Not Ours

Sirs:

Somebody's face is going to be red, brother!

From LIFE, April 13, page 33, bottom cut: A group of marines are shown standing in a barbed-wire enclosure. The caption reads "Marines on Bataan line up for orders before wading into the jungle to clean out some Jap outposts."

(Now enter TIME magazine blushing.) . . . Identically the same photograph appears [TIME, April 13] but with another caption, which reads: "Marines have just cleaned out a Japanese hillside position!" . . .

FRANK GRAHAM Columbia, S.C.

Sirs:

After more than 40 years service with the U.S. Marines I am a firm believer that no task is too great for that branch of our armed forces. . . .

In your issue of TIME, April 13, and the issue of LIFE for the same date, identical pictures appear of a group of Marines said to have been taken somewhere on Bataan Peninsula, Luzon, P.I.

LIFE notes that they are about to wade into the jungle for the purpose of cleaning out some Jap outposts. TIME says they have just returned from what was presumably the same mission.

Is it possible that since I retired some three years ago the Marines have added another accomplishment to their bag of tricks? Is it really so, that they are actually able to be coming & going, both at one and the same time?

Welcome, TIME & LIFE, into the ranks of the true believers whose motto is "The Marines can do anything."

F. L. BRADMAN

Brigadier General, U.S. Marines

Retired

San Francisco, Calif.

> TIME'S cover is red as usual but not its face. If the Japs had not already been cleaned off the neighboring hillsides, the Marines would not be standing around so nonchalantly.--ED.

Lost Generation?

Sirs:

. . . Since the priorities system has greatly curtailed their activities and earnings, a large number [of traveling salesmen and sales managers] have tried to get commissions rather than wait for the draft because of dependents and obligations. Most of these men have made lots of money in civilian life and $21 a month would drastically reduce their standard of life and they would not be able to return to it easily when the war is over. . . . Salesmen as a rule have a good education, are easily able to handle the public and their customers, are especially well versed in current affairs due to incessant reading of the newspapers. . . . Yet they are passed up by both services because of lack of specific knowledge.

As public relation officers or purchasing quartermasters, as post exchange officers, as intelligence officers, training camp instructors, as personnel officers and in the Navy as similar officers . . . as recruiting officers, as supply officers, and so very many other departments in which they are more qualified than many other ones who have been commissioned. Most salesmen know the service requirements and specifications for buying materials, know the best and fastest sources of supply, and know how to handle personnel better than any other group in America. I know personally that most of the post exchanges in the U.S. are not on a paying basis and could easily be if they had experienced merchandisers and buyers in charge.

These men are all anxious to serve and could be of little service as privates or sailors due to years of easy living and age restrictions. . . .

G. G. GREGORY

Lubbock, Tex.

Sirs:

We might as well face the facts: There are a hell of a lot of us, fairly comfortably situated, holding the usual kinds of jobs in publishing, in advertising, in sales promotion, in paper-shuffling who are not worth a tinkers' damn in the war effort. We've had our jobs long enough --those comfortable berths with the clockwork pay check--to fear the alien breezes which blow just outside the office door. We started in our early and eager 20s and now we are crowding our tired 40s. We could swim and hike and dance in the old days and eat 20-c- lunches and look forward to the years ahead as a great adventure. We are on the paunchy side and our hair is thinner and we would rather relax with the paper or go to a movie after the day's work is done.

We know that the comfortable world we knew is on the skids. Voting the Republican ticket isn't going to save it for us. We were successively antilabor, anti-low tariff, anti-socialistic, anti-Marxist, anti-Communist and antiFascist. And now a lot of those things we were against have somehow become respectable. . . . We are only vaguely aware of the underlying reasons for which the present war is being fought. But, at least, we know that it is now our fight and, wistfully, we'd like to be doing something about it in addition to paying taxes.

We are all safely --for the time being --classified as 3-A. We have a little house in the suburbs and two children and a car and a mortgage. We cut the lawn and dig a little garden with our shortening breath and perspiring brows. If we were called to active service, we'd feel more at home at a desk job in Washington than in a jeep in Virginia. But we hate the thought of either.

We might like to learn how to run a drill press or a lathe or a riveter in our spare time and put in two or three hours every evening helping to build war machines. But the unions wouldn't let us and there is no available machinery set in motion to make it possible. If we have been selling bonds, or insurance, or refrigerators, or cars, or real estate, or advertising, all the pep talks in the world, all the posters and all the brass bands are of no avail to urge us to roll up our sleeves, step up production and lick the Japs in the "silver months" which remain of 1942.

We are the great useless middle class. We are not Labor and we are not Capital. Our bodies are hardly good enough to be shot at and our skills for making the shooting machines is nonexistent. We can only sell things --when there are no things to sell.

We are truly the Lost Generation. . . .

LAURENCE WRAY

New York City

> The war's dislocation of the No. 1 U.S. career is serious indeed. Last Census Bureau figures listed more than 3,000,000 men and women each trained in the art of convincing people that they had to have what he sold; whether they needed it or not --people whose pay ranged from $15 a week to $100,000 a year. Those who are drafted, however, may after three months basic training, like other draftees, become candidates for officer training.--ED.

Salute

Sirs:

Shame on TIME [April 13] for its ill-mannered treatment of Mrs. Cornelia Marvin Pierce, distinguished Oregonian, wife and secretary of Oregon's only Democratic Congressman, ex-Governor Walter M. Pierce.

Here in this vast eastern Oregon district, second or third largest Congressional district in the U.S., we are proud of Cornelia, as she is affectionally known; frequently boast that we are represented by not one Congressman but two. No responsible constituent objects to receiving one of her always lively letters.

Mrs. Pierce is a former faculty member of the University of Wisconsin; former Oregon State librarian; ex-member of Oregon's State board of higher education. She has been a distinguished public figure in Oregon for many years.

She was quite right in her provocation over the letter addressed to her husband while he was in Oregon attending the funeral of his only son. Mrs. Pierce did what any self-respecting Congressman would do--struck back courteously but forcefully at criticism that had deteriorated into personal abuse.

More power to her. When & if Mr. Pierce decides to retire, we are going to run her for Congress. And she'll be elected too!

ARTHUR H. BONE

Publisher

The Malheur Enterprise

Vale, Ore.

Silence Pays

Sirs:

Re TIME, April 20.

Hurrah for the Dallas Morning News. It made Sam Rayburn mad and official Washington grumble, but the people of the U.S. got some news --3,300 planes a month, a trainload of tanks a day and from just one factory.

If that is good news to our enemies, I am certainly a dumbbell. However, the Brain Trust in Washington has decreed that Dumbbell Americans like myself should not have any news of the war until all the rest of the world knows what has happened.

I presume at the present time the refusal of Washington to report the bombing of Japan is to keep the fact from the Japanese people.

Isn't it wonderful that just a few men can see everything so clearly, that 130,000,000 citizens need not know nor worry about what is happening.

H. F. McGlNLEY

Kingman, Ariz.

> TIME is all for more and better information for the U.S. people, but the Government's failure to report the bombing of Japan makes good sense. There is every reason to believe that the Japs have been guessing long and hard where the raid came from--and how to fend off another. As long as they are kept guessing, silence pays.--ED.

Not Exclusive

Sirs:

I wish to protest against certain errors in your article "Surrealists in Exile" [TIME, April 20]. . . . I point out that I am not exclusively a collector of Surrealist art and that my collection covers every form of nonrealistic art of any importance that has appeared in the last 32 years.

My art center will comprise paintings of Cubist and Abstract artists as well as Surrealists. My interests are entirely neutral and my home is by no means the center of Surrealism but is open to all artists in whose work I believe.

PEGGY GUGGENHEIM

New York City

> That Peggy Guggenheim is no one-ism woman, TIME is well aware. But Surrealist Pope Ernst's permanent residence in Peggy Guggenheim's mansion makes it Surrealism's Vatican. --ED.

Pacifist Ayres

Sirs:

I have just read the telegram from John Huston and other Hollywood "firsts" in the April 20 issue of TIME. I feel gratified that these intelligent and courageous people have come to the defense of Lew Ayres.

I am a private in the Air Force, not by compulsion, but by desire. I am here because I want to see the new-world principles of free thought and free speech preserved. I have followed closely the furor caused by the flag-wavers who would deny Lew Ayres the right to do what so many Americans are too cowardly to do --stick by honest principles regardless of public opinion. . . .

Most of us believe that this war is being fought so that people like Lew Ayres all over the world will be free to live and say what they please as long as it is not injurious to the public good. Lew Ayres, instead of being detrimental to our public good, is indicative of what the American people wrote into their Bill of Rights and what we fight our wars about --the right to freedom in a democracy.

Roughly, there are 2,500 men who do not choose to kill now in Conscientious Objectors Camps in the U.S. Doubtless, there are many more, in and out of the Armed Forces, who feel as Lew Ayres feels, but who are too weak to be nonconformists. Then, shouldn't we admire Lew Ayres because he is strong enough to face the suspicion, ridicule, and hate that is always the lot of those who do not choose to conform?

I do not agree with Lew Ayres as far as killing people is concerned. I feel that if it is necessary to kill the disciples of Herr Schicklgruber and his ruthless cohorts in order to insure freedom and democracy for the world that we must push relentlessly forward and accomplish our honorable task as soon as possible. But. when I am fighting for freedom and democracy, I want it known that I am fighting for freedom and democracy for Lew Ayres as much as for any other citizen of my country.

PRIVATE EUGENE B. CROWE

Lemoore, Calif.

Straightened Out

Sirs:

Let's straighten things out about "rank-&-filers" on the "ad-less" Stars & Stripes [TIME, April 13].

Captain F. P. Adams columned on the paper for ten weeks then was transferred to other duties. Lieut. Grantland Rice went to work the issue that the sport page was abolished. "Rank-&-Filers" Mark Watson and Stephen Early were Major Watson and Captain Early. Alexander Woollcott was a sergeant, and the official roster doesn't list a single Marx --let alone Harpo. So, it seems, the only authentic private of your picked group is Harold Ross.

As to advertising, Stars & Stripes Historian John T. Winterich wrote (in Squads Write!; Harper & Bros., 1931):

"We carried advertising, but not for revenue only. The revenue, in fact, was so much fungus. Every centime which The Stars and Stripes took in --and it took in 50 of them per copy, one dime American --vanished eventually into the unheeding maw of the United States Treasury. We carried advertising solely in order that The Stars and Stripes would look like what it was --a newspaper."

ROY SWANFELDT

Hollywood, Calif.

> TIME erred, indeed, on several points. However, Historian Winterich also wrote: "Now we of the staff were not anti-officer. Some of our best friends were officers. But there was a commissioned viewpoint and there was an uncommissioned viewpoint, and as enlisted men . . . outnumbered officers . . . it was plainly our duty . . . to have regard for the greater good we might do the greater number."--ED.

They Got What They Wanted

Sirs:

. . . We agree with you more often than we disagree, but when you say [TIME, April 20] we didn't get the man we wanted . . . when we nominated Curly Brooks, you are quite a bit off the general feeling this Midwest State has toward Senator Brooks.

You might raise your sights a bit higher, get a view beyond the Hudson River, and find the State of Illinois has picked a pretty fair example of just what this country needs at the present time in Washington.

R. W. MILLER

Henry, Ill.

Sirs:

. . . No, TIME, the only reason nearly 700,000 Illinois Republicans voted for Senator Brooks is because they prefer an honest, straightforward American to a shirttail-riding, "where-he-leads-I'll-follow," rubber-stamp type of candidate. After all Illinois has an open primary.

E. H. ETTINGER

Chicago, Ill.

Sirs:

. . . Why do you say the Sun and the News "sniped away at the Tribune while the really big game --the Senate seat --slipped through?" What do you mean by "slipped through?" The Sun gave exactly the same reasons as TIME for not electing Brooks. It went further and endorsed a proRoosevelt-foreign-policy man, Raymond McKeough, who for some reason you hesitate either to approve or to give basis for disapproving. If you would spend more time trying to be specific and less trying to turn a good phrase, such lameness and ambiguity would not occur.

MARY L. MANGUM

Chicago, Ill.

> If Illinoisans Miller, Ettinger and others are satisfied with Kelly-Nash's Raymond McKeough and Colonel McCormick's Curly Brooks, that is as it should be. If the majority of Illinois' 7,897,000 citizens do not really admire such candidates, yet were not roused to prevent their nominations, that is as it should not be.--ED.

Pipe, Slippers & Fireside

Sirs:

"I feel I have reached an age where I can reasonably expect to stay wherever I go for the rest of my life." --Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt. [TIME, April 6].

This is the most wonderful news for countless millions! Mrs. Roosevelt Roosevelt has certainly earned an immediate holiday for the rest of her life --and the people certainly deserve it.

H. M. VARNELL

Los Angeles, Calif.

> Outline of Mrs. Roosevelt's April itinerary: at least seven visits to Manhattan, four to Brooklyn (to see son Franklin), two to Hyde Park, one each to Boston, Nashville, Trenton, Richmond, Hampton, Va., with various stop-offs between trips in Washington. --ED.

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