The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945

by The New York Times

  Lieut. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commander in Chief of the Allied forces in North Africa, and Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham, Naval Commander in Chief for the Mediterranean, were on the bridge of the famous British cruiser Aurora when she led a fleet of four other cruisers and eight destroyers in the bombardment of Pantelleria on Tuesday. The Aurora steamed close inshore to test the fire of the Italian shore batteries.

  SHELLS HIT NEAR CRUISER

  The Allied Commander in Chief and Admiral Cunningham watched the dramatic naval and air assault, which came to a climax at noon when motor torpedo boats dashed into the harbor of Pantelleria on a test run. While the squadron was waiting for the small craft to reappear, shells from the big Italian shore batteries fell within 300 yards of the Aurora.

  When the naval bombardment and aerial pounding were over for the day, General Eisenhower said there was “no doubt” that the island would fall “once the infantry gets in their part.”

  The surrender was the first in the war by a fortress of the size of Pantelleria to air power supported by sea power, without serious action by ground forces.

  American bombers and fighter bombers, which bore the main weight of the Allied attacks on Pantelleria, also contributed heavily to the campaign of attrition against the Axis fighters in this theatre. Thirty-seven enemy fighters were shot down by American airmen over Pantelleria yesterday. In the last thirteen days of the offensive seventy-eight enemy planes were destroyed in combat against an Allied loss of twelve.

  The shattering attack delivered yesterday eclipsed anything done before in this theatre. The greatest number of Flying Fortresses ever employed in this area led the attack on the island, dropping hundreds of thousand-pound bombs. It is estimated that well over a thousand sorties were flown by the Allied airmen. The assaults, which started with dawn and ended at the approach of dusk and a thunderstorm, dropped a load of bombs that no other target of similar size ever sustained in one day. The night before heavily loaded Wellington medium bombers and Hurricane fighter-bombers of the Royal Air Force had hammered the island as a prelude to the great assault to come.

  British troops in Sicily, 1943.

  During the day traffic over the island, which was marked by a heavy cloud of smoke that lay above it, was so heavy that the bomber formations had to circle the island waiting their turn to make “a pass” at the target.

  The aerial offensive against Pantelleria was “a test-tube attack” that went beyond the original objective of battering the island defenses to a point where A1lied troops could land to force complete surrender of the island. Although sea power gave valuable support and the ground forces were ready when the time came, it was air power that conquered the vital, strongly defended fortress.

  GREAT POWER THROWN AT TARGET

  In the culmination of the air attack yesterday Flying Fortresses, Marauders, Mitchells, Bostons, Baltimores, Lightning and War-hawk fighter-bombers and Spitfire fighters from the Allied air forces took part in day-long attacks.

  The progress of the offensive was worked out on a mathematical pattern, with the weight of bombs and number of aircraft gradually increased each day from May 29 until the knockout punch was delivered yesterday and this morning following the refusal of the island’s commander to surrender. Another request for unconditional surrender had been dropped on the island yesterday after the two previous ones had been ignored.

  Hundreds of hits were made on military installations, batteries, range finders, barracks and gun positions all during yesterday’s bombing. Several large explosions, probably the result of bombs hitting ammunition dumps, were reported.

  When the Boston, Baltimore and Mitchell bombers of the United States Army Air Force and Royal Air Force began their attacks yesterday morning they found antiaircraft fire was negligible and encountered no enemy fighters. Between sorties by light and medium bombers, fighter-bombers attacked targets at fifteen-minute intervals, sweeping in at low level to top off the destruction started by high-level attacks.

  Pilots and crews returned from Pantelleria impressed by the destruction down below. First Lieutenant Melvin Pool of Durant, Okla., called it “a damned good show” and said he believed the Fortresses “had the bases loaded and knocked a home run.” Wellingtons attacking the night before had started several fires, some of them very large, in the Pantelleria harbor area.

  Studded with heavy gun batteries well concealed in and behind cliffs along the coast, Pantelleria was believed impregnable by the Italians. Benito Mussolini wrapped the island in a cloak of secrecy after 1937, when he announced that naval and air bases were being built there. Landings were forbidden on the island except for Italian military, naval and air personnel, and a decree forbade flight over it or adjoining territorial waters.

  Bit by bit this island fortress, two-thirds the size of Malta, was knocked apart. Bombers, began by wrecking the airfield in the early days of the offensive, destroying numerous planes on the ground.

  Then every ship in the harbor either was sunk or damaged so severely that she was useless.

  Gun batteries were next. One by one the emplacements were bombed by Flying Fortresses and medium bombers, while fighter-bombers attacked from lower levels. Meanwhile, a complete sea blockade was achieved and the enemy fighter fleet based on Sicily was unable to check the steady progress of the offensive.

  The enemy made his greatest defensive effort yesterday in the day of aerial operations that undoubtedly will become a classical example of the exertion of air power.

  ENEMY ATTACKS FROM SICILY

  Drawing from fighter squadrons based on-Sicily, the enemy attacked Allied bombers heavily from mid-morning to dusk. Marauders of the Strategic Air Force and an escort of Warhawks were intercepted over Pantelleria by Axis fighters. The Warhawks got five enemy planes and the bombers destroyed one in a running fight that lasted from the target to near the African coast at Cap Bon.

  Captain Ralph Taylor of Durham, N.C., shot down two Messerschmitt 109’s in this engagement.

  American Spitfire pilots of the Tactical Air Force destroyed twelve Italian and German aircraft. One squadron knocked five enemy planes out of the skies in the morning while another squadron of the same group shot down seven more in the late afternoon. The group as a whole destroyed seventeen aircraft June 9 and 10, and lost only one plane.

  Thirteen Macchi 202’s dived on Allied bombers that the Spitfires were escorting to open the afternoon battle. The Spitfires gave chase and intercepted the Italians before they reached the bombers. The dogfight was joined by six Messerschmitt 109’s and three Focke-Wulf 190’s.

  The Italians were being knocked down so fast that the Spitfire squadron commander, Major Frank Hill of Hillsdale, N.J., said he counted four enemy parachutes in the air at one time.

  “And down below us,” he added, “I could see I don’t know how many splashes in the Mediterranean where their aircraft were crashing,” Major Hill destroyed a Macchi 202, his sixth victory of the war.

  Lightning fighter-bombers led by Lieut. Col. John Stevenson, West Point graduate from Laramie, Wyo., fought a brief action with several Messerschmitts, destroying one. So many pilots pumped lead into an enemy plane that it “went down as a squadron victory, and that makes everybody happy,” according to Colonel Stevenson.

  Altogether twenty-six of thirty-seven enemy aircraft destroyed over Pantelleria were knocked down by the Tactical Air Force. Marauders of the Coastal Air Force operating near the coast of Italy yesterday shot down two Messerschmitt 109’s, increasing the day’s victory total to thirty-nine. Six Allied planes were lost.

  The highest scorer in the American Spitfire unit is Lieutenant Sylvan Feld of Lynn, Mass., who on June 6 shot down a German plane to bring his total of victories to nine, all scored since March 22.

  JUNE 20, 1943

  CRITICAL PERIOD AT HAND IN HOME-FRONT CONFLICT

  War Crises in Mining, Wages, Food and Inflation Reflect Uncertainties Of the National Effort

  BYRNES, BARUCH TO THE F
ORE

  By ARTHUR KROCK

  WASHINGTON, June 19—The most critical period on the home front since the United States entered the war is at hand. Whatever may be the immediate solutions of such emergent matters as the wages of the United Mine Workers, some weeks must elapse before it will be possible to determine with certainty whether the Administration will be able to support the military forces with supplies produced at an expanding rate and at anywhere near the present levels of cost.

  On the outcome of the group conflicts now raging depend also the morale of the home front and, to some extent, that of the armed services. Conditions in the various areas of dispute which constitute a battlefield on which the struggle will, in the next few weeks, be won, lost or compromised—harmfully or destructively—are about as follows:

  Food—Unfavorable weather, a price system in several respects ill-conceived, depletion of farm manpower, restriction of farm machinery and of the reproductive elements in agriculture have combined with a loose and confused administration of food controls by Washington to bring about a menacing situation. Among examples of what is happening in this sector is a report by Senator Scott Lucas of Illinois that farmers are holding 900,000,000 bushels of corn in their bins awaiting a price adjustment; a depressing crop report by the Department of Agriculture, and an assertion by Chester C. Davis, Food Administrator, that serious food shortages are certain. It has been predicted that between the time of the next spring planting and the 1944 harvest some of these shortages will be acute.

  REFORMS MAY BE FORCED

  Many remedies have been proposed, and some will be attempted during the critical period on which the nation is now entering. There are definite signs that the War Department has revised downward the size of the Army planned for the end of 1943, which should relieve the drain on the manpower that produces and processes food. The President has rejected proposals that all Federal food controls be merged under the Secretary of Agriculture, replacing the incumbent, Claude Wickard, with Mr. Davis; and he has also declined to break up the Office of Price Administration or cause a revolutionary change in its pricing policies.

  Plans are proceeding to institute a broad system of Federal subsidies to maintain consumer prices of certain foods and push down the prices of others to the level of several months ago. No one authority agrees with another as to the ultimate cost of such a program, the guesses ranging from Price Administrator Prentiss Brown’s of less than a billion to the President’s of a three billions maximum. Food-producing groups, their spokesmen in Congress and outside citizens who fear that politics will mix with economies in the use of subsidies are resisting the project But the general belief is that the present limited subsidy program will be expanded by the Administration in an effort to win the adherence of organized labor to the President’s hold-the-line program.

  Wages—Despite the common national peril and military effort, the attitude of organized labor toward legal restraints invited by its own excesses and toward the employing group remains hostile. Only this week A. F. Whitney, president of the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, denounced the railroad managers as swollen with war profits and conspiring to create the greatest monopoly in American history after the war has ended. He said that in opposing wage increases and rate decreases at the same time, the managers are about “as reasonable as an alley-cat with a hunk of raw meat.”

  A store clerk next to a sign supporting government-controlled prices during the war.

  ATMOSPHERE OF HOSTILITY

  This same atmosphere of hostility between employees and employers surrounds other industrial areas in a time when good-will would amount to a military asset. Mr. Whitney is known as a “maverick,” not representative of the general attitude of railway labor.

  Yet his outburst, coming from a source where labor relations have been more harmonious than in any other, emphasizes the spread of ill-feeling. The President has done much to foster economic and social class resentment, and in this respect his own chickens are coming home to roost. But it is the whole country and the war program that must pay the price.

  The philippics of John L. Lewis toward the employers of coal miners have been almost a part of the daily news record for the last few weeks. In purple phrases he has drawn a picture of hungry workers and undernourished children, victims of rich and heartless coal operators who would be complimented by the names of war profiteer, cormorant or vulture. This language is only part of Mr. Lewis’ tactics when he is fighting for a wages rise. But the effect on the workers is to stimulate a feeling of bitterness toward those who pay their wages, and this contributes to the critical situation in which the nation finds itself. How much it is ameliorated by the reiteration Friday of the “no strike” pledge by Van Bittner, Daniel Tobin and other labor leaders remains to be seen.

  WEIGHING THE REMEDIES

  As this is written, and probably when it shall have been published, the ultimate solutions of the conflicts over mine wages and the anti-strike bill are not in sight, though stop-gap methods may be discovered in the interim. But not for some time will it be possible to measure the effects or durability of the remedies. And only when that measurement can be made with some accuracy will it be discerned whether the American people have passed from a most critical period into a worse one, or into improved conditions that will make it possible to hasten victory and keep down the cost in life and treasure.

  Mr. Lewis defied the jurisdiction of the War Labor Board, and, braced by the President through the Office of War Mobilization, by Congress with the anti-strike bill and by many evidences of popular support, the board stood firm against Mr. Lewis. If he is routed by the various processes, his power as a labor leader will be destroyed for some time, perhaps forever. But his tactics have brought him to the point where his rout must be total or he will continue to make difficulties in labor ranks and prolong the critical period. He has won every other battle in which he has engaged since the President took office, at first within and then without the political structure of the Administration. This fact will impel sound observers to make more than an instant test of the effects on Mr. Lewis’ influence of events in the next few days.

  THE BATTLE OF INFLATION

  Inflation—This dubious battle will be decided in the areas of conflict over food, prices and wage controls as outlined above. As they go, it will go.

  Next to the President, the burden of resolving the critical period into one of progress falls upon James F. Byrnes, chairman of OWM. But signs are innumerable that the country is looking behind him to his eminent official adviser, B. M. Baruch. If the line holds and goes forward, the pair will be given credit for much of the victory, and vice versa. But if the line is broken, by Presidential concessions and related causes, Mr. Baruch will be expected either to accept a share of the blame or divest himself of it by retiring from his first official post since 1920.

  JUNE 21, 1943

  Escort Carrier Helps Convoys Win Five-Day Battle with U-Boat Packs

  New Type of Protective Vessel Instrumental In Destruction of Enemy Raiders—Land-Based Planes Also Play Big Part

  By JAMES MacDONALD

  By Cable to The New York Times.

  LONDON, June 20—Illustrating why the month of May was one of the best for Atlantic convoys to Britain since the closing days of 1941, officials gave out today an exciting account of a bitter five-day fight against enemy U-boats in which warships and planes from a carrier and shore stations sank two submarines, probably destroyed three more and are believed to have damaged many others.

  Ranging over hundreds of miles of ocean, including the particularly dangerous area in mid-Atlantic beyond the reach of land-based planes, the struggle marked one of the fiercest and most sustained attempts ever undertaken by U-boat packs to prevent ships and supplies from reaching this country. The ships were so well protected that the majority of the U-boats were kept well out of the range of their intended victims. Some did get within range, however, but they scored on only 3 per cent of the vast merchan
t fleet involved.

  A new technique in anti-submarine warfare was responsible for the fact that the losses were small, considering the intensity of the attack. An important role was played by one of the British Navy’s newest weapons—the pocket aircraft carrier, known officially as the escort carrier.

  This vessel was H.M.S. Biter, a former merchant ship built in the United States and transformed into a floating air base for the special purpose of closing the “air gap” in mid-Atlantic where U-boats were formerly immune to blows from the air. The Biter was commanded by Captain Abel Smith, a kinsman of Queen Elizabeth and former equerry to King George. He was a member of the royal party on its tour of Canada and the United States in 1939.

  The fight began, according to a joint communiqué issued by the Admiralty and the Air Ministry, when two U-boats in a big pack were sighted far out in the Atlantic by navy planes that had taken off from the Biter. The planes attacked the submarines with depth charges and machine-gun fire, forcing them to dive.

  Later, after the convoy had proceeded so far that it was within reach of land-based planes, its protection was increased by Royal Air Force Coastal Command forces. First blood was drawn by an RAF Liberator, which disabled one U-boat while it was fifteen miles from the surface ships.

  Meanwhile, Navy planes were busy with another U-boat. They sent word to H.M.S. Broadway—formerly the U.S.S. Hunt, one of the fifty destroyers transferred to Britain in 1940—and the frigate Lagan, one of Britain’s latest-type special-duty warships, and guided them to the scene. The destroyer and the frigate took turns attacking the submarine. The Broadway struck twice, and, after its second attack, there were muffled undersea explosions that shot wreckage bearing German markings to the surface. The communiqué said that the U-boat was considered sunk.