Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the American forces in Brittany had captured Rennes, continuing to move south, while a second spearhead moved toward Dinan along the road to Brest. (Because of an overexposed section of both the front page and editorial page of this date, our summary will necessarily be abbreviated, leaving out on the front page the details of the daily communique on both the American advance in Brittany and the move by the Eighth Army toward Florence in Italy. We shall endeavor at some future time to replace those two pages.)

Life would report in its August 21 issue that the Bretons were of a different sort from the Normans, the latter more restrained and less emotive. When the Americans arrived in Brittany, the reaction had been an outpouring of affection and kisses. The Bretons treated collaborationists differently also, with a swift back hand to the face until they were bleeding. In Normandy, the collaborationists had received fair and judicious treatment.

On the Caumont front, the British attacked by moonlight against the German stronghold at Villers-Bocage, capturing five towns before dawn along the way. Villers-Bocage was believed to have become a No Man's Land while the Nazis still maintained their defenses on the perimeter. It was still unclear whether the Germans were prepared to make a stand in the town or retreat; but there was evidence of new German reinforcements on the scene. Other British units to the south advanced to within 2,000 yards of Aunay-sur-Odon, taking La Lande and high ground to the north. The British had taken Cathcoles, Montchamo, and Entcy, southeast of captured Le Beny-Bocage. In the Vire sector, they had captured Le Crousel, Viessox, and Le Bas Perrier. The thrust was to the east from Vire and Le Beny-Bocage.

Up to 3,000 American and British planes from Britain and Italy attacked numerous targets in France, Germany, and Northern Italy. Five hundred heavy bombers from England attacked Saarbrucken, Mulhouse, and Strasbourg. From Italy, 750 heavy bombers attacked targets in the north.

The Russian forces had moved to within three miles of the East Prussian border, fighting near Virbalis and Wizainy, advancing from captured Dydvizhe to within 21 miles of Tilset, 44 miles from the key rail junction and industrial city of Insterburg, and 93 miles from the capital at Koenigsberg. From these locations, Russian artillery was for the first time reaching German soil. The heaviest attacks were in the Maurian Lake region, as General Ivan Cherniakhovsky's men moved in excess of five miles the day before along the established 200-mile front.

A map on the page shows the various towns and cities of East Prussia along with rail routes and major rivers.

The Russians were moving speedboats, mines, and torpedoes by truck to the Gulf of Riga on the Baltic Sea along a ten mile wide corridor, 35 miles west of Riga, the boats and explosives to be used to harass German shipping seeking to evacuate the 20 to 30 German divisions of the 16th and 18th Armies cut off and trapped by the drive west of Riga.

German radio reported that the Russians had established two bridgeheads across the Vistula River, 37 miles south of Warsaw, now under siege for four days by the forces under the command of Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, maintaining a twenty-mile arc through the suburbs, while inside the city, the Polish underground was at work fighting in the streets. One bridgehead was said by the Germans to be eight miles west of the Vistula, in the area of Warka, 37 miles south of Warsaw. The other was reported as being at Baranow, 125 miles northeast of Warsaw.

To the south, in the hill country of the Carpathians, another Russian column moved to within 70 miles of Krakow in Poland.

On Guam, a force of 10,000 Japanese soldiers had been pushed back into the jungles, as the American line now extended from Tumon Bay on the west coast across the island to the east, three miles north of captured Agana and ten miles north of occupied Port Apra.

In Philadelphia, the Army was making preparations, at the request of the Citizens Committee of the city and the transportation company, to take over the strike beset subways, buses, and trolleys of the city.

Workers had struck Monday night over a dispute on hiring practices which excluded blacks from becoming drivers. In the wake of that strike, the stranded city on a warm summer's night saw looting by black teenagers in black neighborhoods and street fighting between whites and blacks.

On the editorial page, "Half Way" comments on the expected outcome of the run for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination by North Carolina Governor J. Melville Broughton. No one had realistically expected the candidacy to catch fire. North Carolina was, in the words of former Governor O. Max Gardner, too liberal to attract the rest of the South and not liberal enough to be acceptable to the North.

"Turkey Jumps" finds the long overdue decision of Turkey to abandon its neutrality and sever all relations with Germany to be one which could aid the Allies, for instance by giving access to the Dardanelles, enabling passage from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea. But, given the lateness in the war, the change of policy was coming too late to afford Turkey any important seat at the peace table.

"Crescendo" views the battleground in France and the East as now being decisive in urging the conclusion of the war, which could come, it suggests, even before the Allies reached Paris or the Russians pressed across the German border. Now that General Bradley's forces were freed from the hedgerows of Normandy and on open ground in Brittany, the prospects were that one prong would seal off the Brest Peninsula while the other would advance toward Paris with the British-Canadian troops of the Second Army now fighting below Caen.

"The Kiss" remarks with consternation on the renomination by the New York Republicans of Ham Fish—even though he would eventually lose in November. The editorial could simply not understand New Yorkers. North Carolinians had so plainly stated the proverbial handwriting to Senator Robert Rice Reynolds during the winter that he had chosen not to run for a third term in the Senate against former Governor Clyde R. Hoey, the Democratic nominee. But Mr. Fish was still in there fighting.

Drew Pearson writes of the disparity in treatment between German prisoners of war in America, well fed and clothed, and the American prisoners in German camps, barely surviving but for the Red Cross packages supplied them every week or ten days. Otherwise, they were provided water for breakfast, bad dark bread and thin soup for lunch, two potatoes for supper.

Marquis Childs comments on the first month of the Dewey campaign for the presidency, not visible to the public, but nonetheless busy in shoring up party support from behind the scenes, all orchestrated by his campaign manager, Herbert Brownell, future Attorney General under President Eisenhower.

Samuel Grafton expresses his irritation at those persons who insisted on calling themselves internationalists without indicating where they stood on the Bretton Woods plan for a world bank, with 9.1 billion dollars earmarked for its assets and 8.8 billion for a currency stabilization fund, agreed upon by 45 nations during July. He offers that one could disagree with this plan, but then one could not properly include one's self among the company of internationalists.

The overexposure of the right side of the page has unfortunately obliterated the column of Dorothy Thompson in follow-up to that of Tuesday concerning her hypothesis that the attempted assassination of Hitler by a cabal of the Officers' Corps was not that at all, but rather, similar to the Reichstag fire and consequent purge of the military leaders perceived as unfriendly to Hitler in 1933-34, a staged event to afford the opportunity to the Nazi inner circle to see what the Wehrmacht would do in the case of a report of Hitler's death. When they showed their hands by ordering seizure of government offices on the Wilhelmstrasse, Hitler ordered the arrest and execution of those giving the order, then used the concocted coup as an excuse for further purges.

We shall try to replace the page with a readable copy in the near future, as we find this theory of Ms. Thompson to set forth a scenario entirely consistent with Nazi modus operandi.

Likewise unreadable is most of the column of Hal Boyle. He begins by reporting that the Germans were retreating so quickly and in such willy-nilly confusion, without adequate transportation, destroyed by Allied bombing, that they were forced to abandon most of their ammunition and food supplies, the latter now being used to feed French refugees. In one instance, they had left intact an entire makeshift bakery, including a thousand loaves of freshly baked bread, even if it was found to be so hard that dropping a loaf on one's foot could produce serious consequences.