Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Josef Kramer and Irma Grese and nine others, including two other women, had been sentenced at Lueneberg to hang pursuant to their convictions for war crimes at Belsen and Oswiecim concentration camps. Of the other nineteen convicted war criminals, one was sentenced by the British military tribunal to life imprisonment while the others were sentenced to terms of from one to fifteen years each.

In China, Government forces had taken Shanhaikwan from 10,000 Communists, forcing the Red forces from the Great Wall, gateway to Manchuria.

Admiral Chester Nimitz told the Senate Military Committee that the proposed merger of the Army and Navy under a single Defense Department would not work and urged instead the proposal by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal that a national security council, composed of the Secretaries of War, Navy, and State, be created. He could not foresee anything but disaster for the Navy in the attempted merger: either it would remain autonomous, in which case it should remain separate, or would drop to a secondary service. Maintaining control of the sea lanes, he counseled, was necessary to retain influence abroad.

The joint Congressional committee investigating Pearl Harbor heard a report from Rear Admiral T. B. Inglis that the Japanese were going to call off the attack on Pearl Harbor should their diplomatic negotiations succeed.

Should their diplomatic negotiations succeed: which demanded resumption of trade with the United States, without removal of Japanese forces from China or Indo-China.

Rear Admiral Inglis, the Republicans' errand boy, could not seem to figure out how the Japanese knew by December 5 that there would be no carriers in Pearl Harbor on December 7, apparently not realizing the quaint device of coded messages from Honolulu by Japanese spies who were in place, known since 1941.

But nothing sells like a good mystery story.

The 36th installment in the series of articles by General Jonathan Wainwright tells of the punitive action taken by the Japanese against officers imprisoned at Shirakawa Prison Camp for standing up for their rights under the Geneva convention and refusing to engage in menial work. The officers were forbidden from lying down or sitting on their bunks before bedtime and could not assemble in groups of more than two. Two or three times per night, they were rousted from bed, made to dress and answer roll call on the parade ground. Finally, they forced the officers to work, clearing out a mosquito-infested area near the camp, and gave them no extra portion of rice for their work.

The Japanese butchered one pig per week which the men had raised, took the best cuts, and left them the remaining parts.

Eventually, in 1944, the Protective Powers sent two representatives, one Dutch and one Swiss, to examine the camp conditions. The men were instructed in advance on what they could and could not say. While the representatives observed the poor condition of the men and saw the workers coming in from the fields, emaciated and haggard, nothing ever came of the meeting.

In October, 1944, the men, including the officers with General Wainwright, were transferred from Shirakawa to Japan and then to Manchuria. It would be their last transfer.

In Philadelphia, Nobel Prize winning scientist Arthur Compton predicted that within a decade power companies would be producing power from atomic energy rather than coal. He promised no smoke, safety, and reduced costs to cities utilizing atomic power.

He, of course, did not talk about potential meltdowns of reactor cores. But that's a minor detail. Call the fire department.

Coal miners? Eh. They can go work in a mill. Sell auto parts.

In Lisbon, a free and open election was about to take place the following day. Despite a nineteen year dictatorship of Premier Dr. Antonio de Olivera Salazar, there was, amazingly, no opposition. Nevertheless, a close election was predicted. Portugal was seeking the good graces of the United States.

It was reported from Sweden that 20 Nazi scientists were hard at work on building an atomic bomb in Spain, with the approval of Franco.

Another report from Sweden stated that all 90 scientists who had been working on the V-rockets at Peenemunde before the end of the war had been transferred to the United States to develop the rocket-bomb further. No confirmation was forthcoming from the War Department, but it said that several of the scientists from Germany, as reported earlier, had been brought to the U.S. to work on projects vital to national security.

In Capetown, South Africa, the U.S. Fleet had brought sailors who were stocking up on engagement rings and loose diamonds, "almost like peanuts". They also bought leopard skin bags, curios, and other souvenirs. The highest price paid by any individual American was $3,200 for a pure white diamond weighing four and a half carats. Some of the sailors had bought three or four watches each.

On the editorial page, "A Touch of Baptist Bigotry" comments on the apparent bigotry being displayed against President Truman by the Baptist State Convention in Texas, seeking to prevent Baylor University from conferring an honorary degree on the President because he occasionally played poker and was said to take a snifter of bourbon now and again. Baylor itself announced that it intended to convey the degree anyway, and thus the Baptists appeared falling on their own sword.

The piece remarks that, earlier in the week, the column had found no fault with the North Carolina Baptists for calling for a return of the assigned American diplomat to the Vatican on the basis of maintaining separation of Church and State. While no bigotry was apparent in that decision, there was in this one.

"The Danger of Independence" finds the proposal to provide legal barriers in the state against diversion of highway funds for other purposes to be an attempt to give the Highway Department inordinate control of the State's finances, much as was the system in South Carolina, where the Highway Commissioner was said to be more powerful than the Governor. It was why, according to former Governor Burnet Maybank, South Carolina had a glorious highway system and poor education, comparing it to a home with a piano in the parlor and no meat in the kitchen.

"Anniversary" remarks on the eightieth anniversary of the founding of the Salvation Army in the London slums, about to embark on its new season, established in 97 countries. The Army had concerned itself with the derelict and forgotten souls and thus had a worthwhile mission in society, one of personal sacrifice.

And so the piece returns their own salutation: "God bless you."

A piece from The Chicago Tribune, titled "The Career of B. O. Plenty", comments on a comic strip character from "Dick Tracy" who tried to do in Breathless and was robbed by Itchy of some lucre, B. O. eventually meeting his fate at the hands of Itchy—perhaps a Klansman.

It says that he might have been done in by the atom bomb or a V-2 or a flame thrower or a mortar, model M-3, or bombs from a B-29 or strafing from a P-51.

Instead, he suffered burns from lighted matches applied to his toes and was cast adrift on a plank in a sewer.

B.O., it concludes, was from a "gentler time".

Drew Pearson counsels the generals and the War Department to listen to the average soldier and officer through mail being written, their bitter rumblings regarding sitting around doing nothing during the slow demobilization process. It was a lesson learned by France at the outbreak of World War II, by maintaining a peacetime army which had nothing to do and so corroded from the inside, from ennui and lethargy. He then provides a cross-section of mail he had received.

Marquis Childs comments on the reports from Germany that the American occupation force was suffering a breakdown in discipline, including looting and disorder. The job of General Eisenhower, he asserts, was next to impossible as the troops were not trained in occupation duties. Part of the problem had stemmed from the belief that there should be a harsh peace in Germany, with imposition of a new economic life stripped of industrialization. In reality, it had proved unworkable for the fact of the difficulty in obtaining agreement between the four occupying nations. The result of the situation would likely soon be death from starvation on a mass scale.

A Soldier at Camp Croft writes a letter making a plea for a typewriter. He had to sell his to afford to pay for his wife's illness. About to be discharged at age 36, his entire adult life had been devoted to work requiring a typewriter, including some newspaper work and being a deputy sheriff of the jail. The editors note that they were moved to try to send him one of their own but found them all in use and ask readers to consider a donation.

Another letter, from a doctor, chairman of the North Carolina State Medical Society Cancer Committee, thanks The News for its coverage of the American Cancer Society meeting recently held in Durham.

Better watch out for the atomic bomb tests to come and the burying of missiles in your midst.

Samuel Grafton looks at the report on the future from General Hap Arnold, chief of staff of the Army Air Forces, finds it scary stuff. First, he tells of supersonic missiles traveling at 3,000 miles per hour and then reports of hydroponic food, food grown from chemicals and water only, for the airmen of the future, tried successfully in the Ascension Islands.

The choice was between a future in which science could be made to work for mankind or mankind could become slave to science "gone mad".