Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the French forces now fighting in Italy had driven two miles into the Apennines from the east, capturing the eastern slopes of Mt. San Pietro and securing all of Monna Casale, while the American forces advanced a short distance from the south, seeking to encircle Cassino at what the Germans had dubbed their "Gustav Line", consisting of high ground and the river. The French had outflanked Viticuso to the southeast of Cassino and had taken all of the ground northeast and southwest of Aquafondata, seven miles northeast of the last Nazi stronghold on the road to Rome. Aquafondata had already been evacuated by the Germans, according to reports from Berlin.

Meanwhile, American Flying Fortresses and Liberators of the Fifteenth Air Force, now commanded by General Nathan F. Twining, let loose a shower of bombs on three airfields near Rome, leaving them in flames, including the Guidonia experimental research facility, where Mussolini's scientists a few years earlier had developed an experimental jet plane. The Nazis had been using the airfields to launch air raids on the Allied lines.

The Eighth Army advanced 500 yards toward Orsogna on the Adriatic front, but activity there continued to be primarily patrols, resultant of the weather.

RAF Mosquitos bombed Western Germany the night before, as a large cloud of American bombers returned from flying multiple sorties during the whole of the day across the Channel to undisclosed targets along the Northern French coast.

General Constantine Rokossovsky's troops in White Russia had captured two key rail towns twelve miles apart, Kalinkovichi on the Moscow-to-Warsaw and Leningrad-to-Odessa lines, and Mozyr, cutting Nazi escape routes and leaving the troops streaming, screaming westward toward Poland. The captures cleared a path for the Red Army to proceed through the Pripet Marshes into Poland from the north, having already penetrated through the Ukraine the old Polish border in the southern regions.

The House Elections Committee voted 7 to 5 against a Federal absentee ballot measure, relegating the matter to the states, only nine of which would even hold regularly scheduled legislative sessions in 1944. The Committee Chairman, Democratic Representative Worley of Texas, for the measure, vowed to take the fight to the House floor. The defeat of the bill, said the Congressman, would mean that the eleven million men and women in service of their country would be disfranchised in the 1944 election--disfranchised by four Republicans and three Democrats.

Following in the footsteps of Private Billy Miller, reported to have taken single-handedly nineteen German POW's by convincing them they were surrounded, Pfc. Ira O. Creed of Johnson City, Tennessee is shown in a photograph having captured by himself, on Mt. Porchia in Italy, three Germans of the prestigious Hermann Goering Division.

Perhaps both privates had seen "Sahara" and taken the idea quite literally. Half the effort is always in the belief.

Yet, caveat emptor, boys in Blue: the other fellow, the damned Yellowjackets, may obtain at some point the same idea, and snatch your belief right away from you, zapping you right in the head. That is when the preparation, that done in Heaven, maybe in Hell, the laps on the track in the middle-muddle of January in Chapel Hill, freezing your backsides off, must come in to win the day of the March Hare, to defeat the only occasionally obtained Hyde of the damned Jackal. They may have been one hell of an engineer, but, in the end, the city life, you see, the city life...

Everyone knows, after all, that a dog of Hector's, even if Hector's no longer exists, is by far the superior to those antiquated Galapagos creations of the Varsity.

Hmmm, come to think of it though, wouldn't mind having one right about now. Yeah. Can you order those online?

To bolster morale at home, desperately in need of a victory, Tokyo radio broadcast the false report that Arawe Peninsula in south New Britain had been recaptured from the Allies. General MacArthur reported that several attempts had been made by the Japanese since the Sixth Army landed on the peninsula December 15. But the Allied troops had dug in and held their ground. The Japanese were entrenched just a few hundred yards from the Allied lines.

Allied planes and PT-boats had taken out thirteen more transport barges of the Japanese in the area of Alexishafen in northeastern New Guinea.

A piece on the editorial page reports of a second air attack on Formosa, this time on Takao, the first having been on Thanksgiving Day. The American raiders out of China had also attacked targets in Bangkok and along the Yangtze.

A piece by AP reporter Fred Hampson, titled "Japanese Escape Efforts Become Rides of Death", begins: "From Choiseul to Kavieng, death rains out of the night into the Emperor's barges. It is the same corraled execution visited upon the Japanese who tried to escape from New Guinea, Kolombangara, and Vella Lavella, working this time against the bypassed Nipponese on the Shortlands, Choiseul, and South Bougainville of the Solomons."

The Japanese were trapped and either had to fight it out, give up, or effect somehow escape. But those who sought land's end on the beaches by night met an ambuscade constructed of planes and PT-boats before the fade of dark to light. "Those who survived the night found American planes specking the morning skies, their pilots' eyes sharp and their guns eager."

Hal Boyle reports of the flying jitneys, the gypsies of the war, the transport planes in the Mediterranean, responsible for ferrying food, ammunition, supplies, even Bob Hope. When the Fifth Army landed at Salerno in September, only one transport plane was available to supply the men for the first two weeks. Two pilots, Lieutenant A. T. La Prade of Phoenix and Lieutenant W. C. Pauls of Pasadena, each took turns flying missions, put in 200 hours of flying time during those two weeks. At one point, they had ferried 100,000 gallons of gas, weighing six million pounds, during the course of just three days, to one of the islands in the Mediterranean.

Lieutenant La Prade had an ambition to purchase a Fiat and turn a corner of the transport plane into a shop--maybe one bearing the name Seizers' Freezer, or, perhaps, Seisins of the Son. He figured that by doing so, he could land near a town and drive right out from the plane on his own steam.

We have some advice on that one, Lieutenant: don’t bet on it. Instead, save your shekels until you reach Stuttgart. The 850 Spyder we had burned up on the freeway near Greensboro, 28 years after the war ended.

Stick with the best; it will get you to the West, if the West doesn‘t get you first in its Test.

On the editorial page, "Objection" expresses lack of surprise at the remark of Senator Reynolds in opposition to the President’s proposal for universal service, that it would enslave America on the same basis as Hitler and Stalin had their societies and satrapies. That he included the ally of the United States in the adverse comparison was only consistent with his past in which he had always found the worse of evils to be Communism, or British Socialism, relative to Nazism.

"Big Losses" reminds that the 57 lost American bombers on Tuesday’s mission over Germany, while high, was not debilitating to the overall plan and ability of the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces to maintain the consistent level of relentless bombing, that losses would likely continue to mount thusly, but were necessary to winning the war ultimately.

"The Vote" supports the overwhelming weight of opinion of the people, 90 percent of whom were in favor of delivering control of absentee soldier ballots to the Federal Government rather than leaving it slipshod and inefficiently variable under state umbrage. The piece condemns Southern Congressmen who were seeking to block the measure on the premise that it would compromise States' Rights, impairing especially individual state determination of eligibility requirements for voting--that is removing barriers to exercise by blacks of their franchise against the whips cracked in the South.

The editorial favors the measure, not only for the purpose of its insuring military personnel the right to vote in 1944, but also that it might remove unjust bars to voting in numerous states--that is the poll tax and literacy tests, still used in eight Southern states of the time.

"Real Plans" commends the Mayor and Charlotte Planning Committee for looking ahead to the post-war environment and planning the community's needs for that time. The primary need, said the Mayor, would be new low-cost housing. While recognizing that more housing projects would not solve completely the high incidence of crime and poverty prevalent in the poorer sections of the city, they would go long to alleviate the worst of the problems inherent in the slums for the time being.

"Mrs. McCrorey" laments the loss in a fire of Mrs. H. L. McCrorey, wife of the president of Johnson C. Smith University and active in fostering positive race relations in the community, across political lines, even, through gentility, winning the respect, says the piece, of reactionaries, with alacritous affinity, from the grip of procrastinate disunity.

Samuel Grafton comments on the President's proposed national service act and how it was very rude of him to dare rock the implacable quiet of so many Americans luxuriating in their minks by suggesting that Congress pass a compulsory work bill. It now shifted the burden to Congress as to who would be more susceptible of the charge of politicking in an election year, based on whether they faced the reality that such a bill was needed to avert wartime strikes, or whether they dodged the issue for the sake of their political hides.

Raymond Clapper, his piece again beginning on the front page, backtracks to his previous piece on General MacArthur, to clarify that when he said the General was behaving as a caged lion, he did not mean one sulking, but rather one doing his best under confined circumstances, with the priorities of the war directed to the European theater for the previous two years.

It had even been reported after the August Quebec Conference between Roosevelt and Churchill that the decision was made to give Lord Mountbatten, placed in command of the Burma-India theater and Southeast Asia, precedence in supplies over General MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific command. That rumor now appeared not to be accurate, as General MacArthur was plainly being provided more planes and supplies to wage effective offensive maneuvers. But nevertheless, it had been so reported, further causing for awhile irritation to already irritable feelings.

General MacArthur had on September 21 objected to the concept of island hopping now being utilized since November by the Navy, taking the Gilberts and Tarawa in a bloody conflict, next aiming for the Marshalls--where Mr. Clapper himself would meet his death. General MacArthur favored instead a process of landing on large islands away from the enemy, entrenching, capturing airstrips and then taking the enemy slowly, step by step, surrounding them and forcing surrender or death. He believed that the head-on landing on heavily fortified small islands to the north had and would cost lives unnecessarily.

Mr. Clapper was unwilling as a civilian to venture any firm opinion on who had the better of the case, but suggested that probably both types of operation were necessary and complementary. He proposed to outline the arguments for each strategy in future columns.

He concludes: "Perhaps every war produces its MacArthur, that is a strong figure who is forced by circumstances into a position of standing for a cause which has a strong appeal but which apparently conflicts with controlling decisions in the conduct of the war."

It was reported in a news piece on the page that an Army Aviation Cadet landed a plane safely near Chico, California, despite his having suffered temporary blindness during the flight. He was guided by audio commands which included directions for complex banking maneuvers; he performed as any sky pilot ought.

A letter writer, inveighing against sales taxes in North Carolina, advocates the Tea Party.

Drew Pearson comments on the catty remarks attributed to Representative Winifred Stanley of New York anent Globalonious Representative Clare Boothe Luce of Connecticut when asked by former Congressman George Tinkham of Massachusetts to be introduced to her. Said Representative Stanley, she would be glad to do so. "You do like actresses, don't you?" she inquired of a somewhat stunned Mr. Tinkham. She then went on to describe the vast world travels of Mrs. Luce, 15 minutes in Tokyo and considerable searching for the wild game of writing material within the capitals of most nations.

Mr. Pearson then moves on to detail the statistics regarding the proliferation of Bang's disease among the cattle of the nation. The disease could be spread to humans as undulant fever, that which killed Edsel Ford, May 26, 1943.

It is that also which likely killed the Ford Edsel, November 19, 1959--96 years, maybe 96 Tears, after the Gettysburg Address; four days after the Clutter murders in Holcomb, Kansas.

Framed Edition

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