Site Ed. Note: In one of those serendipitous stop, stop, stop moments a couple of weeks ago, we ran across a piece from this date, as it whizzed on the spool by our eyne, regarding the arrest of the Touhy Gang in Chicago, as reported December 29 and December 30. Drew Pearson, in his syndicated Washington Merry-Go-Round column, (his usual partner in the column, Robert Allen, having joined the Army), wrote in detail of the arrest by the F.B.I.

J. Edgar Hoover personally effected the pinch, even participated in a multi-hour nighttime stakeout across the hall from one of the gang's apartments, during the night preceding the arrest of "Terrible" Touhy and "The Owl" Banghart, escapees from Stateville Prison in Joliet, imprisoned pursuant to convictions for fraud and kidnapping, having been notorious bootleggers during the Prohibition era. They had, according to the Bureau, planned a large-scale crime spree in the Chicago area, interdicted by the arrests.

You may read the piece on your own for the exciting blow by blow description of the apprehensions.

That which we find remarkable now, however, though we did not read the piece at all when we clipped it from the machine for potential inclusion here, is the fact that accompanying Director Hoover on the stakeout of the Leland Avenue apartment were six agents. Two hid in the bathroom down the hall. Two hid in the apartment in which two of the gang members were staying and from which these two were subsequently shot and killed by those two agents. The Director, meanwhile, was secreted across the hall in another apartment with two other agents, each taking turns, amid irritating bedbug bites, peering through a gimlet hole in the door, conning for anyone approaching the targeted apartment.

One of those accompanying the Director in this task was Assistant Director F. J. Connelley. The other was Special Agent W. G. Banister (spelled "Bannister" in the piece), in charge of the Chicago office at the time.

The latter agent was William Guy Banister, of subsequent notoriety for his alleged involvement in gun-running activity to anti-Castro Cubans, alleged to have been administered, subsequent to his 1954 retirement from the F.B.I., out of his private detective agency located at 531 Lafayette Street, New Orleans, during the summer of 1963. He was of course even more notorious for his alleged connections during that same period to Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald listed 544 Camp Street, an address around the corner from 531 Lafayette, but physically a part of the same building, on pro-Castro pamphlets which he was handing out in the streets of New Orleans when he got into a scuffle with some anti-Castro Cubans during August, 1963. (It should be noted that some familiar with the now razed building at the corner of Camp and Lafayette contend that the two addresses were on separate floors and that no direct access was available between Guy Banister’s office and the address listed by Oswald. Of course, that does not serve to sever the coincidental connection of the physical locale listed by Oswald with that of Banister's office.)

The reader will be tempted, perhaps, given the article immediately to the right of this piece, to inquire, with up-turned lip and nose, what the fact of Guy Banister’s accompanying the Director and five other F.B.I. agents in a December, 1942 arrest in Chicago has to do with the price of eggs in the South, whether a month or 20 years later.

Well, perhaps nothing. But, perhaps, quite a lot. It does prove that Director Hoover placed great faith in Guy Banister in 1942 and relied on him as a top agent to assist in a stakeout of a major gang in whose arrest the Director saw fit personally to participate, even if protocol probably insisted upon the Special Agent in charge of the Chicago office assisting in the arrest if the Director himself was participating. Nevertheless, the Director would not have in his company for this task some flunky agent who might fall asleep at the gimlet hole or otherwise bungle the operation such that the Director, personally present, would wind up with egg on his face.

The utilization of a gimletized hole for spying, incidentally, reminds us of John Wilkes Booth peeking through a gimlet hole in the door leading to the box at Ford's Theater, just before entering that box to undertake his deadly task on the night of April 14, 1865.

Well, we mention the little coincidences of this arrest. They may mean nothing and lead to nothing. We shall see.

Regardless, it was the last time J. Edgar Hoover ever personally conducted an arrest.

We also remind that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from September, 1960 through early October, 1962, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, had approved in March, 1962 Operation Northwoods, which, among other things, suggested the undertaking of government-approved disruptive activity in the American South, utilizing anti-Castro Cubans as actors pretending to be pro-Castro Cubans, to stimulate and exploit already extant anti-Castro sentiment, and to provide the basis for cracking down on pro-Castro activities in the United States, as well as to lay the foundation of public antipathy to Castro to justify his overthrow and even his assassination, planned pursuant to Operation Mongoose.

General Lemnitzer's approval of Operation Northwoods, the final executive authorization for which was refused by President Kennedy, along with his having urged the President to undertake in April, 1961 the Bay of Pigs Operation, planned during the Eisenhower Administration, were central fumbles in causing President Kennedy to seek the General's resignation as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, just prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and transfer him to the position of Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe.

General Lemnitzer had accompanied General Mark Clark, surreptitiously landing by commando-supported submarine off the coast of Algeria three weeks before the commencement of Operation Torch on November 8, 1942, to lay successfully the foundation for cooperation among the French forces to avoid resistance to the landings.

The front page carries the news of the President’s budget request from the Congress, a hundred billion dollars for the ensuing fiscal year. That added to the ninety-six billion already spent since Pearl Harbor meant that spending precipitated by the war estimated to mid-1944 would fall short only by a billion dollars of equaling the entire previous amount spent by the Government since the Founding.

The President hastened to add, however, that money alone, even the armaments on which it would be spent, accounting for the bulk of the expenditure, would not suffice to win the war. It would, he stressed grimly, take the blood of determined and well-trained soldiers using those tools of war developed out of this vastly expanded production apparatus, embracing every aspect of the American industrial base, to achieve victory.

The news from Guadalcanal and New Guinea continued to be good. The engagement reported by the communiques to have been initiated by the Allies the previous day was against Japanese positions on Mount Austen and the proximal ridges of Sea Horse and Galloping Horse, an operation which would conclude successfully on January 23, the last substantial engagement on the island.

That of which the Allies were not yet aware was the decision by the Japanese High Command, already determined on December 31, to abandon Guadalcanal in favor of fortifying the bomb-besieged Munda airbase 200 miles northwest on New Georgia Island and its positions yet further northwest on Bougainville. The armada forming in and around Rabaul was in fact an evacuation vehicle, not one of supply and offense, as Admiral William Halsey had believed.

The misperception was of little consequence to the outcome, for depletion of the Japanese forces, wherever they were found, was the object. That they were retreating for the nonce did not mean a retreat to Japan and for good. They were merely regrouping for further action.

There were still four weeks of fighting left on Guadalcanal, but the Japanese campaign to take Henderson Field was over, having been determined by the High Command to have cost the Japanese too many men, ships, and planes for the value of the objective.

Another report indicates more bombing raids in North Africa, these targeting supply positions in front of Rommel's retreat, trying to cut him off from his attempted joinder with the Axis forces holding down the strongholds at Tunis and Bizerte.

The treaty with the Chinese, to which commitment was made in October, whereby both the United States and Britain renounced the privilege of extraterritoriality, the system by which civilian nationals of the two foreign countries had enjoyed immunity from Chinese law while engaging in trade and commerce in China, had been signed in Washington and London. The event, said the Chinese, marked a new era in positive Sino-Western relations.

Wiley Rutledge, the former dean of both the University of Iowa and University of Washington law schools, and, since 1939, a member of the D. C. Circuit Court of Appeals, as we set forth in the note accompanying October 6, 1942, was named to the Supreme Court to replace James Byrnes who resigned after only one full term to become head of the new Office of Economic Stabilization, a sort of "assistant president" in charge of implementing the price and wage controls, either directly authorized by Congress or indirectly authorized through the declarations of war permitting the president to undertake all necessary steps to prosecute the war effectively.

Prentiss Brown of Michigan, who had just lost his re-election bid in November to the Senate, was named, as expected, to replace outgoing OPA chief, Leon Henderson.

On the editorial page, Dorothy Thompson calls for clarity in the French North African leadership, examining further the assassination of Admiral Darlan, questioning the affiliation of his assassin, whether pro-Axis or Resistance. Reports indicated that he was a royalist, probably sympathetic to the fascist cause in France. But the accuracy of these reports was still in question as no one had even disclosed the assassin’s identity. Ms. Thompson hypothesizes that the reason for the vagueness was to avoid purge of Vichy sympathizers still populating the French leadership in North Africa, an inexorable result should the assassin’s identity reveal affinity to Vichy--or should his reported Italian mother suggest fascist ties.

Though Ms. Thompson states the number of fascists among the military leadership to be probably no more than ten percent, she calls for a thorough purge of those remaining, to instill confidence and unity among the Free French.

She also mentions the apparent tension between Generals De Gaulle and Giraud. Indeed, De Gaulle would initially refuse to participate in the upcoming Casablanca Conference in Morocco, set to begin January 14, between FDR and Churchill, (Stalin having been invited but declining because of the ongoing war effort in Russia). De Gaulle did, however, finally agree to attend, at the urging of President Roosevelt, to foster the appearance of a united French front at this critical hour in the North African campaign.

Samuel Grafton picks up the exhortation to cleanse the French government in North Africa of fascist sympathizers, indicating that CBS Radio correspondent Charles Collingwood had been especially stringent in his denunciations of the number of fascists surrounding General Giraud. Mr. Grafton suggests that the recent indication in the speech by Vice-President Wallace that to purge the Germans and Japanese post-war of all vestiges of fascism and militarism was a fine sentiment, but, being without likelihood of opportunity for realization any time soon, was hollow without the resolve immediately to actualize the intention by ridding presently from responsible positions in North Africa all fascist sympathizers. With that firm commitment, Mr. Grafton asserts, there would be no need for an international air force policing the world after the war, as the Vice-President was perceived implicitly to have advocated.

Was Mr. Grafton correct in this belief?

It assumes that fascists are born of a bad seed, nurtured in a fascist school. But, are they not bred from conditions of want on the part of the masses and its inevitable demagoguery stimulated, poised always peering for opportunity to exploit those hungry bellies? The elimination of the want must always be the goal. Then the demagogues have no hungry hold by which to attach their hungry, piratical hooks.

By the same logic, however, weeding out the coterie of fascist sympathizers among the French leaders in North Africa was obviously an immediate goal to be sought for insuring success in the operations within the region, for there to be a future of which the Vice-President had spoken.

"The Answer" lauds the bombing campaigns in Tunisia, the Solomons, and New Guinea as being crucial to Allied success ultimately, even if without the headline grabbing flash which accompanies large-scale expeditionary landings, bold tank and infantry battles, and naval operations. The goal was to wear down the Axis in each theater, and the editorial points out perceptively that the accomplishment of this goal was greatly dependent on these relentless bombing sorties being carried out almost daily, weather permitting. That, notwithstanding criticism from such places as the London Daily Mail, complaining that if the North African campaign continued to bog down until spring, the Axis would be able to reinforce itself and a long struggle for the region might ensue.

Indeed, the proof of the effectiveness of these raids was not only exhibited in New Guinea, from which the Japanese had been nearly ousted by this point, but also by the coming success, already a fait accompli, on Guadalcanal and the elimination of the Japanese presence there as well.

"The Last Straw" finds empathy for the farmer in trying to plot the course to be followed in the coming year, seeing before them both Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand, they would need try to comply with the government parameter seeking an eighty percent increase in crop yield for 1943, even after a record production year in 1942; on the other, such extraordinary production had to be accomplished, if at all, with a diminishing supply of labor, depleted by both the draft and the draw of high city wages in war industry. The editorial concludes that the farmer was likely to shrug his shoulders in frustration, that goals were one thing, realization on inadequate means to accomplish them, quite another.

In chapter seven of They Were Expendable, by William L. White, Lieutenant Kelly finds New Year's Eve at first lonely at the tunnel entrance to the Army hospital--until first, nurse Charlotte, grieving over the wounding of her boyfriend, offers to commiserate; and then nurse Peggy joins them by surprise, apparently leaving the dance and her medical officer boyfriend, back from Bataan, behind.

And, she was wearing "that cute cool-looking cotton-print civilian dress". (Whether she was long, the dress white, is not indicated.)

Well, we had better turn our backs for awhile and afford them privacy, hard to come by, reports the lieutenant, as, reminiscent of a scene out of "From Here to Eternity", he and Peggy struggled for snatches of solitude in the moments intervening every five minutes or so when passage of jeep headlights lit their position beside the road. Out of fear of stepping on someone, they couldn't walk around for the 11,000 men camped bedroll to bedroll on the Rock.

The lieutenant doesn't impart what music might have been echoing through the island from the dance on this night. So we shall need use our imagination a couple of times this time.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Bulkeley, the PT-boat squadron commander, was preparing a plan by which escape might be effected for his boat and crew from the Philippines before it fell and the crew captured. The first plan was to island-hop all the way to Australia via caches of stored gasoline left by the Navy. But that entailed going to Singapore and Singapore was hot with Japanese activity coming down the Malay Peninsula to Johore Strait. An alternative plan was devised whereby they would intern in China. They would first torpedo some of the Japanese transports heading for Hong Kong and then sail north to Swatow Province where the Japanese lines were thin, extending only about ten miles inland. A Chinese captain in Chungking approved the plan. A Chinese force would slip through the lines and pick up the men of the PT-boats on the beach. From there, they would be transported inland and eventually catch a ride back to the States on one of the returning transport planes. But that was for later.

First, they needed to defend the Philippines.

Lieutenant Kelly relates of his eagerness to return to duty, and tries to wrangle permission from the doctors. Peggy intrudes and insures that he stays put.

A restless week passes. His crew, meanwhile, heads for Subic Bay on a mission to attack a Japanese cruiser in the heavily guarded harbor, a mission he describes as suicidal.

Consequently, the time spent waiting for the outcome of the daring raid was especially agonizing, but eventually word came that one of two boats returned safely, that being Bulkeley's. His own boat, however, was missing.

And Chuck McCarthy demonstrates how he treats, with the toe of his boot, the hosses in his stable when they do not perform up to the speed demanded of them under the spotlights in Silver City.

Had it all, on the bony key's volt, out of the Lake of Fire.