Site Ed. Note: While Jurgen von Arnim's forces continued to hold its Medjerda River Valley positions against incursion by the Allies, feeding from that location into the plain before Tunis and the ground for the final assault on the Axis positions defending Tunis, the U. S. Second Army Corps took Mateur, reports the front page, a key rail and communications junction between Bizerte and Tunis. U.S. and French units occupied Kef Rdjal Touila, twelve miles northwest of Mateur. On the southern front, French forces occupied Djebel El Dib, two and a half miles west of Saouf. Other French forces fighting to the west of Lake Achkel moved to within four miles of the lake, placing them 15 miles west of Bizerte.

After a day spent resting on Sunday, the Allies were again on the steady move, even if forced to a crawl in the densely defended region into which the Axis forces were now compressed.

In the Pacific, 51 Japanese planes inflicted heavy losses in an attack on Darwin, Australia. Though precise numbers were not yet available, it was the first time in a year, since the fall of Corregidor, that a report had indicated heavy losses from a Japanese raid.

The most serious attack of the war on Darwin had occurred February 19, 1942, killing 243 people in two attacks consisting of a total of 188 Japanese planes.

Somewhere in the Atlantic off the South Carolina coast, a U-boat was sunk, bringing the unofficial tally of German U-boats sunk since Pearl Harbor to 42, 103 since June 30, 1940. As 52 more submarines had been sunk but not determined either as Italian or German, it was believed that the German U-boat losses were substantially greater than the Associated Press total. Thirty-four survivors, including the captain, of the latest sunk vessel were captured and delivered by the Icarus to Charleston Navy Yard.

After a talk to the nation by the President on radio the night before, John L. Lewis, to the great relief of his rank-and-file union members, ordered the coal miners who had struck Friday at midnight back to work on Tuesday for fifteen more days. The time would be used to try to negotiate a new contract.

The miners of Pennsylvania were reported as deeply moved by the President’s remarks on how badly the country needed their service in aid of the fighting men abroad, dying every day to preserve freedom. Some were seen in tears.

A portion of the miners in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Ohio, and Illinois returned to work on Monday morning, pursuant to the calls of the President and Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes, to whom the President on Saturday had turned over operation of the mines.

The Supreme Court decided the case of Jones v. City of Opelika, 319 US 105, combined cases out of Pennsylvania and Alabama in which the towns in each case had charged a licensing fee to Jehovah's Witnesses for distributing to the public their religious literature, and then prosecuted criminally and obtained convictions for distributing the tracts without a license. The Court determined 5 to 4 in favor of the Witnesses, reversing their convictions for failing to abide by the ordinance.

The State had claimed that the ordinance was not violative of the First Amendment proscriptions against making laws which interfere with the free exercise of religion, contending that the literature in question appealed for monetary contributions and thus was subject to licensure, as with other forms of commercial speech. The Supreme Court disagreed, holding that the charging of a fee for the literature and the appeal within it for contributions did not thereby change the essential nature of the religious message, any more than passing the plate in a church made the message therein commercial speech subject to licensure.

Licensing, the Court held, presupposes a privilege conferred by the State. There was no privilege in issue; freedom of exercise of religion is inherent in the First Amendment as a right, not subject therefore to licensure by the State.

Justice Douglas delivered the opinion of the Court, stating:

It is claimed, however, that the ultimate question in determining the constitutionality of this license tax is whether the state has given something for which it can ask a return. That principle has wide applicability. (State Tax Commission v. Aldrich, 316 U.S. 174, 62 S.Ct. 1008, 139 A.L.R. 1436, and cases cited.) But it is quite irrelevant here. This tax is not a charge for the enjoyment of a privilege or benefit bestowed by the state. The privilege in question exists apart from state authority. It is guaranteed the people by the federal constitution.

Justices Jackson, Reed, Roberts, and Frankfurter, dissented.

A previous hearing of the case, reported at 316 US 584, had been decided adversely to the petitioners near the end of the previous term in June. That opinion was vacated this date upon rehearing. The earlier case, with Justice Reed writing for the 5 to 4 majority, had upheld the constitutionality of the ordinance as a just exercise of state authority to license commercialized speech, to regulate its time, place, and manner of delivery.

The Court had said therein:

When proponents of religious or social theories use the ordinary commercial methods of sales of articles to raise propaganda funds, it is a natural and proper exercise of the power of the state to charge reasonable fees for the privilege of canvassing. Careful as we may and should be to protect the freedoms safeguarded by the Bill of Rights, it is difficult to see in such enactments a shadow of prohibition of the exercise of religion or of abridgement of the freedom of speech or the press. It is prohibition and unjustifiable abridgement which is interdicted, not taxation. Nor do we believe it can be fairly said that because such proper charges may be expanded into unjustifiable abridgements they are therefore invalid on their face. The freedoms claimed by those seeking relief here are guaranteed against abridgement by the Fourteenth Amendment. Its commands protect their rights. The legislative power of municipalities must yield when abridgement is shown.

The difference in the outcome between the two hearings of the case turned only on the change in membership of the Court, when James Byrnes left after only one full term to join the Administration as Director of the new Office of Economic Stabilization and was replaced in February, 1943 by Wiley Rutledge. Justice Rutledge voted with the majority on rehearing to find the ordinance unconstitutional, whereas Justice Byrnes had voted with the majority in the previous hearing of the case to find it not violative of the First Amendment.

On the editorial page, "Twin Threats" draws on speculation that two possible Allied offenses were in the offing, one on Italy and the other on Japan, which might set the stage by autumn for the final phase of the war in each theater. It reasons that, in Italy, the resistance of the Italian soldiers could be minimal, leaving the Nazis to fight it out in central and northern Italy as they retreated across the Brenner Pass into occupied France.

The piece accurately forecasts the end in Italy by autumn. But no grand offensive would occur in the Pacific to bring about the final phase of the war there. The war first had to be won in Europe, or at least the beachhead gained on two fronts, the southern and the western; the bulk of the air support, so vital to victory in the Pacific, had first to be supplied the European theater for that purpose.

"Of Valor" pridefully offers praise to the spirit of the Southern fighting man in war, even if statistics showed that the South had sent fewer volunteers into the fight than other regions of the country.

"Temporary" echoes the nation's sigh of relief at the stay of the coal strike for fifteen days, but cautions the while that, with John L. Lewis still about the union landscape, the respite offered but temporary relief. It voices a hope that the Congress would pass a law prohibiting strikes for the duration and not merely rest contented upon the no-strike pledge of the previous year, now broken, even if patched up and repaired for a fortnight to come. If that meant outlawing John L. Lewis, it concludes, then so be it. (Of course, literally, Congress is prohibited by the prohibition against bills of attainder from passing laws which, by their nature, would be aimed at one individual.)

"The Majority" makes appeal to the patriotism of the people of Charlotte to vote in the city council runoff the following day. Given that turnout the previous week of those exercising their franchise was only 10,000, less than 10% of Charlotte’s population at the time, the editorial had its appellate work cut out for it.

Samuel Grafton draws a distinction between the peoples of the various nations and their governments. He begins with the issues regarding the withdrawal of the American diplomatic legation from Finland, as announced the previous week. The Finnish government had sent envoys to inquire of Hitler whether the American efforts to effect peace between Finland and Russia should be provided support, to which Hitler refused assent, the toadying Finnish Government then abiding the master's Will. To the people, meanwhile, was not disclosed the fact of the withdrawal of the United States legation or its prior efforts in effecting the peace.

Likewise, in Mexico, a Deputy of the Chamber of Deputies had drawn a distinction between the American Government, in its steadfast recognition of sovereignty of all nations among the Allies, and the propaganda being disseminated by a small minority of the American people and press, especially the Chicago Tribune, to the effect that America's aim was to annex Britain as American states.

He further elucidates the premise with the example of the French and the Poles, the latter case of distinction between people and government, he suggests, providing credence to the Russian notion that the Polish government-in-exile was unacceptable while the Polish people remained in amity with the Soviets.

He strikes the principle from these various examples that often, as in North Africa, while the people of the country were loyal to the Allies, the leadership varied and thus the balance to be struck was to find a government which fit the will of the people in the countries being liberated, a leadership to effect something other than a Pax Romana.

In a short piece from the Baltimore Sun, the provision of Lend-Lease supplies to Russia and the other Allies far from home shores is extolled for both its speed and efficient deployment of machinery and equipment, virtually miraculous in agile proliferation.

Joe Jones writes a piece reprinted from The Chapel Hill Weekly, affording a peek into the agonies and the excise of sleep attached to everyday Army life. The soldier writes of the perils of night duty, the unnecessary stretching by the corporal of a job which could be finished by midnight into one laboring on until two or three o'clock in the morning, all to obviate the prospect that the officers who made up the work schedule would assume that they were not setting forth enough tasks--a corollary to "The Peter Principle" as it would subsequently, in 1969, come to be called, a routinized rule of any bureaucratic framework, that, self-preservation being the first order of business for each rung in the chain of command, it is necessary thus...

He writes of the further difficulty occasioned to his sleep schedule by the insistent rapine of his senses wrought by a blaring radio incessantly tuned all day to the most rambunctiously inarticulate music available, resting but five feet from his bunk. The resistless controller of the caterwauling concatenation was a fellow also on the night shift, but one who managed through malingering usually to find an excuse not to work and thus found sleep in not a whit of tension with the uninterrupted enjoyment of the rapacious flow of notes issuing from his tweeter. The other members of the shift were younger and more fit than the writer and thus appeared abler to effect a state of somnolence, regardless of the incessant jabberwocky besetting the barracks.

What the soldier needed to do, perhaps, was to make a friend of the radio and place it right up to his ear, turning the volume as high as he could possibly stand it, eventually so to dull the senses as to become a soporific.

Anyway, that used to work for us in college, by employing the strategically timed placement of headphones, the old Koss Electrostatic jobs with the gas-inflated earmuffs. Perhaps, though, they did not yet have those in 1943.

And, we landed safely Saturday, without a Scratch, even if the craft in which we had been riding was rendered completely disintegral.

We then did in fact conduct a dedicated and exhaustive search through the forest for Roger, in both forms. Having failed to find him in either shifted shape, however, and after wasting several idle hours looking for him, we conclude that the roots of his two forms, and his name in each, combine to render shrubtigrog. Shrubtigrog, we found through abundant and illimitable research, was of an ancient Russian dialect, which eventually was passed into English to give us "subterfuge". Yet, this shrubtigrog, in search of Roger, as any sky pilot knows, having constantly to hear and say Roger this and Roger that, nevertheless affords sufficient distraction to relax the mind so that landings on water may be effected more smoothly than did we ours within the forested veil, which reached out, grabbed our wings and mercilessly tore the craft nearly into such pieces as to be indiscernible any longer as an earthly manifestation of manmade activity. Yet, we walked away from the descent, unscathed. So, we thank Roger anyway, and in both forms.

Pouter, tumbler and fantail are from the same source;
The racer and hack may be traced to one horse;
So men were developed from monkeys of course,
Which nobody can deny.

--The Origin of Species, Lord Charles Neaves