Page 4—-P. A. Features Foibles, — Fancies And Facts @ How Do You Mean, Bud “Female movie stars, once off the celluloid, look about like your wife.” Bruce Hutchison on New York sights in the Vancouver Sun. Se aoe - Pointed Psychology “As members of the Ca- nadian Merchant Marine, it is mot our job to act as psy- chiatric wardens to malad- justed people. The job is still what it has always been: to deliver the goods where our fighting brothers need them.” From an article “De- liver the Goods, Seamen. Ignore Zoot-suit Boys,’ in The Canadian Seaman. Progressive Capitalist Who Learned “Byery thoughtful Amer- ican knows today that a strong labor movement is one of our greatest bulwarks against the growth of fas- cistic tendencies and conse- quently is necessary for the democratic way of life. From the pen of the late Wendell L. Willkie. Tooting the Tory Drew Horn ' “OF course everyone must know what Major Smythe is getting at. It is the ques- tion which the Minister of Defence refuses to meet. And that is, why send untrained or halftrained boys into the line when there are 60,000 men in Canada who have been in training wee ng ears? That is the ques- ben?” William Irvine, CCF federal candidate in B.C., in the CCF People’s Weekly. Bringing Light to the Heathen a “On my first day in Sa- moa I undertook to give a lesson in Basic English to an aged native reclining be- neath a coco palm. Point- ing to a marine cleaning his ‘carbine, I said, “Man.” The ancient repeated, Man. Pleased, I pomted to the palm. “Eree, 1 announced. He echoed. Just then a plane roared overhead. Pointing my wneer, 1 demanded, a Wihatt The native stood up and squinted. “I’m not sure, he said. “It looks like a PB2Y; but it might be a B-24_ Lt. SN in American Mag- azine and quoted in Modern Digest BELORD DAF’ AN AUSTRALIAN BOMBER UNIT BASED IN NEW GUINEA MADE 69 SORTIES IN ONE DAY, EACA GREW MAKING SIX OR — TRIPS 7 2 z ae § Sas ea: ake UNITED maTions PAIGTS . GATCHES VENOMOUS SNAKES AND FOISON \; POISON! A SOUTH AFRIGAN MEDIGAL CORPS EXTRACTS THEIR POISON FOR SNAKES BITE SERUM To PROTECT UANED NATIONS SUNGLE FIGHTERS 7 AIAMEN OPERATIONS ON GZEChOSLOVAK AIR- MEN, THE BRMISH SURGEON, A-H. FOR HIS SKILLED PLASTIC SURGERY McINDEE , WAS AWARDEDTAE CzFCHO- SLOVAK ORDER OF THE wiitE Lion / National Affairs M onthily -- - November What Shall We Do. With Germany by E. PALME DUTT Contemporary Publishers Pamphlets Package includes amongst other pamphlets FOUR by DYSON CARTER All for $1.00 BOOKS MAKE LASTING CHRISTMAS GIFTS neetings to the New Paper PEOPLE’S BOUKSTORE 420 WEST PENDER STREET Phone MArine 5863 e Sopa Book Review — The Firing Squad * i (F. C. Weiskopf ... Alfred A. Knopf, publis pales mangle is crushing the life out of us All” cried Serge Marofke on his way to the-madhouse from Stalingrad. « ingrad . . : a meatchopper, that’s what it is!” Marofke had been pot-bellied and boisterous, a confirmed } when he was in charge of the platoon in Prague to which Holler, who tells the story of The Firing Squad, belonged. to Stalingrad for’ attempting: to avoid active service, he ¢ out of the debacle a shrunken, white-haired old man, driven ¢ by the meat-chopper. x - It is probable that Weiskopf’s novel comes closer to a real ture of the psychological and mental deterioration of the Ger soldier than many others of the last war or this, although must presume that lowering of morale could not have been | erally as bottomless as in the case of the Guard and Police © toon, since the Nazis are still fighting. ; The men in the platoon were average men. Fathers, < brothers—some of them cowards, many indeterminate, Diet vicious toadying Nazi, Holler constantly reprimanded for “softening of the heart.” How they became brutes or suicide dramatically told against the blood-and-sable backdrop of streets of Prague following the execution by Patriots of But Heydrich. : ke Hans Holler drifted into the Nazi cause out ofa milieu in w the swastika dominated all but his mother and anti-fascist sis Barbara. He found there Maurer, the underground worker;\ Re ardt, the peasant who at the last found his soul in his disg and deserted to the Russians: Von Chabrun, the Prussian jun intellectual and tolerant in all save his devotion to army. discip and tradition. : Holler finds them all guilty, except for those few Germ “who kept their hearts from turning brutish . . . people like Re ardt and Mother, and then the Barbaras, the Maurers, the $4 ful ones, the bearers of the flame.” “The “Hol For those who acquiesced he has no excuse. to the Soviet nurse to whom as well are guilty,” he declares makes his statement. “Guilty, because I’ve been a silent witness to so much de ment. Guilty, because I went ‘shopping with my revolver.” Gu: because I went to that military brothel in Sytchevka where women were tied to the beds. ... women and mere children, jus they’d been gathered from the market-place. Guilty, becaus said no when Reichardt showed me the propaganda sheet 7 called surrender to the Russians the simplest evay out. Gui because I grinned with dog-like humbleness when Dietz told he could arrange my transfer to the SS Scouting Command.” No advocate.of a soft peace for Germany, this Hans Holler his creator, F. G. Weiskopf. There are many who could read : book to advantage. ~ e . { Invasion Journal : (Richard L. Tobin ... E. P. Dutton and Co., $2.- Reviewed by MICHAEL SINGER, in the New York W orkez. pe Herald-Tribune correspondent and radio commentator written a personal diary of his impressions, many of ti robust and progressive, during the weeks preceding D-Day. Perhaps Tobin’s best contribution is his angry and well-ple fire at the Walt Disney and Major de Seversky air power sche In Invasion Journal, speaking from his experiences as a - correspondent close to military headquarters and the scene action, Tobin charges that “air power can be given too m credit, and can be taken too easily as a cure-all, Air power fa at Cassino. It has now failed at Gaen. I think the war is goiny. be won, as all wars have been won, by the infantry and the res: the ground troops, with naval and air support” J Such impressions, along with his heartfelt enthusiasm for Soviet contribution to victory and his earnest faith inthe pec make Invasion Journal, in many respects, an oustanding war bi Tobin hates the Nazis, he detests the hypocrisy of those + demand a strong stand against Germany and are shocked at shaven heads of French women collaborators, he is angry : bitter at “the stubbornness, informing, stealth, selfishness, sm: ness, narrowness . . . of the Hire of today.’ He is shocked those who “never raised their voices against the despicable bor ings of undefended Spanish towns, yet have become hysteri because Rome ean hear the sound of Allied guns. ...A strc stand by the Pope against the shocking anti-Semitism in Germs and Poland, a germ that turned into anti-Catholicism and at Protestantism, a strong stand by the head of that powerful chu: would have cut the war by years.” | | | | sues an outburst winds up with a disgusted “oh well, why t about it?” Jt is in this “oh well,” that the reader runs i a paradox of emotions, gets full force. the weaknesses in the bo | There is also too much diary pedanticism, a little too much triy gossip. of other war correspondents and personalities, a flav of personal discomfort over the war that never jells with the gc things Tobin says and believes. : Hew accounts in published form will reveal so much, howey of how London looked, lived and ate during the robot period; the robots themselvyes—what they really are, what they rea did. There are vivid highlights of a troopship and life abo: it; of GI’s in pubs, in blackouts. in foxholes- of officers; of 2¢ erals, of the landing, the breakthrough, the ebb and flow of batt;