central Tunisia Sector
By FRANK L. KLUCKHOHN
Wireless to The New York Times.
ON THE TUNISIAN FRONT, Feb. 2 (Delayed)—The American Air Force fought the Germans today over the expanding battlefield in Southern Tunisia as Field Marshal General Erwin Rommel succeeded in getting some of his prize armored units into the fighting in this sector.
Both at Sened Station, on the way to Maknassy, and opposite Faid Pass, American armored units and what infantry support they could muster ran into units that Marshal Rommel—“the professor” to the American troops—has been able to rush north in an attempt to break the British First Army’s communications southward and clear the way coincidentally for his own advance to the north.
German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (third from left) on the Tunisian front, 1943.
The infantry—green two days ago—succeeded today in taking the high hills east of Sened Station, giving it a commanding position there. Our tanks beyond Sened backed an estimated twenty German tanks against the mountains and captured them in heavy fighting.
But today was devoted primarily to air battles as dive-bombers raked the American positions, Messerschmitts cannonaded them and Focke-Wulfs did both. In 150 sorties, the numerically inferior planes of Major Gen. James H. Doolittle’s command sought to break up the air attack that the enemy had held in leash for such a moment.
MARETH LINE GETS MORE GUNS
Besides rushing troops and tanks to halt the American operating in the south under Lieut. Gen. Kenneth A. N. Anderson’s orders, Marshal Rommel is reportedly reinforcing the Mareth Line, which runs fifty miles between the sea and the mountains, with medium and heavy artillery—88-mm. guns and long-range 105s. Col. Gen. Dietloff von Arnim’s forces around Tunis and Bizerte also were making demonstrations southward against our communications lines as their air force cut loose after a week of inactivity on the ground. As was the case earlier on the northern front, where the British form the bulk of the force, as soon as our light fighter sweeps disappeared, the enemy swooped in, his bombs making it tough for our infantry. It was a measure of what the green American troops could take before giving it back that our infantry units could capture the hills beyond Sened today. I saw these troops dive-bombed time after time on their way to battle. Yesterday they were attacked by tanks but they counter-attacked. Today they moved forward despite their casualties.
BATTLE OF FAID DESCRIBED
For two days, American armored forces attached to General Anderson’s First Army have been battling to check the German breakthrough near Faid Pass. From an Arab rug tent camouflaged around the sides with brush I watched preparations for a counter-attack in which, as this is written, twenty-two enemy tanks have been reported destroyed against five of ours knocked out by German 88-mm. artillery.
FEBRUARY 5, 1943
MIKHAILOVITCH SET TO MOBILIZE 200,000
By C. L. SULZBERGER
Wireless to The New York Times.
LONDON, Feb. 4—General Draja Mikhailovitch, Serbian-born de Gaulle of the Balkans, has reported by wireless to the Yugoslav Government in London that he is prepared to mobilize an army of more than 200,000 men in occupied Yugoslavia and that he is now in constant touch with Greek and Bulgarian sympathizers who are prepared to act with him when the United Nations second front opens up in the Balkans, it is stated by General Mikhailovitch’s admirers in the Yugoslav Cabinet here.
This correspondent makes no pretense to verifying these claims. That is impossible. However, this is a tale of “Draja” as told by his adherents and, like previous accounts of the Partisan movement, it should be accepted as a one-sided version in a two-sided dispute.
General Mikhailovitch can be regarded as preeminently a Serb, who wants to liberate his country and restore the prewar Kingdom of Yugoslavia under the Serbian Karageorgevitch dynasty. At the time the present war started in 1939 he was charged with planning new fortifications along the Italian-German frontiers, and he recommended that it was a foolish and wasteful expenditure because in case of attack the Yugoslav Army must be withdrawn nearer to the center of the country and there try to hold, first, in the region of the Sava River.
General Mikhailovitch, then colonel, was disapproved by the General Staff of the time and withdrawn to Belgrade, where he received a relatively unimportant job. In this sense of disagreement with his superiors on the basis of military opinion, General Mikhailovitch’s career was much like that of General Charles de Gaulle. Both have been proven right by events.
While he was in Belgrade General Mikhailovitch participated in occasional secret talks held at Zemun, across the Sava from Belgrade, in which patriot officers discussed possible action in case the government knuckled under to Axis pressure. Others who took part in these talks were General Borivoye Mirkovitch, who was a major directing force in the Yugoslav coup d’etat; General Simovich, former Prime Minister, who was selected by General Mirkovitch to be titular head of the coup, and various air force and army officers, some of whom are now abroad helping the Yugoslav cause.
AMONG FIRST TO RESIST
When the bewildered government gave its shattered army the order to surrender to the Axis, General Mikhailovitch was one of many officers who disappeared into the mountains, as had patriotic South Slavs for centuries before when they fought occupying troops in Hajduk and Chetnik bands. Already the first shots of guerrilla resistance had been fired in Hercegovina by an independent peasant band by the time General Mikhailovitch began to organize his forces.
In the remote mountains he found Major Paloshevitch, who had refused to demobilize his battalion, and together they planned the future fight. Word of their plans began to filter through the land. Although all Yugoslav generals, good as well as bad, had lost their popular reputations as a result of the army’s collapse, General Mikhailovitch was the only colonel who did not suffer from this blot. He worked slowly, gathering recruits and cached arms and limiting himself to small skirmishes and sabotage until Germany invaded Russia, when the feeling spread through Slavophil Yugoslavia that the moment had come to arise.
According to the Yugoslav War Minister, who was promoted to general by the emigre government after his first successful attacks, his army is being thoroughly trained on a basis of regular officer cadres and a large number of noncommissioned officers, but with small irregular groups of Chetniks under them conducting limited raids. In other words, he claims to be retaining command of the nucleus of a large force while keeping many of his sworn followers in their native villages and towns prepared to rise on a given signal from his secret agents.
In this connection it is reported here that the Axis is busily trying to round up his clandestine supporters and break this organization and their agents traveling about occupied Yugoslavia, pretending to collect funds in General Mikhailovitch’s name and arresting all contributors. Between Dec. 9 and 13, 3,000 are believed to have been arrested of which number 300 were shot on Christmas Eve, and later 3,900 more were rounded up and executed.
FEBRUARY 7, 1943
Editorial
WAR ON ALL FRONTS
The nature of this total and global war brings it about that while the United Nations are able to hail gratifying victories on some fronts, there are stalemates and touch-and-go battles on others, and there are also cries of distress and urgent appeals for help from some of our allies exposed to an immediate menace.
Such outcries and appeals, combined with foreign and domestic criticism of our conduct of the war, arose during those dark days some months ago when the Russians were apparently holding on to Stalingrad and the passes of Caucasus with little more than the skin of their teeth and grim determination, and when our Marines were fighting
for their little beachhead in the Solomons. There were cries for the second front, for more lend-lease aid to Russia, for more troops and supplies for our hard-pressed forces on Guadalcanal. As soon and as adequately as it was humanly possible, supplies were sent to Russia at great risk and cost, a second front was established in Africa, and the German disaster in Russia began to take shape. Likewise, our troops in the Solomons received reinforcements and drove back the Japanese.
Now there come similar outcries and appeals from both Australia and China. The first is menaced by a Japanese invasion, the second is pictured as being close to an economic collapse. Nobody will deny the justification of these pleas, or minimize the dangers which they picture. If either of these dangers should materialize it would be a catastrophe of great magnitude for all the United Nations.
Yet, in answer to frequent criticism that our aid to China or Australia is still inadequate, it must be pointed out that what we can send is determined in large part by circumstances at present beyond our control, and that the battles fought in Russia, in Africa or in the Solomons are as much battles for China and Australia as for any other country. Unfortunately, despite the American and British production miracles, there is just so much to go around. There are just so many planes, and tanks, and guns, and there are just so many ships to transport them to the front lines. In the Pacific all our available forces are in there fighting to protect Australia. And in North Africa all available United Nations forces are likewise fighting, not only to drive out the Germans and Italians and thereby blast a way for an invasion of the European continent, but also to open up the Mediterranean as a supply route to India, Burma and China, without which a major campaign from these regions is impossible.
The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945 Page 85