Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the First Army, in one of the largest ground and air attacks yet of the war, had driven a wedge two miles deep on a six-mile front ten miles north of Aachen in an attempt to punch a fourth hole in the Siegfried Line. The force launched its attack from the Dutch village of Groenstratt and was aiming for the German town of Geilenkirchen. The Germans were strongly resisting the effort. The American forces were pouring into a gap between Cologne and Dusseldorf, aiming for the Rhine. For days prior to the attack, American infantrymen had staked out positions as close as 50 yards from the German lines.

After forging the Wurm River, the forces were reported to have advanced 400 yards beyond the Aachen-Geilenkirchen Railroad. Fighting extended twenty miles north of Aachen. The Nazis were said to be entrenching inside the city.

Another American attack proceeded at Overloon, Holland, west of the Meuse. And yet another at Havert in Germany, near the Dutch border, northwest of Geilenkirchen.

The attacks were supported by heavy advance artillery fire and by bombing, with American heavy bombers hitting Hamm, Kassel, and Cologne, as well as a factory at Weilerwist, 30 miles southeast of Aachen. More than 2,700 planes participated in the raids, a thousand of which supported the First Army drive with another 1,400 hitting nearby Cologne and Kassel, as 300 heavy bombers struck Hamm.

Because of bad weather, American and British bombers had conducted no raids on Sunday, after having made raids on Germany 20 of the 30 days of September.

General Hap Arnold announced that the Army Air Forces had dropped their millionth ton of bombs since the start of the war, almost half of which tonnage, 432,000 tons, had been dropped just since D-Day. The Air Forces had suffered 72,000 casualties in battle and another 5,300 non-battle casualties. They had lost 42,000 planes, of which 14,600 had been lost in combat and 9,900 lost overseas in non-combat roles, while domestically, 17,500 planes had been lost. Meanwhile, they had destroyed 27,000 enemy planes, probably destroyed another 6,000, and damaged 10,000 others.

The British Second Army was cleaning up to a depth of five miles along an 18-mile front on the northwest flank of the British salient into Holland, as the Germans appeared on the retreat from the Dutch coastal loop, albeit not yet evident in large numbers. The Germans were attempting to punch counter-offensives into Nijmejen and were reinforcing their troops in the vicinity of Arnhem.

The Canadian First Army drove several miles north of captured Merxplas and advanced into Holland, capturing Brecht.

Major General R. E. Urquhart stated that the 2,000 of 8,000 British First Airborne troops who had escaped the pocket near Arnhem after being trapped for eight days could not have maintained their position for another 24 hours for the fact of dwindling supplies. They had been overwhelmed, he asserted, by the German tanks which had mowed down several units trying to hold the bridge and fighting their way into Arnhem. At one point during the battle, the wounded were so numerous that both sides used the same hospital inside Arnhem.

The Third Army, it was officially announced, had been the first to break through the Siegfried Line. And the Ninth Infantry Division, which had sliced German defenses of the Cherbourg Peninsula by leading the attack on St. Lo in July, was among the first American units to cross the Line, doing so on September 14, after 85 consecutive days of front line duty. The U.S. First Infantry Division supplied the first infantry troops to enter German soil, although armored units had preceded them.

In Italy, the Fifth Army repulsed German counter-attacks on Monte Battaglia and captured Monte Cappella. On the Adriatic front, the Eighth Army cleared the last German troops from Savignano.

The Russians gained along a 70 to 100-mile front southeast of Belgrade, to within 43 miles of the Belgrade-Nis railway.

Unconfirmed reports from Budapest indicated that Soviet troops had moved 28 miles into southeastern Hungary, less than a hundred miles from the capital.

Other unconfirmed reports from Warsaw stated that the Partisans fighting inside Warsaw were being slowly annihilated by the Germans.

The enveloping of Riga by the Baltic Armies continued and was said to be in its final phases.

In the Pacific, the Americans had firm control of Peleliu in the Palaus, as well as over eight other islands of the group. The only active enemy pockets remaining on Peleliu were on Bloody Nose Ridge and at Angular Islet. Over 10,000 of the enemy had been killed in the islands in seventeen days of fighting.

Head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Eric Johnston, stated his opposition to the easing of the Little Steel formula which froze wages 15% above those extant in January, 1941, lest the relaxation of the restriction produce runaway inflation after the war.

Office of War Mobilization Director James Byrnes announced that, contrary to indications by the Office of Price Administration, there would be no new rationing of coffee.

People needed to remain alert.

On the editorial page, "Communess" discusses the ostensible fact that Helen Gahagan Douglas, wife of Melvyn Douglas, running for the House, was a Communist. It had surely to be so, or at least that she was a fellow traveler, for she had been so labeled by none other than the vaunted Dies Committee.

The reason for the label was that prior to Nevada's primary in the Senate race, she had sent a glowing pink telegram to Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, land of the pink grapefruit, in which she had urged that he encourage Vail Pittman, brother to the deceased Senator Key Pittman, to run for the Senate seat against isolationist Senator Pat McCarran. Now that the Dies Committee was investigating the CIO PAC, it contended that the Douglas telegram had been paid for in the pink by the PAC.

The editorial finds her supposed pinkish crime therefore to have been only that of lending her support to a Senatorial candidate in a losing cause to an incumbent. It suggests that, in fairness, the Dies Committee ought also to look into the voting record of Senator McCarran, which the piece obliges, replete with its consistent isolationist positions.

It concludes that Ms. Douglas found a valid basis for objecting to the re-election of Senator McCarran, or that perhaps the majority of Congress who had also disagreed with his positions were imbued likewise with a "pinkish tinge".

Of course, it was Mr. Nixon in 1950 who called Ms. Douglas the "Pink Lady", "pink down to her underwear", to win his Senate seat from California, running against Ms. Douglas.

And the rest, as they say, is history, as Nixon turned out as a Pink Richard.

"Memos" tells of one of the men on the Desk, three flights down from the Ivory Tower, who had, via pneumatic tube, sent along a communique "for what it's worth", thinking it might pose the basis for an editorial. It asked the question whether there was not a lesson for the learning in the resultant bitterness endued the South by the harsh treatment of the North during Reconstruction after the Civil War, and so a lesson likewise to be applied to World War II in providing direction as to how the Allies should treat the Germans to avoid such lingering acridity.

Ah, but wait ten and twenty years...

"Dispensable?" contends against the notion that President Roosevelt enjoyed the status of indispensability, or that any man did, finds the issue created around the concept on both sides of the campaign to be a tangential irrelevancy. It cites for the proposition several long-term public servants, George Clinton, Governor of New York for 21 years before serving two terms as Vice-President, President Washington, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, who served Britain for 19 years, Gladstone, who served for 12, Bismarck of Germany, for over 27, and Porfirio Diaz of Mexico, President for 35 years. (It leaves out the indispensable Thad Eure, North Carolina's Secretary of State for about 153 years, anyway longest serving public servant in the nation's history.)

"Hold On" comments on War Mobilizer James Byrnes's insistence on creating conditions in the post-war period which would not lead to rampant inflation such that the increased wages of workers would govern less buying power, with eggs, butter, and milk, for instance, going through the roof. He advocated price and wage controls to continue until the war in the Pacific war was won. He also wanted maintenance of the Little Steel formula governing wages.

Marquis Childs compares the 1940 presidential campaign with that of 1944 and finds Governor Dewey not making the mistake of Wendell Willkie in talking too much, but rather following the advice of the master, President Roosevelt, who in 1940 had counseled that the successful campaigner should strike a chord with a limited theme and then keep striking the same chord.

Hal Boyle, reporting from Belgium on September 26, tells of how a Nebraska private and his squad of men managed to capture 64 German paratroops, utilizing hunting skills as a basis for locating the quarry and then baiting them into the trap.

Drew Pearson reveals that Prime Minister Churchill in the spring had been cool to the idea of the re-election of President Roosevelt and that some in the Prime Minister's camp had quietly courted Governor Dewey. The two war horses had differed at Tehran regarding the Balkans and when a second front should be initiated.

A corporal in the Army writes a letter to the editor complaining of the unfairness of the demobilization bill, that its priority points system ignored the married soldier without dependents and likewise gave no credit for age. In the latter case, therefore, the older soldier, who would have probably been inducted late during the war would receive no priority on discharge versus the younger soldier who had been in service longer. Yet, carped the correspondent, the older man would have undoubtedly left behind greater financial responsibilities which would suffer in his absence than those of the younger man. And the elder soldier would be less competitive for jobs upon return. The soldier was convinced that the demobilization bill was simply a lot of hokum to bait the public into hopefulness of the discharge of soldiers while they would in fact remain entangled in Army regulations.