Site Ed. Note: The front page reports on this date, the last edition of The News before the world would take a profound collective shift in time, that General MacArthur announced that he was in command of the entire Ryukyus and that a large invasion force was being formed in the islands, including Okinawa, to attack Japan.

Get ready.

The change in command status of General MacArthur, made by the Joint Chiefs in Washington, became effective at midnight Tuesday.

Lt. General James Doolittle was still operating, however, from Okinawa under his own independent command. It remained unclear whether Naval air units on Okinawa generally under the command of Admiral Nimitz would pass to the command of General MacArthur.

Raids were being conducted regularly from the islands on Kyushu. The Japanese still held the nearby Sakishima Islands, and the Amami, Tokara, and Osumi groups.

The 100 Mustang raid of the day before by the Army Strategic Air Forces of General Carl Spaatz had targeted rail facilities in the Tokyo area. Six planes were lost. Only ten Japanese interceptors had taken off to resist the raid, the Japanese obviously holding back most of their remaining air force for the land invasion and future kamikaze attacks.

On July 29, a few Japanese kamikaze raiders had struck American ships, sinking one and damaging another, the first successful raid on Okinawa since its fall to the American forces on June 22.

General MacArthur also reported that bad weather prevented new attacks from Okinawa, but that raids on Indo-China and Formosa had continued. He informed that the Far East Air Forces had sunk over a million tons of Japanese shipping since the beginning of 1945, with another half million probably sunk, and 1.3 million tons damaged.

The General further announced that a Japanese hospital ship, marked with red crosses, was found to be carrying arms and 1,500 phony patients, most being able soldiers, after seizure and search in the Banda Sea north of Dutch-Portuguese Timor.

A boarding party from the Allied Seventh Fleet found aboard machineguns, 75 millimeter shells and other ammunition packed in boxes marked "medical supplies".

Another hospital ship, the Takasago Maru, was also hailed and searched for contraband on July 3 and 5 on a voyage from Wake Island, but its 947 Japanese patients were found legitimate and it was sent on its way.

The searches were allowed within the Geneva Convention.

Against U. S. Army charges that the Japanese were deliberately placing prisoner of war camps in strategic locations to avoid bombing, Domei, the Japanese news agency, responded that even if the camps were established on Fujiyama, there would be no safe haven there from American bombing raids, that all of Japan was at risk.

Parenthetically, among the four selected target cities for the deployment of the pair of atom bombs to be dropped as soon as the weather would clear, only Hiroshima was not in proximity to a prisoner of war camp. It was determined, however, that the targets were too vital and the remaining relatively unscathed cities too few to alter the short list.

Domei had reported that American prisoners had been killed in a recent raid by B-29's on Kawasaki. The State Department then responded with the protest. Domei also accused American pilots of bombing shrines, temples, schools, historic relics, hospitals, dwellings and fishing boats.

To the Americans, it claimed, "Japanese paddy fields are anti-tank dugouts, potato fields are mine fields, and shrines and temples are fortresses." It claimed innocent women and children in farming and fishing villages had been indiscriminately bombed.

It also claimed that the big Sea Monster from the deep, with big green scales and breathing fire, would come soon and gobble up all the B-29's, and that all would be happy again in the Temple of the Rising Sun.

The poems of the Empress would keep everyone safe in their beddy-byes.

President Truman was reported to have with him aboard the Augusta the blueprints, approved by the American and British military commanders, for the final defeat of Japan. Discussion had taken place of reallocation of command areas such that Lord Louis Mountbatten would take over the area from the Solomons to a line just below the Philippines, including Singapore and the Malay States, while General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz would be in charge of the Japanese homeland.

General Doolittle had advocated to Congress that an overall Supreme Commander in the Pacific be appointed to speed victory and that the command be provided to General MacArthur.

Just how thick the portfolio was in which the President carried that blueprint was not indicated, but we imagine it to have been rather thin, perhaps, a couple of pages of paper.

In any event, the B-29 headed for Ground Zero was now set to go on Monday, its untested but deadly cargo having been readied, as the weather by then was scheduled to clear of the typhoon.

The "strong, healthy boy" of which Saburo Kurusu had communicated in code to Kamaichi Yamamoto of the Japanese Foreign Ministry on November 27, 1941, as being aborning, had grown to a full 1,337 days of age, and was about to be dropped back home in his native Japan, the country which, along with their pals in Germany, ultimately gave him the spank and spark of life, the Rising Sun.

Madrid radio was broadcasting Spain's indignation at having been excluded from the United Nations Organization by the Potsdam Conference joint statement. It said that Spain was ready to join the concert of nations and must assert itself on the exclusion.

Russians were reported training in military exercises on the Caucasian Front in the Caucasian Mountains.

Pierre Laval continued his testimony at the treason trial of Henri Petain in Paris, stating that he and the Marshal had been forced by the Nazis to speak out against the Allied landings in North Africa in November, 1942. He again contended that it would have been impossible for France to have survived the Nazi occupation without collaboration, that France had fared better than Belgium during the war and had obtained the release of 50,000 French prisoners.

Whether the jurors and Marshal Petain managed to keep their eyes open this date without the aid of toothpicks was not reported.

Another walkout at Wright Aeronautical, this time in the Cincinnati plant, by 4,000 workers, effectively closed the plant employing 23,000, causing the striking or resulting out-of-work labor force to reach more than 80,000. The plant manufactured B-29 engines. The original cause of the walkout was the layoff of 14 aluminum foundry workers, which the union claimed to have been a violation of contract. About 25,000 of the idle workers were in metal-working industries, aluminum and steel.

Don't worry, boys and girls. Come Monday, no matter what Mr. Meany may say, those B-29 engines will become less and less in demand until you are all back pumping gas in Palookaville, should you decide to continue the strikes.

It was disclosed for the first time, from Bad Tolz, Germany, that Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had committed suicide the previous October rather than face Hitler's People's Court to stand trial for his alleged complicity in the July 20 bomb plot against the Fuehrer. The information was imparted by Rommel's 17-year old son, Manfred, to Third Army headquarters. Manfred's father had told him of his intent to take poison, just a few minutes after a visit from Generals Maisel and Burgdorff on October 14, that it would be futile and dangerous to the family for him to appear before the People's Court. The trial before the infamous People's Court had a foregone conclusion for all defendants hauled before it.

The elder Rommel had been informed that nothing would happen to his family in the event of his suicide. Manfred also stated that his father had been wounded on July 17, 1944 at Livarot, France during an American air raid, as had been reported at the time in the press.

A similar statement regarding Rommel's suicide had been provided on June 25 to Allied officers at Wiesbaden by Lt. General Fritz Baverlien, Rommel's former chief of staff.

In Manila, a round-up of a thousand prostitutes in an effort to stem venereal disease among soldiers and sailors had transpired during the previous two days. Two hundred brothels had been placed off limits.

The War Department insisted that Representative Andrew May of Kentucky and the House Military Affairs Committee had been misled into apparently believing that the Army condoned brutality by guards against soldier prisoners. The suspicion was based on a court martial of Army guards who allegedly participated or condoned the beating of a prisoner at the Lincoln, Neb., Army Air Field. One guard had been convicted and four others acquitted in the incident. An officer was also acquitted and the airfield's provost marshal, who Mr. May had wanted charged, was not tried.

In the last of the series of articles on the Nationalists Party of Robert Rice Reynolds, Eugene Segal of the Scripps-Howard newspapers tells, on an inside page, of the attempts of the party to woo to it veterans of the war.

The City of Chicago had endured a rough week. The Central Police Station property vault on the seventh floor had been burglarized the previous weekend, with the thieves making off with $11,000 worth of cash and valuables.

To add to the embarrassing woes, Mayor Ed Kelly's police escort car had been stolen from in front of the home of a detective and used in at least four south side hold-ups before finally being recovered, following a 90 mph chase.

The thieves, however, managed to escape, as did the yeggs of the vault caper.

The news of the fleeing hold-up car had startled the patrolmen who knew the tag number well, M-275, the Boss's special escort.

On the editorial page, "Better Late" recommends to the City Planning Board that it begin the task of designating streets to be widened before approving the erection of new buildings along narrow streets which ultimately would not prove suitable to the post-war traffic patterns sure to come.

"A Poor Rule" comments on a proposed Full Employment bill co-sponsored by Representative Wright Patman of Texas and Senator Robert Wagner of New York, and wonders whether the Government could afford to provide the necessary jobs after the war without going so deeply into debt as to bankrupt the country.

"The Peace" observes that the Potsdam Declaration had not dealt with Japan but nevertheless had set forth the blueprint by which Japan might expect to be treated after the war, by extension from the plans set up for Germany.

The Declaration had reached tough decisions, mandating that Germany have only self-sustaining industries and farming, without any military apparatus. Its heavy industrial equipment was to be removed and used for reparations.

The central government created by Bismarck in 1870 would be dismantled and government reposited under local control. Only such functions as communications and transportation would have a centralized coordinating authority.

Germany's territory would be truncated, with Austria severed and Poland tentatively provided large areas in the East. Poland in turn would lose some of its Eastern territory to Russia.

The formal peace treaty with Germany would await the Council of Foreign Ministers meeting, to begin in London on September 1.

There was also good will in the document shown the people of Germany. While Germany would be reduced to a third or fourth-rate power, it would nevertheless be allowed to survive as a country, albeit one carefully scrutinized during the future to insure its warring past would not be resurrected.

And Italy, Finland, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Hungary were invited to join the United Nations Organization.

Thus, concludes the piece, the Japanese could take some heart from the document.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon seeking to introduce a bill to address the food shortage in the country, but first taking some umbrage at suggestions by Senator Tom Connally of Texas that he was threatening to cut off debate by Senator Aiken of Vermont the next morning unless he were permitted to finish speaking that evening. He wanted to talk about Oregon lambs and address the OPA bungling which had led to the food crisis.

We think Senator Morse got to make his statement about the lambs of Oregon as that was excerpted a few weeks ago, on June 18 to be exact.

But maybe this was a different occasion and another statement about the lambs, or maybe he had been waiting those 45 days since the sacrifice had been set up, to make his statement further about the lambs.

We shall just have to wait and see how it all turns out next week.

We should probably note here that, in December, 1970, as we were watching the River flow, while time passed slowly in the mountains, we purchased from Ed Kelly's a Morse receiver set, with both sides attached, replete with a Garrard encapsulated by the walnut. It enabled receipt of distant communications.

Four and a half years later, one summer afternoon, we disconnected the motor on the Garrard from its one-arm amplification system, which enabled manual turning of the Garrard in either direction while still being able to hear the amplified signals as translated through the diamond to the ceramic, in turn impelling electrons along the four little eensy-weensy wires to the solid state transistors and resistors, ultimately along the other, bigger wires out the back to stimulate the coils, sending vibrations which fluctuated the cloth-impregnated paper in rhythmic cadence, pushing air tonally in waves until reaching our hammers and anvils and stirrups, in turn, sending electro-chemical impulses across the synapses for interpolation and extrapolation inside our welkin, that enabling to occur for the first time exegesis of "Revolution 9", played backwards, to reveal that which we had heard for six years was the case. It also worked on the interstitial space at the end, just before...

But, alas, we are not in the mood for words.

It was also then, incidentally, when we were able for the first time to play the speech of W. J. Cash, delivered June 2, 1941 at the University of Texas commencement exercises, preserved for posterity on seven sides of four records, which play backwards, from the inner groove to the outer groove.

Drew Pearson reports that, because of transportation limitations, G.I.'s in the American Army of occupation in Europe would be unable to bring their wives to Europe even though some of the G.I.'s had been in continuous service abroad for two to three years.

Marquis Childs reports that during the Potsdam Conference, Soviet radio, broadcasting in the Soviet zone of Germany, had maintained an anti-American and anti-British stance against the occupying forces of the other sectors, contending they were collaborating with Fascist and reactionary elements. Mr. Childs finds the effort to signal future problems.

Samuel Grafton comments on the rejection by Japan of the July 26 ultimatum provided by the United States, Britain, and China to surrender or face total destruction. The American voices who had demanded that particular terms of surrender be tendered on the belief that Japan, either the Emperor or the Zaibatsu, the industrial class, might accept, now had to take a seat in silence. It had not worked.

A letter writer, a veteran of World War I with a son serving in World War II, offers that he was disgusted at reading about the plans for compulsory military training. He wondered whether, as with the present draft, the sons of the favored in the country, the politicians and aristocrats, would be exempt while those of the less fortunate were trained and sent into combat. He wonders also whether the men who took war jobs to avoid the draft would be able likewise to escape the compulsory service act. He suggests that such a law would produce a new crop of psycho-neurotics to escape the draft.

Another letter writer, a teacher of organ and music theory at Queens College who was now in service, urges the planned placement of an organ in the prospective new Municipal Auditorium to attract renowned artists.

As Dorman Smith points out, in the context of the British election results of July 26, the world, indeed, was at a Crossroads, whether to go right or to go left.