Site Ed. Note: The war did not stop for Thanksgiving, as the front page amply attests. Fighting continued on the Stalingrad front, with German resistance showing signs of stiffening at the Don and in the outskirts of the city itself, despite being flanked on both sides by Russian insurgents.

In Great Britain, Thanksgiving was marked, against tradition. Most of the American soldiers had roast pork. The few turkeys available had been sent from the United States and were donated to hospitals.

A report from Morocco suggested that a major offensive against Axis stronghold Tunis would soon be mounted by the British First Army under Lt.-General K.A.N. Anderson and an American force under the command of Maj.-General George Patton.

Reports coming from Spain predicted that the Axis was prepared to sacrifice Tripoli to make its last stand in North Africa in heavily fortified and equipped Tunisia, at Bizerte and Tunis.

Meanwhile, a lull in the British Eighth Army pursuit of Rommel across Libya entered its third day, as Rommel was apparently preparing to make a stand at El Agheila.

And, in a Thanksgiving Day football game, no doubt followed with intensity by tens of thousands of North Carolinians, Colgate blanked Brown in Providence 13 to 0.

On the editorial page, Raymond Clapper reflects on the situation extant compared to that of a year earlier. Then, anxiety was high: where and when, not whether, Japan would attack were the questions poised on everyone’s mind.

Would America survive as a democracy? Would it be physically attacked from both sides by the Axis? Would it, rather, crumble from within, under the weight of the isolationists’ slow undermining of American respect for the will of demos rather than the temptingly bitter words of the demagogue promising plenty for all in exchange of personal fealty, in sympathy with the goals of Nazi Germany, openly suspicious of anything British? Would it, when called upon to fight for the first time in nearly a quarter century, with the new generation as its fighting base, still have the mineable fortitude to pull itself away from its many new distractions which had come to be in the interim, the radio, the jukebox, the swing music, the jitterbug, the talking movies with fuller plots and scripts, more closely approximating life, the fast car on the paved road, all the many distractions of a generation believed by its elders to be spoiled and unlikely to possess the ardor to prick up the necessary quantum of courage and screw it to the sticking place with requisite resolve to fight for the preservation of an ideal, one not measurable in the world of George Babbitt?

Now, a year later, having gone through the darkest of days with the gunpowdered odor of defeat pervading, in the Pacific, in Russia, in North Africa, the tide had suddenly turned in the previous three and a half months: first, with the invasion of Guadalcanal in the Pacific on August 7 and the seizing quickly of the Japanese airbase there not quite completed, taking away from the Axis a base from which it would have harassed and interrupted supply lanes to Australia, General MacArthur‘s base of Pacific operations since the fall of the Philippines in mid-March through early May; second, with the driving by MacArthur of the Japanese back over the Owen Stanley Mountains in New Guinea, away from Port Moresby, the critical Allied base to which the Japanese insurgents had moved within 32 miles at one point, to trapped positions at Buna along the northern coast of the peninsula, with little means of escape; third, the thrust from El Alamein by the British Eighth Army on October 23, after the stand in early July, forcing Rommel out of Egypt and halfway back across Libya; fourth, the November 8 invasion of North Africa, opening a second front to relieve the Russians, while providing a western pincer pushing to bottle up Rommel’s fleeing, disorganized and tattered forces.

These more visible operations were supplemented by the nearly daily RAF raids on Germany, France, and, more recently, northern Italy, stressing Turin and Genoa, with the naval port at Toulon also receiving attention in recent days, as well as consistent raids against Axis supply depots and harbors along the North African coast and in the Mediterranean, at Sicily, Sardinia, and Crete.

The war was far from over, but the tide had turned during the course of this critical first year of American involvement, from an awakened industrial giant staggering on its legs in a stupor in the smoldering ruins left in the aftermath of December 7, to one pulling itself up straight and strong, hitting full stride, spewing battleships, planes, and tanks aplenty in record numbers from all its available factories, enduring sacrifice as never before since the Civil War, even if without complete unity in the effort. And now, finally, the colossus, for an unprecedented threat, made to operate in greater unison for self-preservation than had ever been its custom, was beginning to put the new materiel and the newly trained men to hurl it at the enemy into full deployment, with immediate and drastic effect on the Axis fronts and forces.

All the territory which Hitler had captured in Russia and in Central and Eastern Europe, all the territory which the Japanese had captured in the Pacific, was now increasingly becoming a colossal white elephant, unmanageable to either leg of the Axis, as surely as the elephants on which the Japanese rode triumphantly into Burma would become perhaps one of the more visible symbols of how empire finally becomes so clumsy and weighty as to collapse on itself for want of a sufficiently adapted skeleton to support it, with just a little prodding in the right places from without.

It was a Thanksgiving, this first one since Pearl Harbor, but with far less horn o' plenty on the table for all than in previous years. Where food was short, thanks had to be given for the simple fact of still being alive in such a treacherous world, exploding with gluttony in all its corners and in its middle.

Meanwhile, someone with a wry wit tabulated the ever-spiraling costs of the new Pentagon Building in Washington and found the bill to crest at something on the order of 63.890 squintillion dollars--which is quite a payload, that is payroll, when you think about it.