Site Ed. Note: With the British Eighth Army beginning to meet stiffer resistance along the east coast, approaching Catania, the front page reports that General Montgomery had advanced four miles north of Augusta to take Brucoli and Mellili in Sicily.

General Patton's Seventh Army meanwhile steadily moved forward on the western flank, advancing four miles to capture another airfield and some significant heights.

A combined effort of Americans, Canadians, and British also made a thrust up the middle of the line, where a gain of six or seven miles was accomplished, into the area of Ragusa and Vizzini.

Elite troops of the Hermann Goering Division were reported to have been transferred from the west to the east coast, part of the supposed reason being that these troops had enjoyed little success against Patton in Tunisia. Military sources, however, questioned the authenticity of this report as most of this Division had been decimated in the fighting in Tunisia. It was thus deduced that the newly reconstituted division was little more than one in name only, an effort of the Wehrmacht to save face with the Herrenvolk back in the suffering Vaterland.

On the inside page appears a map of Sicily, showing the latest conquests by the Allies on the island.

A piece describes the Italian Fleet's penchant for hiding since the dark days of the North African campaign and continuing at anchor with the fight extended now to Sicily. Their forces were divided between Taranto in the south and Spezia on the west coast of the Italian peninsula. In between were the Sicilian and Messina straits, each of which was too well covered by Allied air prowess to offer opportunity for joinder of the two naval forces. Each standing alone had too few guns and ships to muster into a formidable opposing force capable of contention with Allied ships and planes. Thus, the Navy which once held parity with that of France pre-war, stayed safely tucked away out of sight, the impotent skeletal remains of its former existence.

Another piece examines the role of the American transport plane, the C-47, and its unsung role thus far in the war, every bit the capable force in the air of its better known cousin, the Flying Fortress, even if the C-47 was not bred to bomb or fight but rather only to transport troops and supplies. Nevertheless, it caught its share of flak.

The report tells of one harrowing escape by a Cinderella, as the C-47 was called, skimming along the Mediterranean back to North Africa with only half a plane left intact, after delivering its load of troops and supplies to Sicily. Hung together by the last shreds of the baling wire used to construct it in the first place, it found a landing strip and returned to earth with one engine so hot it would not stop.

Another firsthand account, this one by journalist H. R. Knickerbocker, details the day of voyage on Friday and landing during the small hours Saturday on the beaches of Sicily . The raging storm which nearly scrubbed the planned invasion is again described, with its fateful dying winds just in time to permit the landing without so much as a breeze to interfere with calmed post-storm seas and the emergence from the amphibious landing craft of the tens of thousands of men onto the Continent for the first time in force in three years.

From the Russian front came the report that the Soviet Army had begun a counter-thrust against the German offensive at Orel, the northern point of the 200-mile German line through Kursk down to Belgorod. The move had captured about fifteen miles of territory along a 25-mile front, including the capture of about fifty populated areas. A Russian communique claimed 2,000 Germans captured and 12,000 killed east of Orel.

On the editorial page, "Eat It All" reports of Charlotte's Scotch past apparently surfacing to afford its success at the national Clean Your Plate program, a mission designed, not to encourage gluttony, but to discourage waste of food across the country so that the soldier would be fed plentiful rations. Charlotte was disposing of only two tons of garbage daily, a small amount, insures the piece, for its 100,000 population. Kudos to Charlotte.

"Martinique" counsels, if for no other reason than to stay in practice, future use of the effective blockade operation which had been imposed several months earlier on Martinique and Guadaloupe, resulting finally in their surrender to the Allies and the renunciation of loyalty to Vichy by Admiral Georges Robert.

Indeed, 19 years hence, the tactic of blockade would be used more expeditiously on another Caribbean island, and with resounding success, averting a nuclear war.

"Check Rein" reports that Governor Chauncey Sparks of Alabama, despite being at odds with his Democratic Party, had reprimanded fellow Southern Democrats for threatening to bolt the party, resultant primarily of dissatisfaction over a growing Federal bureaucracy and Federal Government influence over their lives. He chastened Representative Sam Jones of Louisiana for publicly stating his intent to lead the Southern exodus.

The editorial predicts that non-Southern Democrats would have little to fear, that the Republicans offered small comfort on the issues which Southern Democrats held causative of their potential departure. Rather than splinter into third party movements, they would stick loyally with the Democrats in 1944, despite increasing reservations about FDR and the New Deal.

The following year would prove the editorial true. Four years later, however, with the introduction of a civil rights plank into the 1948 Democratic Convention Platform, combined with less identifiable loyalty to Harry Truman than to FDR, Strom Thurmond would lead his fellow Dixiecrats out of the Democratic fold in an ostentatious display of hubris and racism. Their failure to cost the Democrats thereby the presidency, however, (except in Chicago), turned back the movement for a time. But only for a time.

By 1963, another Alabama Governor would be taking the other fork in the road than that advocated in 1943 by Governor Sparks, even if George Wallace had run unsuccessfully in 1958 as a moderate Democrat, vowing thereafter never to be "out-niggered" by any other opponent. His fire-breathing out-niggering of his political opposition became legend, hero to states' rights advocates and segregationists, anathema to those who supported the Constitution and equality of rights under the law. Governor Wallace formed a third party movement in 1968, running for president on the American Independent Party ticket, with former Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis Lemay as his running mate, obtaining ten million votes and winning five Deep South states, capturing 46 electoral votes, including a lone stray from North Carolina.

Nevertheless, while the 1968 election was close between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, determined by 550,000 votes, the Wallace factor, beyond its tendency to foster divisiveness across the country in an already divisive and tragedy beset election year, likely did not impact the outcome, as most of the Wallace supporters would have swung to Nixon or remained at home rather than support Humphrey, who had introduced the 1948 civil rights plank. Moreover, Nixon won by 110 electoral votes, and so, even assuming all the Wallace electors going to Humphrey, the outcome would not have been different.

Or would it? Seventeen states carried by Nixon, representing 220 of his 301 electoral votes--Alaska, California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin--were close enough to be swayed the other way with a substantial tilt among the Wallace voters to Humphrey, had Wallace not been in the race. But likewise, seven states going to Humphrey, representing 109 of his 191 electoral votes--including electoral rich Texas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, plus Connecticut, Maryland, Washington, and West Virginia--were close enough to be swayed to Nixon, and much more probably so than any of the aforementioned close Nixon-carried states to Humphrey, absent the Wallace third-party candidacy. Thus, while mathematically feasible the other way about, it was more likely that the election would have been more favorable in outcome to Nixon, both in popular and electoral vote, without the presence of the Wallace wildcard.

"The Commander" posits that the new offensive in Russia, with its full-throated dare, throwing into the cannon’s mouth whole hosts of troops and armored personnel, signalled that Hitler himself was once again in control of operations on that front. As always, Hitler commanded the ground which ran thick with the blood of his own countrymen.

A letter to the editor assails The News for its editorial appearing July 9 questioning the fitness of Harry Riddle to serve on the board governing the State Hospitals, defends his appointment, finding him an able administrator and honorable man. The author had lived inside Mr. Riddle’s home, he tells us, and had known him personally for several years.

But whether the letter writer had ever been inside the facility at Morganton, he failed to impart.

Drew Pearson spends the greater part of his column examining Representative Goober Cox of Georgia, who had resorted to the tactic often attempted by government officials on the take, investigating and attempting to smear his accusers, in this case the FCC, who sent to the Justice Department for investigation the charge that Congressman Cox had pocketed a lobbying fee of $2,500.

Bribe takers in government, when afforded the opportunity, most usually resort to such tactics, to shift attention from their graft.

Mr. Pearson begins his Merry-Go-Round of the day by describing the efforts of the Air Forces to eschew "classical warfare", that is the notion of deploying ground troops to gain real estate yard by yard. The new method was to bomb the unwilling into submission. The Air Forces believed they could effectuate on the whole of northern Italy the same result achieved on Pantellaria, without waiting for a long and costly infantry campaign.

Raymond Clapper, reinforcing this view of modern warfare, reports of his exploring the ruins of Bizerte and Tunis in North Africa, finding Tunis largely undamaged save for its harbor facilities. But Bizerte, having been evacuated of its civilian population and occupied almost wholly by the Axis, had been a target without pity for the Allied bombers. It was so reduced to rubble that no one strode its devastated streets even at midday. A few electrical lines were strung on statues serving as light poles to effect the only remaining semblance of modernity.

The destruction was so complete that Mr. Clapper wondered whether the city might ever be rebuilt or instead stand as mute testimony to the history of World War II, much as its surrounding Carthagenian and Roman ruins stood as testament to the occupations of the region by those once proud and shining empires.

Whatever might occur in the future with Bizerte, it stood now as foreshadow to the ruin which would be heaped on Europe's industrial centers of the Reich, and to the indomitable presence of air superiority in modern warfare.

Demonstrative of Mr. Clapper's observations, the image below was taken May Day, 1943 by Life photographer Margaret Bourke-White, showing the crumbled mortar lining a street in Bizerte.

Samuel Grafton sees through the effort of the Administration to bolster before the world the position of General Giraud and try to repackage him to the French people as a leader of a movement. He assures that only in De Gaulle was reposited the confidence significant enough to qualify him as leader of a French movement. Giraud was no more than "a shadow on the wall".

Finding the beatification of Giraud to betray the State Department's attraction to the pre-war past, dodging the reality of the war and the future to come from it, Mr. Grafton identifies De Gaulle as signal of the future, Giraud the echo of the dim age of obeisance to the will of a superior force, an age in which it was deemed acceptable for some Frenchmen to have thrown in their lot with Vichy and the Nazis, that they should nevertheless be treated with ingratiating courtesy and respect, not imprisoned or shot as traitors to France.

The French people, cautions Mr. Grafton, had thoroughly repudiated the Giraud stance and had as thoroughly embraced the path trod by De Gaulle toward insuring resurrection of the French Republic.

With Giraud, in other words, the President and the State Department were playing solitaire 'til dawn with a deck of 51, perhaps out on Highway 61.