» L.T. - SUXQCQ. TUIilSDAY- ■DECEIiIBER 219.41 GOOD ii'/ENING EVERYBODY; President Eoosevelt has asked Japan a pointed question. It’s about those troop movements in indo-China, close to the border of Thailand, land^ air and naval forces far larger than the agreement with Vichy permitted. And the president wants to know:- What is all this about, please? t The question was asked of the Japanese envoys by Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles. And late this afternoon. Just a couple of hours ago, Mr. Roosevelt told the newspapermen i ■ at the press conference what he had done. It's a step of the utmost seriousness. And the way the President explained it makes it all the more serious. He revealed that he had asked Japan, what was the idea of sending those large forces of troops, planes and warships to Indo-China? Then he added that it couldn't have been for police work, because Indo-China has been and continues to be a most peaceful spot The president then revealed some facts that hadn’t been LEAD - 2 published before, a review of his negotiations with the IKikado's Government. As long ago as last April, conversations were started, the purpose of our Government being to reach a settlement, a permanent peace throughout the entire Pacific area. This country was astonished, he added, when Japanese troops, right in the middle of those conversations, moved into Indo-China in June, after only the briefest negotiations with the Vichty government. Vichy agreed only because it was powerless to object, but, said Mr. Roosevelt the number of Japanese troops allowed in there was definitely specified. The president then went on to say that nevertheless the conversations with Japan will be resumed, on the strict f understanding laid down by this Government that peace in the Pacific | dependend upon no more conquests in that direction. Only the other day we learned that larger bodies of Japanese forces of all kinds weremoving into Indo-China, and now it is ascertained that still more are on their way. The pres-dent said he had addressed his question to I lead • 3 the Japanese Govemment politely. He added that he hoped to have a prompt reply. Newspapermen asked him whether he had udbixn set any time limit on that reply. That, he retorted, was a silly question. A reporter asked him what our Government would do if Japan moves into Thailand. That query he avoided. in the middle of these questions and answers, a veteran Washington newspaperman handed him a cane with a large club head and, said the newspaperman: ”Lord knows you need a big stick as no one has needed it since Teddy Roosevelt.The President laughed and said that was right, it was Just what he needed. Bo thage wo are•- teoJt of war, the lo—t-i dyamatto as Almost as dramatic is the news from j lAmmMr nowg East itself / A It British fleet r steamed into Singapore today, a powerful armada including a brand new thirty-five thousand ton man-o-war, H.M.S. PRINCE GIUALESy flying the flag of Admiral s ± t ’fom Phillips. \You-~3nay-rQC>ll^that. iast Kay the PRINCE OF W/LbS was one of K^ng George»s battle wagons; _ LEAD - 4 that helped sink the Nazi BISMARCK. The PRINCE OF WALES is the • first ship tfayt? th4 British have had in those waters since the old China station squadron was abolished^ pi fact, the first capital ship she ever sent to the Far East. But that isn*t all. A The dispatch from Singapore reports that the PRINCE OF WALES headed a long column of warships. A4|ong them was another capital ship. described as a mystery 2ry A A i<5 any rate, its name mmm not given A t f'U 111% nnmich -te- the faetr'thyt- tlite censor at ’Singapore allowed trhiE ntwB~l.u Iw LitflTTflniTtliimt Int nr hlmlTfin^? The force under Admiral Phillips is called '»the Eastern fleet”. It»s a new unit in King George’s Navy, and it takes the same rank as the home fleet and the Mediterranean squadron, If I SYDNEY The Australian warship SYDNEY has been sunki There* s a line to call forth a tiirilling memory of the last war. You may "F^emember how the Gerraan raider EMDEN, after terrorizing the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, and the China Sea, and sinking seventy Allied vessels, finally made the mistake of raiding the British radio 7 station in the Cocos Islands. Just before the Germans put the apparatus out of commission the operator was able to wireless a call for help. The signal was received by His Majesty’s Australian cruiser SYDNEY, a swift and powerful raan-O-war. She wasn’t so far away, and tor» ovor::t2w-::s«CT under forced draf to catch the EMDEN. With her superior battery and speed, in half an hour the SYDNEY blasted the daylights out of the German raider. And we aaxU-t-f«?ggt^:tte=^^fc^ode-when-Captain-voft Mueller of tho EMDBN7* wa a-captprsd^cnwi^Umiidadto tha British C—amdor^-yhp- idlwediatoAy it to a9*<i galrlan^ oneay^ But it wasn't that same SYDNEY that the British Admiralty today reports mM having sunfc^ The good old SYDNEY went to the bone-yard long since, and in Nineteen Thirty-Four, the Commonwealth of Australia commissioned another SYDNEY, a fast light cruiser, £rJKu:Y - which in less than two years won a reputation as the scourge of the If- Italian Navy. She was paid for by popular subscriptions^ first went into action in June, Nineteen Forty, A sank an Italian warship and escaped through a hail of bombs from Italian planes, iini;Gat;he^ to Alexandria. From that time on, one of the main activities of the Italian Navy Dopartraent was reporting the sinking of the SYDNEY. No less than eight times they had her destroyed, ^^n July, Nineteen Forty, she sank one of the most modern of Mussolini’s cruisers and damaged another. 1^^ the next fifteen months, she cruised more than eighty thousand miles, foioght at least twenty actions, fired forty thousand shells, and survived sixty bombing attacks without the loss of a man. Among her exploits was bombing the Italian naval base at Rhodes in the Dodecanese Islands. More lately, the SYDNEY was detailed to the South Pacific, where a large, heavily armed German raider, the STEr3RB4ARCK,^was^emulatfiag the record of the E10EN. She was a largei), fast^^ more mfKlerT^an4-HfiK>re he-pyj-iy araH^d-v-ennol was knov/n to have destroyed numerous British and Greek A r - 3 aierch£int vessels. Finally, some time in November, the SYDNEY caught up v.’ith the STEIERMARCK. There was a battle, one of those epic fights at sea, almost equal to the historic one of the SERAPIS and the BON HOMME RICHARD. blazing duel,-tJ5« formidable raider A or» somewhere out there in the South Pacific, and again 4^ Australian cruise ^SYDNEY sank /i The Australian Government organized elaborate searches both on r But .It was SYDNEY sustained fatal injuries. tne sea and by air, but after more than a week there has been no word from the SYDNEY. So it is believed that she too went to the (?. fUucAAC^ bottom without trace^ with her entire complement of six hundred c-ud forty-five officers and men. And |iere»s a line from Australia to add to that story. The minute the news became known, subscriptions began to pour in -ti) /. from all over the Commonwealth, for a new Australian cruiser SYDNEY. A WAR The war news will have ^ be brief tonight^and you canM;=- imtm m thfe^ —Tho Fed* claln. they have Myall along the line, not only S*r Rostov but in front of Moscow and Leningrad. That’s the A o^^icial announcement. ^ In the Ukraine Hitler’s panzer divisions on the run from Rostov hive been split up, cut off and are threatened with complete disaste 7.^ At Leningrad the Reds declare they have recaptured six key positions from the Nazis. And on the Moscow front the Soviet armies have Overwhelmed the Germans and put them to flight in the Tula sector wherj they left behind them large quantities of equipment. The news from Libya^t«iljt-sa^i»*t:* The British admit the ru^\^ Nazis have pm up an Important victory but, the British add, it’s only temporary. Reinforcements are being rushed to the spot from Egypt. --s2-e The Nazi High Command declares that the Axis columns^In the A desert have taken more than nine thousand prisoners and have captured or destroyed eight hundred and fourteen tanks and armored cars, shot /\ down a hundred and twenty-seven British planes. The Nazis also have a different story to tell about the ME - 2 fighting in Russia. admit they evacuated Rostovj^^^Wt they^ deny that the Reds have recaptured positions to the west of Rostov. And the German High Command declares briefly that they thrust new holes into the defenses around Moscow. London, which has kept a pretty cold and impartial eye on the operation in Russlaa seems to believe the accounts of Soviet successes. The British peopie were officially warned today that Hitler will react to a defeat in Russia by a ferocious attempt to^ invade Britain. The warning came direct from Prime Minister ft Churchill himself/ \ Adolf Hitler, he said, may soon recognize that he has been/beaten by the Red armies. Then Churchill added:- *’to recover froii^^^€ disaster he may visit us with all his fury. ” Thereupon the Prime Minister waxed encouraging. He used these words:- «We are ready for him; we shall receive him by day or nightwith far greater forces and with every modern iraprcvement.” The Prime Minister then announced that ne’d liave to ask the people for more sacrifices, more self-denial. ”We have to make a definitely harder turn of the screw,” he said. Then he explained with a motion in the House of Commons to raise the age for cofQpulsory military service of men from forty-one tofifty, and he warned that later on he might have to ask Parliament to add another ten years, conscript men up to sixty. He also asked for the conscription of some one million, six hundred and twenty thousand unmarried women between the ages of twenty and thirty for the uniformed auxiliary forces. The manufacturers of America have accomplished In one year what It took Hitler’s Nazis all of six years to do. That fact came up today In connection with the convention of the National Association of Manufacturers now being held at tteir forliii i A sub-committee on defense production has been Investigating all over the country and that’s the gist of Its report: six years’ work In one year. But the chairman of the sub-committee adds that this doesn’t mean everything is perfect In national defense. There are flaws and bottlenecks, particularly, he rinds, a bottleneck In brains Many business top-notchers are sitting on the sidelines, he explains. while Junior salesmen are in key positions in Washington, laying down tules for the men who used to be their bosses. •S t- RAILROADS The railroad men of the United States eet their raise in pay as of yesterday. President Roosevelt made a formal announcement of t^e terms of settlement today• It means a raise of seventy-six cents a day for the fellows who run the trains. ten cents an hour more for the office workers. All in all it meqns three hundred millions a year added to the payrolls of the companies. And the strike is off. DIES WMle the Corigresaoen In the house were nervously debating anti-strike laws today, Chairman Dies of the Un-American Activities Committee threw a young bombshell into the midst of the proceedings. It was a photostat document which, said Dies, set forth the criminal records of twenty C.I.O. union officials. The records, he explained. had been gathered by investigators for his Committee, and added Dies, ”Tirae and time again we discovered that C.I.O. leaders had ooth Communist and criminal records. Such ugly facts,” he added. ”concernlng the backgrounds of the C.I.O. officials, piled up in our files until they began to make a pattern,” said he. The documents concerning those twenty C.I.O. leaders, he Before the end of the year, they wll contain similar records of almost a thousand C.I.O. officials. ”There is an inexorable logic,” Dies continued, ”in bis coaltion between Communism and crime. That logic,” he explained. i 3 added, were taken more or less at random from the Committee’s files. i! I is this,:- ”a lot of crooks discovered they had been in the wrong racket Then they figured that there was atleast one racket beyond the law. They had only to masquerade as labor leaders in order to ply their old trades of robbery, bui'glary and larceny. The result has been ■ DIES - 2 that hundreds of men have stepped literally out of prisons into union jobs,” So says Congressman Martin Dies. I RAID 1 An organized mob of thieves has been robbing the Ford •60 Motor Company of automobile llfee one million to five million dollars a year. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has made a series of raids in Detroit, New York andChicago, and the results are announced today. Director J. Edgar Hoover of the F.B.I. says that xujUixEKM two receivers of stolen property, fences, just two of them, admitted that they alone had fcTWiagiBtxrt bought stolen parts more than five hundred thousand dollars this year. One fence in New York City, said Hoover, was doing such a business that his company published and distributed a catalogue advertising genuine Ford motor parts for sale, under-selling authorized distributors. The way the racket worked was this:- Ford employees and others having legitimate business inside the Ford plants abstracted the parts, one man would jBHxtto do the swiping, and hand the stuff to another, who in turn handed it to a third, and so on, until it reached the gate. A sort of bucket brigade for stolen parts, roller bearings, piston rings, shock absorbers, cylinder heads, windshield v/ipers, and what-not^ INVESTORS A firm of investment b«nkers is todayaccused of having swhdled the public of something like six hundred million dollars. There is quite a bit of drama connected with that announceineiit• Three years ago, tie Securities and Exctiange Commission started to press charges against the Fidelity Investment Association of Wheeling, V/estVirginia. It took the Department of Justice quite a while to run down evidence and matters came to a climax J^esterday . If an indictment had been delayed until today, the Statute of Limitations would have gone into operation, and nobody could have been prosecuted. BASEBALL y\J(Ai)^ I lorkeva^^ Mel Ott, of the stron^;-throwiug arm arid the lusty wallop. becomes Manager of the Mew i^ork Giants, And what about Bill Terry? He goes up tato the front office as General Manager of the Club. That means he’ll have charge of the Giant’s farm system, t}am smaller clubs the Giants own to develop Big League players. A The betting is that there’ll be cheers among all the Giant fans. Their favorite team, onee the crack outfit of the League, has been Jogging along in the second division for three years, and the wails have been loud and constant. But now they have a manager everybody likes. Mel Ott is as agreeable as he is versatile - — one of the most all-round players iir the game. He came A up to the big league as a catcher sixteen years ago, and fighting I John McGraw turned him into a right fielder. Then Manager Bill Terry brought him in from the outfield and put him on third^bas#, where he soon became as good as he was in the outfield. And now he’s the I 3 manager, and he says he’ll be a playing manager, no^bench warmer. ex , axiu lie sajr o nc jlj . wss » Cc^ Vr"") ■ I