Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that another raid, the largest yet, this time by British naval squadrons in combination with Allied air cover, took place against Pantellaria. The planes dropped leaflets demanding unconditional surrender to spare the island's inhabitants from further unnecessary suffering. No reply had been received.

The report the day before from Berlin and Italian communiques, that a raid by five companies of British commandoes attempting to take the outlying Italian island of Lampedusa had been repulsed, was countered with a British statement that a small coastal reconnaissance mission had been carried out on Lampedusa and all returned safely except two members of the landing party.

It was reported that the French underground was massing for a sweep against the Axis at the time of the Allied invasion. A Free French report indicated increasing tension in France between German and Italian occupation forces. After an attack by the Underground had killed eleven Italian soldiers at Marseilles, the Italians made sweeping arrests and imposed a curfew. The Nazis, however, fearing setting off further rebellion, promptly nullified the orders.

Clark Lee, in Chapter 9 of They Call It Pacific, as continued also on the inside page, tells of the primary need in the Philippines for more planes during the first week of the Manila bombing raids through mid-December, 1941. A lull in the bombing seemed to signal that the Japanese were concentrating for the time their firepower on Hong Kong. But the truth was that they were transferring their planes from Formosa to northern Luzon.

False reports continued to abound, rumors that the Lexington was just off the coast, that the Navy was on its way with planes aplenty to bail out the entrapped military and civilian populations of the Philippines. Mr. Lee had ceased to believe such rumors after the first few days, understood that the Navy was going to be cautious in its risk of ships and planes after Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, civilians continued to perpetuate the optimistic rumors.

Also on the inside page, Drew Pearson discusses the damage done to the labor movement by John L. Lewis's insistence on a strike to obtain a new contract between the UMW and mine owners. In response, the Smith-Connally anti-strike bill had been passed by the House with lightning speed and with little debate and analysis.

On the editorial page, "Talked About" expresses the opinion that Churchill’s calling Congress an "august body" went too far in praising American aid in the war.

"Disagreement" examines two front page reports appearing side by side the previous day, one from General Daniel Noce, an American military expert on amphibious operations, predicting that the Allied landing on the Continent would be successful, and the other by Dr. Kurt Pseisser, a Nazi military expert, indicating that the German reliance on U-boats would prove effective in repelling an invasion. The piece predicts that General Noce had the better of the argument.

"Disillusion" finds signal from the fact that the younger Nazi recruits taken prisoner in Tunisia had expressed to their captors no faith in Hitler, did not believe Germany would win the war. Some believed that the war would end in a negotiated peace after Germany defeated Russia. But those who had returned from the Russian front professed no such confidence. The piece concludes that the war was already over and lost in the hearts of the German people, that the skeptical attitudes of these young recruits, the first to have been subject from their earliest years to Nazi indoctrination, demonstrated its failure.

Bert Wyler of the Overseas News Service examines the Nazi propaganda being disseminated in Germany warning Germans of the apocalyptic circumstances surely to fall upon them should Germany be defeated by the Allies, visions of hell incarnate predominating in the paintings thus rendered. By contrast, the Germans were not convinced. Remembering British and American treatment after World War I, they did not believe that they would be mistreated by the same nations after the present war. The Russians were considered on different terms but, even in that case, there was a feeling that things could be no worse for Germany under Russian control than under its present system.

Raymond Clapper contrasts the return to Britain after the third Washington conference with FDR with that following the first two visits, in January, 1942 and in the previous July. He had returned the first time after Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaya had fallen to the Japanese; he had returned the second time after the fall of Tobruk in Libya, and the beginning of Rommel's seeming unobstructed drive to the Suez and the Red Sea to link up with Japan in the Indian Ocean. But now, he returned triumphant, with the Tunisian campaign won and the invasion of the Continent nigh, a far cry from the dark days when he first came to 10 Downing Street just before the debacle at Dunkerque.

Samuel Grafton observes the Argentinian revolution and finds it to be one only in name, to impress the democracies with Argentina's resolve to join the Allied cause. But the truth was, he asserts, that the revolutionaries were no more than merely a subset of the former pro-Fascist Castillo Government and that the true revolutionaries among the people, those favoring democratic reform, were given no place at the table in the new government, that, indeed, the Congress, with an anti-Castillo majority, had been disbanded. The revolution was simply a sham to try convince the world of Argentina’s turn from neutrality to the Allies, while in fact maintaining its same ideals as before, Fascism.