Scorched Earth in the U. S.

From the mountains of New England to the shaggy slopes of Georgia's hills, flames ate greedily at priceless timber. Red-eyed, smoke-bleary, smudge-blackened men fought, cursed, touched off backfires. Out over the Atlantic rolled billows of smoke, swept east by the prevailing winds. Airmen on patrol for submarines groped through the haze.

Evidence of sabotage was near-conclusive. At Providence, R.I., it seemed strange that 15 fires should spring up in one area at once. At Keene, N.H., a small boy stumbled on to a burned-out candle in a paper bag attached to a small balloon.

If the coastal fires were the work of Axis agents, their purpose was twofold: to cloak submarines from the prying eyes of U.S. aircraft on patrol; to drag men from vital war factories to fight the fires. Fire-fighting manpower was at a low ebb. The draft had cut deeply into the ranks of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Soldiers and sailors banded together with hastily recruited citizens to dig trenches, fell trees.

Spring's forest fires struck in an unexpected quarter. Anticipated next summer and autumn were lightning, cigaret and even faggot-set fires in the vast tinderbox of the Northwest, which is as vulnerable to incendiaries as Japan's papery cities. But the late April-early May fires in the East were a flank attack.

Forest sabotage is no wartime novelty. The U.S. experienced it in 1917-18. As mile after mile of tall timber was reduced last week to black stumps the Forest Service schemed to prevent any more Axis-scorched earth in the U.S. Throughout the Pacific Coast's 91,940,000 acres of timberland an abnormally wet winter and spring have nourished lush, thick vegetation, highly inflammable once it dries. Men were already in training in Washington State's breadbasket to fight grain fires in June.

Complaining in the Senate about a $16,000,000 reduction in an $18,000,000 fire-fighting appropriation proposed by the Forest Service, California's Sheridan Downey called forest-fire control "the most desperate problem in the whole U.S. today."

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