Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Fifth Army, in blood and rain-soaked fighting, had captured the summit of Mount Camino, taken three villages southwest of Mignano, and recaptured Monastery Ridge, the foothill leading to Mount Camino taken the day before by the Nazis, thereby capturing and recapturing precious high ground overlooking the road to Cassino and Rome. The fighting had pushed Germans back to the northern and western shoulders of Mount Camino and Mount Maggiore.

The newly won positions provided the Fifth Army with command of the entire southern section of the road through the valley from Mignano to Cassino, along the Liri River flowing into the upper Garigliano. A radio report from Algiers added that the Army was but a mile and a half from being out of the mountainous terrain into the Camino Plain, in which tanks could be used to effect the final push toward Rome.

Repelling fierce counter-blows, costing the Germans all officers save one of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring's 65^th Infantry Division and necessitating support from the 90^th Armored Grenadiers, the Eighth Army, also battling rain and mud, held their ground and made small gains on the other side of the Moro River on the Adriatic coast. The Army also resisted a strong German counter-attack at Lanciano.

In a classic case of Yankee ingenuity, Army engineers, cutting a job which it was thought would take six months down to about two, had restored gas to Naples.

Further reports issuing in the wake of the Second Cairo Conference, held December 4-6 between FDR, Churchill, and President Ismet Inonu of Turkey, and attended by the British and American general military staffs, appeared to bolster the belief that Turkey would soon solidly support the Allied effort, ushering in the possibility of a full-scale invasion of the Balkans through Turkey. Turkish commitment, however, remained vague.

--Man, like, I don't know. Those Nazis up there, ye know? We hear that they are developing rocket-bomb. You have rocket-bomb? Not yet, huh? Well, then, we shall consider it and see further how things go around here. Perhaps, maybe. We like you though and hope to remain good friends to U.S. and Britain. Soviets? Eh… Rocket-bomb needs be developed at your end, too. Thank you and may I now invite you to smoke peace pipe in celebration of newly re-affirmed friendship, just discussed 'at all angles'?

Nevertheless, in the wake of Turkey's move away from its former status as a fence-sitting, bong-smoking neutral in the war, it was reported from Istanbul via Stockholm that Soviet-friendly Bulgaria would likely join the Allies at the first opportunity, following the lead of Italy.

In Russia, one of the heaviest German tank and infantry drives of the seven-week battle by the Russians to retake Kiev was reported, forcing the Red Army back on its heels in the area of Chernyakhov. Field Marshal Fritz von Mannstein had hurled 1,700 tanks against the Russian position west of Kiev. The Russians claimed, however, to have killed 1,500 Nazis and destroyed or disabled 63 tanks in the assault.

The Russians made gains, however, in the area southwest of Kremenchug and had nearly enveloped Znamenka. Three Russian columns were converging on Znamenka, one of which had reached to within four miles of the city, key communications and rail center supplying Kiev. Two of four rail lines serving Znamenka, the junctions at Tsibulevo and Dimitrovka having been taken the day before, had been severed in the fighting below Kremenchug. The fall of Znamenka thus appeared imminent.

In Yugoslavia, the headquarters of Marshal Tito, leader of the Partisan forces, reported that the Wehrmacht under the command of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had begun a thrust across the Bosnian-Serbian border, breaking through to Prijepolje. The forces of Rommel were said to include pro-Nazi Croats and Chetniks, as well as support troops brought from Greece, Albania, and Austria. A report out of Stockholm had confirmed that the Chetniks were fighting with the Nazis against the Yugoslav Partisans.

The Partisans had mounted a successful offensive, however, against the Germans in Croatia, killing 300 of the enemy forces.

The Nazis were said to be perpetrating "great atrocities" on Macedonian civilians, as Macedonian troops fought with the Partisans to repel the Nazis near Macedonia's border with Albania.

In China, Chinese troops had broken into Sinyang, in the northwest suburbs of the recently Japanese-captured railway center at Changteh, important junction on the Peiping-Hankow railroad. The Chinese had also broken through to another suburb southeast of Changteh, Suhlsien. Changteh stood as a gateway to the Hunan provincial capital at Changsha, which the Chinese were trying fiercely to defend.

Changsha, incidentally, had been the site in 1927 of a Communist uprising led by Mao Zedong, who was educated in the city.

In the Pacific, aerial observation of Rabaul noted a definite diminution of Japanese naval activity in the key supply dump for New Guinea operations, possessing three airdromes and a deep-water harbor, 800 miles from the Japanese main supply depot at Truk in the Caroline Islands. Also observed was the presence of 200 fighter planes, suggesting an increase in fighter support to defend Rabaul.

On Monday, 150 tons of bombs were dropped on Cape Gloucester, on the western tip of New Britain, closest geographic point to New Guinea, making 738 tons having been dropped in that area of New Britain during the previous eight days.

Joseph Dyan reported that a Free French expeditionary force, including Arab troops, were being trained in the deserts of Algeria to attack Nazi defense positions along the southern coast of France. Newly armed with American vehicles, guns, and artillery, the seasoned troops, who had fought in Tunisia during the winter and spring before modernization of their armament, expressed a desire to be sent to Italy as well, as they had maintained the memory of the Italian stab to their backs in June, 1940 at the fall of France.

The somewhat overzealous sounding French poilu warriors appeared oblivious to the old news that Italians were now very solidly in the Allied camp, even fighting as underground rebels in the Nazi-held North of Italy. But, for the poilus, separated from their wives and sweethearts since being sent into continuous service in 1939, fighting the while with antiquated rifles--probably among them some captured Mannlicher-Carcanos--and horse-drawn field artillery, their only way home was through victory over the enemy. Now, with new weaponry at their disposal, even wearing new G.I.-issue uniforms, they wanted to prove themselves, albeit apparently against an erstwhile enemy turned ally.

C'est la vie; c'est la guerre.

Walter Reuther, vice-president, later powerful president, of the United Automobile Workers, testified before the Senate Banking Committee that, led by General Foods Corporation, the "food trust" was leading an attack on subsidies, waging an effective war to produce inflation while laying the blame for inflation on unions seeking higher wages. The workers, continued Mr. Reuther, were getting the short end of the stick on wages compared with the farmers and the wholesale and retail food industry which had heavily lobbied for the anti-subsidy bill pending before Congress.

Democratic Senator O'Mahoney of Wyoming supported testimony provided to the Senate by Office of War Mobilization Director James Byrnes that a comprehensive set of controls on both prices and wages, one more comprehensive than that which had been passed already, intended to hold the line at levels extant on September 15, 1942, would need be implemented forthwith to avoid inflationary trends in the society, as evidenced by the pending anti-subsidy bill before Congress and the move to allow increases in wages of railway workers.

In response, the ranking minority member of the House Banking Committee, Representative Wolcott of Michigan, obviously foreseeing imminent victory in both Europe and the Pacific, called the Byrnes approach demagoguery exerted against the ailing American public, a mere political move in furtherance of keeping wages low in time of imminent Victory.

The Senate Finance Committee voted to approve and send to the floor for a vote the House measure raising the liquor tax from $6 to $9 per gallon.

Let us hope so.

And President Roosevelt had signed an order December 1 authorizing the takeover by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox of the Los Angeles Shipbuilding & Drydock Corporation for failure to perform adequately in fulfillment of Navy shipbuilding contracts.

Probably too much emphasis on clean hands, getting every last drop of blood out, and not enough on the business of building ships for the war effort.

On the editorial page, "Showdown" reports on the upcoming meeting the following day between Army officials and representatives of the City of Charlotte regarding the vice situation which had, according to the Army, caused the highest rate of syphilis of any base in the country at Morris Field. The city's response had been that it was doing all that it could to stem the incidence of prostitution.

The editorial hopes that the meeting would resolve the issue, in its opinion, poorly handled thus far.

"Siegfried" expresses the belief that had Neitzsche, or Wagner, or Hitler, or Goebbels viewed the happy, complacent cotton-picking in Mississippi by German prisoners held there, they would have reacted with considerable consternation. But not only would the cognitive dissonance have come from the complacency with which the onerous task was being performed by the Ubermensch but also for its inferior speed compared to the usual black cotton-pickers. The Nazis were only capable of picking 45 pounds per day while blacks averaged 400 pounds.

Where did the Superman myth fit into such an equation? asks the piece.

The adorers of the Idyll appeared, themselves, to be idle on comparison to their non-Aryan inferiors.

"Candidate" begs to differ from the editorial support provided in Fuquay Springs, N.C. for Governor J. Melville Broughton as a candidate for the presidency in 1944. While the Governor had performed great service to North Carolina, the News did not find him to have demonstrated sufficient political interest beyond the parochial to be a viable national candidate.

"Taft Aft" finds political theater at its worst in the sentiments expressed on the floor of the Senate the previous week by Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, contending that the Army and Navy were running a campaign for FDR among the soldiers and sailors, one meant to offset the off-year Republican victories recently tallied. It was, says the piece, properly countered by Senator Scott Lucas of Illinois when he reminded the body that both the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, and the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, were Republicans.

"Sick Man" expresses the sentiment that few would notice any change in Mussolini or feel any pity in his reportedly suffering paralysis from a slowly worsening condition contracted in his youth. What else was new? suggests the piece.

Samuel Grafton equates the anti-subsidy advocates with haters of science. The opposition to subsidies, he offers, was based on a general philosophy of encouraging inflation by applying a remedy en masse where subsidies would allow particularized application of help where needed, based on statistical analyses of the various crop producers, leaving overall prices frozen and thus anti-inflationary in its outcome. The anti-subsidy advocates wanted to unfreeze the entire economy, wages and prices, and let the free market principle have at it, a dangerous concept in time of war for the resultant tendency to encourage an inflationary spiral, ultimately crippling the society economically and potentially hamstringing war production.

Raymond Clapper carps at the veil of secrecy imposed over the Cairo and Tehran conferences with respect especially to American journalists, while the Axis had free run to read of it in the European press. An advance statement from the Tehran Conference had been received by the United Press on Saturday afternoon, but its release was forbidden. Why would such an advance report be provided if not for general release to the public? asks Mr. Clapper.

Meanwhile, he reports that rumors floated about from the Cairo Conference that Prime Minister Churchill donned a ten-gallon hat and danced a jig while the Scotch ran out at Mena House on the night the conference met there. The President was accompanied by both his son-in-law and a special jeep, but White House Press Secretary Steve Early was left in Washington. Why?

A democracy could not afford, concludes Mr. Clapper, Oriental forms of secrecy.

Drew Pearson revisits the slapping incident involving General Patton and provides a factual background suggesting that it was the War Department and not General Eisenhower who had decided to mandate only an apology while keeping General Patton in at least titular command of the Seventh Army--even if the Seventh Army no longer existed as a fighting unit, its troops having been absorbed, since the early August slapping incident, by General Mark Clark's Fifth Army in Italy.

General Eisenhower, reports Mr. Pearson, had wanted to sack Patton and send him home. But a three-man team of high-ranking military officers sent from Washington by the War Department investigated the incident in Sicily, and after hearing Patton describe his having knelt to pray, reduced to tears, beside a severely wounded man in the hospital, becoming then especially repulsed by the presence of two men in the hospital apparently suffering from shell-shock, the investigating committee recommended the lighter discipline to be provided the General.

Now, however, with the Senate Military Affairs Committee receiving reports that General Patton had a long series of miscues, including reportedly shooting a horse which displeased him in its performance at polo, shooting a mule blocking a column seeking to cross a bridge in Sicily, firing his pearl-handled revolver into the air while berating an officer, and making impolitic friends in Morocco a year earlier, including pro-Vichyites and Auguste Nogues, notorious for his hatred of America and the Free French, the broader issue had become the withholding of the negative information while Patton's promotion in permanent rank was pending approval before the Senate. Thus, concludes Mr. Pearson, the Patton matter would inure to the detriment of other deserving officers who might be passed for promotion for fear that some undisclosed matter might lie hidden in their background.

A re-printed editorial from The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot expresses no surprise that Berlin’s Nazi organ, Voelkischer Beobachter, had featured on the front page of its first edition since the concentrated bombing of Berlin a story headlined, "Morgenthau Establishes Jewish Bank to Plunder World", while burying on page three the account of the Berlin bombing, which had even hit the offices of the newspaper, resulting in a truncated edition. Substituting propaganda for news while hiding the facts to the extent possible had become such a routine in Nazi Germany that variance from it was hardly to be expected.

The piece points out that Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau could not even convince the U.S. Congress to pass a 10.5 billion dollar tax bill to pay for the war, let alone establish a world bank.

A news item on the page reported that FDR had declared January 1, 1944 to be a National Day of Prayer, especially one aimed at preserving the country from false pride in its accomplishments in war and from "willful neglect of the last measure of public and private sacrifice necessary to attain final victory and peace".

The Reverend Herbert Spaugh reports on the religious conversion by former agnostic, Colonel Arthur Rogers, a Carolinian who commanded a group of fliers somewhere in New Guinea, dubbed the "Jolly Rogers". Colonel Rogers had converted, acknowledging a higher power, after flying training missions over New York City and then over the empty plains of Texas, during which missions he realized how small the land below was in relation to the stars and the universe beyond. Experiencing over Texas what he thought might be incipient engine trouble, he placed his faith in the creator of the star, perhaps Sirius, which suddenly held his gaze, and then flew on to safety.

Mrs. Stewart W. Cramer was elected the new president of the Piedmont Kennel Club, in meeting for its annual election of officers and board members at Kuester's dining room, located on E. Morehead Street in Charlotte. For your own reservations, just dial 3-0303 and ask to speak with Burke.

And, remember that when carrying the eggs home from the store, don't wrestle, perhaps sumo-style, with the Japanese too much, lest you break some of them, as per a previous mission.