Nevertheless, it indicates, Charlotte was in the best position it had ever been to proceed on a cash basis and should use ingenuity to fit projects within the cash budget.

During the thick of the fighting through hedgerow country in June and July, it was impossible to predict that a year hence there would be peace in Europe. Even after the penetration beyond St. Low and the rush thence to Paris, the Rhine still seemed an impenetrable barrier which could take years to break.

Though it seemed now long in the past, it had only been a year since the beginning of the end had come in Europe.

Unfortunately, the scantily printed quote is so scarcely discernible as to provide little more than a titillating teaser of what the words were.

Sorry. Censored.

Another part, not printed, stated:

"But [the Post Office officials'] very sincerity makes the record useful as a memorial to commemorate the utter confusion and lack of intelligible standards which can never be escaped when that task [of censorship] is attempted. We believe that the Post Office officials should experience a feeling of relief if they are limited to the more prosaic function of seeing to it that 'neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.'"

Presumably, the part printed on the page came from the same non-offending source as the above, The Saturday Review of Literature for June 16, 1945, which printed the entire opinion, finding it the most important freedom of press case since that in 1933 on the Post Office ban of James Joyce's Ulysses.

New Hampshire Senator Styles Bridges was angry at the decision for it consigning the Congress to be a millionaires' club to assure means of support in addition to the salary.

Senator Bridges, himself, was vice-president and trustee of a bank, treasurer of an agricultural foundation, and director of an insurance company. Most members were likewise situated.

But, other than that, we cannot make it out. If you can, more power to you.

Mr. Pearson then reprints the report of Herbert Pell, until recently the chairman of the Americans on the War Crimes Commission, made to the White House on May 23.

Mr. Pell states that when he went to London in June, 1943, the State Department initially had made life difficult for him, providing an assistant, Lawrence Preuss, who wrote denunciatory letters regarding Mr. Pell to Mr. Sandler of the State Department.

On one occasion, after Mr. Pell had received an eyes-only document from a general, Mr. Preuss had requested copies, which Mr. Pell refused, but granted him permission to read the document. Mr. Pell then caught Mr. Preuss dictating copies to a stenographer, at which point Mr. Pell seized the copies and informed U.S. Ambassador to Britain John Winant of the problem. Mr. Preuss was then returned to the United States but Mr. Pell later discovered that he had been placed in a sensitive position in the State Department and now represented the United States in the delegation at San Francisco.

Mr. Pell, during the summer of 1944, had chaired a committee of the War Crimes Commission which recommended that any crimes committed based on race or religion would be considered war crimes. The committee had dispatched the recommendation to the British Foreign Office and the State Department in late May. No answer was received from either entity.

At the end of the summer, the committee recommended setting up a police organization to apprehend war criminals and to constitute mixed military courts.

Mr. Pell then returned to the United States in December to find inaction on all of the committee's recommendations. He then protested, leading to Congress refusing to appropriate $30,000 for the War Crimes Commission. Mr. Pell was told not to return to London. The State Department, however, maintained a full staff in London, with all of the support necessary for the commission save a salary for the commissioner, $6,000. He offered to work for free, but the offer was refused.

He met with President Roosevelt who told him to return right away to London and set himself up as commissioner. But when he went to the State Depatrment, Mr. Hackworth told him that he could not return, telling him that he was the President's appointee, not the State Department's.

During the intervening four months since that January meeting with the President, nothing had occurred in terms of prosecution of war criminals.

He declared to President Truman in this letter that the result had been harmful to the prestige of the United States in Europe. The millions who had lived under Nazi oppression had looked to America for leadership in getting justice and yet America was doing nothing.

Along with the issues regarding the veto and the Polish government were those of the trusteeships in the Pacific and the admission of Argentina, after which it had been reported that Argentina continued to engage in cruel repression of its citizens with numerous political prisoners in concentration camps.

Assistant Secretary of State Nelson Rockefeller had been primarily responsible for working out the deal for admission of Argentina to the United Nations conference, along with two old guard conservatives, Avia Warren of the State Department and Robert Haddo of the British Embassy in Washington.

Mr. Childs concludes by recalling that, with the end of the European war imminent, many had counseled postponement of the conference beyond its April 25 start date, to avoid the prospect of Allied leaders and foreign ministries becoming preoccupied instead with the duties of constructing the peace in Europe. But conventional wisdom had pressed the conference forward as a now-or-never proposition.

But the Americans and British, he complains, were the exact opposite, with a no-fraternization policy sternly in place while leaving untouched the bulk of the Junkers and industrialists who had caused the war. The one was a function of the other. The West did not want to talk to the Germans because they had no real policy of occupation.

The West had identified only 3,218 war criminals when most observers believed that, for peace and democracy to have a chance in post-war Germany, between 100,000 and 200,000 Nazis had to be eliminated.

But the West appeared, sub silentio, to be adopting a policy which would cultivate a military state in Germany to resist Bolshevism. Yet there was hesitancy about adopting that feeling with respect to Russia as an ally, and so no one talked about it.

Thus far, the entire policy, especially with respect to Russia, was muddled. A Big Three meeting was needed to sort out the problems to avoid a future with two Germanys, one organized and functioning under Russian control, and the other a directionless mess under the West.

In World War I, total American casualties had been 343,422, albeit through only seven months of active fighting, so that casualties in World War II were actually half that per month those in World War I, 24,000 versus 49,000 in the earlier war, with its deadly trench warfare in France. There had been more death from disease, especially flu, during World War I than from battle.

The British had suffered 1,128,315 casualties, of whom 307,201 had been killed, a third of the British casualties of World War I. British civilian casualties amounted to 146,780, of whom 60,585 had been killed and another 86,173 seriously wounded. Canadians had suffered 102,875 casualties, of whom more than 40,000 had been killed.

Between 6 and 7 million Germans had been killed, 6.3 million admitted by Hitler in March, 1945, and another three million seriously wounded, with 3.2 million taken prisoner by the Allies, it being unclear as to whether the figures included civilians. A recent dispatch from Berlin by a correspondent placed the German Army deaths at 3.5 to 4 million, about twice those of the Germans during World War I.

The previous June, it was reported that Russia had suffered 5.3 million killed, missing, or captured. An American dispatch from Berlin four weeks earlier had placed the number of Russian soldiers killed at 6 to 7.5 million, with an equivalent number of dead civilians.

An estimate of the number of killed Chinese soldiers was at 3 million.

The war had cost the Allies thus far a trillion dollars, of which the United States had contributed 280 billion.