The piece again refers to the positive example set the previous week by the Atlanta Regional War Labor Board in making adherence to the no-strike pledge a condition of a maintenance-of-membership contract for the union.

The Wright strike was especially troubling as it originated in a sector traditionally thought to be management and not, per se, labor, but nevertheless had spread pervasively to all of the CIO member workers.

During the week, he had inveighed against the proposed law to have compulsory military training for American youth, despite the country's general support of it. His reason was that such a system would show a lack of faith in maintaining the future peace.

The editorial then finds inexplicable his reasoning in support of a voluntary program aimed at training 100,000 Air Force pilots per year.

Congressman Joe Martin of Massachusetts had calculated that as few as 325,000 votes properly distributed in close states would have changed the outcome.

That latter method of arithmetic, however, is almost always available to the losing candidate in presidential elections so long as the quaint, but anachronistic, convention of the electoral college remains with us. But, such fine figuring presumes that all close states would go one way, a rarity in presidential politics.

Scorpion, a magazine published for the German soldiers, edited by Heinrich Himmler, had demanded instant death by shooting of any soldier or officer who sought to surrender. The exhortation had made room for the possibility that soldiers might take advantage of the invitation and assassinate their superior officers for something other than intention to surrender, but presumed the good faith and discipline of the ordinary soldier in the ranks to avoid such unintended consequences of the policy.

It was indicative, says the editorial, of the desperate fear within the Nazi hierarchy, so desperate as to invite general revolt within the ranks. The next stage would be panic, after which anything could occur.

Mr. Davis met the request but, without informing the General, changed the inscription so that it read, "We shall return." He wanted to hedge his bets in case the military command structure required someone other than MacArthur to lead the way. Once the matches were shipped, General MacArthur had no recourse but to use them as printed—unless of course he wanted to cross out the "we" and insert "I" on two million books of matches.

Mr. Pearson next indicates that Louis Bean—no relation, we presume, to D. D. Bean—of the U.S. Budget Bureau, had accurately predicted the percentage of the President's popular vote victory in the election, but had missed by three votes the electoral count. It was the more remarkable as he had made the prediction on July 7 and then sent it sealed to his old boss, Vice-President Henry Wallace. Mr. Wallace had asked Mr. Bean what his favorite poll was and Mr. Bean had replied, "The Galluping Bean Poll."

Mr. Bean had also predicted a gain of 30 seats in the House by the Democrats, two off the actual count. He had been off by only one percent in each of his predictions for 1936, 1938, 1940, and 1942. His methodology leading to such unerring accuracy was to add two to three percentage points to the Gallup poll results on the theory that Gallup underestimated support for Roosevelt and that working people did not wish to disclose their choice.

The column next reports that one of the reasons for the lack of success in the military operations against the Japanese in China had been the fact that the American military attache, Col. Morris B. De Pass, had not been efficient during the previous year in his analysis of Japanese military strategy in the region. He had sent a message six months earlier to the War Department dismissing the inception of the Japanese drive on American air bases in southeastern China as being unimportant. He even thought it merely a maneuver to train new Japanese troops. Only when the offensive reached the edge of Kweilin, capital of Kwangsi Province and locus of an American air base, did he finally rate the situation grave.

Finally, Mr. Pearson relates of the eagerness with which Frances Perkins sought her departure from her job as Secretary of Labor after 12 years at the post. She had tendered her resignation three years earlier and the President had refused it. By manipulation from rival functionaries in the executive branch, the Labor Department had lost some 90 percent of its power in recent years, so unpopular had been Secretary Perkins with her Cabinet colleagues. Much of the displaced authority had been delivered to Paul McNutt as Manpower Coordinator, other parts to various other agencies set up specially to administer the war effort. Ms. Perkins had, for awhile, resisted the effort, but ere long had tired of the attempt when it got nowhere.

Mr. Pearson then repeats his erroneous prediction that Teamster head Dan Tobin would be her most likely replacement. It would be instead former Wisconsin Senator Lewis Schwellenbach.

The country had come a long way without compulsory national service as had been the case for the duration in Great Britain and the Soviet Union—where, in the latter case, non-producers did not eat. (Comrade Bachmann, you have a home at last for your No Work-No Eat program.)

To maintain the current system meant that war workers, while weary, were going to have to continue to produce until the war was finally won.

So the question arose as to why the conference was even being held. Mr Grafton wonders why it would not have been just as well to have scheduled it a year hence.

Nevertheless, without attracting much public notice, the conference was making important decisions for the post-war world, especially with respect to implicit forgiveness of the neutral nations. Once invited to the table, these nations would have to be invited to the other peace conferences as well.

While America did not much mind the exclusion of the Soviet Union since it would not be dependent on Soviet air routes after the war, and while rejecting Britain's desire for carefully apportioned routes based on air traffic of each nation would also work to the benefit of Americans, the decisions being made at this conference could compromise post-war unity between nations.

She recalls the speech a year earlier by South African Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts, having as an assumption that the British would be the weakest of the three major powers after the war, requring that Britain maintain close relationship with Western Europe, especially France, but also forming an entente inclusive of Norway, the Low Countries, and, eventually, Italy and Spain.

While Britain was busy trying to create such an alliance—that which became NATO—the Soviets were trying to create a defensive bloc in the East—that which became the Warsaw Pact countries.

The Soviets, however, she says, were not, as Great Britain, reliant solely on their powers of persuasion. Finland, Rumania, and Bulgaria had been enemies of Russia and, now that they had surrendered, could be coerced. Other countries, such as Iran, were undeveloped colonial states. Still others, as Yugoslavia and Poland, were in semi-revolutionary status, rife with internal controversy to be resolved after the war, leaving it to the Soviets to choose which side among the various rival factions they would back.

The entire situation put the Atlantic Charter, renouncing extraterritorial aggression by its signatories, off to one side as an antiquated instrument. The Russian sphere of influence would extend at least to the Oder River inside Germany; the British sphere would go at least as far as the Rhine and Ruhr Valleys. As the area between those two spheres was small, she predicts that both blocs would in the future meet on German soil—that which ultimately became in August, 1961, following 15 years of steadily increasing tension between East and West, the Berlin Wall.

American interests were also involved, to avoid a third world war. America was not interested in power blocs but in European stability and prosperity through liberation of Europe, encouraging of a European federation or several federations, independent of either Soviet or British control and integrated into the United Nations. But that would require both the British and Soviets simultaneously renouncing their intended spheres of influence. Neither would do so unilaterally in trepidation of the other then dominating Europe.

But the toughest battle of all, he said, was the single day he wound up fighting with the infantry at Montebourg in France, after having one of the six tanks he had lost shot out from under him and his crew. One of his crew had died, another was critically wounded and would later die. He and his bow gunner were both wounded, he in the leg. But he found a rifle on a dead soldier, picked it up, and began fighting with the infantry. He concluded that he preferred fighting under a shield of armor.