MR. ELMER DAVIS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 October 1943, Page 4

MR. ELMER DAVIS

BRITISH JOURNALIST’S PEN PICTURE

An excellent sketch of the Director of the United States Office of War Information (Mi’ Elmer Davis) was given recently by a “Manchester Guardian” writer, who interviewed Mr Davis on his arrival in London. “The United States’s Brendan Bracken,” he wrote, “arrived in London on Friday on his first visit since the days of the heavy raids. He found as big a change, he said, as in the war situation generally. London looks ‘manicured and well made up.’- Mr Davis himself looked pretty trim: light-suit-ed, soft-collared, bow-tied, his spats maybe a gesture to his hosts. He leaned back in a swivel chair at the Embassy and puffed at a cigar as he reminded the British, American, and Empire journalists to match the successes in the Pacific with those in Sicily and Russia.

“Two comments Mr Davis made on the Pacific fighting were that we were not committed to a strategy of ‘island by island' and that the news of our air raid on Sourabaya would be all over the Dutch East East Indies, heartening the friends awaiting our return, within a couple of days.

“Mr Davis steered adroitly away from questions about the American attitude to French North African politics, and talked himself out of answering one on what Americans thought of our Indian policy and of Mr Gandhi. He hoped, he said, for better collaboration between American and Russian propaganda services. Americans, he said, being so far from the battlefronts, were always in danger of thinking every victory the beginning of the end. But they were beginning to realise that each victory so far was only a rung in a long ladder, and Congress, testy though it was in domestic matters, was careful not to impede the prosecution of the war.”