ALPINE STORMS

New Zealand Herald, Volume 79, Issue 24189, 3 February 1942, Page 6

ALPINE STORMS

SEVERE AVALANCHES

DEATH AND DESTRUCTION

VALLEY HOMES CARRIED AWAY

(Reed. 11.25 p.m.) GENEVA, Feb. 2 Heavy snowstorms in the Alps have resulted in the most disastrous avalanches for decades in Switzerland, killing 25 people. A huge avalanche fell on a goods train at Gothard, blocking traffic, particularly German and Italian. Homes in the Bisis Valley were carried away, and telephones over a large aroa were put out of action. The Vichy radio stated that an avalanche on Passv Plateau buried a sanatorium. All the patients were rescued. Another French avalanche killed four.

WORKERS WALK OUT

FULL CO-OPERATION

FIRST BIRTHDAY

BRITAIN'S QUIET NIGHT

PHILANTHROPIST DIES

TACOMA SHIPYARD TROUBLE

DISPUTE AMONG MEN

(Reed. 5.5 p.m.) SEATTLE, Feb. 1 A walk-out of 1180 independent welders at the Tacoma shipyard has spread to a further 1200 shipbuilding workers at five of the Seattle yards in the first major defence strike since America entered the war. The walkouts resulted from the dismissals of independent welders who refused to pay dues to the American Federation of Labour unions, which hold close shop | contracts at the yards involved. A mass meeting of the striking independent welders at the Seattle and Tacoma shipyards and the Boeing Aircraft Company requested the Secretary for the Navy, Colonel Frank Knox, and the Secretary for the Army, Mr. H. L. Stimson, to take over the operation of the plants involved in the dispute between the Independent Welders' Union and tlie American Federation of Labour. This action was taken in answer to the War Production Board, which denounced the strike as intolerable and exhorted the strikers to return to work immediately. The spokesman for the. Independent Union declared that the strikers would not resume their jobs without the reinstatement of the nine members who were discharged for refusing to pay their dues to the American Federation of Labour. The Boilermakers' Union, which holds closed shop contracts, has also struck. The plants are operating at a slower pace, with Americau Federation of Labour members replacing the striking welders.

BRITISH WORKERS' POSITION

DEFEAT OF NAZISM

(Reed. 5.5 p.m.) LONDON, Feb. 1 Mr. Will Lawther, president of the Mine Workers' Federation of Great Britain, in a broadcast talk, says the British official wireless, quoted the following message from Mr. Phillip Murray, president of the Congress of Industrial Organisations and vice-president of the United Mine Workers of America: "I want to assure you, and through you, the workers of the United Kingdom, of the wholehearted support of American labour in the common effort to crush Hitlerism and the Axis Powers." Mr. Lawther added: "During the last, few weeks in Britain we have had a deputation of Russian trade unionists over here. They have visited nearly all the chief centres of industry, seeing men and women at work in the factories, and have gone down some of the pits. In no single instance at any meeting at which they • have spoken has a solitary hand or voice been raised against their proposals for wholehearted efforts to defeat Nazism. Russia wants tanks, not thanks; coal, not resolutions. In my opinion it is sheer cant, humbug and hypocrisy to cheer the Soviet trade unionists and, through them, their Red Army, and then to hesitate to deliver the goods or produce the coal they want to drive the murderous and vicious gangs of Hitler from the soil of their fatherland. "And this is what the Russians think, too," he added. "Of course, I know there are grievances that flare up to 'stop production. It is possible to know them only in a democracy. You would not know them under Hitler. There are wrongs to be righted and errors to bo corrected, but I also know there is the machinery to put these things right. And it is the duty of those who have grievances to use that machinery."

TRAINING FOR AIR FORCE

LONDON, Feb. 1 Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary for Air, sent the following message to the Air Training Corps, through its commandant, Air Commodore A. J. Chamier, on the occasion of the first anniversary of its formation: "The Air Training Corps reaches its first birthday with the knowledge that it has surmounted the perils of infancy and taken its place in the support line behind the Royal Air Force. The Corps offered boys a chance to learn the elements of flying and they seized that chance with both hands. "The keenest minds among the rising generation were the first to enrol and, since last February, many thousands of cadets have passed into the R.A.F. or the Fleet Air Arm with their preliminary training already completed. To all of you I offer congratulations on the first year's work and good wishes for the future. I am sure that you would wish me also to express your thanks to your officers and instructors, and the other helpers, without whose devoted labours you could not have reached your goal. "The sky is still overcast, but there is a place in the sun above the cloudy canopy for all who can fly high enough to reach it. Boys of your stamp will reach any mark at which you aim, and, as you pass on into the ranks of the R.A.F. and the Fleet Air Arm, your younger brothers, equally keen and liardv, will take your places in the j A.T.C." ;

LONDON, Feb. 2 There was no enemy air activity over Britain on Sunday night.

LONDON, Feb. Q The death has occurred of Sir Edward Meyerstein, aged 78, a retired London stockbroker. During his lifeSir Edward made gifts of nearly £ooo,ooo, chiefly to London hospitals.