Sunday, December 14, 1941

WILL MEN AND WOMEN BE DRAFTED? Not for combat, of course, but Brig. Gen. Lewis B. Hershey says that "we undoubtedly are soon going to consider the registration of women" between 18 and 65 for war work -- taking the place of men on assembly lines, working in civil defense, or doing noncombatant jobs in the military. According to the Associated Press, General Hershey envisions that 20,000,000 women could be put into national service this way. When you read things like this, you realize what an unprecedented situation we’re in.

As reported by Samuel W. Bell in the New York Herald Tribune, the current draft bill is sweeping enough. All men between 18 and 65 must register. All men between 18 and 45 are subject to military service in the land or naval forces. That’s a potential of 10,000,000 men available for military duty and another 30,000,000 who could be inducted for non-combat service. That’s what the War Department’s put before Congress, and there’s no doubt it’ll pass, of course.

Plus the Senate approved $10,572,350,000 in war appropriations Friday -- a figure so massive that the Chicago Tribune followed it with an exclamation mark in their front-page banner headline.

After a year of fitful attempts at "preparedness," we’re finally taking the job seriously. And it only took a direct, immediate threat to our national survival to get us to do it.

WE’RE HOLDING ON IN THE PACIFIC. The Administration says that Guam, which was guarded by a scant 550 American soldiers, is "probably" lost. But our troops are holding on at Wake Island, at Midway, and in the Philippines. In fact, the brightest spot at the moment appears to be the latter, where according to Saturday’s headlines, U.S. and native Philippine troops repulsed three Japanese landing attempts on Luzon. Enemy parachutists have landed at two other locations on northern Luzon, but neither is considered a major threat to Manila. And there are good tidings on the sea -- Navy planes have sunk two Japanese battleships off Luzon, and Dutch submariners have reportedly sunk four Japanese transport ships off Malaya, killing 4,000 of the enemy.

Still no official word on the toll from the Hawaii attack, though. The newspapers seem to be blacking out the story since Wednesday, but the rumor mill is going full steam. Does the Administration realize the adverse consequences of blacking out critical news? When will we hear some hard facts?

THE GERMAN CENTER COLLAPSES. That’s what it sounds like, anyway. A week ago the Nazis announced they had given up attempting to take Moscow until next spring, and would dig in their current positions for the winter. I didn’t give it much credence, and in any case, it’s become academic whether Berlin really meant it or not -- the Russians have no intention of letting the Germans rest in place. Rest in peace, maybe. This is how the Washington Post reports the latest Red claims --

""Russia announced the utter defeat of a crumbling German army of 750,000 men on the Moscow front . . . with 85,000 Germans killed and 23 of an original 51 divisions either smashed, routed, surrounded, or retreating. A special communique reported German troops in flight along both flanks of the encirclement front on the frozen Moscow plain. Red Cossack detachments were said to be slashing through the German lines, isolating division after division and leaving them behind for battles of annihilation to come."

Soviet claims have sometimes been as extravagant as Nazi boasts, but it’s hard to believe that Stalin’s regime would be crowing on this large a scale unless there was something to it. And coupled with the German defeat at Rostov, Axis morale on the Eastern Front has to be falling through the cellar about now.

MORE AIR RAID ALARMS, STILL NO PLANES. Four consecutive nights of alerts in southern California. But the main focus is still on San Francisco, which went through what the Associated Press calls a "weird wartime blackout" Friday night. Once again, no bombs fell, but from the A.P. dispatch it sounds like mayhem out there --

"Unidentified airplanes roared low over the city during the two hours and thirty-four minutes of total darkness. Unverified reports said flares were dropped in the financial district and into the ocean, but police were inclined to discount them. Dogs howled in all parts of the city and many accidents were reported. 'People were running around like wild,' declared Elmer Combs, booking steward at Central Emergency Hospital. 'A lot of people came in that we couldn’t even begin to handle. There were accidents from all kinds of things -- autos, streetcars, streetcars sliding down hills. Some people blew their tops.'"

A modest proposal -- why bother with comprehensive blackouts at all? There was a story in the New York Herald Tribune yesterday quoting Samuel O. Hibben, the director of applied lighting for Westinghouse. He said that a blackout of all the street lights in New York City would be "more deadly than bombs" and that blackout-induced traffic accidents in London last year killed more people than raids. Yes, Mr. Hibben says, turn out the advertising signs and home and business lights. But darkening the streets would lead to "confusion, death, and destruction." Judging from what’s happening on the West Coast, it sounds like he knows what he's talking about.

Meanwhile, the Herald Tribune also reported that Emil Davies, a British official who headed the London County Council during the worst of last year’s blitz, says it’s "likely" there were be German nuisance raids on New York City. The story says German pilots might "do what they did over England: drop their load of bombs over New York, fly on for some 300 miles, bail out and give themselves up as war prisoners." I still think the West Coast is where we have to worry most about getting raided, but East Coast raids are probably more plausible than I thought.