Site Ed. Note: The front page reports Navy confirmation that on Tuesday the Battle of Kula Gulf, located between New Georgia and Kolombangara Island, had cost the U.S. but one cruiser, the Helena, and that most of its officers and crew of 800 had been rescued. No other American ships were even damaged. The enemy losses were increased to either eight or nine ships sunk, including four or five destroyers, and two others possibly destroyed.

Meanwhile, General MacArthur disclosed that American jungle forces had battled their way from two landing points to within six miles of the airbase at Munda, the primary objective of the invasion on New Georgia, preceded by heavy naval and air bombardment.

A delayed by-lined piece recounted a successful effort by the Marines, taking a leaf from the tactics manual of the Japanese in the attack on Singapore late January and early February, 1942, to perform a rear action against the Japanese on Monday to take Viru Harbor on New Georgia. The Marines pushed their way thirty miles through jungle territory to reach the Harbor and then pushed the Japanese back to a cliff and into the sea. The Japanese were prepared for a frontal attack from the sea. The enemy had used the tactic to slash their way through the dense jungles north of Singapore across the Johore Strait 17 months earlier.

Further daylight raids were conducted by the U.S. on Gerbini airfield on Sicily, a principal target of late, its nineteenth attack in 24 hours. Night raids of the RAF had hit Sciacca and Palermo. Reduction of anti-aircraft fire from Palermo was reported by the RAF pilots, indicating the toll being taken on the Italians’ and Germans' ability to defend the position.

On the Russian front, the Nazis were still moving north from Belgorod and south from Orel to try to converge on a point behind the Russian-held Kursk, an important rail junction. In three days of fighting along the 165-mile front, the Russians reported having killed 30,000 German soldiers, destroyed 1,539 tanks and shot down 649 planes. According to Tass, four of the tanks destroyed were 60-ton Tigers. German sources claimed that even heavier tanks were being inserted into the battle lines at Kursk.

Berlin radio asserted that the tank battles around Belgorod and Orel involved the heaviest fighting yet on the Russian front in the two years since the Nazi invasion. The Germans claimed destruction of 400 Russian tanks and 103 airplanes during the previous day of fighting.

Once again, Berlin radio reported that General Eisenhower was preparing an imminent attack on Southern Europe across the Mediterranean. It was good intelligence.

Toolmakers walked off the job at G.M.'s Saginaw, Michigan gun production plant, as UAW leaders urged the Government to seize the facility.

The Senate voted to drop efforts to block food-price subsidies, the bill so aiming having been previously vetoed by the President. Senator George of Georgia objected that the Senate was being cowed by the threat of another presidential veto.

General Henri Giraud began talks in Washington with President Roosevelt by discussing the possibility of a Free French replacement for Admiral Georges Robert in Martinique, to bring the Vichy-aligned island into the sphere of the Allies. The previous week, Admiral Robert had made overtures to the State Department to turn over the island's command to the Allies. At Fort-De-France on the island, a demonstration of 15,000 people had been taking place, demanding that Martinique be turned over to the Fighting French under General De Gaulle.

The inside page presents a map outlining the six years of war in China.

Harold V. Boyle, in an impressionistically episodic piece, writes from Tunisia of the aftermath of the war there, the steady streams of refugees, merging, for their sheer numbers, into the unconscious, nearly unnoticed after awhile, trying to find the ruins of what once were their homes.

He anecdotally offers the observation that rarely had he witnessed American airmen or soldiers going into combat with alcohol on their breath, even though enemy soldiers in Tunisia had been captured quite tipsy.

Finally, he describes the drink of choice among the airmen when off-duty and no raid scheduled the following day. It was Popskull de Tuniste, a concoction made from a makeshift still produced from B-25 bomber parts. The name represented its impact on the imbiber. By the third quaff, he relates from practical experimentation related by a soldier, one felt as though a hammer had been dropped on one's head, maximally--probably from the laced remnants of the aviation fuel, indelibly fused in metallurgic reaction, to the can, mixing with the cooked fumes.

Drew Pearson compares the current American troubles with Labor to those of France before the Fall to Germany in 1940, offers it as warning, that the divisive behavior afoot in the country would not become so severe that it might cripple the war effort further into the future.

He then shifts to citing figures for the high after-tax profits, averaging 45-50% or more, of the nation’s aircraft manufacturers. Not only airplane manufacturers, but also such parts manufacturers as Sperry Gyroscope were doing quite well in the war.

And, the publisher of The Police Gazette was seeking before a hearing at the Post Office Department in Washington restoration of his license to send his magazine through the mails, having lost it the previous September on the ground that the publication allegedly contained lewd and lascivious material. The publisher claimed that the closest he had come to ascertaining what material the Postmaster General had fingered as lewd and lascivious was the latter's supposed complaint that he had purchased a pair of dice from an ad in the magazine and that one, to his immense chagrin, had turned out loaded, discovered only at a social gathering at his home when he wound up accused of cheating. An associate of the Postmaster General vehemently took issue with this charge, saying that the head of the department had never owned a pair of dice in his life, save as part of a parchesi or backgammon set.

The piece also carefully clarifies that no professional dice player would use only one loaded die. A pair would be requisite for maximum effect.

So, in one fell swoop, the inside page has informed of the busthead being consumed among the soldiers in Tunisia and the possibility that the Postmaster General of the United States played friendly games of chance with social guests in his home utilizing a loaded die, notwithstanding his assistant's denials.

And the manufacturers of airplanes, whose eventual pilots would always fly sober, even if gambling with their lives each mission, were making money hand over fist in supplying the planes to replace the ever increasing numbers of lost bombers.

On the editorial page, "First Steps" continues the saga of the near riot among the soldiers on Sunday on Trade Street in Charlotte, by lending its support, however tepidly, to a ban passed by the County Commissioners on light drinking. Nevertheless, the piece regards the ordinance as unlikely to stop weekend drinking by soldiers.

It offers that the better solution would be to provide entertainment for the soldiers on the weekend to conquer ennui.

Indeed, a letter to the editor from a self-confessed damnyankee the day before had counseled that the ban on Sunday night movies until 9:00 p.m. had contributed to the outbreak of violence among the soldiers for their suffering from sheer boredom. (That particular ban, however, was designed to alleviate overcrowding of the buses, crammed full by the restrictions on pleasure driving and rationing of gas. Hard to win in a world war...)

By the same token, the editorial recognizes that boredom is part of a soldier's life and he need not expect to be entertained every waking moment while off base.

The Army was also considering delimiting the soldiers, either by preventing them from coming into town or declaring certain joints off limits.

The piece concludes by chastising Councilman Charles Daughtry (and the Deaf Aids) for his suggestion that the soldiers had been simply engaged in good clean fun, a little rough-housing being part of the ordinary regimen of a soldier's life. Nearly starting a riot, says the piece, was not good clean fun.

Well, obviously what they needed was a rooftop concert by the Stones. They might never have been the same. Indeed, they all might have gone AWOL and called off the war.

"The Air Lines" again addresses the issue of Charlotte's place in the future of air travel and the airlines vying for service of the region.

"Unfinished" reviews a Chicago speech by Dr. Howard Odum, noted sociologist of the University of North Carolina, anent race relations. The piece finds him to have been overly vague in his offer of advice on the subject of effectively ameliorating tensions which had arisen of late between the races, chafing against one another in war industry in large cities, now crammed to the gills with new workers, many having migrated from the South to the North--given as the primary match lighting the fuse which had precipitated the recent Detroit riot.

Dr. Odum, author of the noted tract in 1936, Southern Regions, which drew praise from President Roosevelt at the time of publication and was used by the Administration to approach problems of poverty arising in the South, had set forth three basic recommendations to meet the crisis in race relations: first, that the nation declare a moratorium on violence domestically; second, that America show character and maturity in the face of the crisis; and third, that it eliminate the use of interracial epithets and denunciations, and cease in the tendency to seek to place blame on others for the problems giving rise to the tensions.

The editorial finds the remarks tantamount to suggesting that a mosquito infestation be met by ceasing to itch and avoidance of malaria.

The solution there was simply quinine and the Flit.

Normally incisive, the professor this time had left his recommendations wanting of sufficient specificity to make them worthwhile.

Dr. Odum, incidentally, had provided valuable and patient insight to Cash at the inception of his work on The Mind of the South, exchanging correspondence with him between 1929 and 1932.

Now that the Orel to Belgorod front had been established by the Wehrmacht, Samuel Grafton admonishes the country for having become somewhat complacent in anticipation of the lack of Germany's renewed summer offensive capability in Russia. He urges it as a lesson against taking for granted the defeat of the German fighting will any time soon.

Raymond Clapper, visiting North Africa, finds the soldiers especially well-equipped, the P-38 being touted by the airmen as superior in maneuverability and speed to anything the Luftwaffe could throw at them in the way of a Focke-Wulf.

The area where morale was suffering, however, he warns, was evident from their reading in Star and Stripes of the various domestic squabbles in the United States, from the coal strike to the dispute between Vice-President Wallace and Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones over who was more responsible for lack of proper procurement of supplies and raw materials most efficiently to prosecute the war effort. Having just come from Britain where he spent the month of June, Mr. Clapper reminds that the British had benched all that sort of squabbling for the duration. He counsels that America do likewise. The reports were beginning to make America appear resemblant to the French in North Africa, and that was not healthy for American morale.

The editors compiled a piece on the prospects for 1944 G.I. voting and the demographic odds for which party they might favor. The assumption was that the bulk would vote Democratic.

And, three letters to the editor written by four soldiers chasten, from the mild to the more caustic, the World War I veteran who had written a letter appearing in Monday's paper urging that the World War II soldiers should be disciplined enough to do their own laundry as had the soldiers in his day, thereby saving the Government a pile of money. The soldiers each had other ideas on the matter and didn't much care for being told by some old soldier that they should take twenty minutes per day to clean their own uniforms when they were hard at work in training 12 to 24 hours each day.

So, there, pops. Take a hike, you and your dirty laundry.