HQN^_HUGH_GIBSON__ SUNOCO__-_MONDAY_ GOOD EVENING - Many thanks Mr. Hugh James for mentioning our book, the one on which President Hoover and I have been at work for a rather long time. Lowell Thomas has asked me, in the course of the succeeding minutes, to answer one question about it. But before I do, let us see what has been going on in the world this past weekend, and especially today. The question Mr. Thomas put to me actually relates to the day's news. So, let's first have a look at that. RUSSIA The Soviet High Command has made a flank attack on the Nazi invaders of the Caucasus. In a surorise move, they landed not only marines but ccssack cavalry on the Caucasian Coast. With these reinforcements the Reds delivered a series of counter-attacks at Hitler's Panzer spea^-heads north the of/Maikop oil fields, those vital oil deposits in the Caucasus. The Reds again claim they inflicted tremendous losses on the Nazis, slaughtered nearly five thousand of tuv** in three sectors alone. And, they announce that fresh defenses of the Red Army are counter-attacking with maz massed artillery and Stormovik Dive Bombers. Seventy miles north of Stalingrad wave upon wave of German infantry and tanks have been trying to cross the Don, but the K hxxz & xx * Russians RUSSIA 2 claim they threw them back. Cossacks are attacking the German vanguard along a front of one hundred miles along the railroad to the gxMX Caucasus. But/ the Russian High Command admits it is a defensive battle and that the situation is as grave as it could be. Now, here is what the Nazi High Command claims. German armies are rolling into the Caucasus along the railroad line from Rostov to Baku. They are coming close to the upper reaches of the &x Kuban River. They claim they are now one hundred and thirty miles to the south of Rostov. They also claim that last Friday they captured a place called Salsk, seventy-five miles north of the Kuban River. So the German tale is one of continued advance into the Caucasus, while the Russians declare they have stopped them for the time being, at least, and are counter-attacking. EAII)t The British Air Ministry today published a report on the Ro;&l Air Force attack on Duesseldorf last Friday. The Air Ministry has been assembling and aerial ocrutinizing xhikh I photographs of the damage. The hiy story told those pictures reveals that an area amounting to twelve acres around the docks of that river port was devastated,at least eight important war industries damaged, and that fires were still burning twelve hours after the attack. All the factories that were bombed have not yet been identified. At the same time the Air Ministry reports tha the attack which the R.A.F. made on Saarbrucken Wednesday night did severe damage. The Nazi High Command, on the other hand, ± e claims good success for the German Kids on cities in the Midlands, the East, anc the Northern oarts of England. The Nazis declare they drop ed he?vy calibre RAIDS - 2 bombs in York, also in Norwich, Harwich, and Great Yarmouth. The British admit these bombs did some damage, but principally killed bathers at seaside resorts. On the other side of the world our own air force carried out a raid and did a lot of harm to Japanese headquarters and transports at Linchuan. It was a squadron of bombers and it dropped three and a half tons of bombs. An interesting part of this item is that the bombers were escorted by fighter planes from the twenty-third group which the Japanese last week said they had wiped out. Coming hack to Europe, a German long-range bomber made an attack on Iceland, which is protected by American troops. It was one lone, lorn plane. It flew over the southwestern part of that northern RAIDS - 3 island, dropped some bombs and machine-gunned some military installations. But the damage was only negligible, and there were no casualties. ££Q2LiEMS_0F_LASTING_PEACE So much for the ’Aar and what has been happening, and now for that question Lowell Thomas asked me. It was this:- "With the Germans driving /deep into the Caucasus, with the Japanese holding a vast territory that includes not only the Dutch Empire in the East but a considerable part of the British Empire as well, with the Japanese apparently getting a fairly strong foothold in our Aleutian Islands; doesn’t it look as though this is ix likely to be a long, long war? And if that is the case, why write a book about the problems of lasting peace and bring it out at this stage of affairs? Why not think only of winning this vast global war -- at any rate for the time being?" Many people have put this same question to Mr. Hoover and to me. After all, the purpose of winning the war is to get the sort of peace we want. PROBLEMS OF LASTING PEACE 2 We expect to win. And you can rest assured the enemy is already making plans for what will follow the var if he wins. If we do not make such plans, well, even if we win the war, we will lose it. I think everyone agrees on that. Therefore, we feel strongly that no matter how long this war may last it is none too soon to think about the problems of peace. Mr. Hoover and I have not sought to answer all the questions that have arisen in connection with the peace. Neither have we offered a blue print for the brave new world. We have sought rather to indicate the questions which call for public discussio if we are to have national understanding of the problems we must solve in order to make a good peace. RUBBEB Synthetic rubber comes into the news again today? ^hrough the publicatiion of a letter written to Senator Gillette sf I^w^.-- U*—tfl Chairman of the Sub-committee —■•■n^F^roDtpy^ invest igatiiig the synthetic rubber business. It was a letter from the Houdry Process Corporation. You may remember thatjthe Houdry Cor oration asked for permission to build a plant to make butadiene according to the (X toot~ h — orocess perfected by Inventor Houdry, butadiene being /\ the principal essential for the making of synthetic rubber. The letter referred to testimony given 7- /by Michael J. Maddigan, an engineer in charge of construction for the Rubber ReserveCompany. Maddigan had told the committee that the Rubber Reserve Company was already set on xx a program when Houdry reached a st?te of development where he was insisting on RUBBER - 2 injecting himself into the picture. The Houdry Corporation points out that it first filed its data with the Rubber Reserve Company on April Tenth, and asked permission to build a fifty thousand ton plant on May Twenty-first. On July Fifteenth, Mr. Maddigan was asked by the committee when the program had been set, and Maddigan replied: "7?e struck that point about two weeks ago.” Meaning about July First. Actually, says the letter to Senator Gillette, the program is not set even yet. The letter also points % out technical discrepancies in the testimony given by Maddigan,and also by one of his advisers. SABOTEURS The military commission appointed to iry the eight Nazi saboteurs has finished its job. It has made a complete report on its findings, not only findings of fact but recommendations about penalties. But we still are not told what those findings or recommendations are. And we shall not know uuntil the President himself tells us. The Commission delivered its report, four thick manila envelopes two feet thick, to the White House today. Major General McCoy, President of the Commission, delivered the report himself and refused to feive newspaper men any inkling or comment about the report. Presidential Secretary Steve Early said prob ably that the President wouldn’t make it public until tomorrow. But, of course, the generalbelief through­ out Washington is that the Commission has found all eight of those men guilty and recommended death for at least seven of them. The President, to be sure, is not bound to accept the Commission’s recommendation nor act upon it. But the guess is that he will. SPY TRIAL - FOLLOW SABOTEURS Meanwhile a judge and jury at Hartford, Connecticut, were trying the Lutheran Reverend Kurt Molzahn on the charge of being a spy. There was interesting evidence in thatHartford court today. On the stand was Otto Willumeit, Nazi Bund leader in the Midwest. Willumeit has pleaded guilty. He told about a trip that he had taken with Wilhelm Kunze, Fuehrer of the German-American Bund, who has also pleaded guilty. This trip they two months before Pearl Harbor, and Kunze on the way pointed out harbor installations, naval dispositions, shipping points that were vulnerable, andiplaces of possible invasion, iHxasiixH Willumeit said that Kunze had a kaleidoscopic memory ofthe entire geographical, topographical, mineralogical resources of the entire West Coast. He did not so much as look at a road map once during the trip. And Willumeit added that he checked Kunze1s bPY_TRIAL_- 2 informal ion and found he wasn*i wron^ once. Ainon^ other things that hunze pointed out was a big dam near bacramento where an eilect-ive bit ol saootage would have inundated hundreds of miles of countrv. Another Federal Jury at Indianapolis was listening to the defense ol William Ludlev Peliey, Feuhrer of the Silver Shirts, editor ol the Galilean, charged with sedition. Peliey testifies, lor Liaioelf and claimed that statenents he . t a c e I •; ^ Galilean were justiiiable political criTicibm. Peliey said further that it never occurred to him that the things he said could be interpreted as being intended to cause mutiny. One statement in the indictment threw up the fact that Peliey had said nobody in America had a flicker of feeling against the Nipponese. In defense Peliey declared that this assertion was based on his own observation, on Gallup Foils, ana on other Surveys. Then he used these words: "Perhaps I was a bit overcritical but I did not mean to impair the v,ar ei^or^ sZlAZlth * 3 of the nation. That thought was fartheset from my mind. Peliey believed, he said, that fifty-one percent of our people want our troops brought nome from foreign lands. Then he aaded: "JMve got myself in trouole for saving things I believe. If I had known this would happen, I wouldn't have said those silly little things." PETRILLO The clamor against Petrillo, alleged Czar of the iViUsicians Union, came to a head today. The Government moved in on Petrillo’s edict that no more phonograph records should be made in America. The Department of Justice asked the Federal Court at Washington to pass out an injunction against Petrillo and his union. This is the latest move in a long squabble. Petrillo apparently has keenly enjoyed the resentment of listeners and phonograph owners, to say nothing of the radio chains and independent stations. You will recall that last week he snubbed Elmer Davis, head of the Office of War Information, curtly rejected Davis’s appeal to him not to enforce his edict mt at such a time. Petrillo told Davis he didn’t know what he was talking about. He said that his order did not prevent the xxaiia making of phonograph records PETRILLO 2 for home consumption, only for use in so-called juke boxes or radio broadcasting stations. But as the companies p^int out, decisions of the courts have ruled that companies which manufacture an article can have nothing to say as to how it may be distributed or used. So the Department of Justice asks for an immediate injunction against Petrillo and eight other men in his union. MURDER Early today there was a bridge game at a gaming club in the heart of New York’s tenderloin. Four men were placing, another was kibitiing. In walked a masked man, gun in hand. He swung that gun on one of the card players, a man named Robert Green, politely described as a prominent betting commissioner. At any rate, he was a betting commissioner in the money, for he hqd offices on Wall Street, homes on Central Park West, and at Palm Beach. Green started to rise from his chair and laid down his hand. Quite a good hand, with the Ace, King, Queen Jack Ten of Diamonds, and Ace of Spades. The masked man fired three shots and killed Robert B. Green, the eminent betting commissioner. Before killing Green he did away with the kibitzer, a Broadway character popularly known as Dimples Wolen, who had once been an associate of the notorious mobster Louis Lepke Buchalter, whom Racket-Buster Tom Dewey prosecuted and convicted. The murderer got away, leaving two victims MURDER _ 2 lying on the floor underneath the bridge table. And, in so doing, he created a murder mystery which is bound to be a nine days' wonder for police and underworld, maybe even more. Both newspapers and cops were pointing out the extraordinary similarity between this affair and the Arnold Rothsteain murder of fourteen years ago. Literally scores of detectives of all ranks are working on this affair. And now speaking for Lowell Thomas, I bid you -- so long until tomorrow.