Get an English Girl

Sirs:

Elizabeth Gellhorn [TIME, April 13] and other jealous Yankee gals appear perturbed about so many soldiers being in England this spring. Elizabeth expresses her jealousy by denouncing the English mother of an American soldier's illegitimate quads. A friend of mine in a letter last week expressed it in classic parody: "Oh to be in England now that the Army's there." British females, given good girdles and such, silk stockings, high heels, a permanent wave and a good set of cosmetics, could easily come up to American standards of beauty. After five years of war they aren't doing bad now.

The startling thing I find about English girls though is their helpful and cooperative nature. Gladly will they darn your socks, wash your clothes, share their limited food rations with you, . . . listen to your bragging about central heating and then apologize for what five years of war have done to what appears to me a beautiful little island after the flat dry desolation of Texas and the stinking swamps of Louisiana.

Yes, indeed, the girls back home should worry, or else learn to ... darn socks or something else besides play bridge and sip cocktails all afternoon. The English say we spoil our women. After seeing and going out with a number of both I'm convinced we certainly do. My advice to any bewildered bachelor back home: send to England for a wife. The initial investment may be large but she will save you two thousand bucks a year in upkeep.

(PFC.) JOHN M. STEVENS c/o Postmaster New York City

Methodists and Businessmen

Sirs:

TIME'S excellent article (April 24) about my trip ended with a phrase from a letter of mine to a friend about our needing "more Methodists and more businessmen" in our foreign affairs. This phrase caused me some trouble. . . .

Of course, I was trying to express to a friend (who is not a Methodist) the need for more practical idealism and more inspired common sense in managing our foreign policy. I was thinking of the kind of church people whose religion moves them to do things, not just to say them, and who, therefore, feel their ideals must be workable, and that common sense can have a spiritual quality. Many people, Catholics and Jews and others, are that way.

At present we have some announced ideals, but have not been using them. The Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter were apparently campaign oratory. Our zigzag diplomacy has not even been a success by Machiavellian standards, with the French, the Italians, and the Jugoslavs. I recognize the awful difficulties that confront our leaders, but I believe that for our policies to win friends and influence people, we need to preach better, and practice more, and to pray harder. I think a just peace can be made to satisfy both the spiritual and the material needs of our country.

This is the sort of thing I meant by more Methodists and businessmen.

JOHN M. VORYS Washington

Admiral Nimitz and Pony

Sirs:

I have just seen a copy of TIME'S first Pacific Pony Edition. The war has created new difficulties for the publishing industry, and the ingenuity and energy needed to surmount difficulties connected with production of this edition must have been considerable. The war also has created new opportunities for publishers, and I am happy to see that TIME, in characteristic fashion, is taking fullest advantage of them. I feel sure that servicemen in the Pacific Area will benefit from the prompt dissemination of news.

CHESTER W. NIMITZ Admiral, U.S.N.

Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean Areas Pearl Harbor, T.H.

Gentleman from Chile

Sirs:

If the gentleman from Chile had visited the U.S. and England not after, but before, Pearl Harbor and Dunkirk, he might have written about those two countries as he wrote about Chile (TiME, April 24). . . .

I have read many, many reports on pre-Pearl Harbor U.S. on the same and even more somber lines than this one on Chile, and I took it upon myself to tell all kinds of audiences in this country that I did not share the sort of defeatism growing therefrom. As a matter of fact, I wrote in a book, You Americans, long before the war, of my bewilderment about that little faith shown here on the spiritual reserve of this people that, I thought, would never fail this country, and did not.

What I thought of your democracy I think of ours. I deem it important, furthermore, that by emphasizing the occasional not entirely satisfactory pictures of representative regimes we do not nourish a fondness for the alternative. And the alternative is the one this country is fighting against. . . .

I do not contend the accuracy of the beautifully worded letter in question. I have been too long away from my country to discuss that. But there is one thing of which I am certain and that is that there is in Chile a wealth of sturdy spiritual strength and potential unity not different from the one that you stored here behind your pre-Pearl Harbor days.

I take that letter to mean no more than something of what your Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: that authoritarian regimes sail well but sometimes strike a rock and go to the bottom, whereas democracy is like a raft "which would never sink, but then your feet are always in the water."

CARLOS DA VILA New York City

P:To Reader Davila, onetime revolutionist (he helped depose Chilean President Montero), onetime Chilean Ambassador to the U.S., onetime President of Chile, now a Manhattan-based journalist, TIME'S thanks for an illuminating letter.--ED.

U.S. v. M. Ward

Sirs: The seizure of Montgomery Ward's Chicago office [TIME, May 8] represents simply the most outrageous recent outbreak of a home-grown American Fascism which is steadily developing under the New Deal Government. . . .

The smugly sycophantic Attorney General, Mr. Biddle, who is always available, it seems, with any legal interpretation desired by his masters, contributed his bit to this classically European situation by his condescending remark that Mr. Avery "put up quite a fight." Pleading the "war effort" is scarcely any excuse for this highhanded and dictatorial confiscation of a business property and this cynical violence upon the person of a respectable, though anti-New Deal, gentleman whose difficulties with Government bureaus do not necessarily brand him a common crook. . . .

What happened in Chicago is a thing which we have so often been told "cannot happen here." It can happen here, it has happened here, and it will continue to happen here with increasing frequency and intensity until we poor deluded citizens wake up to the fact that long-continued, self-perpetuating power is evil in its very essence, no matter who wields it, no matter how idealistic their motives, and no matter how world-shattering the war that drugs us into feeling that any one man or any one party is indispensable.

R. D. BULLOCK

San Francisco

Sirs:

. . . Avery may have looked like a potentate to you, but to me he looked like a Brooklyn umpire being escorted from the park.

E. F. BLOCK Philadelphia

Sirs:

. . . The Government should be ashamed of its part in the argument, as should the union. They both show lack of intelligence and definite un-American tendencies. . . .

CONSTANCE S. FALCONER West Orange, NJ.

Sirs:

. . . Thank God they didn't order me to take part in that. I, for one, didn't volunteer to fight the CIO's battles and I'm thoroughly disgusted with the Administration's highhanded, Nazi-like handling of the whole matter. . . .

(NAVY LIEUTENANT) Seattle

Sirs:

... As one with a pretty fair stake in private industry, I do not see in the President's clamping down on this self-centered and rugged egoist any resemblances to the Brown-Shirted seizure of private businesses in Berlin a decade ago, nor do I see any grave threat to capitalistic economy. In fact, I feel that Attorney General Biddle, whom I happen to know, was unduly sensitive of Avery's rights and his sensitivities. Much more so in fact than Avery has been of others in the course of his rugged career. . . .

WALKER MANN

Philadelphia

Who's Boss?

Sirs:

The argument that we've been having for the past few weeks is that Admiral Halsey has to report to General MacArthur for orders, and that General MacArthur is ranking officer over Admiral Halsey. We would like very much for you to straighten us out on that argument. We do know that one has command of the South Pacific and the other has the Southwest Pacific. . . .

(Ppc.) MORRIS RICKMAN Somewhere in the South Pacific

P:General MacArthur has direct strategic command of all Allied forces operating within the Southwest Pacific area. If Admiral Halsey wants to operate there, MacArthur is his strategic boss. Elsewhere, Admiral Halsey is under the sole command of Admiral Nimitz, CINCPAC and CINCPOA.--ED.

Those Brass-Button Queens

Sirs:

Cursed be the dark days I penned those lines about "The Marines, the Marines, those seagoing bellhops, those brass-button queens. . . ." you ran in TIME [May 1]. And thrice cursed be that low Army character who knifed me between my shoulder blades with his editor's shears some two years ago. Because I happen to be a Marine and damned proud of it, and I certainly have my share of the "conscious superiority inherent in every Marine."

Here's the straight dope on that bit of doggerel "believed to be by a sailor." . . .

Shortly after coming in the Marine Corps I pecked this poem out, with one important difference. In the stanzas which you printed I tried to sum up most of the complaints the other services give when they beef about the Marines. But in the last stanza, which you did not run, I got around to our usual "conscious superiority," saying that the Marines were not only as good as they said they were but a damned sight better and that the other services were griped because they couldn't all be Marines.

Well, I tossed it to another officer and forgot about it. Two weeks later it appeared in a Marine publication called The Recruiter. A month after that I landed in Pearl Harbor and came across a copy of Yank, the Army newspaper. I found they had picked it up from the other magazines and, with typical G.I. humor, had left off the last stanza and included a cartoon of an odd-looking gent in dress blues with a chest like a barrage balloon and medals dripping down to the ground and trailing behind him. A little twirp in the background had a blurb which said: "Gee, look, a Marine!"

Boy, that did it! Every once in a while I would see an issue of Yank and almost invariably there would be some letter to the editor ... by Leathernecks who all uttered the same monotonous theme of wanting to "lower the boom" on my greying head. Because, to top matters off, Yank had simply signed the poem with my rank and name, so naturally the Leathernecks to a man thought I was Army. . . .

Man, that hurt! I grabbed a pen and wrote a letter to the editor of Yank and told him to get me from behind the eight ball. Someone told me they printed it. ... Anyhow, I thought the matter was dead & buried.

After Tarawa and nearly two years in the Pacific I came back to the States dreaming of a little peace and contentment. Now this thing pops up again. . . . Brother, where's my foxhole ?

EARL J. WILSON Captain, U.S.M.C. Washington

P:To help remove the curse from Captain Wilson's head, TIME prints his Yank-excised last stanza:

They grab all the gravy away from

the Navy

And all they leave the poor sailors

is beans.

The Army gripes likewise about

those leatherneck guys

'Cause they wish that they all were Marines.--ED.

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