Letters, Sep. 4, 1944

No V-Day Blowoff?

Sirs:

Instead of all this talk and planning about closing up shop and blowing off steam when V-day in Europe comes, how about keeping our shirts on, sticking soberly on the job, and putting our backs into helping those one million boys in the Pacific get home the sooner?

WM. B. HOLT Laguna Beach, Calif.

Astronauts

Sirs:

“Glimpses of the Moon” (TIME, July 31) is an interesting and well-handled piece.

. . . But it contains a couple of errors. You say Professor Robert Hutchings Goddard (see cut) is “no astronaut.” TIME’S reporter evidently has not read Goddard’s classical paper on rockets, A Method of Reaching Extreme, Altitudes, published’ in 1919 by the Smithsonian Institution. This is the monograph that reopened rocket experimentation, and really started the modern era of rocket research. In it Goddard not only showed how to reach “high altitudes” theoretically, but also gave considerable space to ways of reaching the moon, and gave the results of some experiments he had made to send some flash powder to the moon, so earthly astronomers could see the hit. He calculated that only a little flash powder would do the job: 2.67 Ib. for a “just-visible” flash, and 13.82 to be “strikingly visible.”

Thus Goddard was not only an “astronaut,” as you call them, but actually started the whole modern cycle of astronautics. He is the spiritual father of the whole German and French discussion along these lines in the ‘205 and ‘305, though Ley gives him scant treatment in his book.

G. EDWARD PENDRAY Secretary

American Rocket Society Mt. Lebanon, Pa.

“Why Not?”

Sirs:

… I hereby wager a $25 war bond that, should you reprint “Why Not?” (TIME, Aug. 14) and invite your readers to vote on its merits, the majority will agree that it is a masterpiece—unequaled by any comment on the subject of Soviet Russia and the shape of things to come under her leadership. . . .

MAURICE WINOGRAD

New York City

Sirs:

In my opinion “Why Not?” is the best estimate of Russian influence in postwar Europe that has appeared in print since the war began. . . .

CHARLES S. SEELY Lieutenant Commander Norfolk, Va.

Selective Blood-Collecting

Sirs:

I notice an article in TIME (Aug. 7) concerning the difficulty the Red Cross is having collecting blood. It seems odd to me that the Red Cross is always pleading for blood donations but has never made any attempt to collect any in a city the size of Houston. Can you give any reason for that?

MORTON C. KING

Houston

¶ The blood-collecting activities of the Red Cross are organized, not to reach every possible donor, but to get the largest possible amount of blood with maximum efficiency and dispatch. Because of the scattered location of processing laboratories and other facilities, certain U.S. cities, including Houston, are omitted from the program.—ED.

Stork’s Checks

Sirs:

Back in the days of Tyre and Nineveh, in ancient Rome and more ancient Greece, the waiters in the early versions of the Stork Club presented checks face down to the customers, as a matter of courtesy and tact. The custom has held good down through the ages, with waiter trainees being admonished by their professors that it is a cardinal faux pas in cabaret etiquette to offer the “tab” facing boldly up.

Today, in all of Manhattan’s worthy nightclubs and hotel ballrooms, this universal more is maintained. Checks are always presented, on a platter, with the mathematical notations hidden from the naked eye until the patron who is to pay for the fun decides to turn it over, a prerogative that is invariably exercised.

Hence my complaint about the following misleading statements (TIME, Aug. 7) about the current squabble between New York nightclubs and Mayor LaGuardia’s bookkeepers: “At the Stork, the check is usually placed face down on the table, with the total written on the back. Only an outlander who should not be at the Stork Club at all would turn the check over and tot up the bill. If he did, the city contends, he would find that the total had been padded.”

I should be pleased to invite a crew of TIME’S truth-delvers and fact-finders to station themselves at vantage points throughout the Stork Club and observe with what regularity the bon vivants turn over their checks before removing the rubber bands from their wallets. And the same holds true at all of Gotham’s popular watering places.

SHERMAN BILLINGSLEY

Stork Club New York City

¶I In some less troublous time, TIME’S truth-delvers may accept Host Billingsley’s invitation.—ED.

Hitler Throttled

Sirs:

Take a good look at the enclosed French 20 franc note (see cut). It’s one of the cleverest methods of subtle noncollaboration I can imagine. The French people who gave it to me said that millions of these were circulating around while the Germans were here. . . . The effect is produced by inserting a German postage-stamp portrait of Hitler behind the French fisherman’s rope.

(Ppc.) LESLIE LIEBER c/o Postmaster New York City

Medics Snubbed

Sirs:

The War Department recently put out a circular awarding the Combat Infantryman Badge to all (frontline) infantry units for exemplary action in combat. Officers, warrant officers, and enlisted men of the Medical Department and Corps of Chaplains were not considered eligible for the award.

I am an aid man assigned to a front-line infantry battalion in the Fifth Army in Italy, and since my division has been up front I have been up with them. I have seen much small-arms fire, and at times when the riflemen were pinned down by machine-gun fire, the other aid men and I have left our slit trenches to give aid to our wounded buddies. At the same time we saw our litter bearers risking their lives trying to evacuate the casualties from the field. Several of us were awarded the Bronze Star for heroism in combat. . . .

Front-line medics do as much to bring victory as any soldier and it is unfair to refuse them the recognition they so richly deserve. . . .

(SERVICEMAN’S NAME WITHHELD) c/o Postmaster New York City

Tinkling Bosom

Sirs:

The article in TIME (Aug. 14) about the frustrated deliveries of olive oil to the black market by “pregnant” Italian women reminds one of some felicitous phrases in a dispatch to our State Department by James Russell Lowell, while he was serving as Minister to Spain [1877-80]. He was describing somewhat similar efforts of Señor X to evade the octroi duties on olive oil.

“Selecting the leanest and least mammalian women he could find, he fitted them with tin cases so as to give them the pectoral proportions of a Juno.” All went well until an amorous guard playfully tapped one of the women upon her bosom. “Lo, it tinkled! He had struck oil unawares and Señor X’s perambulating oil well suddenly ran dry.”

WALTER BATES FARR Boston

“Their Colors Were Not Taken”

Sirs:

Nobody need regard the surrender of the Royal Welch Fusiliers to General Washington at Yorktown as a blot on the regiment’s otherwise untarnished record (TIME, July 17). Cornwallis capitulated because of hunger, sickness and lack of ammunition to an army some five times his strength. . . . The Royal Welch, who had taken part in the victories of Charleston, Camden, Guilford Court House, had also fought as marines under Howe, fought as cavalry in the Virginian campaign and in a cavalry raid on Charlottesville . . . distinguished themselves again at Yorktown. Some companies held Fusilier Redoubt on the extreme right flank and beat off three heavy attacks by Grenadiers of the Count of St. Simon’s brigade; others engaged the Due de Lanzun in a cavalry skirmish across the river at Gloucester. Their casualties reduced them to the weakest corps in the army and after the capitulation they earned not only the thanks of Cornwallis but the congratulations of St. Simon and Lanzun. Their Colors were not taken from them.

ROBERT GRAVES London

¶ To Poet-Novelist Graves, TIME’S apology for a slur on his regiment’s scarcely tarnished and otherwise im-blotted record—ED.

Occupation Troops

Sirs:

While gloomily considering your article on combat troops, their dim chances of early demobilization and the imminent possibility of their being used as occupational troops (TIME, July 24), we the undersigned from the depths of the nadir of morale submit the following plan. . . .

There are sufficient troops in camp or training areas in the States to police the conquered territories. We are convinced that these soldiers are ready and eager to embrace foreign service. Let them be trained not for combat but strictly as police troops. Certainly the pacification of Germany’s die-hard Nazis should furnish excitement enough to cool even their sanguinary spirits.

We query the wisdom of using combat troops as police, for how under heaven can men trained to hate, to kill, to destroy, who had seen the raw flesh and bloody guts of their friends laid open by these people, be changed overnight into calm, impersonal guardians of the homeland of the enemy?

In other words, gentlemen, have we not done our job when we and our allies have won the war ?

(SERVICEMEN’S NAMES WITHHELD) c/o Postmaster New York City