N ews in the summer months wasdominated by the invasion of Sicily, which began on July 9 following the bombing and capture of the smaller island of Pantelleria on June 11. It was, Roosevelt announced, the “beginning of the end” for the Axis nations. This was just as well, since on the home front there were signs of growing impatience with the war effort. In June the Smith-Connally anti-strike bill was introduced into Congress to try to outlaw wartime union activity. Although Roosevelt thought the measure too extreme and vetoed it, Congress on June 26 overrode his veto and the bill became law. The domestic squabbles were soon overshadowed by the massive military undertaking in the Mediterranean.

After a news embargo, The Times finally reported on July 11 the start of the invasion. Eisenhower, noted the report, “Rubs His Seven Luck Pieces,” seven old coins (including a gold five guinea piece) that he kept in his pocket as a talisman. Times correspondent Hanson Baldwin later described the Sicily campaign as a strategic compromise, “conceived in dissension, born of uneasy alliance… unclear in purpose.” It was, nevertheless, an immediate success as Allied soldiers swarmed onto the south and east coasts of the island. Ernie Pyle, the veteran war correspondent, went ashore with the Army on a section of coast with no enemy opposition and found that the American soldiers were “thoroughly annoyed” that there was no fighting after days with their adrenalin pumping. Italian soldiers gave up quickly. Pyle thought they looked like people “who had just been liberated rather than conquered.” By mid-July General George Patton’s U.S. forces were pushing toward Palermo while Montgomery’s Eighth Army was approaching Catania, hoping to cut off the remaining German and Italian troops. Progress in the mountainous zones was slow; though Italians surrendered by the thousands, the German Army fought with its trademark skill and tenacity.

The Sicilian campaign temporarily overshadowed the Pacific and Soviet campaigns, but there was evidence in both theaters that the “beginning of the end” was no exaggeration. General MacArthur launched the start of his South Pacific campaign against the Japanese in New Guinea on June 29, hand in hand with further advances in the Solomons after the victory on Guadalcanal. On the Eastern Front Hitler’s armies launched Operation Citadel on July 5 against a large Red Army salient around the Russian city of Kursk. After making slow progress on both sides of the salient, Hitler terminated the operation when news arrived of the invasion of Sicily. The Red Army had held back large reserves that were suddenly released against the retreating Germans. The result was a devastating defeat, as German armies were ejected from Orel, Bryansk and Kharkov by late August. This was the first major defeat inflicted on German forces in good summer campaigning weather and it marked a decisive turning point in the Eastern war.

Meanwhile, the bombing of German and Italian targets continued relentlessly. Operation Gomorrah against Hamburg left 37,000 dead after a week of bombing, which included a deadly firestorm on July 27–28 that incinerated 18,000 people. In Italy the decision was finally taken to bomb Rome, the Eternal City, which had been left unscathed because of the political risks of damaging its cultural heritage or accidentally striking Vatican City. On July 19 a Times correspondent, Herbert Matthews, flew in one of the bombers to record the operation against the San Lorenzo and Littorio marshaling yards and the Ciampino air base. The headline the following day ran “Times Man from Air Sees Shrines Spared,” though Rome’s Basilica of San Lorenzo was, in fact, badly damaged. Six days later Mussolini was overthrown by a revolt of the army and some Fascist Party leaders. The Times, like many other papers, assumed that the bombing must have accelerated the decision to stage a coup, but it did not yet mean that Italy would surrender.

JUNE 2, 1943

MANY WOMEN SHOW WAR WORK STRAIN

Signs of Fatigue, Loneliness and Sense Of Instability Noted in USO Survey

HOUSING HELD BIG FACTOR

Also Sanitation, Recreation—Trailers Present A Variety of Special Problems

Women in war jobs in various areas are beginning to show signs of fatigue and emotional strain, according to Miss Florence Williams, director of health and recreation for the United Service Organizations division of the National Young Women’s Christian Association, who returned yesterday from a six-month field trip through centers in the East, South and Midwest. She is now drafting a program to aid women white collar and factory workers.

That old adage about “all work and no play” is in evidence among women workers in factories and offices, Miss Williams said. She has noted distinct signs of loneliness and a sense of instability.

“Last year,” she continued, “most women regarded taking war jobs as a game. Today it has become a serious business. Women are showing visible signs of fatigue. In many communities, they just work and go to bed; work and go to bed. They aren’t living right or eating right. And many are working under the misapprehension that it is unpatriotic to have a good time.”

Working the file room of the FBI, 1943.

THE PRINCIPAL PROBLEMS

Chief problems noted by Miss Williams were inadequate housing facilities, with girls having to do their laundry in a tiny cubicle that is also the only place where they can receive men visitors: lack of washrooms and adequate cafeterias in both dormitories and plants; locations that offer no form of amusement or relaxation; high cost of food; long hours and too frequent changes of women workers from “graveyard” shifts to swing shifts.

Another problem arises from trailers that wind their way across the country. As many as 350 were found in one Kansas war plant community, with only seventy of these units filled.

Miss Williams, in consulting some of these families, found a distinct contrast between their point of view and that of the community. The trailerites consider themselves modern pioneers, carrying on the tradition of the covered wagon. Towns where they set down their caravans, however, frequently frown upon them. Consequently the women in the trailer colonies are lonely and unhappy, with difficulty in obtaining food added to their social problems.

The USO, Miss Williams said, is helping these colonists set up their own community law and planning committees. For those whose knowledge of child care and sanitation is deficient, the USO conducts child-care classes and teaches mothers, some as young as 16, how to enforce sanitary laws.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO ‘MELTING POT’

Miss Williams stressed, however, that persons of widely differing cultures are living in trailers parked right beside each other, and that with each group contributing its native games and customs, the trailer colony is adding to the melting pot qualities of American democracy.

Housing conditions in certain areas of Texas are so poor that women war workers have to wade through mud to get to and from their dormitories. In one part of Ohio, the only recreational center is a USO clubhouse, consisting of two rooms over stores twelve miles from the industrial dormitories.

JUNE 6, 1943

JAPANESE EXCEL IN U.S. COMBAT UNIT

American-Born and Nizei from Hawaii Are Setting Mark at Camp Shelby, Miss.

GROUPS ARE SHOCK TROOPS

Officers Praise Highly Their Zeal for Military Training, Sports and Sociability

Special to The New York Times.

CAMP SHELBY, Miss., June 5 —Spiritedly conforming to its regimental motto, the Japanese-American Combat Team is rapidly taking shape here on the red clay drill fields of southern Mississippi. Japanese by ancestry but Americans by speech, customs and ideals, the several thousand Nisei from Hawaii and War Relocation Centers on the mainland are training for the day when they can fight shoulder-to-shoulder with other Americans against a common enemy.

“Go for Broke” is the motto they have inscribed on their self-designed and officially approved coat of arms. It is soldier slang born of dice games, and it means “shoot the works,” or risk all on the big venture before them. It was no idly chosen phrase. The Japanese-Americans realize they have perhaps more at stake in this war than the average soldier. They have known from the beginning they would be under close public scrutiny, each soldier—in the words of their commanding officer—“a symbol of the loyalty of the Japanese-American population” in our country.

WELL SUITED TO COMBAT TEAMS

By temperament, character and zeal they are admirably suited for a combat team. A combat team is a small, streamlined army able to fight its own battles without aid from other forces. The Infantry calls them combat teams, the Armored Forces call them combat commands and the Navy calls them task forces. They do essentially the same thing—specific jobs, operating often independently of other units.

The Nisei are proud to be chosen for a combat team. Young, mostly unmarried and with all the makings of combat team troops, they are keen for action and anxious to make good. Among themselves they boast they have “a year and three minutes to live—a year of training and three minutes of action.” Already they have the psychology of shock troops.

Officers training the Japanese-Americans without exception praise the attitude and early soldierly bearing of the Nisei. For the most part these officers are having their first contact with soldiers of Japanese ancestry. Said one lieutenant: “Once in a while you may have to tell them something twice, but not often. They are so eager to learn they are constantly attentive and usually get it the first time.” Another company officer commented: “I’ve been in the Army twenty-six months and I’ve never seen a group of soldiers with less griping than this organization. And as for profanity, it simply doesn’t exist.”

About thirty company officers are Nisei, the rest Caucasian.

AVID FOR MANUAL OF STUDY

Even off the drill field, the Nisei constantly seek to better themselves by study of manuals and technical books. One bookstore in nearby Hattiesburg is reported to have done about $2,000 worth of business during the first month after the arrival of the Japanese-Americans, selling them textbooks and other works on military subjects, some at prices ranging up to $5 apiece. Recently during a weekend visit of 100 Japanese-American girls from a Relocation Center in Arkansas a sizable group of Nisei were observed in a nearby field practicing grenade throwing, entirely aloof to the presence of femininity.

The Nisei are proud, too, that the Combat Team is 100 per cent an organization of volunteers. In fact, thousands more volunteered than the prescribed quota. Many applicants who were turned down actually wept in disappointment. Many quit high-paying jobs in Hawaii to enlist, and some left wives and children in the islands.

Typical, too, is the reasoning of Private Tadashi Morimoto of Honolulu, a social worker, a graduate of the New York School of Social Work. Private Morimoto in 1940 served six months in the Psychiatric Clinic of the Manhattan Children’s Court in New York. “In Hawaii,” he said, “I met a soldier from New York. He was homesick for his wife and children. He said he hoped for nothing more than an early victory so he could return to civilian life, enjoy his family and his old job. Suddenly it occurred to me that this soldier not only wanted the very things I did, but he was willing to fight for them. Why then should I sit back and let someone else fight for the rights and privileges I myself cherish? I didn’t want anyone else to do my fighting for me. My wife concurred, so I enlisted for the Combat Team.”

From a mainland volunteer came this succinct statement: “We are anxious to show what real lovers of American democracy will do to preserve it. Our actions will speak for us more than words.”

On the post the Japanese Americans already have made a name for themselves in athletics, with their musical talent and in war bond buying. The Combat Team, in two days and with no more than a suggestion from company commanders, bought $101,550 worth of war bonds, putting their cash on the barrelhead.

The Combat Team has two baseball teams, both near the top of one of Shelby’s leagues.

Sentiment, too, runs high among the troops from Hawaii. On Mother’s Day they sent 247 telegrams to the islands at an average cost of $2 a message. A thousand more sent air-mail letters, and many others inquired about personal telephone calls.

Commanding the Combat Team is Colonel Charles W. Pence, who was born in Illinois and served overseas in the First World War in the Fourth Division. Colonel Pence also served for four years with the famous Fifteenth (Can Do) Infantry Regiment in China. Before coming here last February he commanded a regiment at Fort McClellan, Alabama.

Second in command is Lieutenant Colonel Merritt B. Booth, also born in Illinois but who entered West Point from New York and came to the Combat Team from foreign service.

JUNE 12, 1943

ALLIES PLANT FLAG ON FIRST MEDITERRANEAN STEPPING-STONE

ISLAND IS OCCUPIED

The Italian ‘Gibraltar’ is Knocked Out By Record Avalanche of Bombs

ALL GUNS SILENCED

Troops Take Over in 22 Minutes as New Design in Warfare Emerges

By DREW MIDDLETON
By Wireless to The New York Times.

ALLIED HEADQUARTERS IN NORTH AFRICA, June 11 —Blasted into ruins by hundreds of tons of bombs, the Italian island of Pantelleria, the last Axis stronghold in the Sicilian Strait, surrendered to overwhelming Allied air power this morning rather than endure another day of death and destruction under the most concentrated aerial attack in the history of warfare.

Allied assault craft darted ashore at noon soon after air crews had sighted a white cross of surrender on the airfield and cruisers and destroyers that supported the landing had spied a white flag flying from Semafore Hill, 2,000 yards from the Harbor of Pantelleria. There was slight resistance from Axis troops, dazed by thirteen days of continuous bombing, and all primary objectives were reached by 12:22 P.M. [London estimates placed the garrison at 8,000 Italians, The Associated Press said.]

It was evident that the island was so disorganized by the bombing and frequent shelling by British cruisers and destroyers that news of the surrender had failed to reach all the enemy troops on the island although the commander had surrendered by displaying the white flag and white cross.

GERMAN DIVE-BOMBERS ROUTED

British troops scrambled up the rocky beaches past wrecked gun batteries—the last enemy gun was silenced by dusk yesterday—and the people of the island crept from shelters to watch with eyes dulled by fear.

[Within an hour after the surrender of Pantelleria, fifty to sixty German dive-bombers attempted to break up the landing forces, but Americans in Lightning fighters routed the Germans, forcing them to jettison their bombs haphazardly in flight, The Associated Press reported. An Algiers broadcast said that naval and infantry casualties in the occupation were negligible.]

The major share of credit for opening the first breach in Italy’s chain of island strongholds goes to air power, such air power as never before had been concentrated on a target of similar size.

The climax came yesterday when more bombs were dropped on the island than were dropped in the entire month of April on all targets in Tunisia, Sicily, Sardinia and Italy.

As great a weight of bombs was unloaded on the island in the intensified aerial offensive from May 29 to June 10 as was dropped on all targets in the African theatre in the month of May. And this round-the-clock assault was preceded by six days of heavy intermittent attacks.

YIELDED AFTER THIRD DEMAND

The capitulation in the form of the white cross on the airfield came as formations of Flying Fortresses, Mitchells and Marauders were over the island. Two previous requests to surrender were ignored by the commander of the Axis garrison. Once emblems of surrender were sighted by the Allied air and naval forces [at 11:40 A.M., according to The Associated Press], the Allied military commander started occupation of the island.

[The surrender also was made known by Admiral Paresseni, senior Italian officer on the island, in a message to an American air base, saying, “Beg surrender through lack of water,” The Associated Press said.]

Lieut. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commander in Chief of the Allied forces in North Africa, and Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham, Naval Commander in Chief for the Mediterranean, were on the bridge of the famous British cruiser Aurora when she led a fleet of four other cruisers and eight destroyers in the bombardment of Pantelleria on Tuesday. The Aurora steamed close inshore to test the fire of the Italian shore batteries.

SHELLS HIT NEAR CRUISER

The Allied Commander in Chief and Admiral Cunningham watched the dramatic naval and air assault, which came to a climax at noon when motor torpedo boats dashed into the harbor of Pantelleria on a test run. While the squadron was waiting for the small craft to reappear, shells from the big Italian shore batteries fell within 300 yards of the Aurora.

When the naval bombardment and aerial pounding were over for the day, General Eisenhower said there was “no doubt” that the island would fall “once the infantry gets in their part.”

The surrender was the first in the war by a fortress of the size of Pantelleria to air power supported by sea power, without serious action by ground forces.

American bombers and fighter bombers, which bore the main weight of the Allied attacks on Pantelleria, also contributed heavily to the campaign of attrition against the Axis fighters in this theatre. Thirty-seven enemy fighters were shot down by American airmen over Pantelleria yesterday. In the last thirteen days of the offensive seventy-eight enemy planes were destroyed in combat against an Allied loss of twelve.

The shattering attack delivered yesterday eclipsed anything done before in this theatre. The greatest number of Flying Fortresses ever employed in this area led the attack on the island, dropping hundreds of thousand-pound bombs. It is estimated that well over a thousand sorties were flown by the Allied airmen. The assaults, which started with dawn and ended at the approach of dusk and a thunder-storm, dropped a load of bombs that no other target of similar size ever sustained in one day. The night before heavily loaded Wellington medium bombers and Hurricane fighter-bombers of the Royal Air Force had hammered the island as a prelude to the great assault to come.

During the day traffic over the island, which was marked by a heavy cloud of smoke that lay above it, was so heavy that the bomber formations had to circle the island waiting their turn to make “a pass” at the target.

British troops in Sicily, 1943.

The aerial offensive against Pantelleria was “a test-tube attack” that went beyond the original objective of battering the island defenses to a point where A1lied troops could land to force complete surrender of the island. Although sea power gave valuable support and the ground forces were ready when the time came, it was air power that conquered the vital, strongly defended fortress.

GREAT POWER THROWN AT TARGET

In the culmination of the air attack yesterday Flying Fortresses, Marauders, Mitchells, Bostons, Baltimores, Lightning and War-hawk fighter-bombers and Spitfire fighters from the Allied air forces took part in day-long attacks.

The progress of the offensive was worked out on a mathematical pattern, with the weight of bombs and number of aircraft gradually increased each day from May 29 until the knockout punch was delivered yesterday and this morning following the refusal of the island’s commander to surrender. Another request for unconditional surrender had been dropped on the island yesterday after the two previous ones had been ignored.

Hundreds of hits were made on military installations, batteries, range finders, barracks and gun positions all during yesterday’s bombing. Several large explosions, probably the result of bombs hitting ammunition dumps, were reported.

When the Boston, Baltimore and Mitchell bombers of the United States Army Air Force and Royal Air Force began their attacks yesterday morning they found antiaircraft fire was negligible and encountered no enemy fighters. Between sorties by light and medium bombers, fighter-bombers attacked targets at fifteen-minute intervals, sweeping in at low level to top off the destruction started by high-level attacks.

Pilots and crews returned from Pantelleria impressed by the destruction down below. First Lieutenant Melvin Pool of Durant, Okla., called it “a damned good show” and said he believed the Fortresses “had the bases loaded and knocked a home run.” Wellingtons attacking the night before had started several fires, some of them very large, in the Pantelleria harbor area.

Studded with heavy gun batteries well concealed in and behind cliffs along the coast, Pantelleria was believed impregnable by the Italians. Benito Mussolini wrapped the island in a cloak of secrecy after 1937, when he announced that naval and air bases were being built there. Landings were forbidden on the island except for Italian military, naval and air personnel, and a decree forbade flight over it or adjoining territorial waters.

Bit by bit this island fortress, two-thirds the size of Malta, was knocked apart. Bombers, began by wrecking the airfield in the early days of the offensive, destroying numerous planes on the ground.

Then every ship in the harbor either was sunk or damaged so severely that she was useless.

Gun batteries were next. One by one the emplacements were bombed by Flying Fortresses and medium bombers, while fighter-bombers attacked from lower levels. Meanwhile, a complete sea blockade was achieved and the enemy fighter fleet based on Sicily was unable to check the steady progress of the offensive.

The enemy made his greatest defensive effort yesterday in the day of aerial operations that undoubtedly will become a classical example of the exertion of air power.

ENEMY ATTACKS FROM SICILY

Drawing from fighter squadrons based on-Sicily, the enemy attacked Allied bombers heavily from mid-morning to dusk. Marauders of the Strategic Air Force and an escort of Warhawks were intercepted over Pantelleria by Axis fighters. The Warhawks got five enemy planes and the bombers destroyed one in a running fight that lasted from the target to near the African coast at Cap Bon.

Captain Ralph Taylor of Durham, N.C., shot down two Messerschmitt 109’s in this engagement.

American Spitfire pilots of the Tactical Air Force destroyed twelve Italian and German aircraft. One squadron knocked five enemy planes out of the skies in the morning while another squadron of the same group shot down seven more in the late afternoon. The group as a whole destroyed seventeen aircraft June 9 and 10, and lost only one plane.

Thirteen Macchi 202’s dived on Allied bombers that the Spitfires were escorting to open the afternoon battle. The Spitfires gave chase and intercepted the Italians before they reached the bombers. The dogfight was joined by six Messerschmitt 109’s and three Focke-Wulf 190’s.

The Italians were being knocked down so fast that the Spitfire squadron commander, Major Frank Hill of Hillsdale, N.J., said he counted four enemy parachutes in the air at one time.

“And down below us,” he added, “I could see I don’t know how many splashes in the Mediterranean where their aircraft were crashing,” Major Hill destroyed a Macchi 202, his sixth victory of the war.

Lightning fighter-bombers led by Lieut. Col. John Stevenson, West Point graduate from Laramie, Wyo., fought a brief action with several Messerschmitts, destroying one. So many pilots pumped lead into an enemy plane that it “went down as a squadron victory, and that makes everybody happy,” according to Colonel Stevenson.

Altogether twenty-six of thirty-seven enemy aircraft destroyed over Pantelleria were knocked down by the Tactical Air Force. Marauders of the Coastal Air Force operating near the coast of Italy yesterday shot down two Messerschmitt 109’s, increasing the day’s victory total to thirty-nine. Six Allied planes were lost.

The highest scorer in the American Spitfire unit is Lieutenant Sylvan Feld of Lynn, Mass., who on June 6 shot down a German plane to bring his total of victories to nine, all scored since March 22.

JUNE 20, 1943

CRITICAL PERIOD AT HAND IN HOME-FRONT CONFLICT

War Crises in Mining, Wages, Food and Inflation Reflect Uncertainties Of the National Effort

BYRNES, BARUCH TO THE FORE

By ARTHUR KROCK

WASHINGTON, June 19 —The most critical period on the home front since the United States entered the war is at hand. Whatever may be the immediate solutions of such emergent matters as the wages of the United Mine Workers, some weeks must elapse before it will be possible to determine with certainty whether the Administration will be able to support the military forces with supplies produced at an expanding rate and at anywhere near the present levels of cost.

On the outcome of the group conflicts now raging depend also the morale of the home front and, to some extent, that of the armed services. Conditions in the various areas of dispute which constitute a battlefield on which the struggle will, in the next few weeks, be won, lost or compromised—harmfully or destructively—are about as follows:

Food —Unfavorable weather, a price system in several respects ill-conceived, depletion of farm manpower, restriction of farm machinery and of the reproductive elements in agriculture have combined with a loose and confused administration of food controls by Washington to bring about a menacing situation. Among examples of what is happening in this sector is a report by Senator Scott Lucas of Illinois that farmers are holding 900,000,000 bushels of corn in their bins awaiting a price adjustment; a depressing crop report by the Department of Agriculture, and an assertion by Chester C. Davis, Food Administrator, that serious food shortages are certain. It has been predicted that between the time of the next spring planting and the 1944 harvest some of these shortages will be acute.

REFORMS MAY BE FORCED

Many remedies have been proposed, and some will be attempted during the critical period on which the nation is now entering. There are definite signs that the War Department has revised downward the size of the Army planned for the end of 1943, which should relieve the drain on the manpower that produces and processes food. The President has rejected proposals that all Federal food controls be merged under the Secretary of Agriculture, replacing the incumbent, Claude Wickard, with Mr. Davis; and he has also declined to break up the Office of Price Administration or cause a revolutionary change in its pricing policies.

Plans are proceeding to institute a broad system of Federal subsidies to maintain consumer prices of certain foods and push down the prices of others to the level of several months ago. No one authority agrees with another as to the ultimate cost of such a program, the guesses ranging from Price Administrator Prentiss Brown’s of less than a billion to the President’s of a three billions maximum. Food-producing groups, their spokesmen in Congress and outside citizens who fear that politics will mix with economies in the use of subsidies are resisting the project But the general belief is that the present limited subsidy program will be expanded by the Administration in an effort to win the adherence of organized labor to the President’s hold-the-line program.

A store clerk next to a sign supporting government-controlled prices during the war.

Wages —Despite the common national peril and military effort, the attitude of organized labor toward legal restraints invited by its own excesses and toward the employing group remains hostile. Only this week A. F. Whitney, president of the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, denounced the railroad managers as swollen with war profits and conspiring to create the greatest monopoly in American history after the war has ended. He said that in opposing wage increases and rate decreases at the same time, the managers are about “as reasonable as an alley-cat with a hunk of raw meat.”

ATMOSPHERE OF HOSTILITY

This same atmosphere of hostility between employees and employers surrounds other industrial areas in a time when good-will would amount to a military asset. Mr. Whitney is known as a “maverick,” not representative of the general attitude of railway labor.

Yet his outburst, coming from a source where labor relations have been more harmonious than in any other, emphasizes the spread of ill-feeling. The President has done much to foster economic and social class resentment, and in this respect his own chickens are coming home to roost. But it is the whole country and the war program that must pay the price.

The philippics of John L. Lewis toward the employers of coal miners have been almost a part of the daily news record for the last few weeks. In purple phrases he has drawn a picture of hungry workers and undernourished children, victims of rich and heartless coal operators who would be complimented by the names of war profiteer, cormorant or vulture. This language is only part of Mr. Lewis’ tactics when he is fighting for a wages rise. But the effect on the workers is to stimulate a feeling of bitterness toward those who pay their wages, and this contributes to the critical situation in which the nation finds itself. How much it is ameliorated by the reiteration Friday of the “no strike” pledge by Van Bittner, Daniel Tobin and other labor leaders remains to be seen.

WEIGHING THE REMEDIES

As this is written, and probably when it shall have been published, the ultimate solutions of the conflicts over mine wages and the anti-strike bill are not in sight, though stop-gap methods may be discovered in the interim. But not for some time will it be possible to measure the effects or durability of the remedies. And only when that measurement can be made with some accuracy will it be discerned whether the American people have passed from a most critical period into a worse one, or into improved conditions that will make it possible to hasten victory and keep down the cost in life and treasure.

Mr. Lewis defied the jurisdiction of the War Labor Board, and, braced by the President through the Office of War Mobilization, by Congress with the anti-strike bill and by many evidences of popular support, the board stood firm against Mr. Lewis. If he is routed by the various processes, his power as a labor leader will be destroyed for some time, perhaps forever. But his tactics have brought him to the point where his rout must be total or he will continue to make difficulties in labor ranks and prolong the critical period. He has won every other battle in which he has engaged since the President took office, at first within and then without the political structure of the Administration. This fact will impel sound observers to make more than an instant test of the effects on Mr. Lewis’ influence of events in the next few days.

THE BATTLE OF INFLATION

Inflation —This dubious battle will be decided in the areas of conflict over food, prices and wage controls as outlined above. As they go, it will go.

Next to the President, the burden of resolving the critical period into one of progress falls upon James F. Byrnes, chairman of OWM. But signs are innumerable that the country is looking behind him to his eminent official adviser, B. M. Baruch. If the line holds and goes forward, the pair will be given credit for much of the victory, and vice versa. But if the line is broken, by Presidential concessions and related causes, Mr. Baruch will be expected either to accept a share of the blame or divest himself of it by retiring from his first official post since 1920.

JUNE 21, 1943

Escort Carrier Helps Convoys Win Five-Day Battle with U-Boat Packs

New Type of Protective Vessel Instrumental In Destruction of Enemy Raiders—Land-Based Planes Also Play Big Part

By JAMES MacDONALD
By Cable to The New York Times.

LONDON, June 20 —Illustrating why the month of May was one of the best for Atlantic convoys to Britain since the closing days of 1941, officials gave out today an exciting account of a bitter five-day fight against enemy U-boats in which warships and planes from a carrier and shore stations sank two submarines, probably destroyed three more and are believed to have damaged many others.

Ranging over hundreds of miles of ocean, including the particularly dangerous area in mid-Atlantic beyond the reach of land-based planes, the struggle marked one of the fiercest and most sustained attempts ever undertaken by U-boat packs to prevent ships and supplies from reaching this country. The ships were so well protected that the majority of the U-boats were kept well out of the range of their intended victims. Some did get within range, however, but they scored on only 3 per cent of the vast merchant fleet involved.

A new technique in anti-submarine warfare was responsible for the fact that the losses were small, considering the intensity of the attack. An important role was played by one of the British Navy’s newest weapons—the pocket aircraft carrier, known officially as the escort carrier.

This vessel was H.M.S. Biter, a former merchant ship built in the United States and transformed into a floating air base for the special purpose of closing the “air gap” in mid-Atlantic where U-boats were formerly immune to blows from the air. The Biter was commanded by Captain Abel Smith, a kinsman of Queen Elizabeth and former equerry to King George. He was a member of the royal party on its tour of Canada and the United States in 1939.

The fight began, according to a joint communiqué issued by the Admiralty and the Air Ministry, when two U-boats in a big pack were sighted far out in the Atlantic by navy planes that had taken off from the Biter. The planes attacked the submarines with depth charges and machine-gun fire, forcing them to dive.

Later, after the convoy had proceeded so far that it was within reach of land-based planes, its protection was increased by Royal Air Force Coastal Command forces. First blood was drawn by an RAF Liberator, which disabled one U-boat while it was fifteen miles from the surface ships.

Meanwhile, Navy planes were busy with another U-boat. They sent word to H.M.S. Broadway—formerly the U.S.S. Hunt, one of the fifty destroyers transferred to Britain in 1940—and the frigate Lagan, one of Britain’s latest-type special-duty warships, and guided them to the scene. The destroyer and the frigate took turns attacking the submarine. The Broadway struck twice, and, after its second attack, there were muffled undersea explosions that shot wreckage bearing German markings to the surface. The communiqué said that the U-boat was considered sunk.

As the hours wore on, more Coastal Command planes, including Flying Fortresses, Catalinas and Sunderlands, arrived to protect convoys. Further fights with submarines followed in quick succession. In one of these actions, the destroyer Pathfinder hurled depth charges at a U-boat that surfaced for a brief moment and then disappeared beneath the waves. Its fate was not determined. Later, a Sunderland plane guided the Lagan and the Canadian corvette Drumheller, which has been on active service in the Battle of the Atlantic for three years, to a U-boat that received similar treatment. The spot where that submarine had been seen going down was covered by wreckage and a steadily widening oil slick that covered an area of almost four square miles the next day.

While these scraps were going on, another convoy found itself threatened by a U-boat pack ahead of it. The destroyer Hesperus sighted one enemy submarine on the surface, steering straight for the convoy. The Hesperus commenced an attack with gunfire, scoring repeated hits and blowing the U-boat’s gun-crew into the sea.

Closing in for the kill, the Hesperus let go depth charges. The U-boat either dived or sank out of control. The destroyer threshed across the spot where the enemy had last been seen, dropping a final “pattern” for good measure. The submarine’s fate was uncertain.

Soon afterward the Hesperus spotted another U-boat on the surface. She attacked the enemy with gunfire, then rammed him and probably destroyed him. While the submarine was being gunned, several members of its crew were seen jumping overboard. Whether they were rescued was not reported. The next day the Hesperus attacked still another U-boat, which disappeared amid an oil slick and floating wreckage. Meanwhile, aircraft maintained unceasing patrol over and in the vicinity of the convoys, compelling the undersea raiders to remain submerged well out of harm’s way and to lose track of the prospective victims.

JUNE 26, 1943

CONGRESS REBELS

President Is Defeated by 56 to 25 In Senate, 244–108 in House

SWIFT VOTE TAKEN

Criminal Penalties Are Made Law, But 30-Day Strike Vote Is Set

By W. H. LAWRENCE
Special to The New York Times.

WASHINGTON, June 25 —A rebellious Congress, angered by three coal strikes and other sporadic interruptions of war production, quickly overrode President Roosevelt’s veto today and enacted into law the Smith-Connally anti-strike bill requiring thirty days’ notice in advance of strike votes and providing criminal penalties for those who instigate, direct or aid strikes in government-operated plants or mines.

The Senate voted 56 to 25 to make the bill law despite the Chief Executive’s disapproval. The House voted 244 to 108 immediately afterward. Both votes were well over the constitutional requirement of a two-thirds majority to override a veto.

Both Houses acted not only quickly, but with a minimum of discussion to reject the President’s warning that the measure would stimulate labor unrest, give governmental sanction to strike agitation, and foment slowdowns and strikes.

HOW THE PARTIES DIVIDED

In the Senate, twenty-nine Democrats, including the acting Majority Leader, Senator Lister Hill of Alabama, and twenty-seven Republicans voted to override the President’s veto, and nineteen Democrats, five Republicans and one Progressive voted to sustain it.

Of the Senators who voted after the veto message had been read and who had been recorded on the conference committee report, not one changed his vote as a result of Presidential disapproval of the measure. Senator Joseph Ball, Republican, of Minnesota, who had been paired for the bill but did not vote at the time the conference committee report was taken up, voted to sustain the veto.

In the House 130 Republicans and 114 Democrats voted against the President. Of those who voted to sustain the veto, sixty-seven were Democrats, thirty-seven were Republicans, two Progressives, one Farmer-Laborite and one member of the American Labor party. Advocates of the bill gained twenty-five votes between approval of the conference committee report and the veto action, while opponents of the measure lost twenty-one supporters.

LAW GOES INTO EFFECT AT ONCE

The measure, which had been bitterly opposed by all organized labor, is effective immediately and until six months after the conclusion of the war, and contains these provisions:

The President receives authority to take immediate possession of plants, mines or other production facilities affected by a strike or other labor disturbance.

Wages and other working conditions in effect at the time a plant is taken over by the Government shall be maintained by the Government unless changed by the National War Labor Board at the request of the Government agency or a majority of the employees in the plant.

Persons who coerce, instigate, induce, conspire with or encourage any person to interfere by lockout, strike, slowdown or other interruption with the operation of plants in possession of the Government, or who direct such interruptions or provide funds for continuing them shall be subject to a fine of not more than $5,000, or to imprisonment for not more than one year, or both. The penalty clause does not apply to those who merely cease work or refuse employment.

SUBPOENA POWER FOR NWLB

The NWLB receives subpoena power to require attendance of parties to labor disputes, but NWLB members are forbidden to participate in any decision in which the member has a direct interest as an officer, employee or representative of either party to the dispute.

Employees of war contractors must give to the Secretary of Labor, the NWLB and the National Labor Relations Board notice of any labor dispute which threatens seriously to interrupt war production and the NLRB is required on the thirtieth day after notice is given to take a secret ballot of the employees on the question of whether they will strike.

Labor organizations, as well as national banks and corporations organized by authority of Federal law, are forbidden to make political contributions in any election involving officials of the National Government, with the organization subject to a fine of not more than $5,000 for violating the act and the officers subject to a fine of not more than $1,000 or imprisonment for not more than one year, or both.

The President waited the full ten days of the constitutional period before vetoing the measure which was sent to him by a 219-to-129 House vote and 55-to-22 Senate vote. At 3:13 P.M. his veto message was read to the Senate, and by 5:28 P.M. the measure was law.

SENATE IS FIRST TO ACT

The Senate acted first, with Senator Connally of Texas taking the floor to say:

“I am sorely disappointed. The Senate is sorely disappointed. The House, I am sure, is disappointed. The people of the United States by an overwhelming majority are disappointed. The soldiers and sailors wherever they may be, on land, on the sea, in the air, all over this globe are disappointed.

“The section of the bill to which the President objected was in the House provisions.

“The President has a right to veto legislation. The Senate has a right to pass a bill over the veto.

“I hope that the Senate now will exercise its constitutional privilege.”

Senator Carl Hatch, Democrat of New Mexico, seconded the motion, and the roll-call began.

When the vote was announced as 56 to 25 to override, there was applause from the galleries, led by men in uniform.

The large House majority in favor of overriding was apparent as soon as word of the Senate action reached it. A Commodity Credit Corporation extension and modification bill was up for consideration and members immediately began to move that this either be laid aside or that debate close and immediate action be taken on it, thus to clear the way for consideration of the veto.

APPEAL FOR ACTION CHEERED

Representative Clifton Woodrum, Democrat, of Virginia, received repeated applause and cheers for his plea for “action, not tomorrow, not Monday, but today, so that we can send the message to our boys in the foxholes that the American people are behind them.”

Chairman Andrew J. May of the House Military Affairs Committee, which brought out the original draft of changes in the Senate bill to which the President objected so vigorously, repeated the same thought, bringing objections that he was out of order and “trying to create a lynching spirit in the House.” The latter assertion came from Representative Vito Marcantonio, American Labor, of New York.

Apparently sensing the House insistence on action today, Representative John W. McCormack of Massachusetts, the majority leader, quickly promised that the veto message would be taken up as soon as the pending bill was dis-posed of. Delaying tactics by other Administration supporters in seeking record votes on amendments to the CCC bill failed to find sufficient House support to be effective and a motion made at 4:50 that the House adjourn was overwhelmingly shouted down. The veto message was then read, and the vote taken immediately.

SAYS STRIKES WON’T BE TOLERATED

The President’s veto message firmly declared that the Executive would not countenance strikes in wartime and was conciliatory in its approach to Congress.

Declaring it was the will of the people that for the duration of the war all labor disputes shall be settled by orderly, legally established procedures, and that no war work shall be interrupted by strike or lockout, the President said that the no-strike, no-lockout pledge given by labor and industry after Pear1 Harbor “has been well kept except in the case of the leaders of the United Mine Workers.” During 1942, he said, the time lost by strikes averaged only 5/100ths of 1 per cent of the total man-hours worked, a record which he declared had never before been equalled in this country and which was as good or better than the record of any of our allies in the war.

He conceded that laws often are necessary “to make a very small minority of people live up to the standards that the great majority of the people follow” and in this connection he cited the recent coal strike.

FAVORS FIRST SEVEN SECTIONS

Analyzing the bill, section by section, he said that the first seven sections, “broadly speaking,” incorporate into statute the existing machinery for settling labor disputes and provide criminal penalties for those who instigate, direct or aid a strike in a government-operated plant or mine. Had the bill been limited to this subject matter, he said that he would have signed it.

His principal objection was to the eighth section, which, he said, would foment slowdowns and strikes. That section provides a thirty-day notice before a vote to strike can be taken under supervision of the National Labor Relations Board, and, while Congressional sponsors called this a “cooling off” period, Mr. Roosevelt contended that it “might well become a boiling period” during which workers would devote their thoughts and energies to getting pro-strike votes instead of turning out war material. “In wartime we cannot sanction strikes with or without notice,” he declared. “Section 8 ignores completely labor’s ‘no-strike’ pledge and provides, in effect, for strike notices and strike ballots. Far from discouraging strikes, these provisions would stimulate labor unrest and give government sanction to strike agitations.”

DRAFT CHANGE RECOMMENDED

The President was highly critical also of Section 9, which prohibits, during the war, political contributions by labor organizations. This section, he remarked, “obviously has no relevancy” to an anti-strike bill. If the prohibition on trade union political contributions has merit, he expressed the belief that it should not be confined to the war. Congress, he added, might also give careful consideration to extending the ban to other non-profit organizations.

The President reiterated his recommendation that the Selective Service Act be amended to provide noncombat military service for persons up to the age of 65, declaring that “this will enable us to induct into military service all persons who engage in strikes or stoppages or other interruptions of work in plants in the possession of the United States.”

“This direct approach is necessary to insure the continuity of war work,” he said. “The only alternative would be to extend the principle of selective service and make it universal in character.”

Whether enactment of the bill would cause the withdrawal of labor representatives from NWLB was an open question. Many persons in Washington thought that it would, but no responsible leader of labor would commit himself on this question tonight.

A NEW BILL AIMED AT EMPLOYERS

After Congress, by overriding the veto, had enacted into law the section banning contributions by labor organizations to which the President had objected, Senator Hatch introduced a measure forbidding similar political contributions by associations of employers.

It was the eighth time that Congress had overriden President Roosevelt by a veto during the more than ten years he has been in office, and it was the most important measure on which the Congress acted independent of the Executive since payment of the soldiers’ bonus was authorized, January 27, 1937.

Observers on Capitol Hill believed that the continued absence from work of a large number of coal miners, despite the back-to-work order of the UMW policy committee, and the lukewarm reception by Congress to the President’s draft proposal, played a major role in the decisive votes. There was a roar of protest on the floor of the House when the President reiterated his proposal to increase the draft age to 65 to deal with strikers.

Many members of Congress expressed dissatisfaction, saying that coal mine owners were being punished by being deprived of their property, although it was the union, and not the employers, which had defied the NWLB and called strikes.

Another cause of restiveness among members was the fact that John L. Lewis, in ordering the miners back to work, set another deadline for Oct 31, and said his decision to work on the Government’s terms was predicated on continued Governmental operation of the mines.

JULY 1, 1943

M’ARTHUR STARTS ALLIED OFFENSIVE IN PACIFIC; NEW GUINEA ISLES WON, LANDINGS IN SOLOMONS; CHURCHILL PROMISES BLOWS IN EUROPE BY FALL

UNITED NATIONS FORCES MOVE FORWARD IN THE SOUTHWEST PACIFIC

By SIDNEY SHALETT
Special to The new York Times.

WASHINGTON, July 1 —Combined Army and Navy forces under General Douglas MacArthur have opened the long expected offensive against the Japanese in the south and southwest Pacific.

Fighting was in progress on Rendova and New Georgia islands, which were hit by ground, naval and air forces in “closest synchronization,” a communiqué from General MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia reported today. Nassau Bay, ten miles south of the big Japanese base of Salamaua in New Guinea, fell to the Allies after a slight skirmish, and the Tobriand and Woodlark island groups, 300 to 400 miles west of the New Georgia group, were occupied without opposition.

The Allied push—aimed, observers here believe, at the major Japanese base of Rabaul, on New Britain Island—got under way yesterday, Solomons time, which was Tuesday here.

NUTCRACKER MOVE SEEN

It was believed here, on the basis of early reports, that the fighting and occupations reported so far were preliminary to major actions to come. If bases in the New Georgias are consolidated, a two-way push against Rabaul might be developing, with one arm advancing northwestward from the Central Solomons and the other swinging across eastward from new bases in New Guinea.

United States heavy bombers carried out an attack on Rabaul during the night, dropping nearly twenty-three tons of high-explosive, fragmentation and incendiary bombs throughout the dispersal areas at the Vunakanau and Lakunai airdromes, the communiqué from Australian headquarters reported. “Several explosions” and “numerous fires” were observed, one of which was visible for 100 miles, the announcement said.

United Nations Forces Move Forward in the Southwest Pacific: American troops landed on Rendova and New Georgia Islands (1), in the vicinity of the enemy air base at Munda, and engaged the Japanese. The inset shows this area in detail. To the west, the Allies occupied Woodlark Island (2) and the Trobriand Islands (3) without opposition. In New Guinea they occupied Nassau Bay (4), just below Salamaua; the landing craft encountered only slight resistance. Apparently these widespread operations have as their ultimate goal the reduction of Rabaul (5), which was bombed.

The big bombers, which have punished Rabaul extensively in recent weeks, ran into heavy Japanese anti-aircraft fire and interference from some enemy night fighters. One American bomber was missing after the raid.

The Tobriand and Woodlark islands will be valuable as stepping-stones in a chain of fighter-plane bases from the Allied stronghold of Milne Bay, on the tip of New Guinea. Japanese-held Gasmata and Rabaul may be raided with comparative ease with the aid of these bays.

NAVY GIVES FIRST NEWS

The first report of landing actions came early yesterday when the Navy announced here in a communiqué that combined United States forces had landed June 30 (Solomons time) on Rendova Island, in the New Georgia group, which is only five miles from the important Japanese air base of Munda, on New Georgia Island, but that communiqué said, “No details have been received.”

A hint that the fighting had extended came later from Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox in Los Angeles, where he is inspecting Pacific Coast installations. The Secretary declared that the Rendov attack was the beginning of “an offensive against the Japanese base at Munda and surrounding bases.” Navy officials in Washington yesterday declined, however, to confirm that the attack had been extended to New Georgia.

General MacArthur’s announcement of more sweeping actions in the Pacific seemed to confirm impressions that the American forces were running into opposition on Rendova and were not making a bloodless conquest as had been the case in the occupations of Funafuti, in the Ellice group, and in the Russell Islands, northwest of Guadalcanal, which were the last two places in the South Pacific revealed by the Navy as occupied by our forces.

On March 27 American planes bombed and strafed Japanese positions at Ugali, which is on the northeast coast of Rendova, a previous Navy communiqué disclosed. This indicated that there were enemy forces on the island, which, if they still were there, undoubtedly were resisting.

Observers here have been expecting action in the South and Southwest Pacific for some time. Attention, however, had been focused on spots other than obscure Rendova, a twenty-mile-long, densely wooded island, 195 air miles northwest of Guadalcanal.

Munda was for a while the “Japanese Malta” of the central Solomons. It has been bombed at least 150 times since last November, and the attack on Rendova was preceded by four bombings of Munda within four days. For a brief period a few months back our South Pacific fliers let Munda alone and the impression arose that it had been knocked out by the severe punishment it had received. Then, apparently, the Japanese put it in commission, for the poundings were resumed.

It is believed that American strategy, now that the southern Solomons are safely consolidated, is to move northward through the central Solomons, up to the northern Solomons, where the Japanese are believed to have heavy troop concentrations, and then, if things go well, to the more important objective westward and northward.

It is regarded as entirely likely that the immediate objectives, if Munda is knocked out, are Bougainville Island, about 155 air miles to the northwest, where the important harbor and air base of Kahili is situated, and Rabaul, on New Britain Island, one of Japan’s strongest air and sea bases in the southwest Pacific.

Rendova in American hands will give our forces a base 195 miles nearer Japanese targets than Guadalcanal. Rendova is 103 miles from Rekata Bay, submarine and seaplane base; only twenty-five miles from Vila, an air base; 137 miles from bases in the Shortland area, and 410 miles from Rabaul.

Rendova is described by the Navy as “entirely mountainous and densely wooded.” It gradually increases in height from its southeastern extremity, where it is 1,021 feet high, to its summit, a precipitous volcanic cone called Rendova Peak, which is 3,488 feet high. This peak, only four miles from the northern end of the island, has been a conspicuous landmark in air flights over the island. Its summit, an extinct crater, is frequently obscured by clouds.

There is a black sand beach called Banyetta Point at the western extremity of the island. Tidal currents there are strong. The coast rises steeply and is thickly wooded.

From seven miles above Banyetta Point to the northern point of the island, a barrier reef parallels the coast. It extends out a maximum distance of two and one-half miles. There are six deep passages through the reef, and several islands are located on the northern part of the reef. The lagoon inside the barrier is shallow and is encumbered by several reefs

JULY 6, 1943

PUBLISHER VISITS KREMLIN

Sulzberger and Molotoff Confer For an Hour In Moscow

MOSCOW, July 5 (AP) —Arthur Hays Sulzberger, president and publisher of The New York Times, spent an hour today in the Kremlin with Foreign Commissar Vyacheslaff M. Molotoff.

Mr. Sulzberger said later he could disclose no details of the interview. He was introduced to Mr. Molotoff by William H. Standley, United States Ambassador.

The publisher has been here as a special Red Cross representative and expects to leave Moscow within a few days.

JULY 11, 1943

Eisenhower Rubs His Seven Luck-Pieces As Allied Invasion Fleet Approaches Sicily

By EDWARD GILLING
Representing the Combined British Press.

ALLIED HEADQUARTERS IN NORTH AFRICA, July 10 —Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower always carries in his pocket seven old coins, including a gold five-guinea piece.

As the Allied invasion fleet approached Sicily last night to begin the great assault on Europe, the General gave them a good rub for luck. In fact, as one of his aides said, he gave them several good rubs.

In the early hours of the morning the General heard that the landing had been made and that everything was going according to plan. General Eisenhower spent all night at headquarters, except for one brief period when he drove out to the coast with a small party of his staff to watch an Allied air fleet leaving.

Climbing out of his car, he stood in moonlight with his hand raised to salute the air armada. The period of waiting between the planning of the assault and its realization was over.

Returning to headquarters, General Eisenhower went at once to the naval section, where he joined his staff in following closely the movement of the operations on charts. He spent some time in the Fighter Command room, from which the air umbrella covering the operations was controlled.

At 1:30 A.M. General Eisenhower, apparently satisfied with the progress of operations, went to bed on a cot in a room next to the war room. He slept soundly for three hours until awakened at 4:30 A.M. by an aide who informed him that assault troops had landed and that everything was going according to plan.

The Royal Navy served the General a cup of hot tea and he then returned to the war room, where reports were now coming in regularly. He remained there until he heard the British Broadcasting Corporation broadcast his message telling the people of France that this was the first stage of the invasion of the Continent, which would be followed by others.

General Eisenhower then left the war room, but only for a change of clothes. He returned soon to follow with his commanders the progress of operations.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander in chief of Allied Armies in North Africa, and General Honoré Giraud, commanding the French forces, saluting the flags of both nations at Allied headquarters, 1943.

JULY 11, 1943

ROOSEVELT SEES ‘BEGINNING OF END’

President Reassures Pope on Sparing of Churches and on Respect for the Vatican

By BERTRAM D. HULEN
Special to The New York Times.

WASHINGTON, July 10 —The Allied invasion of Sicily looks to President Roosevelt like “the beginning of the end” for Adolf Hitler and Premier Mussolini.

This was revealed by the White House today as an intimation was given that success in Sicily would be followed by the invasion of Southern Italy.

President Roosevelt stated his views in a dramatic announcement when he received word of the invasion during a dinner at the White House last night in honor of Gen. Henri-Honoré Giraud, the French Commander in Chief.

The intimation that Southern Italy might be the next objective was contained in a communication given out by the White House today from President Roosevelt to Pope Pius XII.

In it the President promised that during the invasion of Italian soil churches and religious institutions would “be spared the devastations of war” and the neutral status of Vatican City, as well as of Papal domains “throughout Italy,” would be respected. Mr. Roosevelt assured the Pontiff that the United States was seeking “a just and enduring peace on earth.”

Mr. Roosevelt’s views concerning the campaign in Sicily were echoed at noon by Senator Tom Connally, Democrat, of Texas, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, who discussed it with the Chief Executive when he called to say good-bye before leaving for Texas.

Our forces will sweep through Sicily,” the Senator declared as he was leaving the White House. “Already on the land, I don’t believe they can be stopped. The curfew has rung for Italy.”

Nevertheless, there was an air of caution here today until the fighting had developed further, because of reports that the Axis has concentrated in Sicily 300,000 troops, including at least two German divisions. The rest are Italians.

The Allied forces consist of British, Canadian and American units. The Americans, from indications given by military experts, are grouped in the Fifth Army under the immediate command of Lieut. Gen. Mark. W. Clark, with Gen. Dwight D. Elsenhower in over-all command from North African headquarters. The British and Canadians are reported probably to outnumber the Americans.

It is considered probable that some days may elapse before definite conclusions can be reached concerning the progress of the campaign, but it is clear that Allied success would mean air and sea control of the Mediterranean and open the way for the conquest of Southern Italy, Sardinia and other Mediterranean points.

Although the operation is not a second front in Europe, it could open a way for such an undertaking.

These considerations were apparently in the mind of President Roosevelt when he made his dramatic announcement at the dinner last night. The details were revealed by Stephen F. Early, Presidential Secretary, today.

The guests included Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Gen. George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff; Admiral William D. Leahy, the President’s Chief of Staff; Admiral Ernest J. King, Commander in Chief of the United States Fleet, and other military and naval officials.

ANNOUNCES NEWS OF ATTACK

President Roosevelt began receiving reports of the invasion of Sicily at about 9 o’clock. Just before 10 o’clock, as the dinner was nearing its close, he made the dramatic announcement:

“I have just had word of the first attack against the soft underbelly of Europe.”

He then asked the guests to say nothing about it until midnight, when simultaneous announcements would be made in North Africa, London and Washington.

He stressed that the major objective was the elimination of Germany, for once ashore our forces could go in different directions, that it certainly was to be hoped that the operation was the beginning of the end, and it could almost be said that it was.

In a toast to unified France, he promised that while this invasion was not directed at the shores of France, eventually all of France would be liberated.

After telling of the attack and landing, the President said:

“This is a good illustration of the fact of planning, not the desire for planning, but the fact of planning. With the commencing of the expedition in North Africa, with the complete cooperation between the British and ourselves, that was followed by complete cooperation with the French in North Africa.

“The result, after landing, was the battle of Tunis. That was not all planning; that was cooperation and from that time on we have been working in complete harmony.

“There are a great many objectives, of course, and the major objective is the elimination of Germany. That goes without saying, as a result of the step which is in progress at this moment. We hope it is the beginning of the end.

“Last autumn the Prime Minister of England called it ‘the end of the beginning.’ I think we can almost say that this action tonight is the beginning of the end.

“We are going to be ashore in a naval sense—air sense—military. Once there, we have the opportunity of going in different directions and I want to tell General Giraud that we haven’t forgotten that France is one of the directions. One of our prime aims, of course, is the restoration of the people of France and the sovereignty of France.

PLEDGES LIBERATION OF PARIS

“Even if a move is not directed at this moment at France itself, General Giraud can rest assured that the ultimate objective—we will do it the best way—is to liberate the people of France, not merely those in the southern part of France, but the people in northern France—Paris. And in this whole operation, I should say rightly in the enormous planning, we have had the complete cooperation of the French military and naval forces in North Africa.

“Gradually the opposition has cooled. The older regime is breaking down. We have seen what has happened or is happening at the present moment in Martinique and Guadeloupe. That is a very major part toward the big objective.

“We want to help rearm those French forces (the President referred to the French forces in North Africa) and to build up the French strength so that when the time comes from a military point of view when we get into France itself and throw the Germans out there will be a French Army and French ships working with the British and ourselves.

“It’s a very great symbol that General Giraud is here tonight, that he has come over to talk to us about his military problems and to help toward the same objective that all of the United Nations have—freedom of France and with it the unity of France.”

GIRAUD THANKS ROOSEVELT

General Giraud, in responding, thanked the President for the support being given France and expressed gratification for American assistance in rearming the soldiers of France.

He then raised his glass in a toast to the President and “the glory of the United States,” referring to this country as “that great nation through which peace and freedom will be restored to the world.”

JULY 11, 1943

GIRAUD’S VISIT REVIVES CONTROVERSY

Americans Caught Up In Emotional Storm That Has Swept Over Frenchmen—President Disappoints Both Sides

By HAROLD CALLENDER
Special to The New York Times.

WASHINGTON, July 10 —The visit to Washington this week of General Henri-Honoré Giraud, who is commander of the French forces in North and West Africa and shares with General Charles de Gaulle the chairmanship of the new French Committee of National Liberation at Algiers, has revived the impassioned controversy that has raged around those two men and the situation in North Africa for six months.

It has raged in North Africa, in London and in Washington, with echoes in remoter places like Moscow and Tahiti and New Caledonia. Although Algiers has not been’ silent—it never is—the storm center this week has been Washington.

At a huge reception for General Giraud yesterday the ballroom of one of the largest Washington hotels glittered with French, British and American uniforms. In that room this correspondent listened to a de Gaullist who felt sure the United States had ruined its reputation in Europe by interfering in French affairs so far as to insist that General Giraud be retained as French commander.

CLASHING OPINIONS

A few feet away he met a Giraudist who warmly praised the official American policy and said the de Gaullists were about as important as their armed forces in North Africa, which numbered 11,000 in a total French force of about 70,000.

Both de Gaullists and Giraudists expressed consternation at the remark made earlier that day by President Roosevelt to the effect that the French were under Germany’s heel and therefore there was no France now.

What, undoubtedly, Mr. Roosevelt meant was that there was no French State to speak for France. If he had said that, his words would have caused less astonishment, but perhaps not much less disappointment; for Frenchmen of both groups have hoped the committee at Algiers would be recognized by the Allies as the ad interim French authority that might speak for France in Allied councils and hold as trustee for France all available territories, including Martinique.

Americans too have been drawn into the emotional torrent. There are Americans sitting at desks in Washington who lose their tempers at the mere mention of de Gaulle or Giraud. Some who were ardent for General de Gaulle have gone to North Africa and come back ardent for General Giraud, or vice versa.

Correspondents here who think it their duty to tell their readers of the official coolness toward General de Gaulle and why it exists are swamped with letters denouncing them for maligning General de Gaulle.

There is something about this controversy that upsets the emotional and perhaps the intellectual equilibrium not only of Frenchmen but of Americans and Britons. It is certainly not the quiet, composed, gentle personality of General Giraud, whose only or at least whose main desire seems to be to kill Germans in a systematic, professional and mechanically efficient manner so as to liberate France and restore French institutions, including, no doubt, the right of Frenchmen to quarrel endlessly among themselves as they have traditionally done.

EMOTION UNLEASHED

General Giraud’s appearance in Washington happened to unleash a new flood of emotion because it was a logical occasion for defining what our officials would describe as the de Gaulle problem and the present attitude of the principal Allies toward it.

The emotionally provocative qualities of the controversy derive from two assumptions on the part of the de Gaullists and the reactions to those assumptions in other quarters.

The first assumption is that General de Gaulle or his movement represents the French people in a special sense—the “petits gens” or little fellows or forgotten men who work hard for a living and have no family estates or distinguished ancestors—the masses who live what may be called the left side of the line of demarcation that has run through the French nation without much variation since the Revolution of 1789.

According to this view Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain and his circle sinned not only by too readily accepting defeat and collaboration, but principally by being politically and socially reactionary—by representing those who never accepted the French Revolution; and de Gaullism is therefore depicted as the youthful, progressive, democratic side of France.

DYNAMIC NATIONALISM

The second assumption is that de Gaullism embodies a dynamic French nationalism indispensable to the revival of a ravaged nation, a nationalism the arteries of which have not begun to harden.

It is a ruthless nationalism calling for purges on all sides and even whisperings of guillotines. It is directed not only against the Germans but just now also against the Allies, who are accused of unnecessarily infringing French sovereignty by taking possession of ports and communications in North Africa and by dictating who shall command the French forces.

It probably will be directed in the future against all foreigners and may verge upon xenophobia, as nationalism in its extreme forms usually does.

Meanwhile, in less friendly quarters the first assumption mentioned above was flatly rejected on the ground that none could tell who, if anyone, represented the imprisoned French people of today. Some frankly feared that General de Gaulle and his underground Allies within France might turn out to be communistic. Had not a Communist Deputy joined General de Gaulle in London? In the same quarters the second assumption was angrily denounced as calculated to interfere with the military operations of the Allies, since it was accompanied by a demand for a purge of French Army officers that our military authorities thought would impair the efficiency of a force which had fought extremely well against the Germans.

ALLIED RESPONSIBILITY

Moreover, it was regarded as absurd for Frenchmen to squabble over technicalities of sovereignty at a moment when Allied armies were preparing to liberate France, whose sovereignty could not be said to exist unless those Allied armies won the war. The Allies had a right to determine how the French could best cooperate in that common task, since the Allies were bearing the major burden and expense and were responsible for the high command.

The two assumptions apparently have generated in General de Gaulle supreme confidence in his popularity and his destiny and a sense of having a kind of Joan of Arc mission to save France. All men with missions tend to inspire boredom or distrust or both in those who do not share their enthusiasm; and de Gaulle, by frankly expressing his aspirations, seems to have put some people’s backs up, notably at the conference at Casablanca.

Moreover, General de Gaulle for three years has carried on a campaign that necessarily clashed all along the line with American policy. For he was denouncing as unworthy and traitorous the government of defeat which the United States recognized and dealt with—although with constant misgivings—as the government of France. It therefore seemed to Washington that de Gaulle’s mission was to frustrate our policy; and for that there was no quick forgiveness.

The recognition of the Vichy Government is now gone, but General de Gaulle is still sabotaging our policy, this time our military policy which alone can save France—so it seems to Washington officials. If he wants to dispel distrust, why does he not stop arguing and start fighting Germans, since he is a military man, ask his critics.

OUR INTERVENTION

American emotions are stirred mainly by the first assumption—that de Gaullism is democracy and all that opposes it is toryism. Prime Minister Churchill’s acceptance of what is described as an antide Gaullist policy is explained by recalling that he is a Tory. President Roosevelt’s adoption of the same attitude is not so easy to explain, but the critics attribute it to some of his advisers in North Africa and here.

From Algiers this week comes the report that many Americans object to Allied intervention in French affairs “to frustrate de Gaulle.” Others think it would be more logical to object to intervention as such, whomever it might frustrate.

The invitation to General Giraud to come here was interpreted as designed to increase his prestige not only with the Army but with civilians in North Africa. His visit is now officially described as strictly military, although it would be rash to suggest that in the General’s conversations here no mention will be made of the committee that aspires to rule the French Empire and its armed forces.

UNITY STILL ABSENT

The status of that committee remains obscure pending definition of the Allied attitude toward it. The case of Martinique, where the Vichy regime has collapsed, offers the opportunity for such a definition.

Meanwhile, the extent of de Gaulle’s influence in the committee and in the French Empire, and the somewhat unbending nature of de Gaulle, seem to preclude at least for the present that French unity which everybody has professed to desire.

JULY 11, 1943

FOURTH-TERM RACE TAKEN FOR GRANTED

But Recent Washington Rows Suggest Re-election Is Far From Certain

POLITICAL TACTICS SHAPED

By TURNER CATLEDGE

WASHINGTON, July 10 —Regardless of the political strain which the intramural feuding and clashes between the White House and Congress undoubtedly have imposed lately upon the Administration, the nomination of Franklin D. Roosevelt for a fourth term as President is still taken for granted here.

Reports from the country as to reactions to the continuing squabbling in Washington suggest the advisability of a recheck by those who would make Mr. Roosevelt a heavy-odds favorite for re-election against the entire field, Democratic and Republican. There appears no evidence that he will be seriously countered in his own party, but a general disgust with the Washington rows, as reported, especially from the Middle West, may, if the quarrels continue, bring about a tightening up of the winter book quotations for 1944.

SIGNS OF WANING SUPPORT

Regardless of the belief that Mr. Roosevelt will be nominated again—assuming, of course, that he wants to be—he perhaps will have less emotional support than ever before from the rank and file of the heterogeneous aggregation that has occupied the Democratic wigwam for these last ten years.

Ardor for him has cooled and is cooling perceptibly among his partisans in some regions. Feeling has run pretty deeply in the South over the activities of the Administration, and particularly of Mrs. Roosevelt, in relation to the delicate racial problem, and in the Middle West over efforts to control farm prices.

Realizing all of this, the White House political high command headed by Harry Hopkins, with David K. Niles as first assistant, is not expected to try to give the fourth-term nomination the semblance of a “draft,” as they did the third-term nomination in 1940. They are expected, on the other hand, and in their own time, to go after the plum by direct and obvious means, always with this legitimate question: “Pray, who else?” And, if the fighting is still under way in the fall of 1944, they can be expected to present the case of Mr. Roosevelt’s fourth-term election as a military necessity to assure victory for the United Nations, and as a means for insuring a more lasting peace for the whole world.

PREPARATORY STEPS

The fourth-term planners are letting no grass grow under their feet. The recent appointment of George E. Allen as secretary of the National Committee can be considered as in line with the purpose of the planners to become more active, especially in appeasing the virulent opposition within the party. Mr. Allen is what is known in his native Mississippi as “a smooth operator.”

While the fourth-termers have made no outstanding open moves to date, they have been laying the groundwork. Proof of the skill with which they have been laying it may be found in some degree in the fact that until now no opponent of the fourth term has stuck his head very high within the party. At this stage four years ago at least two—John N. Garner and James A. Farley, then respectively Vice President and Postmaster General—were offering themselves as rallying points for antithird term Democrats.

Politics is an ever-present element in Washington. It has its influence, one way or another, on practically every major action taken here. The war has brought no exception to that rule—in fact, politics is more present in current measures than at any time for several years.

Yet it is difficult to see the influence of the fourth-term campaign, so far as the “fourth term” is concerned, in these actions and discussions. The question of the two-term limitation seemed to have been disposed of quite definitely in 1940 so far as it involved Mr. Roosevelt. Opposition to him and his measures now is based on other things than his threat further to shatter tradition.

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

Recent Washington developments, particularly the action of Congress in running roughshod over some of the projects of the President, have underscored the view that Mr. Roosevelt’s strength politically is not what it used to be on the domestic front. It may not be basically what it used to be on any front, but Congress, being uncertain of itself and lacking information on international issues, used home ground on which to make its stand.

The trouble between the White House and the Capitol cannot be ascribed altogether to a difference on issues. Of political importance from an intraparty political standpoint is the method which the President and the little inner-circle group around him have used for several years now in dealing with their sensitive partisans on The Hill. So far as the trouble to the White House is concerned, it is a case in large degree of chickens coming home to roost.

One thing which many Washington observers seemed to think settled by the recent feuding was that Vice President Henry A. Wallace would be off the ticket for 1944. Mr. Wallace’s chances already were considered to be dimming, what with his own failure to strike political fire and the availability of other highly placed and more romantic figures. But his row with Jesse H. Jones, Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, undoubtedly set off active opposition. It will be remembered that Mr. Jones was one of a long string of possible Vice-Presidential nominees who, under White House pressure, withdrew their names in favor of Mr. Wallace at the Chicago Convention in 1940.

JULY 14, 1943

Editorial

HITLER IN COMMAND?

There are reports by way of London that Hitler is back in command on the Eastern Front. Good news, if true. There are excellent reasons for believing that the overvaulting ambition of this self-infatuated man played an important part in the disasters which overtook the German armies at the end of last year’s campaign in Russia. It was his decision, most accounts agree, that split the German forces when they should have been united, in a too greedy effort to grab both the Volga and the Caucasus, thereby bringing on the catastrophe at Stalingrad. In the earlier stages of the war, when Germany’s neighbors were unprepared for sudden treacherous attacks, Hitler’s “intuition” frequently worked wonders. In the present stage of the war, with the supremacy of power shifting to the Allied side, any enemy of Germany would prefer to have Hitler’s “intuition” substituted for the cool competence of the German General Staff.

Moreover, if Hitler is now back in command on the Eastern Front, the German people will be reminded, at an inconvenient stage of the war for such remembrances, of past promises about performances in Russia that failed to come off. There was Hitler’s confident declaration, as early as Oct. 3, 1941, that “This enemy is already broken and will never rise again.” There was his promise, on Dec. 11 of the same year, that “With the return of summer weather there will be no obstacle to stop the forward movement of the German troops.” There was his iron-bound guarantee, on March 15, 1942, that “The Russians will be annihilatingly defeated by us in the coming summer.” And there was the famous declaration of last Sept. 30 that Stalingrad would stay in German hands: “You can be of the firm conviction that no human being shall ever push us away from that spot.”

Hitler’s record as a military commander on the Russian front is strewn with pledges he has not redeemed.

JULY 15, 1943

BRITISH ADVANCE NEAR CATANIA; AMERICANS SEIZE KEY AIRDROMES; 12,000 AXIS PRISONERS CAPTURED

U.S. TROOPS LANDING IN SICILY UNDER ENEMY FIRE

By The Associated Press.

ALLIED HEADQUARTERS IN NORTH AFRICA, July 14 —The British Eighth Army bore down tonight on Catania, the port city halfway along the eastern Sicilian coast toward Messina, opposite the toe of Italy. Late dispatches said that Catania’s fall was imminent.

[The Eighth Army stood on the plain before Catania, The United Press reported. According to an Algiers broadcast recorded in London by The Associated Press, the British had driven a wedge into the city’s defenses. A Madrid report quoted by The United Press said that German sources had told of a large-scale landing of British paratroops in the plain, though the Germans claimed that they had wiped out the attackers.] In the southwest a powerful force of Americans, which has already taken more than 8,000 prisoners, scored a fifteen-mile advance on the left flank, captured two more key airdromes and struck inland toward Caltagirone, the southwestern gateway to the Catania Plain. More than 12,000 prisoners altogether have been captured on Sicily, it was announced tonight. On the fifth day of the campaign the Axis defenses appeared to be still paralyzed.

The American middle column, headed toward Caltagirone, was last reported only a few miles from there, fighting a German unit at Niscemi.

MEET NO ‘SERIOUS OPPOSITION’

But an Allied commentator said that, in the over-all picture, the Allies “are not really meeting any serious opposition.” Dispatches made it clear that the invaders were ahead of their timetable.

British troops and the Canadians attached to the Eighth Army were reported to be within fifteen miles of Catania during the afternoon after a swift twenty-mile advance from Augusta. At this rate the Eighth Army should be nearing Catania, unless serious opposition had developed at the intermediate inland cities of Lentini and Carlentini, on the edge of the Catania Plain below Mount Etna. Catania itself has no natural defenses.

The British were moving along a road that curves inland toward

Lentini and may already have taken that city. Catania is thirty-five miles from Augusta along this winding route.

The Americans captured airdromes at Comiso, six miles west of Ragusa, and at Ponte Olivo, nine miles inland from Gela. Plunging west and north from Licata, the Americans overran Palma and Naro. The latter is only twelve miles from Agrigento, where the Axis was said to have concentrated heavy forces for a counter-attack. Hundreds of prisoners were swept up in this fifteen-mile drive.

The American sector of the 150-mile bridgehead was a long, shallow one, with the invasion plan apparently calling for the Americans to deepen and protect the Allied left flank while the British raced up the eastern coast to Messina.

French forces have landed in Sicily and are participating in the Allied campaign, it was officially announced at the headquarters of French forces in North Africa.

JULY 15, 1943

GEN. PATTON WADED ASHORE TO BATTLE

Leader Leaped into Surf from Landing-Craft as Tanks Periled U.S. Force

BY NOEL MONKS
London Daily Mail Correspondent
(Distributed by The Associated Press.)

ABOARD A DESTROYER, Off General Montgomery’s Sicilian Headquarters, July 13 (Delayed) —Lieut. Gen. George S. Patton Jr., commander of the United States Seventh Army invading Sicily leaped into the surf from a landing barge and waded ashore to take personal command of bitter fighting against German tank units opposing the landing.

At General Patton’s American bridgehead at Gela I heard the story of General Patton’s great personal courage and the magnificent fighting quality of his troops.

When the Americans landed at Gela they found the town in control of two German tank regiments. During the next twenty-four hours the fiercest fighting of the whole Allied invasion took place. Twice the Germans were driven from the town and twice the Americans were forced right back on to the beaches.

At this stage General Patton leaped into the surf.

Step by step the Germans were driven back from the beaches as wave after wave of Americans landed from the troopships. By sunset Sunday the bridgehead was well established and the Americans had pushed the Germans back to a few miles beyond town.

When Gen. [Dwight D.] Eisenhower visited General Patton’s headquarters yesterday he warmly congratulated his old colleague on his splendid fighting achievement.

Lieutenant General George S. Patton during the campaign to liberate Sicily, Italy, 1943.

JULY 18, 1943

SUCCESSES ELATE MOSCOW

Failure of Vast German Effort Is Potent Russian Tonic

By Wireless to The New York Times.

MOSCOW, July 17 —Today there is a feeling of excitement and exaltation in Moscow unequaled since the height of last winter’s victories. Everyone has become more aware than ever of the enormous change that has occurred since last year.

The Germans’ failure to cut off the Kursk salient had become increasingly clear since July 5, when the Nazis launched their offensive. It was clear that the Russians had devised, through months of careful training and preparation, means of breaking any Blitzkrieg attack the Germans could devise with their shock tactics and Tiger tanks.

The Russian Army was trained to withstand what seemed impossible, first an artillery barrage of enormous intensity, then an intensive air bombing, and finally vast waves of tanks, including a high proportion of Tigers. When these broke through, still nothing was settled for the Germans. Through remarkable coordination of weapons, the Russians always succeeded in limiting the damage of the break-through and usually managing to destroy the broken-through tanks after detaching them from their infantry or forcing them to turn tail.

The magnitude of the attack may be gauged from the fact that the Russians in many cases succeeded in a small sector in repelling, dispersing and partly destroying as many as 6,000 tanks attacking simultaneously.

This is explainable by several factors working together—the cultivation of Russian iron nerves, for it takes iron nerves to crouch inside a trench, allow a Tiger tank to cross beyond it and then fire from an anti-tank rifle into the tank’s vulnerable rear; iron discipline and an unlimited spirit of self-sacrifice; all this, together with admirable coordination of weapons, an extraordinarily rich endowment of infantry with all types of anti-tank weapons and a general richness in automatic and semi-automatic weapons; failure of the Germans to gain air control in the Kursk-Orel and Belgorod battles, the effectiveness of Russian aviation and above all the high power and skill of the Russian artillery, which bore the brunt of the German onslaught.

Finally, the high quality of Russian tanks, which counter-attacked effectively, proved, according to all reports, that the KV tank is more than equal to the Tiger.

In the Kursk-Orel sector the Germans, who had not made any real progress, gave up hope of achieving anything some days ago. In the Belgorod sector they are still attempting to press forward and enlarge their ten-to fifteen-mile penetrations, but still without success, and above all without that “conviction” with which the Germans started their July 5 offensive, which in the words of Adolf Hitler’s order to his troops, was to become the battle that would decide the war’s outcome.

The moral effect of the failure of the biggest German armored attack ever launched along a relatively narrow front was immense in Moscow. Here, more even than in the Stalingrad battle, was a demonstration of a fundamental improvement in Russian defense tactics immensely greater than the perfection in German attack tactics.

JULY 21, 1943

ROME BOMBED: FIRST PHOTOGRAPHIC REPORT OF ALLIED RAID

By The Associated Press.

ALLIED HEADQUARTERS IN NORTH AFRICA, July 20 —Reconnaissance photographs today showed vast sections of Rome’s great railway yards in twisted, smoking ruins from the terrific blasting inflicted yesterday by hundreds of American bombers. The initial raid on the Italian capital was officially labeled an “outstandingly successful operation.”

While more than 500 heavy and medium bombers, escorted by fighters, struck the city in wave after wave beneath a bright midday sun, Allied communiqués disclosed today, the entire two-and-a-half-hour assault was carried out with the loss of five planes. All the losses were suffered by Maj. Gen. James H. Doolittle’s Strategic Air Force. Ninth United States Air Force headquarters in Cairo announced that all the Liberator bombers participating in the raid had returned safely to bases in the Middle East.

The Ninth Air Force formations alone dumped nearly 330 tons of high explosives on Rome, the Cairo communiqué said, declaring that the Littoria railway yards had been “completely destroyed.”

“String after string of bombs criss-crossed the yards, and photographs indicate that an area 400 yards by two miles long is a mass of twisted steel rails, gaping bomb craters and wreckage of rolling stock and buildings,” the bulletin said. “An ammunition train moving through the yards received several direct hits and exploded, contributing to the destruction.”

An Allied headquarters communiqué said that “very severe damage” had been caused to all the targets, including the Littoria and San Lorenzo rail yards, both within the limits of the city, and near-by airdromes and industrial plants.

Allied aerial chieftains, apparently pleased that the outcome of the attack had surpassed expectations, were lavish in their praise of the airmen responsible for its execution. Lieut. Gen. Carl A. Spaatz, commander of the Northwest African Air Forces, sent congratulations to General Doolittle, saying:

“It is one of the many accurate attacks which your forces have carried on during the present battle, all of which had a marked significance in their successful outcome.”

The Tabonelli steel plant and a large chemical works were battered by the raiders, which met what was described officially as only “slight opposition” from enemy fighter planes. Two enemy interceptors were shot down by Lightning fighters.

The official pictures of the havoc created by the bombers showed that the Ciampino airport had been severely damaged. A number of hangars were blasted or set afire and a large number of parked aircraft near by were hit by fragmentation bombs. The Littoria airport, near the railway yards, also was hit hard.

Vatican apartment of Pope Pius XII after one of the later raids on Rome.

JULY 21, 1943

TIMES CORRESPONDENT BROADCASTS TO ITALY

Matthews Explains Why Allies Had to Raid Capital

LONDON, July 20 (AP) —Herbert L. Matthews, Rome correspondent of The New York Times from 1939 to 1941, said in an Algiers broadcast to Italy today that “it was hard to have to bomb Rome but war is like that.”

Mr. Matthews, who accompanied the Allied bombers, told Italy:

“Neither as an American citizen nor as an individual did I feel any satisfaction when I flew over Rome yesterday. Believe me, this raid was undertaken after long and careful consideration and preparation. There are more than 25,000,000 Catholics in America whose opinion we have to take into account.

“The San Lorenzo marshaling yards are of greatest strategic importance and had to be considered a military target. It was hard to have to bomb it—but war is like that.

“It is the Duce and the Fuehrer whom you have to blame for that.

“Rome’s anti-aircraft defense was feeble and ineffective. Was that all Musso and Hitler could do for you?”

JULY 24, 1943

LUFTWAFFE’S LACK SEEN AS STRATEGIC

British Experts Say Faults Basic in its Creation Are Now Showing Up

NUMERICAL POWER FAILING

Udet’s ‘Second-Rate Planes’ at Loss—Flying Fortress Gets New Praise In London

By FREDERICK GRAHAM
By Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES.

LONDON, July 23 —A study of one phase of military air power is offered in the present position of the Luftwaffe. Reich Marshal Hermann Goering’s once awe-inspiring warbirds now seem to be perched on the edge of the nest uncertain what to do.

The fact that the vaunted Nazi Air Force, which started the war as the most powerful aerial armada in the world, was unable to halt or even to hinder the Allied seaborne invasion of Sicily over 100 miles of open ocean and that the Germans with vaster aerial might proportionally could not beat down the Royal Air Force in 1940 for a Nazi invasion of Britain across twenty miles of water must contain a meaningful lesson for future strategists. Although the full answer belongs to the future, at least a partial solution seems indicated now.

To the frequently asked question, “Where is the Luftwaffe?” the often implied reply, either that it is “stretched too thin” to be really efficient or that it is awaiting the proper moment for a bold counterstroke, is thought here not to be the full, real answer. Even now the Luftwaffe is undoubtedly stronger in both planes and personnel than the RAF was during the Battle of Britain.

Some experts here believe the truth of the matter is that the builders of the Luftwaffe never grasped the real meaning and function of air power. Basically, the Luftwaffe was created to cooperate with the German Army, supporting it in ground operations with hard-hitting, highly mobile units striking a concentrated blow against a single point.

FAILURE IN CONCEPTION

Against defenseless cities and untried troops and without real aerial opposition, it worked out almost exactly as Marshal Goering, Col. Gen. Ernst Udet, technical chief of the Luftwaffe who was killed in 1941, and the others planned. But as a strategic bombing weapon and as a fighter destroyer it must be considered a failure.

Another related reason that is believed to contribute to the comparatively poor showing of the Luftwaffe now was the German idea that quantity was more important in aerial warfare than quality, as remarked in the latest edition of Jane’s “All the World’s Aircraft,” by J. M. Spaight, former Assistant Secretary of the British Air Ministry.

Col. Gen. Udet, who had a large role in building up the Luftwaffe, once told friends in the United States that he did not want the best planes in the world; he wanted overwhelming numerical superiority of the second best. Germany surely had them during 1940 and part of 1941, but they did not achieve Colonel General Udet’s aims.

The current Issue of The Aeroplane, British aeronautical journal, scathingly declares one of the Luftwaffe’s most serious blunders is in the use of fighters, noting that the Germans are no weaker in fighter strength in Sicily or at Orel than the RAF was over southeast Britain in 1940. The RAF, in 1940, fortunately had superior fighters in the Spitfire and the Hurricane.

THE B-17’S ABILITIES HAILED

The big Flying Fortress of the United States Eighth Air Force here and Twelfth Air Force in North Africa, in which American air officials believed as a powerful weapon even when some British experts shook their heads and wrote sour articles for aviation magazines about, is also revealing the weakness of the Luftwaffe’s foundation.

In the first place, the B-17 Fortress is showing its ability to hit important targets from a high altitude and, second, it is proving it can more than hold its own with enemy fighters trying to intercept it. One of the biggest boosters of the Fortress now is the RAF, which has seen and marveled at its precision bombing and its toughness against fighters and anti-aircraft fire.

German plane plants are known to have shifted production from bombers to fighters to meet the battering Allied aerial assaults, but it is probably too late for the Nazis to correct their original mistakes in conception of airpower to win this war or even to stave off defeat.

As to the Flying Fortress, The Aeroplane, whose co-founder and former editor, C. G. Grey, once dubbed the Boeing bomber “the Flying Baloney,” pays high tribute to it in the issue dated tomorrow.

In an article entitled “Bomber Self-Defense,” the magazine states that the Fortress has “reduced the enemy’s fighter attacks to snap-shooting,” and adds that “no bomber could be treated with greater respect” than the B-17 is now by German fighters.

Praising the heavy firepower and the gun turrets of the four-motored Boeing, the article concludes:

“We will gladly offer our thanks to those Fortress crews who showed us what a little more weight and a little more range in turret armament might mean.”

As war wore on, the Luftwaffe was stretched thin.

JULY 25, 1943

LETTERS TO THE TIMES

Rome Bombing Upheld

Attack Regarded As Regrettable But Highly Necessary

To The Editor of the New York Times:

The letter from Pope Pius XII to his Vicar General for the District of Rome is interesting and a worthy document. As always, it again shows his yearning for peace and his noble humility. It deserves careful study by those who are inclined to advocate a ruthless treatment for the Axis nations when the conflict is over.

As could be expected, his message has given Nazi and Fascist leaders the opportunity to make a feature of the Pope’s expressed anxiety for the preservation of ancient works of art and of historic value—not overlooking even Christian civilization, which during four long years they have done everything to destroy.

The high esteem in which His Holiness is held throughout the world has led not a few good people among us to indicate their approval of his declaration. However, all such well-meaning people should be reminded that the greatest and the most precious “work of art and of ancient historic value” is man, who, as the Holy Writ has told us “God created in His own image—in the image of God He created him.”

GREAT CARE USED

Again, the great philosopher and Apostle St. Paul declared that “Man is the Temple of God.” Then note with what scrupulous care our armed forces have carried their attack on the Eternal City, which has been an important Axis base for action against the Allies!

Bearing all this in mind, if some great art objects—the handiwork of man—must be destroyed in order to save the lives of our men, the attack on Rome is fully justified. While millions of Allied soldiers are battling for human rights in a war for which they are in no way responsible the method and conduct of war must be left in the control of our humane military leaders and not to the judgment of spiritual advisers, whose turn will come—let us hope soon.

When mankind is freed from the ravages of war, and the great leaders of the present generation establish a lasting peace founded on justice and righteousness, there will in time arise great men and women in all walks of life, in all lands and among all nations, to more than make up the terrific losses of every nature sustained in this war. The greatest leaders of the future, however, will be those who will render real service to their peoples—a situation quite different from what the great mass of humanity has been accustomed to in the past.

S. KENT COSTIKYAN.

Montclair, N.J., July 23, 1943.

JULY 26, 1943

MUSSOLINI OUSTED WITH FASCIST CABINET;

ARRESTS REPORTED

Berne Hears the Fascist Leaders Are Being Held in Homes

‘PEACE’ CRY IN ROME

Nazis in Milan Said to Have Fired on Mob of Demonstrators

By DANIEL T. BRIGHAM
By Telephone to The New York Times

BERNE, Switzerland, July 25—King Victor Emmanuel announced to Italy tonight that he had accepted the “resignations” of Premier Benito Mussolini and his entire Cabinet. He ordered Marshal Pietro Badoglio to form a military government “to continue the conduct of the war.”

The announcement was made in a proclamation that was broadcast to the people of Italy from Rome at 11 P. M. Rome time. The Rome radio then signed off for twenty minutes, resuming its broadcast at 11:20 to carry a proclamation by Marshal Badoglio. Before giving this, however, the announcer said:

“With the fall of Mussolini and his band, Italy has taken the first step toward peace. Finished is the shame of fascism! Long live peace! Long live the King!”

Italians in Rome, celebrated the downfall of Benito Mussolini with pictures of King Victor Emmanuel, July 1943.

BADOGLIO SAYS HE’LL FIGHT

Marshal Badoglio’s proclamation was then read. It appealed to the nation for “calm” in this hour of trial, saying:

“Italians! On the demand of His Majesty the King-Emperor, I have assumed the military government of the country with full powers. The war will continue. Italy bruised, her provinces invaded, and her cities ruined, will retain her faith in her given word, jealous of her ancient traditions.

“We must tighten our ranks behind the King-Emperor, the living image of the country, who stands as an example for all today. The task I have been charged with is clear and precise. It will be executed scrupulously, and whoever believes he can interrupt the normal progress of events or whoever seeks to disturb internal order will be struck down without mercy.

“Long live Ita1y! Long live the King! PIETRO BADOGLIO.”

For the first time in twenty-one years the Italian radio signed off a nation-wide program by playing only the royal march. “Giovinezza.” the fascist anthem, like fascism, is dead.

[Field Marshal General Albert Kesselring. German Commander in Chief in Italy, and Hans-Georg I Viktor von Mackensen, the German Ambassador, negotiated with Marshal Badoglio in Rome last night, according to a Rome radio bulletin picked up in Stockholm, Sweden, by Reuter.]

Following the proclamation broadcast demonstrations broke out in many parts of the country as Italians went to the streets to celebrate the end of fascism. A Milan report, received here by telephone just before telephone communications were cut at 11 o’clock, told of bloodshed there when German antiaircraft units had apparently fired on a mob. No further details were given.

With half of the Italian population fleeing in an evacuation greater than that in France and those still at home “looking for Blackshirts,” the situation inside Italy is developing rapidly. Frontier reports tell of a state of “latent revolution,” leaving the country still looking for a Government with which to sue for peace. Marshal Enrico Caviglia may be the spokesman, but Marshal Badoglio will be the leader-and the King will remain as long as he can.

As troubles spread in Rome, more than an hour before the rest of Italy, fears were expressed for the safety of Signor Mussolini, Carlo Scorza, the Fascist party secretary, and the entire Cabinet, which was being detained under house arrest. They were therefore transferred to a place outside the capital, the approaches to which are being guarded by the army.

The first details received here of the origin of the Cabinet Crisis—heavily censored, for the movement was still in full swing—say it began in this morning’s special Cabinet session of the key Defense Ministries.

Premier Mussolini outlined “propositions” Adolf Hitler had made for the “salvation of the new European order” during their last meeting. They called for such great Italian sacrifices that the Under-Secretaries of War, Air and Navy refused to accept the responsibility for their execution without consultation with the full Cabinet.

When the Cabinet met the debate was lively until it was decided to submit the entire problem to the King and his councilors, who in the last analysis would be alone responsible to the nation.

The principal “proposition” was said to be the immediate withdrawal of all possible manpower and materiel from the Sicilian front, accepting enormous losses during that operation as inevitable. The Catania front, defended by the Hermann Goering Division, was to be taken over by “sufficient Italian rear guard” to enable its withdrawal first.

Italian forces would then be called upon to fight a “retiring rear-guard operation up the entire length of the Italian mainland from Naples, Calabria and Puglia to a line running approximately east-west through the southern limits of Tuscany, which would leave the Axis nations “a line of elastic defense while final preparations were being completed in the Apennines.”

This operation would be entirely Italian, aided only by German matériel. It was suggested the operation should be exclusively in the hands of the Italian military, while the slightly more trained Blackshirt militia formations would be reserved for “advanced line defense” in front of the Apennine positions.

Rome would be abandoned, while such matériel as could not be moved northward would be destroyed, mainly ammunition and explosives, several very big shipments of which are believed to have just arrived for the Germans.

As presented to the King, the alternative to defeat left little of his already shriveled empire and meant the abandonment of more than half of his country. His refusal was emphatic: the nation stood or fell, but it did one or the other together “despite the lacerations the nation has suffered “at the hands of the Fascist party.

The King then “accepted” the resignations of the Fascist government.

JULY 26, 1943

Biggest RAF-U.S. Raids on Reich Blast Hamburg, Hit Baltic Cities

By The United Press.

LONDON, July 26 —United States heavy bombers struck deep and hard into Germany by daylight yesterday, hammering aircraft factories at the Baltic port of Warnemuende and showering hundreds of high explosives into the smoking ruins of Hamburg, gutted by the British Royal Air Force’s night bombers twelve hours earlier in the greatest bombing assault of the war.

At the same time, other American heavies struck in force at the great German shipyards in Kiel and raided the Baltic industrial center of Wustrow, twenty-five miles west of Rostock.

The attack marked the biggest around-the-clock aerial assaults yet made by the American-British bombing teams. The raid on Warnemuende, seaport for the big manufacturing center of Rostock, was the deepest penetration of Germany yet made by the United States Eighth Air Force.

The RAF’s night bombers in fifty blazing minutes blasted Hamburg with 2,300 tons of explosive and incendiary bombs, a far greater weight of bombs than ever before had been dropped in a single operation. [The British Air Ministry gives its figures in tons of 2,240 pounds; at 2,000 pounds to the ton, the RAF blasted Hamburg with 2,576 tons of bombs.]

RAF heavy bombers returned to the assault on Germany during last night, British officials reported early today. Channel coast watchers reported that a ninety-minute procession of heavy bombers flew out of Britain toward occupied Europe just after midnight.

Large formations of American Flying Fortresses staged the follow-up daylight raid on Hamburg, raining hundreds of 500-pound bombs in mid-afternoon through great clouds of smoke rising thousands of feet from the fires started by the RAF armada.

Nazi fighters swarmed up to attack the American raiders before they completed their crossing of the North Sea en route to the targets, and German ground batteries in every town on their route threw up barrages of anti-aircraft fire and smoke screens.

Returning American crewmen reported that as many as 300 Nazi fighters intercepted their formations as the German defenders, apparently angered and shaken by the fury of the RAF’s Saturday night attack, strove desperately to prevent further damage to the vital port of Hamburg.

HAMBURG RAIDS COORDINATED

Brig. Gen. Frederick L. Anderson, chief of the Eighth Air Force Bomber Command, described the day’s operations as the biggest ever undertaken by the American bombing fleets. The Hamburg assault, he said, was “coordination with the RAF, both in the planning and execution.”

The four-pronged American heavy bomber raids were made at a cost of nineteen planes missing. The RAF over Saturday night, operating in what the Air Ministry, called “very great strength” [an Associated Press account from London cited an estimate of 1,000 British planes used], lost twelve bombers. Paced by the Flying Fortresses’ major raids, medium bombers of the Eighth Air Force and RAF bombers and fighters delivered many other blows at the Nazis in the occupied Low Countries and France.

The American medium bombers pounded factories near Ghent, Belgium, returning without loss. Escorted Mitchells of the RAF wrecked a Fokker aircraft factory at Amsterdam, while American Thunderbolts and Allied fighters swept over France and Belgium. Four Nazi fighters were destroyed.

Typhoon bombers attacked the enemy airfield at Woensdrecht, north of Antwerp. Boston bombers hit the Schipol airfield near Amsterdam.

FORTRESS GUNNERS DO JOB

The Flying Fortress gunners were credited with shooting down a “large number” of the Nazi fighters.

Official reports on the series of American heavy raids stated that bomb bursts were observed flush on the targets of Hamburg, Kiel, Warnemuende and Wurtow, with the weight of the American attack apparently centered on Hamburg.

In the Saturday night blow, far exceeding history’s previous heaviest air attack, the RAF dropped an average of nearly fifty-two tons of explosives and incendiaries every minute on Hamburg harbor and its shipbuilding yards and vital industrial plants, smashing ground defenses and scattering them.

The Allied air offensive against the Nazis in Western Europe was in high gear again. It was resumed after eight days of bad weather when large formations of American Flying Fortresses attacked U-boat installations at Trondheim and an aluminum and magnesium plant at Heroya, Norway, by daylight Saturday.

The Air Ministry announced that the RAF’s Hamburg assault began at 1 A.M. yesterday and soon afterward “dense black smoke rose four miles into the air and there were many reports of violent explosions.”

Fierce, fast-spreading fires roared through the city, illuminating the inky sky with a brilliant yellow glow.

One flier, who had participated in the last seven raids on the Ruhr, said the Nazis, ground defenses at Hamburg were quickly swamped. The raid set a record for concentration as well as for weight. In attacks on Dortmund, Muenster, Bochum and Duesseldorf, the RAF had dropped 2,000 tons of bombs in a little more than an hour.

JULY 26, 1943

PRESIDENT PLEDGES AID TO SAVE JEWS

President Roosevelt, in a message read last night to the Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe, promised that this Government would not cease its efforts to save those who could be saved.

This message and another from Secretary of State Cordell Hull, with which the President concurred, were read at the closing session of the conference in the Hotel Commodore. Mr. Hull said the final defeat of Hitler and the rooting out of the Nazi system were the only complete answer to the problem of saving the 4,000,000 Jews in Europe.

Former President Herbert Hoover, speaking by telephone from San Francisco, suggested development of the uplands of Central Africa as refuges for the oppressed minorities of the Axis-dominated countries.

Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, at the afternoon session, urged the United States and its Allies to serve notice on the Axis that all persons responsible for the deaths of Jews or non-Jews would be tried for murder. Meanwhile there would be practical steps taken for resettling those who desired to emigrate from Europe, he said.

THE PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

The message from President Roosevelt, addressed to Dr. Max Lerner, read:

“In reply to your telegram of July 15, 1943, asking a message to the Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe, I am glad to transmit a message from the Hon. Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, which has my full concurrence. You are aware of the interest of this Government in the terrible condition of the European Jews and of our repeated endeavors to save those who could be saved. These endeavors will not cease until Nazi power is forever crushed.”

Mr. Hull’s message read: “The rescue of the Jewish people, of course, and of other peoples likewise marked for slaughter by Nazi savagery, is under constant examination by the State Department, and any suggestion calculated to that end will be gladly considered. An intergovernmental agency has been created designed to deal with these problems. You will readily realize that no measure is practicable unless it is consistent with the destruction of Nazi tyranny; and that the final defeat of Hitler and the rooting out of the Nazi system is the only complete answer. This Government in cooperation with the British Government has agreed upon those measures which have been found to be practicable under war conditions and steps are now being taken to put them into effect.”

The messages were addressed to Dr. Lerner in his capacity as chairman of the panel on international relations.

GREAT PROBLEM, SAYS HOOVER

Mr. Hoover declared that to find relief for the Jews in Europe was one of the great human problems and that it required temporary and long-view measures.

“There should be more systematic temporary measures,” he said. “There are groups of Jews who have escaped into the neutral countries of Europe. They and any other refugees from the persecution of fascism should be assured of support by the United Nations. This step should go further. Definite refugee stations should be arranged in these neutral countries for those who may escape. But these measures should be accompanied by arrangements to steadily transfer them from these refugee stations in neutral countries to other quarters. Possibly the release of greater numbers of refugees could be secured from the Nazi countries by European neutrals.”

He said he had been urging for more than two years systematic food relief for the starving in the occupied countries. Referring to the aid given to Greece he asked: “Does not this experience warrant its extension to other occupied countries? It would save the lives of thousands of Jews.”

THE LONG-RANGE VIEW

The long-view solution, he said, resolves itself into two phases—where to move these people so as to give them permanent security and how to establish them there.

“We must accept the fact that the older and more fully settled countries have no longer any land and opportunity to absorb the migration of the oppressed,” he said. “Most Jews recognize that it is not in their interest to force such an issue. Palestine could take more of them. But after all, Palestine would absorb only a part of the three or four millions whom this conference has been discussing as needing relief. That could be accomplished only by moving the Arab population to some other quarter. These are problems impossible to settle during the war.

Hamburg in ruins after being heavily bombed by the RAF in July, 1943.

“But I am one of those who do not believe in half measures. And I believe in realism in physical problems.

“The world today needs an outlet for the persecuted of all lands and all faiths, not Jew alone. There should be some place where they may build a new civilization, as they did on this continent during the last century. The newest continent, from the point of view of development, is Africa. It is as yet comparatively unsettled and underdeveloped.

“Particularly in the uplands of Central Africa. Large areas of this upland are suitable for a white civilization. They are rich in material resources. But if we are to make use of them, there must be vast preparation. Men, women and children today cannot be dumped into new lands. There must be definitely organized advance preparation of housing, transportation, industrial establishments and agriculture on a huge scale. Many of these great African areas are mandates established from the last war, in trust for all the world. Such an area in Africa could be considered sentimentally an annex to Palestine.

“At least the time has arrived when we should demand that a real solution be found, and further that the United Nations undertake to finance and manage a real solution as part of the war. And that the enemy countries after the war be required to restore the property of these persecuted peoples and help fiancially their new settlements.

“After all, it is a great human problem that ranks with the other human problems we must meet as part of the reconstruction of the world.”

MAYOR URGES UNITED STATES TO ACT

The Mayor, in proposing that the United Nations serve notice that those responsible for the slaughter of the Jews would be held strictly accountable, said:

“With regard to this action and other actions which might be taken, I have to point out that our own Government cannot urge other nations to take the initiative before it takes action of its own.

“I refer here also to plans of emigration and colonization which have been put forward. We cannot tell others to take in the doomed while we keep our own doors closed. While we consider emigration and colonization, however, we must realize that taking the Jews and other minorities out of terrorist-ruled lands is not really the solution. The rights of the Jews and other minorities must be made safe in every country in the world. Therefore I can tell the Emergency Conference to Save the Jews of Europe that what it is striving for is an important part of what the United Nations are fighting for.”

Francis B. MacMahon, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and president of the Catholic Association for International Peace, characterized the plight of the Jewish people in Europe under Hitler as “the most terrible single tragedy of the present war.” “Passive acquiescence will make us moral participants in the crime of the Nazis,” he said.

Professor MacMahon said that Pope Pius XII had sought in many ways to save the Jews and that the full story could not be told today about the action of the Vatican. “It will be revealed when Germany is conquered,” he added.

Sigrid Undset, author, after denouncing anti-Semitism, said:

“It is the right of the Jewish nation to get the opportunity to defend itself in the future from a national stronghold, as an independent nation, in possession of all the organs of a national life of its own,” she added.

The conference adopted resolutions regarding ways to rescue the Jews of Europe and post-war aid based on previous findings by its various panels.

Chapter 15

“EISENHOWER RUBS HIS SEVEN-LUCK PIECES”

June–July 1943

THE PRINCIPAL PROBLEMS

CONTRIBUTIONS TO ‘MELTING POT’

WELL SUITED TO COMBAT TEAMS

AVID FOR MANUAL OF STUDY

GERMAN DIVE-BOMBERS ROUTED

YIELDED AFTER THIRD DEMAND

SHELLS HIT NEAR CRUISER

GREAT POWER THROWN AT TARGET

ENEMY ATTACKS FROM SICILY

REFORMS MAY BE FORCED

ATMOSPHERE OF HOSTILITY

WEIGHING THE REMEDIES

THE BATTLE OF INFLATION

HOW THE PARTIES DIVIDED

LAW GOES INTO EFFECT AT ONCE

SUBPOENA POWER FOR NWLB

SENATE IS FIRST TO ACT

APPEAL FOR ACTION CHEERED

SAYS STRIKES WON’T BE TOLERATED

FAVORS FIRST SEVEN SECTIONS

DRAFT CHANGE RECOMMENDED

A NEW BILL AIMED AT EMPLOYERS

NUTCRACKER MOVE SEEN

NAVY GIVES FIRST NEWS

ANNOUNCES NEWS OF ATTACK

PLEDGES LIBERATION OF PARIS

GIRAUD THANKS ROOSEVELT

CLASHING OPINIONS

EMOTION UNLEASHED

DYNAMIC NATIONALISM

ALLIED RESPONSIBILITY

OUR INTERVENTION

UNITY STILL ABSENT

SIGNS OF WANING SUPPORT

PREPARATORY STEPS

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

MEET NO ‘SERIOUS OPPOSITION’

FAILURE IN CONCEPTION

THE B-17’S ABILITIES HAILED

GREAT CARE USED

BADOGLIO SAYS HE’LL FIGHT

HAMBURG RAIDS COORDINATED

FORTRESS GUNNERS DO JOB

THE PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

GREAT PROBLEM, SAYS HOOVER

THE LONG-RANGE VIEW

MAYOR URGES UNITED STATES TO ACT