Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the First Army captured Frenz, to move within four miles of Duren, and entered both Hurtgen and Langerwehe, the latter 24.5 miles from Cologne, last German road center before the flooded Roer River.

The Ninth Army, within the outer defenses of Julich, continued its fight toward the Roer River. Heavy infantry battles took place in the vicinity of Barmen, Koslar, and Kirchberg, all in the area of Julich. Barmen was flooded from the Roer, forcing Germans from basement hideyholes.

The Third Army drove through St. Avold and advanced two miles to the east beyond it, seventeen miles from Saarbrucken, now within siege gun range, widening their front to nineteen miles inside the Saar Basin.

The Seventh Army advanced at a point twelve miles north of Strasbourg on the Rhine, on the way to Karlsruhe.

The British Second Army advanced 500 yards to smooth out a bow in their line near Tripsrath, northeast of Geilenkirchen. They also continued to probe the defenses of Venlo on the Meuse River.

Bad weather hampered air support along the front, but the Ninth Air Force struck along the line from Linnich to Julich to Duren.

In the second straight day of air battles, at least 94 German planes were shot down by American planes in a 1,300-plane raid on Magdeburg, Munster, and Brunswick. The two-day total of planes destroyed was 226. It was the first time that the Eighth Air Force had encountered the Luftwaffe in such strength, 450 planes, against a force comprised only of fighter planes. Five hundred heavy bombers attacked Offenburg and Bingen without encountering opposition.

A pre-dawn RAF attack by 270 heavy bombers struck Munich, utilizing six-ton blockbuster bombs for the first time against industrial targets in Germany.

The Russians, after capturing Hatvan on Sunday ensuing a ten-day battle, moved toward the Danube north of Budapest.

Berlin reported that the Soviets had made their way onto the northern tip of Csepel Island in the Danube, five miles south of the capital, but had been repulsed.

The Fourth Ukrainian Army broke a German defense line in eastern Slovakia by taking Michalovce and Humenne, northwest of Ungvar. The thrust brought the Red Army to within 28 miles of Kossa and Presov, two Slovakian strongholds.

For the second time in four days, B-29's struck Tokyo, again from Saipan, as well as hitting installations in Bangkok in Thailand, out of bases in India.

One of the two missing crews from the Friday raid had been rescued after drifting in rafts for nearly 24 hours.

A Japanese broadcast reported an unconfirmed raid also on Hanoi in Japanese-occupied Indo-China.

In China's Kwangsi Province, the Allies lost to the Japanese the town of Hochih, following the Americans having abandoned their airbase at Nanning on November 19.

On Leyte, the 32nd Division, fighting through rain and mud, continued to move southward from captured Limon against weakening Japanese resistance north of Ormoc. The American forces had resisted several efforts by the enemy to retake Limon.

Congress demanded retribution for the systematic murder of millions of Europeans. It called for trials and death sentences for Nazis found guilty of atrocities. House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Sol Bloom of New York and Senator Carl Johnson of Colorado issued the joint statement demanding that Germany not be allowed to retain any form of weapons after the war.

The demands came in the wake of the release of a 25,000-word statement on atrocities prepared by the President's War Refugee Board, which included the statement that it was undeniable that the Germans had murdered millions of innocent civilians, "Jews and Christians alike", throughout Europe.

The seventeen-member House Military Committee was on its way, under a cloak of secrecy, to inspect the European front. Representative Clare Boothe Luce was a member of the committee. There was some suggestion that her popularity with the press and her willingness to speak to the press might pose a problem for the Army, but committee members brushed off as ludicrous the idea that Ms. Luce was being held incommunicado when she was not present at the initial press conference after the committee arrived in London. The Army denied that it had in any way stifled Ms. Luce.

As we have commented before, however, once Ms. Luce was out of Congress after 1947, she became even more of a loose cannon, nearly, along with her improvident, aging husband, causing a world war to end world wars in October, 1962, in order to try to elect a Republican Congress. Of course, they were not alone in the effort either to have their way politically or bring about the end of civilization trying.

The President announced the resignation of Cordell Hull as Secretary of State after twelve years in the position. The Secretary's ailing health was the reason for the resignation. He had been in Bethesda Naval Hospital for five weeks. Undersecretary Edward Stettinius was nominated by the President to take Mr. Hull's place.

The President had reduced his smoking from two packs a day to less than one pack since he had gone to Hobcaw, Bernard Baruch's estate in South Carolina, during April to recover from a bronchial condition. The shortage of cigarettes in the country, however, had not left the White House immune. A downstairs cigarette vending machine, normally supplying the press with its allotment, stood empty.

On the editorial page, "Face-Lifting" discusses the new look to the editorial page, returning to a design similar to that the page had sported prior to the paper shortage occasioned by the war. The type was wider, the headline type a new font for the newspaper, Tempo-Tempo Heavy, all to ease readability. The old headline type, the piece further informs, had been Bodoni Heavy, developed by Giambattista Bodoni in the eighteenth century.

"The Penalty" discusses the complete abandonment by the United States of its isolationist past. Yet, the country could not bring itself to cooperate internationally with use of the world's vital resources, as the languishing of the proposed treaty with Britain in the Senate regarding oil from the Middle East had demonstrated, discussed by Marquis Childs on Saturday.

"Cold Turkey" comments on Charlotte's current good record of collection of local taxes, 97 percent for 1943. But a problem still existed in back taxes from earlier years. The city was still owed $364,595 for the years 1928-43, only $48,500 of which came from 1943.

"End of a Lease" suggests that the world breathed a sigh of relief when the President announced that Lend-Lease would end with the end of the war. Many had thought that the United States might continue the practice into the post-war period, for the purpose of rehabilitation of war-torn nations.

Drew Pearson tells of the political victory for Foreign Minister T. V. Soong in China with the ouster from the Chinese Cabinet of Dr. H. H. Kung as Minister of Finance. Mr. Soong, brother-in-law to Chiang, was in the good graces of the Generalissimo, even if Madame Chiang was not.

Marquis Childs writes of the pork-barrel tradition in Washington and the rallying of Congress to protect its interests in pork-barrel politics. For years, the Rivers and Harbors bill was a favorite catch-all for local pork-barrel projects of individual Representatives and Senators seeking special consideration for their home constituencies.

Mark Twain wrote The Gilded Age about the very notion. Col. Sellers, in that book, was going to get rich if he could just entice Congress to improve his goose creek.

With the success of TVA, a Missouri Valley Authority was now being sought. Senator Josiah W. Bailey of North Carolina and Senator John Overton of Louisiana were opposed to it. It would enable another major river system to be brought under a Federal administrative agency, putting an end to pork-barreling with its streams and rivulets and backwater creeks, to put upon them bridges and dams and other special projects, all designed to fill the pockets of contractors back home.

The Columbia River Basin in the Pacific Northwest was also a logical candidate for a centralized authority.

The lameduck Congress, however, was busily trying to head off any prospect of an MVA.

In an excerpt from the Congressional Record, Democratic Representaive John Lesinski, of Dearborn, Downriver, and Monroe County in Michigan, relates of the uselessness of the Republican late campaign seeking to denigrate the accomplishments of the New Deal and its chief architect. He had, he said, "heard two birds twittering in a tree on the Capitol Grounds."

One was a lady bird, upset for not being able to attract the endorsement of Sidney Hillman and the CIO PAC to the elephant, of which she was Representative, loosely perhaps. The lady bird could say only, redundantly, "Mr. Speaker, clear everything with Sidney."

They had been, he said, "no more successful than the litle boy who took his father's blunderbuss out to the duck blind and loaded it with soap bubbles to shoot ducks."

Samuel Grafton discusses the quick subsiding of the election campaign fervor in the five Midwest cities he had just visited, Akron, Chicago, St. Paul, Des Moines, and Detroit.

Midwesterners preferred the President's dull recitation of the war achievements to his more colorful Fala speech of September 23 before the Teamsters in Washington—even if the latter speech supplied the only memorable line of the entire 1944 campaign.

Hal Boyle, still in France with the Third Infantry Division as on Saturday, reports that the "Gypsy troops" of the division were the only American soldiers in the war to have fought in Africa, Sicily, Italy, and France. They had been on the frontlines for 300 days since landing in Morocco November 8, 1942. The terror of being thusly exposed incessantly to enemy fire for that period of time was inarticulable.

In the World War, frontline doughboys were given respites every two or three weeks. In this war, men were staying much longer, the Third having been on the lines for 38 consecutive days in Sicily, from the Gela landing with Patton to Messina, for 58 days in Southern Italy, then, after two months of rest, 65 straight days at Anzio. Now, they had spent 75 days during the pursuit of the Germans through Southern France to the Vosges.

Two other divisions had spent a few more days on the frontlines than the Third, but none had equaled its battle performance. The Third had captured Casablanca in Morocco, Palermo and Messsina in Sicily, crossed the Volturno in Italy, before leading the breakthrough at Anzio in the operation which led in early June to the taking of Rome.

Since arriving in France, it had in August ambushed at Montelimar a column of 2,000 German vehicles spanning twelve miles, killing 900 Germans and taking prisoner another 900.

The division's heaviest single loss was experienced May 23, 1944 during the breakout at Anzio. They had 995 casualties by midnight that bloody day, one of the highest single day counts for casualties during the war. Many were only wounded and subsequently returned to duty. The Third then pushed on, intrepid, to Rome on June 4.

Somewhere between the news of the day with regard to Mr. Cain, first broadcast on WAGA, the taking of Hatvan by the Russians the previous day in 1944, the disclosure of the Prime Minister's chosen mode of giving dictation at the White House, and some of our previous comments, all in combination with a mention of Montelimar, leads us to remark, lest we be accused of being neglectful in our second reading, with this one.

Summon a surgeon. We are cut to the brains.

If someone named Pineapple next shows up in the news, we intend to take a rest.