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In TIME of April 3, p. 22, Canada, "Something Missing" you mention the "appalling state" of Canadian defense. Among other items you state, "her coastal defense guns date from before the War, and are so small [presumably also short range] that enemy battleships could anchor unharmed 30,000 yards off Halifax or Vancouver and demolish either city."
This arouses my interest in our own coastal defense guns. How many weapons have we in the forts of New England that shoot 30,000 yards ? Are they manned and ready to shoot ? From an article in your companion publication LIFE I gathered that most of our coastal guns were pre-War and short range, on the Atlantic coast. . . .
A. B. TENNEY
Boston, Mass.
> The number and range of U. S. coast-defense guns is an Army secret. But, as every foreign intelligence service probably knows, the U. S. East Coastline could never be adequately defended by existing forts. Best U. S. coast defense is the U. S. Navy. Says the Army: "That's what will keep 'em at 30,000 yards."—ED.
Death of Durand
Sirs:
... A quiet young man, tall and quite good-looking, weighing about 175 Ibs. ... A young man who had for years eaten the meat of wild game he had killed thinking it his inalienable right, was dragged into court, tried and sentenced to what seemed an interminable time in jail for what was in his philosophy no more a crime than raising a garden. There he was badgered and told that he'd be put over for years for killing the range cow which he killed, by the way, because the wardens were hot on his trail for killing the elk. . . .
The unnatural confinement and the contempt in which he was held drove him to an intense resolve to escape. He did escape but not by shaking Riley like a puppy [TIME, March 27], rather by batting his head with a milk bottle. He made Riley drive him home, where he prepared in an excited fever to leave for the mountains. The bright lads, Baker and Lewis, rushed heroically in, as the Hitleresque agents of all majorities against all minorities inevitably do, contrary to the pleadings of his mother, and others who knew him, to let him cool off, get out of his cloudland of primitive fear and excitement. They didn't listen. They got shot for their self-righteous pains.
That started it. There was no cooling off then, no backing out. The rest was all down hill. For a solid week they chased him, during which he made monkeys out of from one to two hundred of them . . . including a detachment of National Guardsmen with trench mortars and a pair of bloodhounds. Yesterday it came to a fantastic climax [TIME, April 3]. ... He walked nonchalantly into the bank, started shooting over the heads of the people there, out the windows, talking, joking, laughing hysterically. He hardly tried to escape, but roused the whole town. Damned fools were shooting into the sides of the buildings neither knowing nor caring what they hit. A guy across the street in a filling station, the nominal hero, by the way, unlimbered a deer rifle, waited for someone to come out. . . . The door finally opened, four men started out, the bullets and the shot filled the air, a bank clerk fell mortally wounded, Durand fell wounded. He shot himself in the head and ended the horrible fog of terror and hate and screaming tautness.