Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President had indicated that, per the usual practice when draft-deferred workers in essential war industries stop working, they would become eligible again for the draft. Coal miners would be ordered back to work on Monday.

Meanwhile, coke furnaces at the nation's steel plants slowly were beginning to be shut down for want of coal.

An anti-strike bill for vital war industries, carrying penalties of fines and prison terms for those who led a strike, was passed by the House. It was now headed back to the Senate for reconciliation.

In a massive 500-plane air raid by the Luftwaffe on Kursk in Russia, the Russians shot down 162 planes in one of the biggest air battles of the war, lasting fully ten hours.

The Argentine military staged a coup d'etat to oust President Raymon Castillo from power, having demanded that he cease his neutrality policy in the war. It was still unclear whether the new military government was pro-Allied or pro-Axis, though likely the former.

Two more raids, this time in the nighttime by the RAF, struck the island of Pantellaria, already heavily bombed during the previous three weeks.

The Chinese reported more successes in the fighting around Tungting Lake, annihilating 2,000 Japanese troops while taking Nanhsten on the lake's northern shore.

Chapter 5 of They Call It Pacific finds Clark Lee describing the first full day in the Philippines after the news of the attack at Pearl Harbor. Mixed stories, most of them offering false hope of rescue by the U.S. military, reached their ears via radio and press accounts. There would, in the end, be no rescue.

On the editorial page, "The Miracle" remarks on the fact of the defense by the Chinese of Chungking against the fierce attack by the Japanese, even though the Chinese had scant arms at their disposal. Apparently, suggests the piece, the Chinese had discovered some secret formula for defeating the Japanese infantry which had thus far largely eluded both the British and Americans.

"One Victory" explains the lessening U-boat menace in the Atlantic, the result of increased American ship production, a shorter route to the Near and Middle East now that the Mediterranean was secure for the Allies, and the increased bombing of U-boat facilities in France and Germany.

Raymond Clapper examines the relations between Finland and Russia, suggests that Finland ought break now with the Axis, with the war for the Axis going badly, especially as Finland had never signed any pact with Germany, and effect a peace with Russia, a position, even though colored by the historical mistrust between the two countries, heightened by the Russo-Finnish War of 1939-40, which nevertheless would place the Finns on the side of their natural allies, the U.S. and Great Britain.

Samuel Grafton writes of how France had slowly begun to cheer for the first time in three years, that the press in North Africa had timidly begun to stand up for De Gaulle, an unfamiliar stance to those forced into an alternative mindset of occupation or Vichy control.

Dorman Smith tells of the Tortoise and the Hare.