Site Ed. Note: The major news of this date, as reported on both the front page and the inside page, was the breakthrough finally of the Allies to the outskirts of Bizerte and Tunis. After Patton's Army II Corps captured Ferryville eight miles south of Bizerte at 1:00 p.m., patrols of these forces then moved into the suburbs of Bizerte, the principal harbor of Tunisia and vital supply and reinforcement means for the Axis. Berlin radio reported that French troops had penetrated the inner fortifications of Bizerte.

Meanwhile, a part of the British First Army, moving from Medjez-El-Bab, broke into the outskirts of Tunis after capturing Le Bardo on the western age of the capital city.

The First Army forces formed a rolling wedge five miles north and five miles south of the road to Tunis, meeting head-on two Nazi tank columns, comprised of 35 tanks in the column to the south of the village of Massicault, 17 miles southwest of Tunis, and 25 in the column to the north of the village. Both columns were decimated by the British, allowing Massicault to be taken by 1:00 p.m., just as Patton stormed into Ferryville to the northwest, both positions shown on the map on the page. From these two locations, the Allied forces were able then to send advance units into the outskirts of both major cities.

Allied air power swept aside the Axis, enabling the fast movement forward of Patton's and K.A.N. Anderson's infantry. Allied planes were reported also to have sunk 23 ships in the Tunisian Straits, apparently trying to evacuate Axis troops to Italy.

The rapid, punishing advances caused General Harold Alexander, Allied commander of all ground forces in Tunisia, to declare in a statement directed to all Allied troops that victory was at hand and the long, bloody struggle, especially dark after the defeat at Kasserine Pass two and a half months earlier, was now having its payoff. North Africa was soon to be out of the hands of the Axis.

In the Caucasus, the Russian Army continued to tighten its fist around the Nazi positions at Novorossisk, a key remaining enemy stronghold protecting the southern Wehrmacht in Russia against being driven into the Black Sea and into the hands of awaiting Russian air and naval power.

Another story tells of the posthumous award of the Medal of Honor to Commander Howard Gilmore of New Orleans who, while on patrol during January somewhere in the central Solomon Islands, had heroically ordered his submarine to dive while still in the conning tower, lying mortally wounded from the deadly fire of a Japanese gunboat. He realized that if he waited until his men could move him to safety through the hatch, the submarine would be hit by the gunboat and sunk. Previously, rather than first ordering his submarine to dive to avoid the fight, he had evaded the gunboat's attempt at ramming with a maneuver which enabled the sub to ram the gunboat. After the gunboat was thusly crippled, the commander was shot by machine-gun fire.

At age 40, Commander Gilmore gave his life so that the lives of his crew would be saved.

On the editorial page, "Invasion Looms" ponders the announcement by Office of War Information head Elmer Davis that during the summer, there would definitely be an invasion of the Continent. It was the first such specific timeframe indicated for the long-awaited opening of a second front in Europe.

The editorial welcomes the prospect and suggests it as the beginning of the end for the Axis which would now be fighting henceforth a defensive war. But, at the same time, it warns that the price in lives for the Allies would be a bloody one as the fighting, already fierce in Tunisia, would now become even more fierce and bloody as the Germans and Italians were for the first time in the war going to be forced to defend their home lands.

The editorial, of course, was quite correct in that assertion, more so than it could have possibly imagined in May, 1943. Two long years yet lay ahead before Germany would at long last surrender to the Allies. It was more apt to say that it was midway of the middle of the war than it was the beginning of the end, consistent with Churchill having stated November 9 that the Operation Torch landings the previous day, in combination with the British Eighth Army's victory in Egypt in latter October pursuant to the Operation Lightfoot advance from El Alamein pushing Rommel back into Libya, were the tocsins sounding “the end of the beginning”.

"The Big Boys" celebrates the coming of the four-motor Liberator aircraft to China, causing bombing missions over Japan to appear now well within range.

It was, however, signal of a hope too early pinned on the Liberators’ advance publicity. The Liberators could still not reach heavily defended mainland Japan from suitably equipped and geographically positioned airfields in China held by the Allies, the bulk of which, as pointed pout previously on the page, were in valleys surrounded by mountainous territory inimical to takeoff of heavy bombers.

Fully loaded with four tons of bombs, the B-24 Liberator had a range of but 400 miles; with a small 2,700-pound load, it could travel 1,200 miles. While useful for long-range reconnaissance, as a bomber it was still limited to harassing Japanese positions at Hong Kong, in northern Indochina, and in Burma.

The ability to reach Japan on a regular basis would not come until February, 1945 with the production of the B-29 long-range bomber and interim taking in June and July, 1944 of two of the northern Marianas Islands, Saipan and Tinian, from the Japanese to use as launching platforms.

Writing for the Overseas News Agency, Harold Lasky examines, as had Dorothy Thompson earlier in the week, some of the tenuous evidence on which the Nazis had contended that the recently unearthed 10,000 Polish officers had been murdered by the Russians in Smolensk in 1940. Like Ms. Thompson, he finds the evidence dubious. Regardless, he stresses, that the worst problem with the entire matter was its diplomatic repercussions within the United Nations resultant from Poland taking the word of Goebbels to demand an investigation of Russian responsibility for the atrocity. Among the Allies, it gave authority for every dissonant and divisive voice, accustomed to declaiming distrust of the Russians, to step forward and echo the plaint of the Polish, destructive of unity just at a time when the Allies were enjoying for the first time in the war uniform success on all fronts, North Africa, Russia, and in the Pacific, and in all facets of the fighting on each front, land, sea, and air.

A piece by Lee Hager describes the demographics of the world, and particularly the United States, between 1800 and 1943, finding world-wide population to have burst from 900 million to over two million during the 143-year interim, and how a 27% decline in birthrates in the U.S. between the two world wars suggested a stagnant population for the United States by 1970, to level off at 165 million from its 1943 population of about 137 million--just in time, incidentally, to meet the prediction of the U.C.L.A. sociology professor who had been quoted in the column January 2 finding it likely that the U.S. would have to fight another war with Japan by 1970, with inadequate compadres from 1943 cribs to do it.

While in the previous hundred years birthrates had declined in the United States from 37 per thousand to 17.6 per thousand, the eradication of many formally epidemic diseases such as smallpox had also decreased the rate of deaths such that life expectancy had risen from an average of 40 years to 63 years, accounting for the dramatic increases in population.

In fact, after the post-war baby boom, which had actually begun shortly after Pearl Harbor, the United States population rose by 1960 to 179 million, by 1970 to 203 million.

He had offered the statistics to suggest the increasing strain on the world’s resources by an ever-growing population and its import in tending against an optimum point of stasis with a balanced industrial and agricultural base to sustain each country's population adequately. When the density of population either surpasses or falls too far below that optimum point, the result, he indicates, is a lack of sufficient resources to feed, clothe, and provide material goods to the people of a given society. The point in Europe and East Asia had already been surpassed. Most other nations were on their way to this condition.

Without saying it, he implies that part of the reason for the war was this inability of densely populated European and Asian countries to care for their people, impelling the lebensraum of the Nazis and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of the Japanese toward the acquisition of territory, other nations' industrial and agricultural production capacity, and the labor base of them enslaved to serve the mother countries--new empires seeking to match and displace the might of the British, French, and Dutch empires of the past.

And it was, of course, a primary motive for starting the war, even if at base, it was the megalomaniacal forces of Hitler and Tojo and their military backers which gave rise to the facile notion that by conquering through force the lands and peoples of other countries, they could robotically control them as they would machines to provide allegiance to the Fatherlands. They had not sufficiently examined the history of the American colonies, for instance, in trying to utilize twentieth century technology to achieve an outmoded nineteenth century and earlier concept to withstand the worst effects of population growth.

Lending to the concept, of course, too, was Social Darwinism, the survival of the fittest out of the war between nations, eliminating the "weak" from the populations of the over-burdened nations. And in Hitler's Germany, in addition to the soldiers sent to the killing fields of Russia, and ultimately to those of France and of Germany itself, that also included the Holocaust.

Just why the little piece from Dave Clark's reactionary Textile Bulletin describing the fate of certain cotton mills in the South during the antebellum and Civil War eras was deemed, together with its reference to one mill working "negro slave labor", significant enough for inclusion on the editorial page, is unclear.

Perhaps, it was intended subliminally to suggest a relationship between the sparsely populated Old South, the burgeoning densely populated urban areas of the North, and the untoward results to a society occasioned by an imbalance between industrial and agricultural population bases within that society.

If so, it was not the result of Dave's erratic scholarship, but the thoughtfulness of The News in juxtaposing the pieces.

Raymond Clapper contrasts Sweden's adaptations to modern industrialization with those of Germany seeking to solve its manifold problems through war, that instead Sweden had renounced its formerly bellicose tendencies of several centuries and reoriented its focus to craftsmanship and industry, for international trade, not for the purpose of building a war machine, to make its way in the world as a relatively small nation. He posits that the problems of Finland had arisen from the outset of the war for the failure so to adapt.

He concludes the piece by echoing the words of Sweden's Premier Hansson who had declared on May Day that Swedes were prepared to fight in defense of their country if invaded by the Axis. Its leadership would not lay down as quislings as had the leaders of Norway. It was, says Mr. Clapper, reassuring that Sweden would not fall victim to the same Nazi sport besetting its two geographically opposing neighbors.

And, "Farmer Bob" Doughton, North Carolina Congressman and Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee writes a denunciatory letter protesting his treatment by an editorial in The News, "The Claimer" from two weeks earlier. The umbrage he took arose out of the editorial's remarks suggesting that his seeking an alternative plan to the Ruml tax plan and proclaiming victory in the House in so doing was but pyrrhic in its implications, that the Republicans had in fact delivered up the pay-as-you-go plan and the Dougherty-championed alternative, after making loud and little reasoned noise about the deviltry of the Ruml Plan, offered but little change from its supposed hellish forerunner. The Ruml Plan had sought to forgive all 1942 tax liability so that the country might be set on a withholding plan to enable payment of the huge war debt being accumulated; the alternative measure passed the previous week by the House forgave 90% of the 1942 tax burden.

Chairman Doughton, however, thought otherwise and doubted strongly The News's family heritage in so expressing his displeasure with their inditement. Combatively said he, "You either know nothing about what you have been writing or you have little or no regard for the truth…"

The News stuck by its guns, gave praise to Caesar, and then stuck a little the dagger in by telling a tale on "Farmer Bob" out of school, that a sudden change had appeared in a report coming over the wires from the Associated Press a few days earlier purporting to quote the Congressman. The first version ascribed to him the expression, "Oh, hell," in response to a report of a Way and Means Committee conference on the tax measure. Shortly, there came flashing over the wires a changed version deleting the reference to the nether regions, instead reading, "Oh, well."

"And that's about the way the whole thing goes," concluded The News.

And that's the way it was as the Allies entered Tunis and Bizerte May 7, 1943 and the final days of the North African campaign, establishing the Allied entry path to Europe across the Mediterranean, vanished quickly into the dim mists of history.

We apologize, incidentally, for excision of the quote of the day. In lieu thereof, we attribute one to Il Duce, probably somewhat adulterated by Il Populo d'Italia: "OH, Bene."

That, while in Germany, Herr Hitler was heard to remark, "Schnell, Hermann, das Flitzen!"