The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • 10

THE SUN, BALTIMORE, THURSDAY MORNING, FEBRUARY 17, 1944 PAGE 10 His Private World Down The Spillway it -ftV. am. we have pushed the Japanese back, there in the Solomons, to the west in New Guinea and New Britain, to the north in the Marshall Islands. Each new stroke has shown greater power and speed and precision. We can see now what Admiral King meant when he said that the inevitable heavy losses at Tulagi and Guadalcanal were "the price to be paid for the hard-won experience which is essential to the attainment of far-reaching results." Published Every Week Dm? TH'J A.

S. ABELL COMPANY Paul Pattemon. President Entered the Postofflce at Bsltlmore as second class mail matter Subscription Rates by Mail Morning Evening Sunday 1 month 65o 65c 65c 0 months 13.50 $3.50 $3.50 1 year $6 .00 $6.00 $6.00 Editorial Offices Baltimore Sun Square Washington National Press Building Loudon 40 Fleet Street Circulation of Sunpapers in January Morning 156,743 155.544 Gain 1,199 Evening 170.000 173,784 Gain 5,216 Sunday 262,402 255,086 Gain 7,316 Member of the Associated Press The Associated Press Is exclusively entitled to the use for republication ol all news dls-psrtchrs credited to It or not otherwise credited lu this paper and also the local news published herein. All rights ol republication of special dispatches herein are also reserved. the more abstruse meanings of the term "balance." This was made clear to us by Curbstone Charlie, who translated Mr.

Bowies' argument in the following way: "The labor big-shots are plenty sore about high food prices. With the in these guys got at the White House they can get away with murder. On account of Roosevelt wanting to cop another election with their votes, he'll cuddle up to them more than he ever has. Well, if these, labor guys don't get subsidies they'll holler for higher wages and maybe pull a national strike that will stop the war plants cold. "To start things up again, F.

D. R. would give them everything like he done with the' railroad guys, only on a bigger scale. That would blow the top right off the whole price-control picture. "But if F.

D. R. can have some subsidies to play with, say around a billion dollars' worth, he might be able to buy these labor guys off. And on account of public opinion about the strikes being pretty fierce, the labor guys themselves might settle for reasonable terms. So, Mr.

Editor, subsidies is the key to the situation as the wise guys in the lobbies see it." That, says Curbstone Charlie, is what Mr. Bowles is saving, though in diplomatic double-talk. On that ground a case for subsidies undoubtedly can be made. It is not a pleasant case, but given the situation as it is, it is a case which cannot be ignored. BALTIMORE.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 17. 1944 1 In The Course of a comment on clocks the other day I remarked that during my boyhood, though there were nn radios to tune in on and few public clocks to consult, no one seemed to have trouble getting the ''correct time." How, I asked, was it managed? Mrs. L. T. Wilson writes me that where she grew up, in Westfield, the system was so simple that It never occurred to her that clock setting could present any such difticulues I suggested.

It seems that Westfield had a curfew law. Children under 18 years were not permitted on the streets after 8 o'clock in winter and 9 o'clock in summer. Tne signal consisted of three blasts of a whistle located at a local foundry. Mrs-Wilson does not know how that whistle blower checked his clock, but she does know that when he blew curfew all the people in town promptly checked their clocks. No matter what they might be doing, listening to a lecture or concert, participating in a church service, attending high-school graduation, the moment they heard that whistle they would pull out their watches and set them.

Waiting for the curfew was a virtual household ritual, coming to a climax with the checking of clocks and the shooing of children oil the bed. Incidentally, Mrs. Wilson adds an interesting note on the many uses to which that same whistle was put. It served as the town fire alarm, with the curfew signal doubling as a daily test of the efficiency of the fire department Even adults liked to "go down to the engine house to see the horses come out when the curfew rang." In stormy weather the whistle blew on mornings when the school authorities decided there would be no classes. During the, WPA era it called the "workers" to the City Hall whenever the paymaster arrived ia town.

She has no doubt that it is seeing service right now as the official Westfield airraid alarm. Some Time Aco I mentioned, as my contribution to musical criticism, the practice of a musical friend of mine who divides all music into two great categories, clean music and dirty music. Bach and Mozart are supposed to be clean music, and Wagner and Rimski-Korsakoff are supposed to be dirty music, according to his definition. Now a chess-playing friend of mine comes along with the remark that cheu playing is also to be divided into two types, clean chess and dirty chess. He insists that by dirty chess he does not mean dishonest chess cheating, and that kind of thing but simply a definite style of play.

Clean chess, he says, is chess that is based on scrupulous attention to the game itself, and nothing else that is to say, the position of the men on the board. The character of the opponent does not enter into this kind of chess game. Dirty chess, on the other hand, is played an eye to the weaknesses of the opponent rather than to the weaknesses in the position of his men on the board. In this kind of game, something like psychological warfare plays a very substantial part. It is a war of nerves, you might say.

If, for example, one's opponent ia known to be thrown into an unreasonable state of jitters by a certain type of move, that type of move should always be made, even though, according to the exponents of clean chess, it might be a "bad" move. Or if an opponent is known to be upset by rapid play, then moves are always made with the utmost speed, even though a better move might be worked out after a little more serious thought. My friend insists that dirty chess does not involve such "unfair" devices as tapping on the table, humming tunes, offering a cigarette when the opponent is obviously concentrating, and so forth, but is just as "fair as clean chess. Ke confesses that he likes to vary his play, sometimes playing a clean gams and sometimes playing a dirty game. John OUxx.

Hardships Rule In Jap Prison Camp By LIEUT. COL. W. E. DYESS As told to Charles Leavelle Doesn't The Board Know The Schools Condition? Now the Board of School Commissioners has detided to remedy the wretched conditions in the portable buildings of the Dunbar Junior High School and make them "habitable" (the board's own word).

It is going to spend $100 to get rid of the rats. It is going to provide adequate toilets. It is going to fix the roof so that it doesn't leak. It is going to repair the holes in the floors. It is going to fix the blackboards so that they can be used as blackboards.

It is oing to make sure that the students aren't suffocated by fumes from the coal stoves. And so on. This seems reasonable enough. Children are required by law to go to school up to a certain age. The least the city can do in return is to provide "habitable" school buildings.

The board goes further and says: If other portables are found to be in equally bad condition, they should receive attention also. Superficially, this seems reasonable enough that is, until one 'remembers how the Dunbar portables were "found to be" in such wretched condition. In the case of the Dunbar portables, nothing was done about them until in desperation the teachers banded together and wrote a letter of protest to the Mayor about them. That is how the Dunbar portables were "found" to be uninhabitable. Will the inadequacies of other portables have to be found out in this same roundabout way? Or will the Board of School Commissioners find out for itself, without waiting for the development of another cause cilebre? And why is it that the Board of School Commissioners doesn't know already whether the portables are in bad condition or not? The Board of School Commissioners is in charge of Baltimore's school system.

Surely that means that the Board of School Commissione'rs recognizes its responsibility for the condition of the city's school plant. And at the very least that would imply a knowledge as to whether the 'city's school buildings are "habitable" or not whether they satisfy that "minimum standard of health and decency" about which we hear so much in connection with housing and health-department regulations. Unless the School Board can say that the schools are habitable, without waiting to be poked and prodded by the Mayor, the teachers, parents and the press, then we say that the School Board is not doing the job which the city hat the right to expect of it. Political Tensions Increase In Mr. Churchill's England In Britain, everyone agrees that Mr.

Churchill is the man best able to carry the war to a successful conclusion. The conviction on this point is all but unanimous, going far beyond anything this country can show as to Mr. Roosevelt. Yet, as our correspondent in London, Mr. Thomas M.

O'Neill, suggested yesterday, the unanimity of the British stops at that point. On nearly every other issue there is disagreement. For a long time, the disagreement was kept very much under cover. A sort of political truce had been arranged, under the terms of which the dominant Conservative party made no campaign against the Laborites and Liberals in by-elections for those seats which had been held by Laborites or Liberals, and opposition parties reciprocated when the situation was reversed. This arrangement was quite satisfactory to the established political parties.

It meant, everything else being equal, that neither side had to worry about campaigning, campaign funds and all the rest of the business of electioneering. It was not so satisfactory to some of the voters. They seemed to feel that national questions of major importance were not being debated as they should have been. For a while, it was the lunatic fringe that protested. But after a time the dissatisfaction went deeper and independent groups, not a party to the truce, began to put their candidates in the field.

As often as not, these candidates were themselves former members of the major parties, led by their own sense of political obligation to break through the fetters which bound them. The situation has now developed to the point where, as Mr. O'Neill reports, the party organizations themselves have begun to question the wisdom of attempting to maintain the agreement. Some of the regular candidates have been defeated. Those who have been successful have squeaked through.

The reasonable deduction is that there is a large body of British opinion which feels that it is not adequately represented by the membership of the present House of Commons, which, after all, has held office since 1935. Whether the situation has yet developed to the point where the truce should be abandoned, and perhaps even a general election arranged, is not yet decided. But both these decisions seem much closer today than they did a year or so ago. Perhaps the major dissatisfaction of the voters with the status quo grows out of the willingness of the present Government to postpone discussion of postwar issues, and even to shelve them when it is possible to do so. Several special boards, commissions and committees have made reports and recommendations, none of which has been adequately debated, let alone acted upon.

In consequence, people grow impatient and begin to ask themselves if the end of the war will find the country wholly unprepared for its new problems. They go further and ask whether a government which has been in power so long has retained enough elasticity and resilience to be able to understand these problems. It is a serious question, one which Americans as well as Britons are asking themselves with new insistence every day. The political comparison between that country and this one cannot be carried out in detail. But there is enough similarity to make it worth while for us to watch what happens in the impending by-elections over there.

Davao prison camp, in Davao This is the nineteenth of a series of articles by the late Colonel Dyess dealing with his experiences in the battle for the Philippines and in Japanese prison camps. Today's installment tells of life in the Mindanao camp. province of southern Mindanao Is land, had been built for the confinement of offenders against the Philippines commonwealth. Mur derers made up 90 per cent, of the board structure, but didn't hit any with heavy wrappings, but the Japs prison population when we arrived sent us in barefoot. As we same of the patients.

Japanese officers who had wit there November 7, 1942. knee deep into the bog, our feet Of the camp itself I will say little and legs were cut by the stones and debris imbedded there. nessed the murder summoned an American surgeon, a lieutenant colonel, who examined the victim and pronounced him dead. The at this time, except that it had the usual watch towers, barb wire en A host of diseases' are endemic tanglements, and machine-gun em Japs explained to him that the shooting was necessary. The man placements.

Its physical details will be of greater importance in a subsequent chapter. had tried to escape. Retaliation Not Possible Major Mida, commander of the camp, was displeased when the saw our emaciated condition. He had There was nothing we could do In retaliation. Striking a guard or even talking back to him meant asked for laborers, not scarecrows.

To our surprise, he did not put the blame on us. Instead, he ordered almost certain death. that we be given rehabilitating I was told by several witnesses of a case on Corregidor in which an American soldier who had been struck by a Jap guard walloped him one in return and knocked food. Good Treatment At First Pushing A Depression Plan Into The Boom Years It's a relatively small thing, but it's indicative. We refer to the drive of two Federal agencies in Congress to perpetuate the emergency school-lunch program begun in the depression.

The program when begun had a twofold purpose, both rooted in the completely abnormal conditions of the depression years. Its major purpose was to dispose of -surplus farm commodities. Its secondary purpose was to supplement the diet of needy children in the schools. Now, with the depression definitely over and everybody in a job who can handle one, the plea is made that school children still need lunches supplied by the Federal Government. With farm commodities not in surplus supply but so scarce that many of the most important of them have to be rationed, we are asked to continue a depression plan for distributing farm surpluses.

Some of the members of the House committee handling the question wonder why the States or the localities can't supply their own funds for school-lunch programs. For critics of the Federal scheme are quite willing to concede that there may be children who require this kind of help from the public. But why should the Federal Government be brought into the school-lunch picture? Why should depression-era school lunches continue any longer than the depression-era WPA or NYA, both of which have been liquidated? Certainly there would be special objection to a school-lunch program in the hands of the Federal Office of Education. Yet this office is one of the claimants for jurisdiction in this field, the Department of Agriculture, which has handled school lunches in the past, being the other. It is true that the Bureau of Education tries to anticipate criticism by saying that State funds should match Federal funds and that the administration of the school programs should be exclusively in State hands.

But if the principle of local control of education is important enough to require local control of Federally financed lunch programs, and a dollar-for-dollar State matching of Federal funds, the same principle is important enough to be further safeguarded by a complete exclusion of Federal funds from the field. There will be enough Federal pressure after the war to take education away from the localities without equipping the Office of Education with the seductive bait of free school lunches. Of course the States which wish to protect their control of education will see to it that children really needing this kind of relief can get it out of State funds. Certainly, if Federal funds are to be made available, some kind of State means test ought to be developed so that only those States could cash in which were too poverty-stricken to feed their own children. In addition to rice, we got pork him flat.

Another Jap bayoneted him sev and beef, cabbage, spinach, squash, onions, potatoes and peanuts. All these were produced on the camp's eral times from behind. The Ameri vast truck farms and live-stock can died in agony. Filipino Exacts Vengeance Our friends, the Filipino mur derers at Davao, took quite a different view of retaliation. They were willing to bide their time.

then strike. One day we were on detail at the edge of the dense Davao jungle with a Filipino his fellows said he really was a Moro who a few days before had been tied up and flogged for selling leaf tobacco to an American. He had been brood ing and silent for days, and, I now realize, waiting for his chance. It came now. The Jap guard called a' rest period, then took oft pastures.

From the orchards, we had assorted fruit, including both raw bananas and cooked plantains. There was plenty of water for drinking, bathing and laundry. Sick men were sent to the hospital to recuperate. Men more than 45 years old were not required to work. Guards were tolerant.

Treatment Doesn't Last It seemed to us at first that in Davao we had found a prison camp very closely approaching heaven. But like most Japanese good things, the swell treatment didn't last. Apparently the recuperation didn't proceed fast enough to please Major Mida, so he took his laborers anyway, cutting our diet to rice and green soup. That was enough to sustain life and permit the prisoners to do some work, but no more. Every man not actually in the hospital was put to work, regardless of age or rank.

Chaplains, officers, and enlisted men labored side by side, planting rice, harvesting it in murky paddies, building and cleaning Jap latrines, cultivating crops, and building roads, bridges and revetments. "Grand Bunch" Of Murderers The only bright spot was the his shoes and sat down in the shade of a tree. Almost Decapitates Jap With a spring so swift it made him look like a little brown blur. in the Philippines. Any skin break becomes a vicious sore within a few hours unless it is cleaned and medicated.

4 A request to the Japs for such treatment would have only gotten us a clout in the face. In those camps virtually all ailments are allowed to run their course, and more often than not the course leads to a shallow grave. Mass Of Sores It was not long until my legs were a mass of ulcers. I will carry the scars the rest of my life. Simultaneously, a finger became infected and swelled to tiiple normal size, lor a time it looked like I might lose it.

To add to my troubles, I fell victim to scurvy, which, with wet and dry beriberi, began sweeping the camp a few weeks after the diet was reduced to rice. It was the old story of vitamin deficiency. The inside of my mouth was a mass of scurvy blisters so painful that in order to eat I had to throw my head back and drop the rice down in balls, praying none of it would touch the sides or roof of the mouth. My lower lip was swollen and covered with blisters. This came at the same time as my ulcers.

The Japs would do nothing for me, though I was very much under the weather. Fruit Cures Scurvy The scurvy eventually was cured when my friends managed to steal quantities of papaya melons and fruit. The sores heeled by themselves. I have said before that the Japs never seemed to do anything that made sense. Major Mida was crying for laborers, yet he would let men lie sick and inactive when he could have had them on their feet with a little of the fruit that grew in profusion around Davao or by applying a few cents' worth of unguents and antiseptics to their ulcers.

If this was not deliberate cruelty, if it was just the Jap way of doing things, the war probably will be much shorter than we now hope. Providing us with fruit, which was rotting on the ground, wouldn't have increased the cost of feeding us, which I am reliably informed, was less than 1 cent a man per day. Cold-Blooded Killings The hospital compound where the sick were kept was the scene of one of several cold-blooded killings that marked our stay at Davao. An American soldier was one victim. He had been assigned to a task outside the barricade and had been given a pass.

He went through the gate and began his duties near the northwest guard tower. After working 45 minutes he grew thirsty and called tc someone within to toss him a canteen of water. A Jap guard in the tower saw the canteen go over the wire. He began shouting and shaking his the Filipino seized an ax and buried it in the Jap's neck, almost decapitating him. Then he snatched a bolo knife and executed some intricate and pretty shocking carv ing on the remains.

After this he put on the Jap's shoes, picked up his rifle and, with out a glance at us, took to the jungle. We expected terrible repercus sions, but as a Filipino convict and not one of us had been responsible, presence of our friends, the Fili pino convicts. They were the grand nothing happened. Japs Burn Their Dead The aftermath, however, was pretty satisfying in a creature way to us. The Japs of Davao est bunch of murderers and cutthroats I have ever known.

They referred to us as "the gentlemen prisoners." They hated the Japs almost as turned out en masse for an impres much as we because the Japs were constantly promising them pardons, asserting that their crimes against the commonwealth were of no concern to Japan. All they had to do, the Jap au Completing The Campaign For The Solomons On August 10, 1942, Admiral Ernest J. King officially indorsed the news then electrifying Americans with a simple statement: "Offensive operations by United States naval and other forces, looking to the occupation of islands in the Tulagi area in the southeasterly Solomon Islands, have been under way for about three days." Now, eighteen months later, on February 16, 1944, Gen. Douglas MacArthur announces that American and New Zealand troops have occupied the island of Nissan and its four small neighbors and that "for all strategic purposes this completes the campaign for the Solomon Islands." Japanese forces, estimated at 22,000. the equivalent of two divisions, still hold portions of Buka and Bougainville and others of the northern Solomons.

But they are "isolated from their sources of supply." Their position is "hopeless." It has been a long campaign and a hard one, particularly during those first few weeks and months when the Japanese grimly contested every foot of advance and American marines wrote an epic of courage and endurance in the jungles of Guadalcanal. Its significance can never be summed in terms of territory taken alone. Up to that August of 1942 the Japanese were still pushing forward, extending their conquests in the Pacific. They themselves had recently moved Into the Solomons and were consolidating their positions for further drives. The American assault, as Admiral King noted at the time, marked "our first assumption of the initiative and of the offensive." Not once since have we lost that initiative all through the Pacific area.

Steadily, with increasing momentum, thorities told them, was teach the Americans to work hard and very soon they (the Filipinos) would "Lifeboat" To the Editor of The Sun Sir; Flowers to your able critic, Mr. Kirkley, for his welcome appraisal of "Lifeboat." walk out free. But the pardons never came. Consequently, the con victs made it as easy- for us as I a mere unit in the cinema audience possible. Senator Tydings To the Editor or The Sun Sir: I note that Senator Tydings charged the Administration and others with our lack of preparedness for this war in hia broadcast February 13.

This sounds very strange, coming from Mr. Tydings. Af cording to the Congressional Record and reports of speeches made elsewhere, Mr. Tydings was very much one of those responsible for this lack. Mr.

Tydings was not present when the vote was taken for additional planes for the army. Mr. Tydings voted against ths extension of military service. Mr. Tydings voted to keep the belligerent-port and combat zones ban.

Mr. Tydings said on October 26, 1939, sThe war in Europe is not our war. It is not necessary for us to denounce Germany or England or France, or any other In December, 1940. it was Mr. Tydings who backed Wheeler's plea for a negotiated peace.

And In December, 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, it was Mr. Tydings who said in a broadcast that we had nothing to fear from Japan. As to fortifying Guam, the record is very clear. The Administration wanted this done, but the House refused to authorize funds for this purpose by a vote of 205 to 163. All the members of the Maryland delegation in Congress voted in the negative.

Elizabeth Holt Dowjts, Corresponding Secretary, the Maryland Citizens Committee for De-' mocracy. Baltimore, Feb. 14. Appeared Very Busy They showed us how to appear sive funeral. After considerable ceremony the dead man was placed upon a funeral pyre and burned.

When the flames had died ashes were placed in an urn and the Japs gathered up the beer, rice, meats, sweet cakes and other foods that had stood near by during the burning. These they removed to a 6mali building so they would be ready at hand for the departed's spirit when he started his journey to the great beyond. Well, I guess they had to figure that this was one Jap ghost that took his chow with him, because when they went back after it they found nothing but empty beer bottles. There was nothing they could say because, according to Jap tradition, no one but the ghost Could have taken the food. It was the first beer I had had in many a day.

And with beef, too! (Copyright. 1944. Chlcsso TrlbuneJ Continued Tomorrow Dyess Honored Posthumously Washington. Feb. 16 UP) Lieut.

Curbstone Charlie Explains The Subsidy Issue Mr. Chester Bowles, of the OPA, has been trying to sell his policy on consumer subsidies to the New York Times. The Times refuses to be sold, however. We suspect the trouble oh both sides is an excess of' the language of statesmanship. Both Mr.

Bowles and the Times discuss the matter in the solemn terminology of large affairs, and this kind of talk is notoriously inadequate in describing the more vulgar facts of political life. The gist of Mr. Bowles letter to the Times is that a "balance" has now been set up between wages and prices. If this balance is upset, he says, "everyone who is familiar with the present tense wage situation agrees that the present wage level cannot be held." And if the wage level is not held, "no one can foretell exactly to what extent all prices and all wages will rise." In language equally chaste, the Times comes back with a learned demonstration that actually there is no "balance" between wages and prices. In the sense in which the statistician or the mathematician might use the term, the Times is, of course, right.

But Mr. Bowles, though solemn in his language, really wasn't talking about very, very busy without actually doing anything. It is amazing how little a Filipino can accomplish if he doesn't want to work. Yet you'd left the theater, in a disgruntled frame of mind, searching vainly for one point to justify its production. It was not entertaining; it was not informative; it lacked good pathos.

for one, shall welcome the explanation on the part of producer and author which Mr. Kirkley suggests is in order. Elizabeth Peacock. Feb. 13.

think he was going like sixty. We soon mastered the trick. Major Mida may have perceived rifle. this, because he transferred most of the Filipino convicts to distant Paulau to work on fortifications. The brunt of the work at Davao then fell upon us.

Prisoner Shot To Death The soldier, believing the guard For two and a half months, I cul thought the canteen contained something contraband, unscrewed the top and poured out some of the water to show him it did not. Without a word, the Jap raised his rifle tivated fields', harvested, cleared Col. William E. Dyess, of Albany. Texas, who escaped from a Japa and shot the American three times; jungles, and worked barefoot in the rice paddies.

Few of us had shoes. The nails of all my toes still, are black from wading in the Ooze around Davao. Thought For Today On all sides today the demand Is for Security. In other days men thought that Enterprise and Energy and Courage and Fortitude were the lovely virtues, and it is certainly to them that we owe our present standard of living. R.

S. Maynard, writing in Live Stock Bulletin, Sydney, Australia, March 1, 1943. nese prison camp and reported to once in the chest and twice in the back after he had fallen. Then in a tantrum, he turned The men who worked in the pad the War Department tne enemy atrocities against prisoners recently disclosed in an official announcement, was awarded the Soldier's the gun on the hospital building dies came down with angry, tropical ulcers. When Filipinos plant and emptied the magazine, une bullets passed through the pine Medal posthumously today.

rice they cover their feet and legs.