Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that demonstrations, threatening open rebellion, were taking place in the streets of Milan, with the demonstrators demanding peace and liberty.

The new Badoglio government of Italy had declared the Fascist Party Council disbanded and the law under which it had governed since 1928 abrogated.

Trains bearing Italian and German soldiers in a ratio of 2 to 1 were observed traveling south from Rome to unknown destinations.

Meanwhile, Patton’s Seventh Army continued to plow onward, moving east now toward Messina from Palermo, capturing on Monday Cefalu, 90 miles east of Messina.

The Canadians and British continued mired in their struggle against stern resistance before Catania on the east coast of Sicily, a stand-off now entering its thirteenth day, longer than either the stalled front of the Eighth Army at El Alamein or at the Mareth Line in Tunisia.

The RAF and the U.S. Air Force had dropped 5,000 tons of bombs on Hamburg since Saturday. The tonnage was more than the Luftwaffe dropped on London during the entire fall of 1940, at the height of the Blitz.

As the U. S. continued to bomb Kiska in the Aleutians for the fourth straight day, the Japanese, under cloak of darkness, evacuated the remainder of their troops from the island this date, unknown to the Allies until mid-August when the island was finally invaded.

For the first time since mid-February, in the wake then of the January Casablanca Conference, President Roosevelt gave a radio address to the nation on the progress of the war. Among other things, he stressed that the war would not end in 1943, but also, as the "pessimists" had recently predicted, (that being the Assistant Chief of Staff of the Navy), would not drag on until 1949. Everyone, he asserted, must remain hard at work at their appointed task for the war to be won in due course.

Italy, he stressed, with the fall of Mussolini and "his Fascist gang", was nearly conquered. Nevertheless, "Hitler and his gang and Tojo and his gang" still had to be brought to heel. It would be a long and bitter fight still ahead to accomplish those goals.

The President also promised that jobs would await the returning servicemen, and unemployment insurance would fill the gap where jobs could not be obtained.

On the editorial page, "States' Rights" warns the blustering governors of the South, trumpeting freedom from Federal bureaucratic red tape and control, that their strategy might eventually backfire. For the South had benefited enormously under the New Deal, bureaucracy and red tape notwithstanding. Take away the Federal bureaucracy and you take away the beneficence of the Federal government as well, leaving to the state and local governments the burden of maintaining expected social services. It would be a remedy beckoning the return of the Great Depression.

The central premise behind this movement would later show itself starkly by 1948 to be nothing but old-fashioned Southern racism, fearful of change to systems deemed immutable by time and the river of no return in the minds of the recidivist recalcitrants.

"Rail Traffic" updates a topic from a year earlier when a controversy swirled around whether Charlotte would give up its buried streetcar rails to the war effort and its need for steel. It turns out that, despite the problems over insurance for the dig having eventually been ironed out with the War Production Board, the rails lay still in their crypts, concealed by the layers of time, still echoing silently the ring of the wheels of the cars which once rolled friction apace against them.

The editorial forecasts that they would remain safe and rest easy, at least until the needs of World War III called upon the city to requisition them again, on some uncertain day in some uncertain year.

"…And your streetcar visions that you placed on the grass…"

"New Peril" looks hopefully at the prospect of an Allied drive by winter through Greece and the Balkans onto the southern flank of the German lines in Russia, driving the Nazi finally back out from whence he came, likely ending the war and averting the need for an Allied drive through France and the Lowlands, in consequence saving many British and American lives.

With Italy on the brink of being out of the war, the prospect was made the more appealing and likely, with a two-sided approach to the Balkans thus made possible, from both the Italian Peninsula and the Middle East.

"Dr. Register" recommends naming the revitalized old Charlotte Sanatorium, once primarily a hospital for treatment of tuberculosis and respiratory diseases, now turned to the treatment of venereal diseases, Edward G. Register Hospital, after the sanatorium's founder, circa 1907-08. It sounded better and was more fitting, offers the piece, than Charlotte Venereal Hospital.

"…And my best friend, the doctor, won't tell me what it is I got."

Samuel Grafton explores the prospective revolution in Germany and what form it might take. He predicts it will be several revolutions, not just one, that it will be a revolution for peace, not for any ideological commitment, even democracy; and, finally, that the East-West split would cause the potential for one part of Germany to revolt in favor of Russia against the West while the other might sidle up to the West as a bulwark to Russia.

Despite doing pretty well with his crystal ball by this point in the piece, he opts out of the prediction business as being too murky. He nevertheless considers that the Russian determination to insure a peace for Germany and restoration of democracy without territorial demands would bode well for the future.

In that one, he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory as predictions go.

"…And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass…"

Burke Davis contributes a by-lined piece to the page looking forward to the first major biography to be published on the life of Thomas Wolfe, now nearly five years in the grave. It was being written at the time by John Skally Terry, an NYU English professor and friend of Wolfe, at least until the latter stages of his life, both having been students together at UNC in the latter teens and early twenties despite Mr. Skally having been seven years Wolfe's senior.

Mr. Skally, incidentally, also is reputed to be the archetype for the character Jerry Alsop in the posthumously published Wolfe novel, The Web and the Rock.

Mr. Davis expresses the lack of appreciation for Wolfe still in his home state, the lack of appreciation generally for creative ability in the region, and hopes that the book might clarify Wolfe, to bring him home again to North Carolinians.

He believes Wolfe was not aided much in his creative germination by his North Carolina roots, save that the University had done much to nourish his genius.

Tradition having it that the University is somewhat an island unto itself within the state, an oasis amid the Sahara of the Bozart, perhaps, nevertheless the University is a part of the state and a principal part of it, supported by the taxpayers, each and all, even if maybe some would rather not had they another choice.

Thus, applying a simple syllogism, if the University helped to nourish his genius, so too did the State of North Carolina. For all the towns, cities and villages of the place did, and probably still do, tend to flow their rivers backward ultimately into a confluence at the delta which is Chapel Hill--whether some of them are aware of it or not being wholly beside the point.

Incidentally, the Po Valley, to which Hitler had insisted the line of defense be drawn for Italy, is further north even than Livorno.

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