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

by The New York Times

  “His investigating committee is doing fine work,” she said. “He ought to stay there.”

  Mrs. Martha E. Truman, who will be 92 on Nov. 25, recalled that she told her son last week, just before he left her home in suburban Grandview, Mo., for the Democratic Convention that he should remain a Senator. She added:

  “Harry said, ‘I’d rather be.’ And he meant it.”

  Mrs. Truman sat in her old-fashioned rocker last night and listened to the convention by radio.

  “I listened to all the Republican Convention, too,” she said. “They keep predicting that Roosevelt will die in office if he’s elected. The Republicans hope he will. They keep saying that I’ll die, too, and I’m almost 92. I hope Roosevelt fools ’em.”

  Mrs. Truman said that if her son were nominated for Vice President.“I’ll be for him.”

  Members of the German High Command, including Hermann Goering (third from left) survey damage to Hitler’s bunker after the failed assassination attempt.

  JULY 21, 1944

  AGAIN NAMED FOR PRESIDENCY

  Roosevelt’s Acceptance

  Following is the text of President Roosevelt’s acceptance speech from a Pacific Coast naval base, as recorded and transcribed by The New York Times:

  Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen of the convention, my friends:

  I have already indicated to you why I accept the nomination that you have offered me, in spite of my desire to retire to the quiet of private life.

  You in this convention are aware of what I have sought to gain for the nation, and you have asked me to continue.

  It seems wholly likely that within the next four years our armed forces, and those of our Allies, will have gained a complete victory over Germany and Japan, sooner or later, and that the world once more will be at peace, under a system, we hope, that will prevent a new world war. In any event, whenever that time comes new hands will then have full opportunity to realize the ideals which we seek.

  In the last three elections the people of the United States have transcended party affiliation. Not only Democrats but also forward-looking Republicans and millions of independent voters have turned to progressive leadership, a leadership which has sought consistently, and with fair success, to advance the lot of the average American citizen who had been so forgotten during the period after the last war. I am confident that they will continue to look to that same kind of liberalism, to build our safer economy for the future.

  I am sure that you will understand me when I say that my decision, expressed to you formally tonight, is based solely on a sense of obligation to serve if called upon to do so by the people of the United States.

  NO CAMPAIGN ‘IN THE USUAL SENSE’

  I shall not campaign, in the usual sense, for the office. In these days of tragic sorrow, I do not consider it fitting. And besides in these days of global warfare, I shall not be able to find the time. I shall, however, feel free to report to the people the facts about matters that concern them and especially to correct any misrepresentations.

  During the past few days I have been coming across the whole width of the continent to a naval base where I am speaking to you now from the train.

  During the Nineteenth Century, during that era of development and expansion on this continent we felt a natural isolation, geographic, economic and political, an isolation from the vast world which lay overseas. Not until this generation, roughly this century, have people here and elsewhere been compelled more and more to widen the orbit of their vision to include every part of the world. Yes, it has been a wrench perhaps, but a very necessary one.

  SAYS ISOLATIONISTS ARE BECOMING EXTINCT

  It is good that we are all getting that broader vision. For we shall need it after the war. The isolationists and the ostriches who plagued our thinking before Pearl Harbor are becoming slowly extinct. The American people now know that all nations of the world, large and small, will have to play their appropriate part in keeping the peace by force, and in deciding peacefully the disputes which might lead to war.

  We all know how truly the world has become one, that if Germany and Japan, for example, were to come through this war with their philosophies established and their armies intact, our own grandchildren would again have to be fighting in their day for their liberties and their lives.

  Some day soon we shall all be able to fly to any other part of the world within twenty-four hours. Oceans will no longer figure as greatly in our physical defense as they have in the past. For our own safety and for our own economic good, therefore, if for no other reason, we must take a leading part in the maintenance of peace and in the increase of trade among all the nations of the world.

  JULY 23, 1944

  Analysis by Morgenthau of Monetary Agreements

  Special to The New York Times

  BRETTON-WOODS, N,H., July 22—The text of Secretary Morgenthau’s radio broadcast tonight marking the completion of the international conference was as follows:

  I am gratified to announce that the conference at Bretton Woods has completed successfully the task before it.

  It was, as we knew when we began, a difficult task, involving complicated technical problems. We came here to work out methods which would do away with the economic evils—the competitive currency devaluation and destructive impediments to trade—which preceded the present war. We have succeeded in that effort. The actual details of a financial and monetary agreement may seem mysterious to the generalpublic. Yet at the heart of it lie the most elementary bread and butter realities of daily life. What we have done here in Bret-ton Woods is to devise machinery by which men and women everywhere can exchange freely, on a fair and stable basis, the goods which they produced through their labor. And we have taken the initial step through which the nations of the world will be able to help one another in economic development to their mutual advantage and for the enrichment of all.

  ‘FACED DIFFERENCES FRANKLY’

  The representatives of the forty-four nations faced differences of opinion frankly, and reached an agreement which is rooted in genuine understanding. None of the nations represented here has had altogether its own way. We have had to yield to one another not in respect to principles or essentials but in respect to methods and procedural details. The fact that we have done so, and that we have done it in a spirit of goodwill and mutual trust, is, I believe, one of the hopeful and heartening portents of our time.

  Here is a sign blazoned upon the horizon, written large upon the threshold of the future—a sign for men in battle, for men at work in mines, and mills, and in the fields, and a sign for women whose hearts have been burdened and anxious lest the cancer of war assail yet another generation—a sign that the peoples of the earth are learning how to join hands and work in unity.

  There is a curious notion that the protection of national interest and the development of international cooperation are conflicting philosophies—that somehow or other men of different nations cannot work together without sacrificing the interests of their particular nation. There has been talk of this sort—and from people who ought to know better—concerning the international cooperative nature of the undertaking just completed at Bretton Woods.

  NATIONAL INTERESTS CITED

  I am perfectly certain that no delegation to this conference has lost sight for a moment of the particular national interest it was sent here to represent. The American delegation, which I have the honor of leading, has been, at all times, conscious of its primary obligation—the protection of American interests. And the other representatives have been no less loyal or devoted to the welfare of their own people.

  Yet none of us has found any incompatibility between devotion to our own country and joint action. Indeed, we have found on the contrary that the only genuine safeguard for our national interests lies in international cooperation. We have come to recognize that the wisest and most effective way to protect our national interests is through international cooperation—that is to say, through united effort
for the attainment of common goals.

  This has been the great lesson taught by the war, and is, I think, the great lesson of contemporary life—that the peoples of the earth are inseparably linked to one another by a deep, underlying community of purpose. This community of purpose is no less real and vital in peace than in war, and cooperation is no less essential to its fulfillment.

  To seek the achievement of our aims separately through the planless, senseless rivalry that divided us in the past, or through the outright economic aggression which turned neighbors into enemies would be to invite ruin again upon us all. Worse, it would be once more to start our steps irretraceably down the steep, disastrous road to war.

  That sort of extreme nationalism belongs to an era that is dead. Today the only enlightened form of national self-interest lies in international accord. At Bretton Woods we have taken practical steps toward putting this lesson into practice in monetary and economic fields.

  I take it as an axiom that after this war is ended no people—and therefore no government of the people—will again tolerate prolonged or widespread unemployment. A revival of international trade is indispensable if full employment is to be achieved in a peaceful world and with standards of living which will permit the realization of man’s reasonable hopes.

  JULY 23, 1944

  RED ARMY DRIVES SHOW NO SIGNS OF FLAGGING

  German Debacle Worse Than That Of Russians in First Month of War

  By W. H. LAWRENCE

  By Wireless to The New York Times.

  MOSCOW, July 22—The Soviet summer offensive was one month old yesterday and still increasing in intensity, each new advance adding to the threat it holds to the bulk of the German Army and that army’s rapidly diminishing prospects of keeping land fighting away from German soil for more than a few months.

  In thirty days Soviet forces, mounting the greatest offensive yet thrown at the battered, reeling Wehrmacht, already have achieved results which stagger the imagination, and every indication is that next month will bring even more bad tidings for German soldiers who try to stand on eastern ground, obeying Hitler’s personal order not to retreat

  CAPTURE TWENTY GENERALS

  In the first month of this offensive, armies operating under seven front commanders and spread over more than 600 miles have liberated a total of 70,000 square miles of Soviet territory and, more important—from a strategical viewpoint—have knocked out a large section of the best part of the German Army, capturing more than twenty generals. They have pushed the front back 317 miles toward Warsaw and Germany in at least one sector, moving at a rapid pace, and the offensive up to now has given no indication of lagging.

  Not only has the Red Army been destroying German soldiers and equipment on a vast scale and regaining thousands of square miles of territory but it has also been systematically knocking out the lines of supply and retreat for German forces with which it has not yet come into contact.

  Specifically, these are the major front advances which have occurred since the Soviet-German war was three years old, on June 22:

  Along the Moscow-Riga railroad in the area west of Velikiye Luki—forty-four miles.

  From Vitebsk area to the suburbs of Kaunas—226 miles.

  From slightly east of Mogilev to a point west of Grodno—317 miles.

  From east of Bobruisk to east of Bialystok—260 miles.

  In the sector east of Brody to the western Bug north of Lwow—62 miles.

  Thus it is easy to see and realize that the position of the German Army in the first month of the fourth year of war with the Soviet Union is even worse than that of the Soviet soldiers in the very first month of the war. All territory for which fighting is now going on was taken by the then unbeaten German Army in their first thirty days on Soviet soil.

  EXTENSIVE PREPARATIONS

  Allied military observers who have been at the Soviet front since this drive began are high in praise of the preparations which preceded it. Perhaps the best testimony of the effectiveness of the Soviet offensive comes from captured Germans themselves, who say simply “they swamped us.”

  Several things are apparent about the Soviet summer campaign. Before launching these drives the Soviets amassed an imposing force, both in terms of manpower and equipment and air-power. This they have used with deadly effect through a series of quick jabs here and there all along the broad front, drawing German reserves first to one place, then to another, beforestriking at a third. Invaluable aid in these campaigns has been given by Partisan forces, whose ability to supply up-to-the minute first-rate information about the disposition of the enemy’s forces has been even more important than sabotage and other guerrilla activity carried out behind the enemy lines.

  The Red Army’s present campaigns are being waged with both the most modern and most ancient of weapons. Modern American trucks carry supplies alongside horsecarts, which are invaluable in the wooded, marshy territory over which much fighting is now being conducted. Correspondents at the front have also reported large-scale use of horse cavalry, including the colorful, relentless Don Cossacks.

  JULY 24, 1944

  Rival Polish ‘Government’ Set Up in Liberated Area

  By E. C. DANIEL

  By Wireless to The New York Times.

  LONDON, July 23—The Moscow radio announced tonight the creation of a Polish Committee of National Liberation designed to perform all the functions that the exiled Polish Government in London had hoped to undertake in territory liberated by the Red Army. This announcement seemed to indicate an utter lack of Russian interest in the eleventh-hour proposal, cautiously put forward last week by Polish circles here, that Premier Stanislaw Mikolajczyk should go to Moscow to settle the differences with Premier Stalin. The Russians, apparently, are not interested in conversations. Three decrees were announced by the Moscow radio as having been issued in Warsaw by the Polish National Council, a pro-Soviet movement that does not recognize the authority of the Government in London. These decrees created the Committee of National Liberation to take charge of the civil administration in the liberated areas of Poland, placed the National Council in charge of the Union of Polish Patriots and the union’s activities in Russia and consolidated the Polish Army in Russia with the council’s underground forces in Poland, under a single command.

  The result is to create in Poland an administration rivaling that of the London Government, which claims to have an organization of 30,000 underground civil servants and a large guerrilla army in the country.

  The creation of such a “provisional government” had been anticpated as the logical outcome of the quarrel between Russia and the Polish regime here. A Polish spokesman here quoting the similarity between the Polish liberation movement and that of Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia, expressed the belief that there was still a possibility for reconciliation with Moscow that would result in combining the rival Polish governments.

  Polish quarters in London clung to their contention that the Polish National Council was simply a small group of radical intellectuals without any broad basis of support among the masses of Polish peasants and workers and the underground forces.

  JULY 28, 1944

  McNair Killed in Normandy Watching Push on U.S. Front

  General Trained Our Ground Forces and Developed Tank Usage—Marshall Called Him the ‘Brains of the Army’

  Special to The New York Times

  WASHINGTON, July 27—Lieut. Gen. Lesley J. McNair, one of the “big four” of the United States Army, who, as commanding general of the Army Ground Forces, directed the greatest military training and conditioning job in history, was killed by enemy fire while observing action of our front-line troops in the new Normandy offensive, the War Department announced today. The news of the death of General McNair, who was 61 years old, came as a personal blow to officials of the War Department. High-ranking officials, including the Chief of Staff, Gen. George C. Marshall, who once was reputed to have described General McNair as “the brains of the Army,” issued statements d
eploring the Army’s great loss.

  General McNair, who recently relinquished his command of Army Ground Forces to go overseas on an important assignment, the nature of which was not disclosed, apparently was killed shortly after his arrival in Normandy. Hard luck had dogged the quiet but scrappy little general, who went through active service throughout the last war without receiving a scratch. In April, 1943, while on an inspection trip to the Tunisian battlefield, he was wounded on the first day he went out to observe American troops in action; now death came to him under somewhat similar circumstances.

  General Marshall, in his statement on his colleague’s death, revealed that it happened during the new offensive which the American First Army has opened on the front below St. Lo. He said:

  “The American Army has sustained a great loss in the death of General McNair. Had he had the choice he would probably have elected to die as he did, in the forefront of the attack. His presence on the firing line with the leading element in the great assault which has just been launched on the American front in Normandy was indicative of his aggressive and fearless spirit, and should be an inspiring example to the forces of our great ground army which he organized and trained.”

  Under-Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson Jr. declared that the Army had lost “one of its great leaders.”

  One of the most striking speeches that General McNair ever delivered—and one that provided a perfect outline for the way he viewed his training job—was his famous Armistice Day address to Army ground troops on Nov. 11, 1942. Speaking over a nation-wide hookup, he declared: