A Crisis Sirs:
. . . The way this crisis is solved--and swearing in Truman did not solve it--will be of greater import to the world than Pearl Harbor, the onset of World War II, etc. Who is going to make Congress see the dynamite of rejecting Bretton Woods and cajole them into reasonableness (or have you failed to tell us good reasons why Congress should want to reject it?).
I try to understand and act intelligently on the basis of the information you supply me. How well are you keeping that trust? Here is a crisis. Last night the radio tried to sell Truman to me. On the basis of what you have told me I can't be sold. . . .
(ARMY OFFICER'S NAME WITHHELD)
Galesburg, Ill.
P: Crisis is another name for "now." TIME stands by its reports on Senator Truman, bids its readers not to prejudge President Truman.--ED.
"I Am My Brother's Keeper"
Sirs:
Being also a housewife who has "given" a son to this war, I can well understand the shame . . . which required the withholding of the name of the housewife [who would not "tighten the belts of my other children to feed Europe"; TIME, April 23].
. . . Twenty years will not repair the damage done by the deliberate starvation, exposure and cruelty of the policies of the Supermen, East and West. For at least that long we must see to it that the minds and bodies of our friends and Allies are nourished. . . .
If there are not millions of American mothers and their families who feel as I do, then indeed has my son's (and all the other sons') death been in vain, and the housewives and their children will in very fact eat themselves swinishly to another holocaust.
DEAN M. STEWART Tucson, Ariz.
Sirs:
... So you lost a son, Mrs. "American." Well, mine is less than two years old. I pray to God to let him go a little hungry now so that he need not die 20 years from now. . . .
I know that if one child in the world is allowed to stay hungry, my children rise empty from our bountiful table. And sooner or later the bell will toll for them. . . .
"I am my brother's keeper." What new tragedies must our world undergo before we learn that unshakable truth?
DOROTHY M.G. WHITING
Detroit
How To Tell A Werewolf
Sirs:
In your issue of April 16 you have a picture of a werewolf. You adorned your mythical horror with a long, bushy tail. Now, that's absolute heresy. A werewolf is bobtailed. It was by his short tail that a werewolf was ordinarily to be distinguished from a real honest-to-goodness wolf.
F. A. MILLER
Neudorf, Sask.
P: Some lycanthropologists go further, insist that the genuine werewolf has no tail at all, and that its clothes can be found not far from its kill. If struck by iron or steel, the skin on the forehead of a true werewolf splits and the naked man pops out. If the beast is freezing cold, however, it is invulnerable to everything but balls of elder pith or bullets made of inherited silver.--ED.
P.O.W. Camps
Sirs:
My compliments to the TIME correspondent who wrote the article on P.O.W. camps (March 19). It is the first article on this subject that I've read that hasn't been filled with gross exaggerations, lies, and prejudice. I've been with a P.O.W. stockade for several months, and I know!
WILLIAM F. WILSON
c/o Postmaster Lieutenant, U.S.A.
New York City
"When I Get Big"
Sirs:
The hope invested in the San Francisco conference and war's meaning to a child are well illustrated in this composition written by a ten-year-old girl for a school assignment. This child lost her father, a naval flyer, two years ago. How this is reflected is to me significant:
"The San Francisco conference is to open Wednesday, April 25, 1945. A man from every country that is not our enemy will be there. They will talk about everlasting peace. That will mean a lot to everybody. When I get big, I won't have to worry about losing my husband or to depart with my children. And when I want to go for rides I won't have to worry about gasoline. And also when I want to make some candy or something, I won't have to say I can't because I haven't enough sugar. Little children in other countries that are suffering will then live in peace. This meeting is really important. It will mean everlasting peace to everybody. But what we can do now every single day is to buy WAR BONDS."
Written by Lynn Jefferies, daughter of Mrs. Inge Jefferies, Santa Ana, Calif.
DONALD W. WHITE
Lieutenant, U.S.A.
San Diego
Time Overseas
Sirs:
Knowing that any good publication appreciates a plug, here is one for the most popular weekly news coverage in the Pacific!
While on duty aboard [ship] in Leyte Gulf a short time prior to the Lingayen invasion, we had many native dugout canoes around our ship, their occupants, of course, being mainly interested in food and clothing. In one such canoe was what appeared to be an entire family, the mother of which was sitting in the stern, paying no attention to the bartering going on, but rather being apparently deeply engrossed in a copy of TIME. I tried to attract her attention with no luck as she was apparently thoroughly enjoying what she was reading. . . .
CHARLES F. DEPPE
Lieutenant, (M. C.) U. S. N.
Terre Haute, Ind.
The Monitor & Death
Sirs:
Your reference (TIME, April 23) to the front-page news of Roosevelt's death in the Christian Science Monitor is guilty of half-truths. Your staff must know that the Monitor went to press Thursday before the flash came. By the time this paper went to press on Friday, every man, woman and child in the country knew the shocking news. Hence the "newsworthy" pointing of the Monitor's Friday afternoon headlines toward the important, morale-stiffening news of that day: the stabilizing effect of Truman's first moves as the reins of government passed to his hands. . . .
As to the mention of death in the Monitor's pages, I find no editorial taboo, as witness the moving tribute to one of your profession, Ernie Pyle, in the editorial columns of a recent issue. . . .
DAVID THOMPSON
Bethel, Maine
P: Although the excellent Monitor generally prefers the euphemism "passed on" to "died,' and is averse to mentioning death, TIME erred in saying that the Monitor has a taboo against it.--ED.
United Hates of America
Sirs:
It appears that Seattle's A. J. Ritchie and friends and their society of Jap haters (TIME, April 16) have missed several potentialities in their plan. They've got something that could be made into a big thing. Why stop at hating just Japs? Thousands of our boys will come from the Western Front hating the Germans. Ritchie could get these men together with all the whites who hate the Negroes, the gentiles who hate the Jews, the Southerners who hate the Yankees, the Northerners who hate the Miamians, the isolationists who hate the British, the Texans who hate the "spicks," the Protestants who hate the "micks," the Kentuckians who hate the "revenooers," ad infinitum.
Then when he had banded all these to gether, he could move that all these hated people be transplanted to their "proper" place, i.e., Jews to Palestine, Pennsylvania Germans back to das Vaterland, Negroes to Africa, etc. He could start this United Hates of America Organization to welcome even those personal grudgers who dislike children, their neighbors, dogs and pets belonging to neighbors, and make his No. 1 plank the abolition of the words "brotherly love."
Severe, even capital, punishment is recommended for those destroyers of America, the ones who think that all deserve just treatment. The pure American will be idolized, he being a combination of all races not hated, if there be any. The best advice we now offer is that he ponder the advertising he could gain by installing as the first leader of this league one who should soon be out of a job, that ace hater and believer in racial discrimination, A. Hitler.
RUSSELL H. PEEBLES
Lieutenant, U.S.A.
Fort Walton, Fla.
Algonquin Park
Sirs:
... It would be some city park that had beaver, chipmunks, and deer on the loose (like Brookfield, near Chicago, maybe). But, as it happens, Toronto's Algonquin Park (TIME, April 16) is about 180-odd miles from Toronto and has, in addition to the above-mentioned fauna, bear, mink, moose, and wolves (researchers beware). It is, in fact, Algonquin Provincial Park, with a post office and all, some 1,500 lakes, covering, I would guess, about 3,000 sq. mi. of "picnic grounds," mostly second-growth coniferous stand, with some virgin timber in the north end.
They were spraying one acre near Park HQ last summer from the autogiro, having had some difficulties with the DDT never landing when it was dropped in a too-fine spray by ordinary plane (the drops just stayed up and wandered off toward Hudson Bay).
Toronto would undoubtedly be flattered by the suggestion that its area extends so far, but it just doesn't happen to be so.
BROWNLEE HAYDON
New York City
P: So TIME'S errant, red-faced, citified Science editor and researchers have discovered.--ED .
Foxhole Critique
Sirs:
I was looking forward last night to seeing The Enchanted Cottage because of TIME'S favorable review (April 16), and I could not understand my friend, who had already seen it, when he said, "Oh I suppose it's a good picture, but. . . ."
The moment Robert Young struck the match and revealed his war-disfigured face, I understood.
G.I. theaters are never quiet. But when that match was struck the audience froze. Hollywood had touched their sore spot--the G.I.'s second most dreaded injury.
Movies offer battle-tired men one of the few escape mechanisms left open to them. For them, even war pictures can be entertaining because they do not show war as they know it. But here, thrown in their faces, was something personal, something they try not to think about.
The picture ignores the daily miracles of plastic surgery and offers as the answer to the problem the enchantment of true love. From the artistic viewpoint and for the philosopher this will suffice. But G.I.s are pessimistic by profession and strict realists.
Both to those who wait and to those who daily go down into hell, I wonder if Hollywood hasn't been unintentionally cruel?
(PVT.) FREDERICK E. SONTAG
Camp Livingston, La.
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