Overcast skies again limited air operations over the front.

RAF heavy bombers struck Barmen on the southern edge of the Ruhr while Fifteenth Air Force planes out of Italy hit Regensburg.

Dortmund, the chief transportation hub of the Ruhr Valley, had been struck the previous day by the RAF in its largest daylight raid of the war, consisting of 1,100 planes, dropping 5,000 tons of bombs.

Unconfirmed reports indicated that Field Marshal Gerd Von Rundstedt had been removed from command in the West for allowing the Rhine crossing without substantial contest, and replaced by Field Marshal Walther Von Model. It was believed by the Nazis that reinforcements would enable a concentric attack on the Allied lines.

President Roosevelt nominated nine Army generals to become four-star generals, a rank held by only two others, General Joseph Stilwell and General Malin Craig. Generals Eisenhower, Marshall, MacArthur, and Arnold were each five-star generals. The nine nominees were: Generals Omar Bradley, Mark Clark, Carl Spaatz, George Kenney, Walter Krueger, Brehon Somervell, Jacob Deveys, Thomas Handy, and Joseph McNarney.

On the Eastern Front, German broadcasts stated that the Russians had taken Kuestrin and crossed the Oder River with at least nine divisions, from Goeritz between Frankfurt and Kuestrin to Kietz, six miles to the south of Kuestrin, and at Lebus, twelve miles to the south and four miles north of Frankfurt. To the north, the Second White Russian Army had moved closer to Danzig, to within sight of its cathedral spires.

The Fifth Army in Italy took a 5,900-foot peak, Monte Spigolino, fourteen miles northwest of Pistoia, three miles east of Plansinatico on Highway 12, southwest of captured Mount Belvedere.

The Chinese recaptured the airbase city of Suichwan, between Hong Kong and Hankow.

B-29's dropped 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs on Osaka, Japan's second largest city, striking an area twice as large as Nagoya, hit the previous day, Osaka's targets being comparable in size to the ten square miles targeted at Tokyo on Saturday.

Nagoya was observed still to be on fire from the 300-plane raid of Monday, with 358,000 square feet of plant space at Aichi Aircraft Works having been destroyed, according to General Curtis LeMay, head of the 21st Bomber Command. The Hokoku Machinery plant was also damaged but only moderately.

With the news of the third of these large and terrible raids on Japan, and given that our note of yesterday happened to reference a note of a few years ago which recommended Errol Morris's "The Fog of War", a look into the mind of former and now deceased Kennedy-Johnson Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, stressing the Vietnam era, but also including a look at his time serving in this war under General LeMay as a strategist on bombing efficiency in these very raids, it might be timely to take a look at that excellent documentary, or even another look should you have seen it previously. It is well worth the two hours of your time.

The film is neither pro-McNamara nor anti-McNamara, which, in our estimate, is appropriate, as the Secretary had the unfortunate task of heading the Defense Department during a period which was characterized by pervasive fright in the country of the Communist menace abroad, perhaps very difficult to understand today twenty-two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but very real at that time. And by "pervasive", we do not mean to suggest that everyone had such an abiding fear; obviously, that was not the case. But everyone who could think at the time and was at all sensitive to the times, including young children, understood that, with the dawning of each day, such were the times that it, indeed, could be our last, by dint of a nuclear blast, a fatalistic way for the world to live, a way which tinted darkly everything occurring in world culture, making some of it today perhaps seem a little overwrought with emotion or downright corny. It was not at the time. It was as real as it gets. Death stared us all down daily, to the point that it ceased to be anything but a subconscious, but nevertheless persistent concern.

And we should never do anything to encourage a return to such a time, for the sake of titillation, for the sake of adrenaline rushes. After a few short years of enduring that stress collectively, the excitement of it dissipated, causing the society to begin ruefully to mock itself and its overwrought emotion, also a concomitant of that era, increasingly pervasive among the younger generation in the latter half of the 1960's, though again, not by any stretch characteristic of all of it.

The Fifth Marine Division on Iwo Jima had compressed further the enemy into a narrowing triangle at Kitano Point. The Fourth Division, on the right flank, was advancing near Tachilwa Point. Hand-to-hand fighting was transpiring as Japanese sometimes crept into American lines, seeking food and water. Two Marines had been sleeping as they awoke to find a Japanese soldier lunging toward them with a bayonet. One Marine grabbed the blade as the other shot the soldier. A second enemy troop then ran toward their position and threw a hand grenade, wounding both Marines, but resulting in the Japanese soldier losing his life.

On Mindanao in the Philippines, the 41st Infantry Division captured Zamboanga, pursuing retreating enemy troops into the hills. Engineers were in process of reconditioning the captured airdrome at San Roque, 215 miles from Borneo. It was reported that the abandoned fixed fortifications at Zamboanga, an ancient Spanish fortress city, were the most formidable encountered in the central and southern Philippines.

Against light opposition on Luzon, the Eleventh Airborne Division captured Los Banos and Batangas. The Fifth Division captured Antipolo on the central part of the island.

In Swanzey, N.H., a town referendum on whether the United States should join the proposed United Nations organization with an international police force, resulted in 173 votes in favor and none opposed. An additional 224 towns across New Hampshire were also conducting the same referendum.

In protest of high taxes, Frank Phillips, chairman of Phillips Petroleum, cut his $50,000 salary to a dollar because he only received $309.36 after taxes. The reason, however, was for the fact that his other income, extending well above his salary, placed him in the highest tax bracket.

It was a childishly spiteful maneuver, especially during wartime, to deprive the Government of much needed tax money from the stinking rich. It's too bad the Government could not tax Mr. Phillips further and leave him with precisely $6.66 from all of his filthy income.

On the editorial page, "A Tyranny" reminds, amid the feeling spreading in the land anent un-American activities secretly hiding away, ready to pop out at the first opportunity of failed vigilance, that such forms of suspicion prevailed also in other countries, in Russia and in Britain.

In places other than Abbey Road, even so late as 1970, however, it was apparent that the incautious practice, inviting of mayhap, mayhop, and mayhem, motivated ostensibly and probably by an inherent streak of obstinacy and atavistic disinclination to remedial solubility, persisted, leading often to traction induced by those motivated with such energy as to be irreconcilable with inertia, causing therefore traction to the macadam of that object which approached to be without sufficiency to avoid intersection in time and space with the actor involved in the licentious and libertine perambulation in derogation of the crosswalk delimiters.

"Two Evil Faces" tells of the distorted faces of the enemy betrayed in the week's events, as if viewed in reversed mirrors. Hitler had again harangued the German people with exhortations to continue the fight. But Japan's Koiso warned more timidly of an imminent landing by the barbaric Americans in the home islands and urged only that the Japanese brace themselves for that eventuality.

"For Oblivion" finds the South Carolina system of private ownership of liquor stores to have shown itself during the war inferior to the State control extant in Virginia and North Carolina. Whereas the latter pair of states had imposed rationing and price control on liquor, South Carolina's private owners had set up to charge whopping prices on limited supplies and gave no heed to limiting sales. The result was every bit as bad as the practice of bootlegging in dry Mecklenburg County.

"End of a Battle" comments on the apparent agreement on a compromise regarding the bill pending before the Legislature to reorganize the four state hospitals, with focus on Morganton. The session was nearing its end but the primary reason for the delay in delivering up the bill from the sub-committee, determining whether to retain provisions intended to eliminate the separate executive committees at each hospital and substitute them with hospital boards, appeared resolved.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record follows the colloquy presented the previous day between Representative Harold Cooley of North Carolina and Representative Robert Rich of Pennsylvania with comments by Mr. Dondero of Michigan and Mr. Zimmerman of Missouri.

Mr. Dondero had his dander up over Mr. Rich having addressed Mr. Cooley as "brother" on more than one occasion during the immediately previous debate, that which Mr. Dondero contended was a plain offense against House rules, requiring that each member address the other by name and state of origin only.

Mr. Zimmerman responded that there were exceptions to all rules, and then explained that there were two brothers in the House, Representatives Schwabe, one from Oklahoma, the other from Missouri. Mr. Zimmerman asked Mr. Dondero whether it would be acceptable for one brother to address the other in that case as "brother".

Drew Pearson indicates that the enunciated goal in the fall by FDR during the campaign, to provide 60 million new jobs following the war, had thus far enjoyed no action in support of it, the President's attention being fully devoted to winning the war; so much had the issue been neglected that aides were quietly expressing worry about the post-war job environment. After the Ardennes offensive of December had pretermitted an early end to the war, as had been hoped might transpire prior to Christmas, the tendency of the War Production Board during the prior fall to talk of post-war planning had subsided.

It is a thought worth keeping whenever the temptation might arise to second guess the decision to deploy the most terrible specie of weapon ever developed by mankind. As we have before mentioned, given the authorization by President Roosevelt for the campaign of incendiary bombing of Japan—something about which he had inquired, regarding the impact of a B-17 on the "paper cities" of Japan, as early as July, 1941—there is no doubt that he would have likewise acted as President Truman did in deploying the bomb.

In any event, Mr. Pearson urges that thinking be done with regard to the method by which the jobs would be created, given that, in peacetime, the greatest number of people ever employed had been 48 million, and during the war, 67 million, of whom twelve million were in the armed forces. Only Henry Wallace had publicly considered the goal, and because the Congress had stripped away his lending powers under the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, removing it from the purview of the Department of Commerce, he no longer had the power as Secretary of Commerce to do much toward accomplishing the task of full employment.

Mr. Pearson next comments on the centennial of Texas independence having occurred March 2, but without fanfare or even recognition initially in the Congress by any Texan, that despite Washington being rife with Texans in official positions. It took Vermont Representative Charles Plumley to provide an oration on the floor of the House commemorating the event. Later that day, when some of the Texas delegation became aware of the speech and their oversight in not recognizing the event, they got together and provided their own commemorative.

Marquis Childs, again reporting from Rome, compares the war to a large tapestry on which so many events were depicted with bold coloration and impact that the background occurrences were often overlooked—perhaps as the equivalent of Fala behind Mr. Death, or the fact that the U.S.S. Independence would set sail from San Francisco on July 16, 1945, arriving in Pearl Harbor on the 19th, from there to Tinian, where it delivered its cargo on July 28. But we jump ahead of ourselves a bit.

Samuel Grafton reminds that the proposed world police force would only have power to deter war as long as force would not have to be applied; as soon as force was used to deter aggressive action, the purpose of the world police force would be defeated, its raison d'etre rendered null.

Dorothy Thompson updates the conditions of morale within Germany, stating that, to the surprise of military observers, the German civilian population now appeared ready and eager to end the war, no longer accepting the line of the Propaganda Ministry that Germans would be annihilated by the advancing Russians and Anglo-Americans, having witnessed the contrary treatment of prisoners by the Allies. Thus, the prediction that the Germans would be able to fight on in the Alps of Austria and Bavaria was no longer likely of fulfillment, given that there was no support among the civilian populace, necessary to enable such a fight.

One thing which Goebbels stated, which no one outside the highest levels of the U.S. Government could understand at this juncture, was to prove accurate: the war would end in a "furioso ... suddenly and rashly", if not quite the way he had intended the statement.

A letter writer observes that he had seen an ad in the newspaper which warned, "Rats are on the loose." He urged that it was the truth, that large rats in his garage had carried away one of his large traps. He had to tie them down and stake them to the ground before capturing his quarry.

He then exhorts the citizenry to support the Red Cross, to help the men abroad fight the rats.

Another letter writer beseeches the readership to help her find the owner of a tagless, bob-tailed German shepherd which had made itself at home with her family, entertaining her children, jumping for food, but also scaring away the postman who refused to leave the mail. Her laundry man had to strike matches in his face, whether his own or the dog's not being made clear, to collect the laundry.

So, if you know to whom the dog belongs or, perchance, it is your own, please at once phone 3-4305 to lay claim to it.