Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Tenth Army pincers moved closer to one another as the Sixth Infantry Division expanded its bulge below Yonabaru, the 32nd Regiment of which advancing 1,600 yards south of the easternmost point of the enemy line and the 184th moving to within 1,500 yards to the southwest. Mud continued to plague progress.

The Japanese appeared to be attempting to establish another defense line two miles south of the "Little Siegfried Line", or that which was left of it.

At the center of the line, near Shuri, the 77th Infantry Division moved through a small village with little opposition, while to the west and south of Shuri, the First Marines captured Asato village. The Americans had been able to scribe an arc larger than a semi-circle about Shuri.

Small counter-attacks were repulsed by the 96th Infantry to the east of Shuri as Sixth Marines continued to fight within the streets of Naha, preparing possibly for a flanking attack on Shuri.

On Mindanao, fighting had entered the mopping-up stage as the island had been bisected by the meeting of the 31st and 40th Infantry Divisions on Wednesday along the Sayre Highway. The forces met near Impalutao village as the remaining Japanese moved into the hills east of the highway, from which they would have to be rooted out.

Another large raid of B-29's attacked Tokyo this date just after midnight Tokyo time, this one lasting an hour and consisting of about 500 planes dropping more than 4,000 tons of incendiary bombs on the Marunouchi business district and Imperial Government center. On the outskirts of the Marunouchi district was the Imperial Hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It had survived the 1923 earthquake, which was estimated to be the equivalent of 8.3 on the Richter Scale. It would also survive the bombing.

Headquarters for the 20th Air Force disclosed that 12 B-29's had been lost in the 550-plane record raid of Thursday on Tokyo, the heaviest loss from any mission of Superfortresses. Reconnaissance photographs showed that 3.2 square miles of the Shinagawa industrial area had been damaged by fire from the previous day's raid. A total of 35.9 miles of Tokyo's 368 square miles was said to have been destroyed in all six of the previous incendiary raids. It was the 24th Superfortress raid on the capital.

Tokyo radio, with a straight face apparently, declared that Russia needed first to rebuild and should not squander the opportunity by engaging in war with Japan, that should Japan desire peace with the Western Allies, it might send its proposals via Russia. The broadcast also stated that the Pacific war was only now beginning. A Japanese newspaper reported that there might be a rift between the United Nations.

Those in the Kremlin were reported to be laughing too hard to respond just yet.

Another broadcast stated that American troops would soon land on Amami Island in the Ryukyus as a second front to cut off the offensive of the Japanese in Okinawa and sever the rear lines of Japanese air power. So had said commentator Hiroshi Kawasaki. Whether he had received the report from Amami or a poppy was not reported. What Premier Suzuki said was neither disclosed.

The four separate zones of occupation for Germany and Austria were soon to be announced. America, Britain, France, and Russia would each occupy a zone. Security prevented disclosure yet of specifics.

Charred notes from a report from Hitler to his division commanders on December 12, just before the beginning of the Ardennes offensive on December 16, candidly stated that his initial goals of the Third Reich had been to introduce universal military training, then to re-establish German sovereignty over the Rhineland and set up a defense fortification system, then to annex Austria and crush Czechoslovakia and Poland to bring Germany to a position for effective defense.

While appearing obvious in hindsight, these notes significantly countered Nazi propaganda that Hitler had acted in "self-defense" in invading Poland.

Whether his plans included the complete destruction of Germany and his native Austria, the report perhaps disclosed on the inside page sub voce.

House Democratic Majority Leader John McCormack of Massachusetts asked that the case of a soldier sentenced to two years at hard labor, following his court martial for assaulting nine German prisoners, be reconsidered. He had been sentenced at Le Mans in France on October 17, 1944, the incident having occurred September 16 while prisoners were setting up barbed-wire fences at a prison camp.

Most of the evidence had come from the private, Joseph McGee, and Germans. It was alleged that he kicked and hit the prisoners with his fists, but there were no serious injuries inflicted, only a sense of being insulted.

Mr. McCormack argued that, in light of the harsh treatment to soldiers and concentration camp prisoners by the Nazis, the sentence was disproportionate to the offense. The Majority Leader later stated that Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson had promised him that the case would be re-evaluated forthwith.

President Truman announced the creation of a home food supply division of the War Food Administration to coordinate Government agencies which oversaw domestic food production and conservation. WFA head Marvin Jones appointed Paul Stark of Louisiana to head the new division.

The Office of Price Administration stated that the production of industrial sugar, that going to bakers, candy manufacturers, and the like, would be cut by half from that of 1944. The reason for the cut was too much consumption of sugar thus far in 1945 over the levels of 1944. In 1944, manufacturers had received 60% of the sugar they had in 1941.

At San Francisco, it was said that the Big Five had lined up enough small nation support for their positions to insure control of the conference henceforth to conclusion. The various committees were seeking to complete their work on this weekend so that the Big Four conference commissions could begin reviewing their reports the following week. The committees had agreed to ban secret treaties and to strengthen the economic and social work of the new organization.

The major remaining issue, the unilateral veto by the Big Five as permanent members of the Security Council, however, was far from settled. The Big Four had agreed that any nation could present an issue to the Security Council and that no veto could prevent the presentation. But the Big Five would each be able to veto any action or even investigation into the issue thus presented.

The Yalta agreement had provided that none of the Big Five or other members of the Council would have veto power if that country were being investigated and peaceful settlement were being made. But each would have the veto, regardless of their own involvement, should the question become whether to use force to resist aggression.

To have this plan approved, the Big Five would need 12 additional votes from the smaller nations and it was being reported that they had these votes assured.

On the editorial page, "Fire With Fire" expresses confidence that some of the discriminatory proposals before the Southern Presbyterian Church assembly at Montreat, N.C., would not be adopted, among them that Presbyterians who married non-Protestants, particularly Catholics, would rear their children in the Presbyterian Church and have a Presbyterian minister preside over the wedding.

"Better Late" finds it not surprising that President Truman had replaced Francis Biddle as Attorney General with Tom Clark. The President had learned of Mr. Biddle's methods during his Senate days heading the Truman Investigating Committee.

Incidentally, somewhere between the first editorial and this editorial's reference to "Frankie", and today's short story out of the Vatican, we are compelled by irresistible impulse to declare that whether the Butler did it, or perhaps that instead the nine killer dogs—referenced in the letter to the editor anent the pitbull tragedy in Miami reported the previous week and the letter writer's thorough disenchantment with dogs, stating that dogs killed more people than snakes, that a cute little puppy had eaten a hole in a crippled man's stomach, (undoubtedly a figurative myth perpetrated by dog-haters, as everyone who has ever had a puppy knows that they could chew but to bits no more than an old brown shoe), to which the editors responded that they were down on pitbulls, mastiffs, and dachshunds, favored spaniels, shepherds, and terriers, believed Great Danes and St. Bernards ate too much—had more to do with it, or whether it was just the old-fashioned need for bacon, we could not say.

"The New & The Old" examines and finds appropriate the three new appointees to the Cabinet, as more extensively reviewed by Drew Pearson: Tom Clark, Lewis Schwellenbach as Secretary of Labor, and Clifford Anderson as Secretary of Agriculture. That left Harold Ickes at Interior and Henry Morgenthau at Treasury among Roosevelt's early appointees, plus Secretary of State Stettinius, appointed in November, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, appointed in 1940, and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, appointed in May, 1944 at the death of Frank Knox. Robert Hannegan had just been appointed Postmaster General. Former Vice-President Henry Wallace had been confirmed, after a prolonged and controversial fight in the Senate, to the position of Secretary of Commerce prior to the death of President Roosevelt.

"Franco Again" finds many of the questions at San Francisco centering tacitly about Franco's Spain and how it would be treated with the war over in Europe. Mexico wanted all nations whose regimes came to power with the aid of the Axis to be excluded from United Nations membership. Since Germany and Italy had directly aided the Insurgents of Franco in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939, that excluded Franco. Russia would likely support the proposal, as Russia had stood alone in 1936 wanting to intervene to prevent the Insurgency.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Bartel Jonkman of Michigan debating the meat shortage with Congressman Martin Gorski of Illinois, the former asking whether regulation would curtail the black market and alleviate the shortage, the latter responding that regulation could not be adequately enforced as long as there was a meat shortage, that many of the inspectors were on the take from merchants to avert their eyes, that the situation was akin to that during Prohibition.

We might suggest to the 1945 housewife that one should be quite careful of the select grade of meat being purveyed by those independent slaughterhouses, especially those around the outskirts of Chicago in the rural countryside. One should probably first become acquainted with Titus Andronicus before feeding it to one's family, unless there was a preferred outcome by a pre-determined fate.

Drew Pearson praises President Truman's selection of Tom Clark as the new Attorney General, indicating that Mr. Clark had been the crusading head of the war fraud unit of the Justice Department and had developed an impressive record in that capacity, prosecuting many of the cases which the Truman Committee had first brought to light. He had prosecuted Anaconda Copper Co. three times for manufacturing faulty wiring for the military, and the Durham Manufacturing Co. of Fort Wayne, Ind., for covering up cracked shell casings produced for the Navy. He had also convicted the Baker & Lockwood Co. of Kansas City for fraud against the Air Force. Mr. Clark had previously served as assistant attorney general in charge of the anti-trust division and the criminal division.

Marquis Childs remarks on the attacks in California against returning Japanese Americans, either from re-location camps or, in some cases, veterans of the war. There had been 15 reported attacks, four attempted arsons and seven threats.

Samuel Grafton explains the ape-like passion for art possessed by the Nazi leaders, which had come to light from the discovery of their stored collections stolen from various museums and private collections throughout Europe. They had taken 200 million dollars worth of paintings. Hermann Goering was said to have provided his wife's nurse with a painting by Jan Vermeer, "Christ and the Adultress", (as spelled by Mr. Grafton and in the original account), worth at least a million dollars, telling her that she would never again have to worry of money. (This story, as reported in The New York Times in 2009 by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, in a dialogue with Jonathan Lopez, author of a book on the subject, had originated through the Associated Press. The painting, it turned out, was only a good forgery of Vermeer by a Nazi artist named Han Van Meegeren, and was worthless as an objet d'art, save perhaps on the lunar surface. The supposed million-dollar value would have been twelve times that by 2008 had it been an original. Moral: Never take candy from a stranger.)

Mr. Grafton finds the original story instructive of the racketeers the Nazis had been. He finds their motivations and actions comparable to a "Little Caesar". Their concern was ultimately for themselves and their pockets, not for Germany. Their goal was to pillage and loot all of Europe. It was essentially organized gangsterism at the head of State.

But the real story from Germany, he asserts, was the fact that the Junker generals had surrendered without a final stand. The prospect was terrifying because they were seeking to cajole the Allies into believing they could not stabilize Germany without the help of these former handmaidens of the Nazis.

Channing Pollock, in The North American Review, imagines no heaven, writes briefly that he did not care whether heaven exists or not, that he would be bored with streets of gold and did not relish the Buddhist concept of endlessly forgetting in Nirvana. His view of an ideal heaven would be as a place in which one could more deeply appreciate memory and view the earth and the heavens with ten times the thrill as that available from within the material world.

"Anything Goes" presents again some snippets from The American Mercury when H. L. Mencken was its editor.