Site Ed. Note: The front page reports continued American and RAF bombing of Tripolitania, hitting an airdrome near Tripoli and a column of Rommel's trucks headed for the important Nazi stronghold.

Despite the Japanese High Command decision to remove all fighting forces from Guadalcanal, fighting continued as the Allies managed a kill ratio of 15:1 against the indefatigable Japanese remnant forces, holding tenaciously to various hidden positions, even if accomplished by scant numbers of troops now ill-equipped to survive much longer.

A lone bomber had dropped bombs in the area of Henderson Field, killing one American soldier and injuring others, the first raid since December 14 when another lone bomber attacked the field. Lone bombers, similar to the sporadic raids continuing over Great Britain, costing lives there still as well, could not affect much strategically, but only worked to effect occasional death in exasperation for battles lost.

A report indicates that bombing raids on German U-boat bases along the French and German coasts had resulted in little damage. The fifteen foot thick walls sheltering the untersee kraftwerke were impenetrable to Allied bombs. Although many U-boats had been sunk in the Atlantic, the resultant depletion of the forces was steadily being replenished by the grinding gears of the still vast German war machine.

Yet, the gears were fast running low on grease.

Facing howling winds across snowdrifts deepening over the steppes west of the Don Bend, the Russian offensive in that area fell to a slower pace as the Caucasus offensive maintained its steady roll westward along a hundred-mile front to the lower Kalmyck steppe.

Word from the State Department disclosed that Charles Bedaux, American industrial engineer, author of the labor loathed "stretch-out" system, had been arrested, charged with trading with the enemy in North Africa.

He was last in the news September 28, 1942 when it was reported that he had been taken hostage by the Nazis in France, in an effort to effect a trade for German prisoners held in the United States and Great Britain.

In November, 1937, Mr. Bedaux had sought to arrange a trip to the United States for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as explored at the time in two editorials appearing in The News, November 5 and 6. The trip was aborted for the company they kept being unacceptable to labor, despite the trip's salutary intent being to inspect labor conditions as part of an international tour for the purpose, but which unfortunately had included a stop in Nazi Germany where the couple were roundly feted, to international denunciation, by their host, Der Fuehrer. Cash, in one of his early editorials after joining the regular staff of the newspaper, had bemoaned the mission's ill fate for its not allowing the Cannons of Concord to offer a lilt-down, maybe tilt-down, bed by Cannon to the royal pair.

Perhaps, the music, after all, which Cash had in mind to accompany the canceled tête–à–tête was from The Mikado, or rather maybe a variation on the well-known theme by Tchaikovsky, as translated by Gilbert & Sullivan. The lyric might have begun, "In 1814, I took a little trip..." The title, no doubt, would have been "Horton Hears a Hoo".

Murphy's Law, however, had intervened to stop it, just as now it had beset Mr. Bedaux on his way to the forum to make a deal.

And the government announced that it was a permissible exception to the ban on pleasure driving to make social calls during the sojourn to and from work. So it looks like those more important private affairs will have to be undertaken on the way to the office or on the way home. And, it's okay to go eat, but not at a restaurant where they entertain. No more lunches at the Top Kat Klub--unless you happen to be a sailor, that is.

On the editorial page, Raymond Clapper explores the collective blowing off of war frustration in Washington, first by the removal of Leon Henderson as head of OPA, out of frustration with the inevitable bugaboos of rationing, now the same effort apparently beginning against Harry Hopkins over frustrations with his administration of Lend-Lease. The latest flak against him was that Lord Beaverbrook of Great Britain had provided Mrs. Hopkins with a chest of emeralds, all to the Hopkinses' howls that it was foul, fiendish Axis-esque propaganda.

Mr. Clapper does not point out the most central benefit, however, which was being derived from Lend-Lease, that being the saving of probably hundreds of thousands of American lives by not having to send men to fight on the Russian front or infantry to fight in China or more than were being sent to fight eventually in Sicily, Italy, and France.

To the same end as that explored by Mr. Clapper writes Samuel Grafton, again addressing the subject of obscurantism among the Republican opposition to the President, those who would not draft legislation for its over revelatory tendencies, exposing to light their obscurantist ways, which could not easily be set down as legislation in any event. The effort, he affirms, consistent with Clapper, would be to seek to undermine Harry Hopkins, angling obliquely thereby to snipe at the President.

The assiduity to the task would labor to continue to roust from the hustings the worst emotions of the populace, by extolling the virtues of diametrically opposed emotions, each fervently held by an entrenched segment of the constituency, praising, for instance, the strength and tenacity of America's allies while inveighing against the extravagance of Lend-Lease.

Speaking of obscurantists, "Barking Dog" plumps for elimination of the Dies Un-American Activities Committee, as its most recent activities in which it had engaged in 1942 had come to precisely naught. Even a fellow member of HUAC, future initial political opponent of Richard Nixon in his first race for Congress in 1946, Congressman Jerry Voorhis,--a--is--a--referenced as--a--rebuking the Dies annual report.

As we have--a--mentioned, Mr. Voorhis once worked in--a--Charlotte during the 1920’s at the--a--Ford assembly plant there.

Soon enough, within two years of Committee Chairman Dies not winning re-election in 1944, he would have his more than ample replacements, both in the Senate and on his former House committee, other barking dogs.

Lieutenant Kelly returns to duty to begin Chapter 9 of They Were Expendable, taking PT-34 on a nighttime patrol north of Corregidor toward Subic Bay, accompanied by Commander John Bulkeley. They first encounter the persistent peril along the coast of friendly fire. "Half the time those dumb bastards don’t know friend from foe," carped Kelly.

Past that peril, they soon met the lights of an approaching boat blinking indiscernible dots and dashes. At first, the thought was that it might contain the two missing men from PT-31 who had gone ashore and remained, and so caution was utilized in approaching the light. But as they drew nearby, the boat's crew opened fire. It turned out to be a Japanese transport full of troops, which PT-34 quickly dispatched and sent to the bottom.

Another boat soon showed itself, but with light firepower. As they closed on its position, it tried to ram PT-34. They pounded the craft with fire until it lay dead in the water, sinking. Lieutenant Bulkeley quickly boarded the blood-spattered, oil-mucked transport to find it possessed of only one dead and two wounded Japanese soldiers, one an officer, the other so badly hurt that he would later die during the ambulance ride from shore to the Corregidor hospital. Both had submissively surrendered, putting the Americans off their harsh feelings.

Anger, especially incensed by the wounding of one of their own in the skirmish with the first transport, suddenly melted into sympathy as they laid eyes on their captives, mere wisps of shivering men, not the frightful, boastful Tiger-man beasts of whom they had heard during training, rather scared to death of dying, sure that they were about to be sent packing to the next world with a quick pistol shot to the head--just as they had been indoctrinated to believe of callous, bestial indifference to life as a central characteristic of their enemy.

Such prejudices made the normal human breeding developed through the ages to conquer the innate drive to survival a gradually easier instinct to re-cultivate out of primordial memory.

Two nights later, Lieutenant Bulkeley, while on patrol in PT-41 near the mouth of Subic Bay, came upon a ship which turned out to be a modern 6,000-ton auxiliary aircraft carrier. They crept upon it in stealth, reducing power to one engine, then poured it on for 1,500 yards until they closed within a thousand, then firing the first torpedo. The carrier, silent to this point, sprung its trap and suddenly opened fire out of the darkness. At four hundred yards, Lieutenant Bulkeley gave the order to fire torpedo two.

Amid mutual fire between the boat and the ship, the first torpedo then struck its target and blew the carrier to pieces.

As the crew of PT-41 zig-zagged their retreat from the area, avoiding the while wire booby-traps designed to entangle their propellers, they were followed by battery fire. Eventually, they got back to Corregidor unscathed.

Meanwhile, back in Silver City, Chuck McCarthy is approached by a promoter needing a model for Nauseating Murder Magazine, some roughed-up broad for the cover. Chuck decided Ellie-Jayne-Marilyn-Lana-Veronica would fit the part perfectly, and so proceeds to rough her appearance some more, to make her suitable for the shooting.

And Clark Kent proves by his column that he was a Liberal. If only the country had listened to him then, how much time might have been saved, how many lives not lost.

The problem was, however, that his faster-than-bullets flying alter-ego, we think, might have been a little fascist at times, offsetting Clark's progressive viewpoint.

But, sooner or later, probably most columnists come face to face with this ornery divergence of Hyde-bound contradictory ends within the split mirror of reality.

And that fellow, of whom Clark wrote, barking that the British were fighting a war merely for continued imperialism, was just another dog barking in the wild.

As to Wash Tubbs, we think some of the infiltrators may have been trained so well to mimic the Nazi that they unfortunately could never get back to democratic ideals, having forged too many alliances perhaps within their spy work. Such are the perils of foreign-blent intriguants.

Finally, we have to consider that which we were perusing last evening, re the insufferable pain experienced for fully a month by Lewis Payne, a.k.a. Lewis Powell (not to be confused with the Nixon-appointed Supreme Court Justice of a later time). The jailers of Mr. Payne, the knife-wielding maimer of Secretary of State Seward, testified to the military tribunal trying him for conspiracy in the assassination of President Lincoln, that he had been complaining to them of this pain, relief from which he had been, from April 29 forward, unable to obtain , rendering him, sought his attorney to prove by the pain's extended indications, quite insane. He wanted to die. They were, he allegedly said to a jailer, "tracing him pretty close", after all, and so he just wanted to get the hanging done, not wishing to fail her, even if to trail her. One of the prosecutors then sought to elicit from the jailer, without success, the interpretation that Mr. Payne meant by the remark to confess that the prosecutors were finding out his role in the conspiracy, no less.

But, we have to question whether, given his enormous pain of the type of which he complained, whether or not it was an indicator, accurately poised, that he was insane, was it not this pain itself which caused Mr. Payne to wish to be rid of the mortal coil's reins. And that the "tracing him pretty close" of which he loosely spoke, more to the point, referenced the devils, those agents of burning persecutions exacted by the bacterial hooks, causing this extraordinarily prolonged, unrelieved pain, wrenching his looks, making him retch as he shook, reaching him deeply in fits, because he was unable, sheepily, to unleash his pain, and not that imposed from without by any actual human agent.

When occupying a throne, it is better to engage in pontification than to have to endure that pain. So, Mr. Payne should, no doubt, have spoken, before undertaking his deadly course, to Mr. Smooth.

Well, when Mr. Hoover, climbing the rear stairway to the Leland Avenue apartment where he and his fellow G-Men were to undertake the stakeout sting of the Touhy Gang members in December, 1942, stepped on the tail of the gray cat, he no doubt exclaimed, "Scat!" And so, too, do we as we leave the cat, Mr. Payne, there in early June, 1865, to feel his own pain through the eternal, infernal regions.