Site Ed. Note: The front page reports of a record number of Japanese planes shot down in one engagement over Guadalcanal the previous day, 77, 32 bombers and 45 Zeroes, topping the previous Pacific record for enemy planes bagged in one raid, 39 in the Japanese attack on the Russell Islands on April 7. Only six American fighters were missing.

Another lull, this one because of bad weather, kept the Northwest African air forces silent the previous day, while British Mosquitoes out of the Middle East bombarded targets in Sicily and southern Italy.

An unidentified source indicated that a Nazi drive planned for June 16 in Russia had been delayed because of the threatened offensive against the Continent from the Americans and British. The planned offensive planned was to be a small one, centering on a hinging movement around the Nazi salient at Orel, planned by Field Marshal Feodor Von Bock.

A Paris radio broadcast indicated an expected offensive by the Russian Army within a few weeks based on troops amassing in the area around Kursk, 80 miles south of Orel.

A report of increasing underground unrest and violence toward Nazi rule emerged from Bulgaria to join the report the day before of Rumanian peace tenders, tentatively being made through neutral sources to the Allies, as quid pro quo for parts of Bukovina and Bessarabia. From Hungary also came a report of preparations to abandon Hitler's "new order" when the opportunity might present itself.

The Navy's attempt to strike a deal with Standard Oil whereby the Navy would purchase certain oilfields in the Elk Hills of California, one of the oilfields involved in the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding Administration, was declared by the Attorney General to be violative of a 1938 law protecting oil reserves.

In Chapter 16 of They Call It Pacific, Clark Lee, continuing on the inside page, tells of his attempt to obtain more information on the Army's front lines, thinking them to be at Lingayen, seeking out the position of General MacArthur on December 29, 1941, being told to go to Bataan, a place of which he had never heard.

Finding the terrain to appear too mountainous to negotiate easily, he and his Filipino companion, Carlos, decided not to go to Bataan but instead, upon counsel of an officer, headed to the town of Mexico. There they encountered a colonel who informed them of the fighting at Lingayen, that the Japanese had proved themselves poor ground fighters on the beaches but had taken the better measure of the Americans and Filipinos with air and naval superiority.

Seeing that the American forces were withdrawing to Bataan, and understanding that the Japanese were closing in everywhere else on Luzon, Mr. Lee began looking for a boat to get him out of the Philippines. Carlos, however, refused to go with him, indicating his fight was with his fellow countrymen. Moreover, he would not be accepted in America, he believed. He was not in favor of the Japanese, but until the Americans learned to accept the Filipinos as equals, there could be no bridge across the gulf of understanding, psychologically or spiritually, between the two peoples.

On the editorial page, Dorothy Thompson examines the concept of punishing post-war Germany as a whole on the premise that the fault for the war lay with the entire German people, not just Nazism. She decries it as a flawed premise, ignoring the fact that fascism is a latent malady in all societies, merely awaiting the right conditions economically and socially to find its vent. The Germans were no more unified in their Nazi resolve than were the Italians in their Fascism, Italians upon whom the Germans themselves had once, prior to 1933, cast the slings of derision as being a people ripe for fascism while Germans had the better sense to enable immunity from the disorder.

Ms. Thompson offers that the intellectuals and the church in Germany had each formed a basis for revolting against the Nazi order from within and had managed to keep a large segment of the youth from being indoctrinated fully into Nazism. The experience in North Africa, the witness of executions of young people by the Gestapo, had caused the youthful Nazi no longer to revere Hitler as a god.

The internal division within the country thus suggested a need to enunciate a post-war plan of de-Nazification while enabling the broad base of the German people to escape any form of reprisal as accomplices to the war and its atrocities.

Samuel Grafton also looks at the notion, the policy of unconditional surrender enunciated by FDR and Churchill at Casablanca in January. He finds it reserved primarily for the leaders of the Fascist movement in Italy, of the Nazi Party in Germany, but also, by logical extension, to be applied to those who continued to embrace the Nazi-Fascist yoke for their benefit, even if disdainfully, with tears in their eyes. For these, no matter their rank in society, there would be no post-war distinction, no post-war forgiveness.

Appearing to have read "Avatar", Cash's February 4, 1940 piece on the Nazi gobbling of the Balkans, Mr. Grafton asserts of the fence-sitters, "These are the walruses who wept at being forced to eat the democratic oysters, but who have eaten them nonetheless."

No longer did these little civil servants and bureaucrats and businessmen have the luxury of such two-faced conduct. They must now come to grips with the situation and realize the meaning of "unconditional surrender" or reap the whirlwind afterward. Either they were to join the Allied cause or be grouped with the Nazis and Fascists after the war and treated accordingly. There would be no middle ground allowed.

Raymond Clapper confesses to having come to England with the view that the bombing campaign had the simple goal of annihilating Germany's ability to manufacture instruments of war: bomb it enough and the industrial infrastructure of Germany and its satrapies would collapse, the war thus won.

He now had gleaned, however, an even more important purpose coincident with the more obvious goal: attrition of the Luftwaffe. Destroying its ability to protect the factories, to provide air support for infantry, was just as much the sure route to victory in the war.

The only way to accomplish this latter goal was through the bombing campaign. For only against the heavy bombers did the fighters of the Luftwaffe venture forth from their coverts. Efforts to lure them out by making short-range flights in fighters over Belgium had proved without effect. The fighters stayed in their coveys to await the day of defense from the bombers.

"Us Weaklings" also seems to have been reminded of a Cash editorial from February 4, 1940, "Ca'lina, Indeed!", criticizing at the time Time for its fo'thgoing reference to "No'th Ca'lina" in conjunction with the declaration by Jim Farley for the presidency, announced, for reasons unstated, at the Robert E. Lee Hotel in Winston-Salem. Cash had insisted that no one in North Carolina actually pronounced it that way, that only those from South Carolina did so, that the editors of Time should come South and look at the region for a change with their ears.

He might have been extending the advice now to Burke Davis.

For, now, The News itself repeated the infernal display of insensitivity by using "Nawth Ca'lina" in connection with a report that the May Act had gone far in Nawth Ca’lina to eliminate syphilis, primarily the result of good State Government cooperation with the Federal program, while, in Tennessay, the Act had been a failure for the insistence in that state, in good Rebel fashion, on maintenance of States' Rights and not having any truck with any demonic Federal Government program, even if its salutary aim was the eradication of syphilis and prostitution. They'd a' soon suffer as syphilitics in Tennessay as give up ther States' Riiights, opines the piece.

The House of the Rising Sun could thus thrive within the howling hants and purlieus of Na'ashville--but nevah, evah in Rawleigh.

"How's Hoiman?" wonders of the fate of Hermann Goering now that bombs were falling so unrelentingly on Germany's major cities that all of their populations were being evacuated to rural areas. He had once assured the Herrenvolk that no bombs would ever touch earth in German territory. Now, the German people were being told not to complain of the cow manure they were stepping in as they schlepped their belongings through the barnyard to the stables, their new homes, that they should be forever joyful just to remain alive in La Damnation de Faust.

Where in all of these trappings would there be a place for a statue sporting the likeness of Hermann Goering? is the implied question asked by the piece.

We can fairly answer the inquiry: 'Twould be fashioned from the manure in which the Herrenvolk were now stepping to get to their new homes in the stables, and the resulting manifestation placed then in prominent display within the outdoor common privy to which they all were now relegated for matters discreet.

"Author, Author" is neither about a 1943 Isaac Asimov short story, not published for another two decades, nor re a future film of the same name. It is rather about the change of name of The Vindicator of Robert Rice Reynolds to The National Record, the former's subsumed organization having been publicly dissolved for the duration by Bob a year earlier, the publication, however, being reincarnated under a new banner without any change to content in the process. A re-printed letter to The Record from a reader, who The News suspects might have actually been Bob himself, takes issue with Winnie Churchill's use of the word "aggression" in relation to the Axis, finds it hypocritical given that Britain had used plentiful aggression to accomplish its empire interests in Africa and India.

The piece suggests that the signer of the note, "An American", was the same sort of quisling who would have lost the war for the Allies two years earlier on the quaint notion of Perfidious Albion, joined with anti-Communist fervor impelling the assumption that Germany would provide the necessary European bulwark to the spread of Soviet Communism.

The News offers a rare apology for having printed on May 28 a piece from The Hour which took to task the North Carolina Shipbuilding Company, with a Navy war contract, for having been indirectly a heavy monetary supporter of a publication called The Wilmington Post. The Hour had offered quotes from The Post which suggested pro-Nazi leanings, suggested the need for investigation of the Shipbuilding Company for its indirect support of this Fascist rag through a subsidiary entity, an anti-union organization which the company had created, the Cape Fear Shipbuilders Association.

The apology, falling short of Plato's, for re-publishing the piece from The Hour, does not make clear, however, whether the fault lay in the attribution of pro-Nazi leanings to The Post or in an error in proclaiming as fact that the Shipbuilding Company was supporting the paper, or both. The apology indicates that the quotes from The Post were accurate. The whole tenor of the apology, expressing as it does that The News now believed that the parties in Wilmington were simply engaged in patriotic activities, suggests that the editors were acting under threat of a lawsuit for libel absent the disclaimer and apology for republication of the piece.

Maybe the piece was libelous; maybe it wasn't.

The Post's admittedly accurate quotes, to us, still sound pro-Nazi. And if, in fact, the Shipbuilding Company was a major source of funds for the rag and did have a Navy contract, why shouldn't it have been investigated for lending support to inimical propaganda? The company was likely pro-Nazi also.

To hell with this apology. They were all a bunch of Nazis, including Bob Reynolds.