Comfort from Kenya

Sir:

Re your May 7 article on Jawaharlal Nehru: Aren't you being a little naive?

"He is not the kind of man who invites a slap on the back and a friendly 'Hi, Pandit' (which, according to Geoffrey Gorer, a studious misinterpreter of U.S. folkways, is the only basis on which Americans really like anybody). . ."

". . . Americans who are far more preoccupied with moral matters than Nehru would give them credit for . . ."

Personally, I like Americans for what they are, not for what some of them would like to be thought they are.

J. M. FOXLEY NORRIS

Mweiga, Kenya, B.E.A.

Price of Infamy

Sir:

Congratulations to TIME, May 28, and Scripps-Howard Correspondent Jim Lucas for the news focus on the Panamanian ship-registry infamy [U.S. and foreign merchant ships trading with the enemy]. Southern California's Reserve "Privateer Squadron" VP-772 is the patrol squadron mentioned in the story.

We pilots feel that "business as usual with the Communists" rates the same comment and punishment as any other treasonable action. But then, we may not be as realistic as some in our country who have more to gain than their lives and freedom.

Our squadron has a seat, first row center, in this comedy. Daily we see these "ex-American" ships making the Communist ports with profits intact. Then we turn the corner of our patrol and watch the profit curtain fall on American lives in Korea . . . What price profits?

BYRON MORGAN

Lieut. U.S.N.R.

U.S. Pacific Fleet Air Force

c/o Fleet P.O.

San Francisco

Sir:

. . . I'd like to see some follow-up reporting on Panamanian ships with ports of call at Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk.

WILLIAM G. SPANGLER

Staten Island, N.Y.

Sir:

Certainly the ones who are not making money on the Panamanian ships are the seamen. It is a well-known fact that a good number of ship operators, especially Europeans, have made tremendous profits breaking embargoes, and are now trading with the enemy . . . Panama, we feel sure, will put a stop to this whenever the U.N. agree on a complete embargo against the enemy . . .

ARMANDO CARLES

Seamen's Syndicate of Panama

New York City

Ace from Thrace

Re King Frederik of Denmark, "strongest monarch in history" [TIME, May 21]: this claim by his onetime physical instructor, in behalf of the Danish sovereign, might reasonably be disputed by a Thracian peasant, C. Julius Maximinus [see cut], A.D. 235-238 . . .

As the first Roman emperor who rose from the ranks as a common soldier . . . his only recommendation for the job was his enormous brute strength. He was accustomed to amuse his soldiers by crumbling stones in his hand, and he could break a horse's leg with his heel. He was 8 1/2 feet tall, and his regular diet included nearly 8 gallons of wine and 40 Ibs. of meat per day.

DR. CHARLES D. PERRY

University, Ala.

Out of Joint

Sir:

Kenneth ("Tea & Crumpets") Gape [whose elder brother was unwilling to accept an English inheritance, TIME, May 28] appears to share the illusion of many otherwise well-informed Americans that Britons are still taking it on the chin because they have a Socialist government, clearly does not realize that the tight little island is out of joint (and out of Sunday joints) mainly because of the beating it took while helping to beat Hitler.

ALEX H. FAULKNER

New York City

Grim Reveille

Sir:

I must rise in wrathful indignation against a [sentence] in your thumbnail sketch of V.M.I. [TIME, May 28] . . . The day does not begin officially with breakfast at 7 a.m. but with a grim reveille formation in an earlier darkness . . . Waiting until the last split second to make reveille, "old" cadets jam through the arches and leap out of first floor windows.

One cold, dark, blustery winter morning, my gangling roommate took the window route with a paratrooper's magnificent form and timing precision. But a sudden gust blew the heavy dormers shut on his flying overcoat tails and left him hung corseted, pitiful and helpless against the barracks' wall, with toes inches from the ground. The streaming mass of humanity fighting for place in ranks ignored his screams, the last bugle note faded, rolls were checked and companies dismissed. Only then, officially absent from formation, did he get a helping hand. Now, 25 years later, the slightest allusion to the incident still gets you an invitation out behind the garage.

ROBERT C. YATES (V.M.I. '24)

West Point, N.Y.

Memo from the Indian Ocean

Sir:

Having been out of contact with so-called civilization for nearly six months, we had the good fortune recently to obtain a copy of TIME, March 19 from a passing schooner. May I rectify a small error in your reference to my father in that issue? You state that he commenced his psychic inquiries in 1919. Actually, he began his investigations in 1884; it was not until 1916 that he received evidence of survival after death of such irrefutable quality as to finally satisfy even his Sherlock Holmes's brain.

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the editors of TIME upon the factual excellence of their information. To an expedition at work amid the uninhabited islets of the Indian Ocean, the chance arrival of a copy was as welcome as a visit from the Delphic oracle.

There is, however, one point which should be made clear to your readers. When you refer to "the British attitude" you refer in fact to the attitude of the present British Socialist government who represent a minority, not a majority, of the British nation. Every Britisher of intelligence is aware that were it not for the courage and generous strength of the U.S., the whole world would be already under the serfdom of Russia . . . The prayers and trigger-fingers of every man who cherishes a hope for the present or a dream for the future are solidly with you.

This letter may take some time to reach you, as it goes first by a native in a hollowed tree-trunk canoe, then in a dhow, then in a trading schooner, and finally in a plane--a kind of potted edition of travel through the ages!

ADRIAN M. DONAN DOYLE

Schooner Gloria Scott

Chole Island

Indian Ocean

Need for a Hole In the Head

Sir:

Congratulations to TIME for an interesting dovetailing of two reports in its May 28 Medicine section.

In one article, Freudian Psychiatrist Fisher asks, "Why aren't there more contented [cowlike] people?" The preceding article, on psychosurgery, has the answer to that question: there just haven't been enough lobotomies yet. Fortunately, most psychiatrists continue to take a dim view of the zombie-like, bovine bliss that results from boring a hole in the patient's head and scraping around with a dull knife.

CHARLES RAMOND

Iowa City, Iowa

From Scratch

Sir:

There have been many American copies and highly successful American developments of British jet engines--but none of them are Westinghouse jets, as told in your May 28 story on "Mr. Horsepower." Engineers of our company, both in our Turbine Division at Philadelphia and in our research laboratories at East Pittsburgh, have been working on jet principles since 1939 and undertook the serious development of a turboprop engine at the request of the Navy on Dec. 7, 1941.

Westinghouse [was] screened by the Navy from any contact with the work of other engineers either abroad or in this country. They were simply charged with developing a successful aircraft jet engine from scratch . . . The Westinghouse jets are as American as the Fourth of July.

W. B. ANDERSON

Westinghouse Electric Corp.

Philadelphia

With the Bible in Baffin Land

Sir:

. . . TIME, May 28, gives high praise to Inuk, written by Father Buliard, and states that the first thing he did when he went to the North was to learn Eskimo--which "gave him a great advantage over his Anglican rivals."

Is Father Buliard suggesting that Anglican missionaries do not speak Eskimo ? Surely he must know that the Rev. Edmund J. Peck first reduced the Baffin Land dialect to written form in 1878? St. Luke's Gospel [was translated] in 1881 and published in Eskimo by the British and Foreign Bible Society . . .

LESLIE BELL

Montreal

Sir: . . . The very first thing the Anglican Church does in preparing missionaries is to teach them the language of the people among whom they are going to work. Not only do our Eskimo missionaries speak the language, but they conduct the services and administer the sacraments in the Eskimo language . . .

(REV.CANON) SYDENHAM B. LINDSAY

Montreal

Inventors & Tubes

Sir:

I doubt if Dr. Lee de Forest claims to be the inventor of the electron tube [TIME, May 28]. He invented several, but credit for the electron tube belongs more properly to Thomas A. Edison for his discovery of "the Edison effect," and to Sir Ambrose Fleming for his development of the thermionic tube which was based on the Edison effect.

SPENCER JONES

Palo Alto, Calif.

Sir:

De Forest added the important third electrode--the grid--to [Fleming's] two-electrode tube . . .

JAMES d'A. CLARK

Longview, Wash.

Oliver Twist

Sir:

TIME, May 14, deserves special kudos for [reporting] the important background facts which make Oliver Twist's release notable. Precensorship lasting two years had deprived the American screen of this film and added another notch to the guns of pressure groups who fire away at any film or book which shows members of their group--not even their group in toto--in an unpleasant role.

The American Council for Judaism, which took the lead among Jewish organizations in opposing the ban on Oliver Twist, believes that every citizen must depend on proper enforcement of public laws to cope with violations of public security and license. For ourselves, we constantly reiterate that "no Jew or group of Jews can speak for or represent the Jews of America" in this or any other matter.

LEONARD R. SUSSMAN

The American Council for Judaism

New York City

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