Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that General Montgomery's Eighth Army continued toward Catania along the east coast of Sicily, being met by only light Axis resistance.

General Patton's Seventh Army cut a swath northwest, taking two of the ten principal Axis airfields in Sicily, Comiso and Ponte Olivo, on the way to taking Naro, twelve miles from Agrigento, a point at which the Axis was reported to be forming a large counter-offensive force. American tanks had met formidable opposition at Niscemi, 25 miles east and slightly north of Licata, initial landing point of Patton's forces west of Gela, but had destroyed already ten 60-ton Tigers in just one engagement.

American Flying Fortresses and Liberators attacked the airfield at Catania and again bombed the supply lines stretching across Messina Strait from Italy's mainland, as American PT-boats also attacked Axis ships in the area of the strait.

A map on the inside page shows the lines closing in on the Japanese airbase at Munda on New Georgia in the Solomons, where operations continued under General MacArthur, edging closer to the objective.

As predicted for the previous month, Martinique joined the Allies and severed its ties with Vichy. Admiral Georges Robert, as he had indicated the month before his willingness to do, surrendered his authority to Henri Hoppenot, a delegate of the French Committee of National Liberation.

Celebrating Bastille Day in Algiers, Charles De Gaulle spoke to a crowd of cheering Frenchmen, urging that liberation was not far away for France. The crowd booed the name of Pierre Laval, Nazi puppet, titularly the present head of occupied France.

On the editorial page, "No Solution" finds that the ban on weekend sales of beer, passed at the request of the Army, would do little to stem the groundswell of potential weekend trouble from drinking soldiers, able at their whimsy to obtain bootleg liquor, beer, or wine.

"New Planes" welcomes the entry to the war of the A-36, a souped-up Mustang, a plane combining the best features of a bomber and a fighter, making its presence felt to the Axis in the skies over Sicily.

"The Champion" hails as a conqueror of the roads a Mr. William Fox of Philadelphia who had taken some ingredients purchased at a paint store, probably paint thinner and petroleum naphtha, and mixed the unrevealed ingredients of his new witches' brew together to obtain an unheard of 25 miles per gallon in his old heap, thus trumping the wartime restrictions on gasoline, leaving the rationing boards in the dust, no longer subject to their regulation as he obtained his "gas" down at the paint store. He, of course, did not impart the cost-effectiveness of his higher miles per gallon concoction.

In a pinch, incidentally, if you are camping, they run on Coleman fuel also. We know. We had to try that a few times out in the boondocks, 50 miles from the nearest service station.

“Disbelief” tells of the shifting of the focus of the Italian people on the mainland from the imminent threat posed by the Allied invasion of Sicily to the new counter-offensive being pushed by the Wehrmacht in the East, with an optimistic eye on the Italian soldiers fighting for the Axis in that theater. Sicily had left them with little about which to be cheerful and so the effort was to dodge the reality.

Sicilians themselves, however, were largely reacting to the Allied invasion with embrace. The front page had informed, for instance, of the Sicilian peasant and village population having taken down signs which once proclaimed boldly, "Evviva Mussolini", and replaced them with "Evviva George VI".

Raymond Clapper attributes the relatively easy landings by Allied troops on the shores of Sicily, with little opposition or opportunity for counter-offensive, to the bombing campaign which had preceded the invasion for two months, softening up the ability of the enemy to resist. Mr. Clapper points to the steady increase in bombing during the previous three months in the Mediterranean theater as the most significant factor in enabling the turning point in the war toward the Allies.

Colonel Frederick Palmer, making room for some inaccuracy in reports, finds the nevertheless high ratios of Luftwaffe to Allied air losses over Europe and the high ratios of Japanese to Allied naval losses in the Pacific to be predictive of the shortening of the war in both theaters--unless, that is, the Germans could defeat the Russians. He posits that they were not likely to be able to do so.

Drew Pearson reports that Congressman Jed Johnson of Oklahoma, in the habit of calling on Presidents just before the summer recess to discuss legislation, found FDR, much as the Congressman had found his two predecessors, Coolidge and Hoover, in an unhappy mood, especially peevish over the continuing price subsidy issue.

Jim Farley was onboard with wealthy Chicago businessmen, former isolationists, favoring the candidacy of Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1944. At first reluctant to join the Gillette camp, at first touting Harry Byrd as the Democrat with the best chance to defeat his old boss, Farley had been influenced by the Chicago moneyed interests to shift his favor to Gillette, as the candidate who could offer the closest shave to FDR.

Mr. Pearson also offers that now that the truth about the Ruml pay-as-you-go tax plan had been exposed to reveal that the greatest benefit in skipping a year of taxes had gone to the wealthy, Republicans such as House Minority Leader Joe Martin of Massachusetts, who originally had pushed for the plan, were now quick to insist that Democrats, too, had voted for the boondoggle for the rich.

And, a letter writer takes issue with Charlotte's handling of its dog situation, including tacitly turning over to the newly dubbed "Humane Society", formerly the "Dog Pound", the decision on hiring and firing the dogcatcher. The dogcatcher, says the letter writer, had been unfairly maligned by the Humane Society as being unfit to serve, as being home drunk, when the fact was that he had simply been at home ill for a day, not drunk a'tall.

Between that and the near riot caused by the drunken soldiers downtown ten days earlier on Trade Street, the proliferation in the downtown area of roving teenaged prostitutes carrying social diseases, as reported during the previous months, and other such maladies with origins in the nether regions, it looked like Charlotte might be heading to the dogs.

In any event, from the sound of things the dogcatcher couldn't get elected as dogcatcher after the Humane Society got through inhumanely ripping to shreds his reputation. It was a dog eat dog world.

But the Metropolitan Opera was sending to Charlotte the anodyne of song as salvation for the various social ills, as Jan Peerce, famed star of the Met, was coming to town in late April to sing in "Carolina Nights". Well, don’t miss it.