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War Telescope 43-04-11 xxx Victorious Week For The Allies
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War Telescope 43-04-11 xxx Victorious Week For The Allies
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- [00:00]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [00:32]
Morgan Beatty
Sunday at this time, the National Broadcasting Company presents Morgan Beatty's War Telescope, a review of the war week and a forecast of possible developments to come. Morgan Beatty is NBC's veteran war reporter in the British capital. And so for his regular Sunday report, we take you now to London.
- [00:52]
This is Morgan Beatty in London, looking at the 188th week of war through the war telescope. As your radios and newspapers have told you, this has been a week of victorious action for the Allies on every battlefront, except perhaps in Russia, where general weather has prevented any changes of importance. This therefore was a week that portends a triumphant spring, the first spring in the last four dominated by hope. In the words of Britain's minister of production this weekend, Oliver Littleton, the spring of our liberation from the horrors and chances of war has begun, and we shall soon be in the high summer of military success. Now Mr. Littleton is often free with his metaphors, his figures of speech, and he has sometimes in the past been over optimistic or perhaps, but events do give him now the benefit of the doubt, and we will overlook his literary flowers. But since the Allies are on the offensive march, after all these years of waiting, I thought perhaps you'd like to go back over the last year with me to recall what was happening to us a year ago on the World war battlefronts. Early last April, the men of Bataan were making their last stand. The losing battle against the Japanese in the Philippines was reaching its tragic climax. The enemy tide was running full throughout the Orient. Singapore was gone and it looked as if the men of the Rising sun would soon be ready to take Australia. At home. We were asking ourselves, and it is reasonable and understandable that we were asking ourselves why the men of Bataan were not relieved, why they got their orders to hold out to the end, why 65,000 or more were finally captured. We didn't quite see, even though we were told why, these men were the price we paid for the time it takes to arm a big nation for modern warfare. Last spring in the Mediterranean, the Axis still held a firm grip on North Africa, and Rommel was even then preparing his daring dash for the Nile Delta and Suez. In this sensational campaign, the German fox came within an ace of success. The flat, green lands of the Nile were almost within sight of the Africa Corps when the British made their last stand, a stand that had to be reinforced, that had to hold. Suez is more of a strategic pawn in war than the Philippines. A year ago at this time, we were all asking ourselves why the British held on at Malta in the face of withering air attacks. We were saying Malta could not last long and neither could the Nile Delta. But British strategists well knew the importance of Malta. They knew that base in the center of the Mediterranean would one day become a sword in the side of the Axis, as it is at this very moment. The strategists knew that once Allied armies had run the U boat gauntlet successfully, once they had been trained more thoroughly and more rigorously in the ways of modern war, we would be on the offensive, and Malta would come in very handy indeed, as it has. But of course, we could not be told all this last spring. And again, it's quite understandable that we would not be able to see the picture puzzle of strategy the way it was being fitted together. We were watching the Axis last April, and the Axis was on the offensive at this same time last year on the Russian front, the great spring quagmires held both the Germans and the Russians in their grip, just as they hold them now. But on the railway line and on the few good highways, Hitler's armored legions were moving as rapidly as possible toward a new offensive, an offensive that would carry them to a vast trap at Stalingrad, a thrust that was destined to take them all almost within sight of the great underground rivers of oil in Russia's Caucasus. Again, we had misjudged the situation, but in a different way. Many of us had thought the Russian winter offensive of 1941, two years ago, was really an offensive, whereas the Soviet armies had managed merely to hold on in the clinches and prevent the Germans from preparing an even more powerful punch than the one they finally unlimbered in the Caucasus. During last spring and summer, the Soviet forces backpedaled out of the German trap. The Russian High Command had plans too, it seems, and at the opportune moment, the Red army staged an almost miraculous comeback last winter. They really packed an offensive punch. Their positions were all restored almost. And Leningrad was relieved last April. The great American industrial machine had just rumbled into maximum action, action toward the seemingly impossible war production goals set by the president last spring. England was beginning to double her production through rigid wartime controls of manpower, a program that since has been expanded to use the full strength of British woman power too. You and I did not see this then as part of a master plan. As a matter of fact, the Combined Chiefs of Staff in London and Washington had only partly worked out their plans for offensive strategy. They did not then know which of the Axis weak points they would strike. It was in June before they fixed upon what our strategy would be and where and when the blow would come. We could not be told all these things then. All we knew was that the Axis seemed to have a stranglehold on our poorly equipped and sometimes badly trained forces. They had us by the throat in the Philippines and in Burma. They were dangerously near the Suez Canal and the Anglo Persian oil fields beyond. And they were poised for an offensive against the Caucasus around Turkey to the north. Now look at the contrast. The Axis is battling desperately to hold its last tiny bridgehead in North Africa. The Germans one perch one bridgehead in Asia. In the west, the Kuban area in the Caucasus is also threatened by the Soviet armies. On the other side of the world, the Japanese have been stopped cold at the doorstep of India and are even now on the defensive. In the air, we have pushed them out of Guadalcanal in the Solomon, and the enemy may be on the verge of a decision to get out of New Guinea a above Australia before he's pushed out. In short, despite their tremendous stride, which we cannot ignore, it's the Axis that's hanging on in the clinches, trying to hold some of the gains made on both sides of the world. In the European theater, Britain is no longer waked up night after night by the rising and falling wail of the air raid sirens. Although Britain is steeled against a return of the Luftwaffe at the moment, the sirens sound so seldom that the noise surprises you. In the Air, the RAF and the 8th American Air Force are carrying on offensive warfare day and night. Great German industrial plants have been smashed to smithereens. Time and again. The last series of attacks knocked out. The great Krupp works at Essen for four solid weeks. But what has made this transformation possible for it is a transformation. First, of course, we can now see the military principle guiding the Allied high command. These men know they Must not strike without adequate force anywhere in the world. The enemy on both sides of the world must see by our military action that defeat, in the end is inevitable. Both German leadership and the soldiers in the field in Tunisia, for example, must be made to understand that only a dunkirk is possible at best, in that theater. When that feeling has saturated the German army, it will communicate itself ultimately to the German people. That feeling of futility is the hampering element in morale against Rommel and his men. Now, as Oliver littleton has said, we have made a beginning. We are in the springtime of victory, even though the road ahead is dangerous, and on it we will find bitter disappointment from time to time. But surely there are other factors in the transformation from last year. Other forces played their part in the turn of the tide. After all, decisions of a high command are merely decisions. They aren't worth the match they're pinned on unless they're carried out. There are the rest of us, the millions, who must carry out the decisions, the commands. There's the regimentation, the rigorous yoke of duty that the british have accepted at the hands of their government, and there's regimentation back home in America. But despite bickering and backsliding, as the baptists say, there's more and more progress. There are always two, three, even more steps forward for every one we slide back. And the people who take these steps, for the most part, are just ordinary men. They're not great leaders, but nor yet are they men of military genius. They're men like Sergeant Ben Marcelones of the 8th Air Force, stationed here in england. But let's go back 10 years for a moment. Ten years ago, Adolf Hitler rode to power in Germany. In the spring of that year, he began to fashion the shackles of Europe and the Germany of the next thousand years, as he thought. And about 10 years ago, perhaps in that same spring, a lad named Ben marcelones was busy one day in his father's workshop out in dearborn, michigan, working on another one of his gadgets. This time it happened to be a diving helmet he was making out of an old hot water tank. Young Ben had, we, shall we say, borrowed the air compressor hose from his father's filling station. His uncle had given him a hand pump. But Ben reached the height of his local triumph. He became the first youngster to walk underwater at his school swimming pool with the aid of a hot water tank diving helmet. But ben grew up and went into the army, and he came to England a year ago, nearly. Ultimately, he found himself at a bomber station Some weeks ago, Ben was busy as usual, working on the gadgets he loved. Sergeant Green, a combat man, came into his shop. But here's Ben Marcelones to tell the story. Sergeant, why did Green come in there? What did he want the day he came in?
- [09:54]
Ben Marcelones
Well, sergeant Greene and Tompkins had been talking over designs for a gun mount in the flying fortresses.
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Morgan Beatty
But why another gun mount, sergeant? Haven't the forts got enough guns?
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Ben Marcelones
Oh, they have plenty of guns, but the nose didn't seem to have enough protection. And those ME109s were coming into the blind spot too often.
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Morgan Beatty
Oh, I see. So what was wanted was a mount to put a gun on and in the nose, eh?
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Ben Marcelones
Yes. You see, it's a pretty tough spot for bracing. Vibration is a problem in gun mounts.
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Morgan Beatty
So the combat sergeant wanted you to help him figure out the answers.
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Ben Marcelones
Right. He gave me the ideas he and Tompkins worked out, and I got busy. We didn't have any special materials for things like that, so I had to use what I could find around the shop. We had some steel plates and some old solid steel rods. A lot of odds and ends. I cut out the plates for a base and welded the rods on using barbed wire for welding rods. And then?
- [10:46]
Morgan Beatty
No, it couldn't have been that easy, Ben.
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Ben Marcelones
Well, no, not exactly. It took about a week every chance. Every time I got a chance, I'd take the gadget into the bomber and make a fitting. I'd bend the leg a little more or straighten another one. But finally we got her in, and the boys tell me she worked. We had to make some more changes, and I understand the army has improved on those, but.
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Morgan Beatty
Just a minute, Ben. We're getting ahead of the story. We might just remind the radio audience that you and Greene have been singled out to receive the legion of merit award. Not just the regular award, but the officers class for showing the, shall we say, big shot engineers how to improve the armaments of our flying fortresses.
- [11:24]
Ben Marcelones
But we weren't thinking of that. We were just thinking about the bullets coming at the nose of the forts and trying to figure out a way to stop them. And it's a pretty simple gadget. It was a lot easier than tearing up alarm clocks back in Dearborn and making miniature motorboat motors out of them. Honest it was.
- [11:39]
Morgan Beatty
That's your story, Ben. But I'll bet your father feels a little better now about all those hacksaws you bent and those cold chisels you dulled with your gadgeteering.
- [11:47]
Ben Marcelones
I hope so. I started making gadgets when I was knee high to a duck. I'm glad one of them turned out to be useful. I used to catch a lot of. Well, the old man had to work on me every once in a while when I was a kid. If all this makes him feel any better, I'm mighty glad and proud.
- [12:02]
Morgan Beatty
Ben. What's more important is that your dad now knows one of his boys helped out the high command in a tight spot. That's why you're getting an award. There had to be a stopgap, a year of planning and defensive action before the Allies could really get going. In this one theater of war, for example, the British and the American high commands had to go in fast with something. The stopgap answer was a combination of day and night bombing with the Lancasters and forts and Liberators. What they were really after was heavier, better armed planes. Planes that could engage and pin down the Luftwaffe. Soon they'll be getting these. Meanwhile, you've provided a heavier firepower for the fortress. It's that heavier firepower that helps the Fortresses knock down German fighters at a ratio of 9 to 1. Your gadgeteering turned out to be a stroke of genius. And the Army's making your gun mount standard equipment on bombers. And what you have done has all come about in our year of crisis. The worst year. The skill you acquired making useless diving helmets in Dearborn 10 years ago, for example, today is shooting down slowly but surely, Hitler's air power. Hitler should have taken you into account 10 years ago, but he failed to do that, just as he failed to take into account millions like you today. Ben. The British government has announced that the United States is now making more than 20 tanks a day for the British army alone, entirely apart from the tanks we're making for our own army. Thank you for coming up this afternoon. You're the proof that there are more ways than one for a man to serve his country. As a matter of fact, you may have thought you were merely a cog in a gigantic machine. You are that, of course, but much more, too. You're a vital cog, just as there are hundreds, thousands more vital cogs. Many of these human cogs do not realize how vital they are as you did not realize it until they told you about your award. But these cogs, these human beings, were the things that made it possible for Oliver Littleton to spread his flowery language yesterday. It made it possible for him to say that the spring of our liberation has begun and we shall soon be in the high summer of military success. And now this is Morgan Beatty saying so long until next Sunday.
- [14:11]
You have been listening to War Telescope, a weekly report on the war as seen from London by Morgan Beatty, NBC's veteran war observer in the British capital. Mr. Beatty is presented every Sunday at this same time, so be sure to tune in again a week from now. This program has come to you from London and New York.
- [14:30]
Ryan Seacrest
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