Reading the paper on January 18, 1942.
It is a dark time…
British and Japanese forces clashed in the mangrove swamps ninety miles from the British crown colony of Singapore yesterday, as the sixth week of the world war drew to a close.
Overhead, seventy Japanese aircraft bombed the city, inflicting 150 casualties, while British aircraft bombed Japanese landing barges as they approached Singapore by river.
Australian forces have managed to stem the Japanese advance along part of the front for the moment.
Recognizing the risk to Australia posed by the rapid advance of the Japanese invasion force, officials there have promised to send additional reinforcements into the fight.
[But it will be in vain. The British will surrender its 85,000 troops in Singapore to the Japanese in four weeks, in the largest British surrender in history.]
Meanwhile, General Douglas MacArthur reports that his badly outnumbered troops are holding the line on the Bataan Peninsula of the Philippines against the rapidly advancing Japanese invasion force.
[This Allied effort will also fail. The Japanese will complete their conquest of the Philippines in April 1942. The US will suffer 23,000 casualties.]
The US submarine sinking of three Japanese merchant ships near Tokyo Bay yesterday has brought the tally of Japanese vessels sunk since December 7 to thirty-five.
The Navy Department acknowledged fifteen US ship losses in this effort so far and warned that German U-boat activity along the East Coast continues, with two American ships sunk off Long Island this week.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill has returned to London following his three-week stay at the White House, traveling more than three thousand miles from Bermuda to England in a ‘flying boat’ aircraft.
Simultaneous with Churchill’s arrival, the White House announced that a “complete understanding” had been reached between Churchill and President Roosevelt on military and naval operations against the Axis powers.
A search party has reached the crash site of a TWA plane in the mountains near Las Vegas.
All twenty-two people aboard were killed in the crash, including the actress, Carole Lombard, age 33, her mother, and a group of ferry pilots who were returning to Long Beach after delivering new aircraft to US air bases.
The TWA plane is believed to have grazed a rocky projection, then exploded in fire as it slammed into the vertical wall of a mountain peak.
The bodies of the dead could not be identified.
Miss Lombard’s husband, Clark Gable, drove to Las Vegas from the Los Angeles airport, where he had been awaiting the flight when he heard the news.
He was speeding up the Nevada mountain on horseback to search for his wife when a member of the search party, led by a seventy-year-old Native American, descended and told him there were no survivors.
Miss Lombard had been in Indianapolis promoting the purchase of war bonds.
Reports say she had flipped a coin whether to take the train back to Los Angeles or fly.
Tails won and she flew.
The TWA crash, its first in a year, is the third commercial airliner to go down since late October.
[Gable, age 41, will enlist in the Army in August.]
Negotiations for the exchange of Germans held in the US for 130 Americans now held in a German hotel, including embassy staff and journalists, are expected to continue for several more weeks.
George Kennan, the first secretary to the US ambassador, is among them.
Once concluded, the exchange is expected to take place in Lisbon.
[But the negotiations will drag on for five months, with the Americans finally returning to New York at the end of May.]
A milk shortage in Britain has forced the government to cut the daily milk ration for school children to one-third of a pint.
***
The National Episcopal Church has reported a nation-wide increase in church attendance and offerings since the December 7 Pearl Harbor attack.
***
The Treasury Department says they have received $36 from an anonymous person in Wichita, Kansas, along with a note which says the money represents an overpayment for service during the First World War.
The money will be deposited in the Treasury’s “conscience fund.”
***
The US Treasury Department has closed 100 German, Japanese and Italian businesses and placed another 98 under strict supervision in an effort to thwart possible industrial espionage or sabotage.
The list includes banks, brokerage houses, a publishing concern and import-export businesses.
And finally…
When a fighter aircraft crashed in choppy seas in October 1941, hurling its pilot into the water, Ensign John J. McMullen dived overboard from the deck of his destroyer, swam underwater to find the pilot, pulled him to the surface, and held him there until both men could be rescued.
While McMullen, a 1940 honors graduate of the Naval Academy, will be presented with official commendations, his father said his son’s actions were ‘what any Navy man would do.’
And the war ends well for him.
McMullen survives, starts a marine engineering firm, and becomes part owner in a professional hockey team and a major league baseball team.
… only in America.
I’ll see you on Monday.
— Brenda
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