JUN 24   RECD

WALTER ROBB 554 2nd Avenue San Francisco 18 California

June 18 1947

Dear Miss Ray:

  Thanks ever so much for your letter of June 13 and the copy of the Committee's "A Statement of Purpose" together with a copy of Philip Wylie's "Antidote for Horror" from the New York Post of May 31.   (The Post published a San Francisco edition during the conference for organization of the United Nations here.   In OWI broadcasting to Manila at the time, I procured a complete set of those papers, as they cane out,  and about a dozen of my Filipino colleagues did likewise.   I procured two additional sets,  one for the library,  one that I sent the public library reopened in Manila.   I shall give my set to Stanford, our son James's alma mater: A. B. and LL. M. James was an Army reserve officer at Manila, where he went through it all at Bataan, the Death March, the different prisoner-of-war camps, including Camp O'Donnell and Cabanatuan, near his birthplace, only to starve to death, with some 1300 other young men, on the lest of the Death Ships.  Tragically, our naval information about those  prisoner-of-war ships was faulty.   Had our Navy not sunk one at Olongapo, and strafed the second during 10 days at Takao, where James was wounded, most of those young men, among whom were hundreds of our friends from Manila and throughout the Philippines, would have reached Japan and survived; and James would have been among them, since he was intelligent, determined, and had learned to live through the direst possible hardships.)
   I learn from the press that we have a President whose reading hobby is accounts of the outstanding military campaigns in the race's brief history.   Under less tragic circumstances,  that would be amusing.   But if even our Chief Magistrate cannot adjust himself to our own age, i. e., the atomic age--the sunpower age,  I shall call it--  what shall we hazard as to the body of the people under his leadership?  Well, we shall say, God help us:  But God helps him who helps himself;   that is, we must utilize our talents for our mutual salvation and the true glory of the Master of the Vineyards... ."if to do were as easy as to know what it were good to do." 
  Philip Wylie is astounded by the military mind at work.  With Fort Santiago, military headquarters, on my newspaper beat at Manila for 25 years,  where I came to know the best of the high brass,  it is not difficult for me to confirm Mr. Wylie's anxieties.