Another battle continued nine miles west of St. Vith on the high ground between St. Vith and Vielsalm. The three-day stand at St. Vith was maintaining separation of the German forces in that area from the wedge of the Wehrmacht being pushed beyond Stavelot.

Subsequent events were not yet disclosed for the 48-hour blackout in news.

The Third Army had been moved northward from Ensdorf in the southeastern section of Saarlautern to attack Von Rundstedt's southern flank, halting his progress.

First Army troops had been taken from the Aachen sector to attack the northern flank of the German plunge line.

A piece provides a day by day account thus far of the progress of the battle. We will not seek to summarize it.

Some 400 American heavy bombers with 700 fighter escorts attacked targets, dropping 1,500 tons of bombs at Ehrang, near Trier, and at Kaiserslautern.

Two Nazi prisoners were put to death by firing squad after a court-martial found them guilty of espionage based on their wearing American uniforms, driving an American truck, and carrying American weapons.

The Nazis were reported to be withholding their full strength in the counter-offensive pending the High Command determination of the potential for a crushing blow to two or three Allied armies cut off from the rest of the forces.

The Russian assurance of committing to the Eastern Front new forces to bring pressure on Warsaw and East Prussia had been made previously and was not the immediate result of the German winter drive.

He might as well have said what he was thinking in his roundabout: that they were letting the Niggers take over.

The piece brushes aside the Congressman's fears as being product of an age-old argument in the country, legislating from the bench versus following the Constitution, i.e., in other terms, Federalism versus States' Rights, (Integration versus Segregation (Respect for Individual Rights versus Royalty (Each Equal versus Some Treated as We Damned Well Please))).

It points out that even in the staid days of President Coolidge, with a Court led by Chief Justice and former President William Howard Taft, joined by conservatives Pierce Butler, George Sutherland, Edward Sanford, Willis Van Devanter, and James McReynolds, to form a six-justice majority, the complaints of too much conservatism arose, legislating from the bench in that direction. And the complaints came from the other three respected members of that Court, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, and Harlan Stone, now the Chief Justice. Then the contention was that the majority legislated from the bench by replacing "economic predilections for the provisions of the Constitution".

So it would be heard, it suggests, in any age in which the Court was at all active.

Of course, the present five Justice majority of the Court never legislates from the bench. Just ask any one of them, or any conservative radio talkshow host. They are five politically pure and quintessentially objective jurists who are handed law by Manu, the Lawgiver upon each 5 to 4 decision the Court renders, indeed, the very reservoir and rock upon which the preservation of Law and Order and the sanctity of the nation under God indivisible rests and is preserved for eternity and a fortnight against the common rabble to whom Liberals always make their radical appeal, tending toward dissolution and chaos, and finally Communism.

In any event, it says with respect to Senator Reynolds: "Doubtless clad in his usual gay fashion, and sporting his mustache of the day, he defended himself vigorously, and made one more plea for the isolation he had chosen not to defend in November." (See the Congressional Record excerpt of the day.)

Gerald Nye of North Dakota, another of the prime pre-war isolationists, likewise was departing the Senate chamber door. He forecasted another world war within twenty years because of America's errant ways, casting aside his advised course.

In contrast, the current drive of the Germans was undertaken after six months of continuous Allied advance and German retreat. The 1918 offensive began in the spring after a relatively quiet winter. Americans were still being shipped to the front in latter March of 1918 when the drive to Amiens began between Arras and St. Quentin, at a temporal junction when only 100,000 Americans were present in France. The German Army had already defeated Italy at the disastrous Battle of Caporetto and taken Russia out of the war with an armistice as well. The Germans had enjoyed numerical superiority and fresh reinforcements.

Yet, even with those advantages, the Germans had finally been forced to surrender within less than eight months from the initiation of the offensives.

In 1944, the Allies held all the advantages they lacked in the prior war, and Germany suffered from a bomb-ruined country, a depleted war morale among its people, at home deprived and starving, its borders of the vaunted Hitler plan for the Heartland of Central Europe with its vassal satrapies in North Africa, the Mediterranean and the Balkans, reduced nearly back to their original pre-war status, a morally depleted nation with little recognizable left from the pre-war Aryan goose-step, the tendentious Will of the strutting ultimate egoist leaving the superego at the Fuehrerbunker Door, its will to fight, save that influenced by the threat of a pistol at their backs should they lay down arms, now all but exhausted in the wake of the carnage of two fronts in Europe so soaked in blood that no one even knew their names or their numbers anymore.

Thus, the Allied observers who made forecast that the winter offensive of the Nazis would be their last and fatal gasp had reason for that optimism, reason which was predicated on fact, and would ultimately prove itself accurate.

He declared himself more fervently in favor of America Firstism, nationalism, and isolationism, than ever before the war.

He then concluded with an evocation of the sadness of Americans over the losses of sons and daughters to the war, "sad hours for the American people".

By implication, the Senator blamed internationalism brought on by his own party for these sad hours—not the unreasoned and irrational stealing of territory by the Nazis, not the concentration camps and their horrors already elucidated to the American people who read, not the unmitigated gall of the Japanese, in contravention to every standard of accepted modern warfare of the time, to engage in a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor while their duly appointed emissaries to Washington played parlour games with the unduly trusting who had not sufficiently learned bridge, if only as a wee lad by observing it from the kitchen cabinet. None of those things.

In actuality, he had been only seeking to convey that the Charter had been formed in snippets radioed back and forth between the ships of Prime Minister Churchill and the President when they had met in Newfoundland in early to mid-August, 1941 to form it. He was not, as his remarks had been interpreted, throwing out the Charter as so much verbiage, non-binding of its signatories. The internationally communicated statement out of context, however, had produced a conclusion that the President no longer felt the document should be accorded weight.

Yet, the President had, in practice, consistently fought for the principles enunciated in the Charter, even if in the case of Greece, for instance, he had not fought very hard.

Mr. Pearson then explains the reason for Churchill's backing of the territorial compromise between Poland and Russia whereby the Russians would receive the territory to the Curzon Line and, in exchange, Poland would receive Danzig and a large part of East Prussia and Upper Silesia, leaving out, in the process, the wishes of the Polish government-in-exile in London. The British agreement to the compromise had occurred by plan, arranged in part a year earlier at Tehran, to obtain from the Soviets a compromise in their wishes for territorial buffer states, areas in which to do the dishes, in Eastern Europe in exchange for a commitment to the opening of a second front offensive in the West. Roosevelt had deliberately stayed on the sidelines of that issue, leaving it to Churchill to convince on his home turf the Polish government-in-exile of the wisdom of the territorial exchange. The timing of the Churchill announcement, informs Mr. Pearson, arose from the exigency produced by the Battle of the Bulge to urge Stalin to initiate his winter offensive.

But Mr. Pearson had also informed earlier in the week that, while military leaders were bitterly disappointed in the sloth on the Eastern Front before Warsaw, investigations of the situation had proved no deliberate withholding of action by the Rooskies, but rather that there was a genuine problem in bringing up supplies over the lengthened supply lines versus the shortened lines of the Nazis, pressed back close to their own original borders.

But others, such as early isolationist Senator Hiram Johnson of California, also had joined the criticism of British policy in Greece, in his case declaring that the Greek Patriots were being "shot down like dogs".

The isolationist Chicago Tribune was editorializing against the spheres of influence being established within Europe by Britain and the Soviet Union, citing the Polish territorial resolution as prime example. The newspaper pressed for Americans to be thus dissuaded from joining the post-war international organization.

Senator Happy Chandler of Kentucky and Senator Robert La Follette of Indiana had entered the fray, though without ever having given much more than tepid support for the international organization. They were both opposed to the State Department appointees for assistants to the Secretary.

Thus the liberals and intellectuals, contended Mr. Grafton, had to reach decision as to whether to continue their opposition to the problems in Europe given the fact that the voices of despair were being echoed for different purposes than their own, not seeking international cooperation but rather to disaffect Americans from the concept of the U.N.

Mr. Childs faults the President for not having first consulted with the members of the committee regarding these appointments to obviate the messy public spectacle which had transpired.

But, Drew Pearson had just commented in his column the previous day that the President had praised Senators Pepper, Chandler, and Gillette for having opposed the nominations of Mr. Dunn and General Holmes on the basis that such opposition would keep them earnestly on their toes. Thus, it would appear that the President simply wanted the debate in the open, to air to the American public the idea that no singular ideology was going to characterize the new State Department, charged with the responsibility of formulating the world peace at war's end and chartering the United Nations organization. Was the President not entirely canny in proceeding thusly? given the studied failings of President Wilson after World War I in not seeking sufficiently to include in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 the conservative Senators of the time, and not enough explaining of the wisdom of his Fourteen Points and, most especially, joinder with the League of Nations.