Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in a ten-mile advance along the Via Casalina, through heavy rain and mud, the Fifth Army had taken Capua, an important point of crossing on the south side of the Volturno River and seventeen miles north of Naples. The Army also took Castel Volturno at the river's mouth, 97 airline miles from Rome.

The Eighth Army, moving up the Adriatic coast, threatened Pescara at the coastal end of a broad highway stretching across the Apennine Mountains to Rome.

A report from Bern described the early August aftermath of the bombing of Hamburg as an holocaust in which thousands died from suffocation as the oxygen was sucked from the air by the tumultuous fires produced by the intense bombing.

Hitler meanwhile coolly told his people that they were down but not out.

Flying Fortresses struck at Bremen after a night of heavy raids by the RAF on Munich, Friedrichshafen, and Stuttgart. Seven planes failed to return from the night raids.

At the same time, fifteen of 60 Luftwaffe bombers penetrated British coastal defenses and let loose 33 tons of bombs on London. Three other raids during the year, however, had been larger. None had compared to the rain of devastation poured on the city during the Blitz, the last such raid having occurred May 10, 1941, when 450 tons of bombs killed almost 1,500 people in a single night.

On the Russian front, a crossing of the Dneiper River by the Red Army to the south of Kiev, combined with other river crossings to the north, indicated that the Russians were closing in on the Ukrainian capital. Increasingly, it appeared that the Nazis were falling back from their main line of defense along the Dneiper. The next natural line was along the Bug River, a less formidable line than the Dneiper and thus more easily breached by the Russians come winter snows and ice.

In the Pacific, General MacArthur's headquarters reported that the airbase at Vila on Kolombangara had been evacuated completely by the Japanese.

The enemy barge traffic from Kolombangara was reported to have ceased and all Allied air operations now focused on Choiseul Island 50 miles to the north, the point to which the surviving Japanese troops on Kolombangara had been transferred for transport further north to Bougainville.

On the editorial page, "A Relapse" finds prostitution once again stalking the city of Charlotte. A vice officer simply explained the problem: "You can't catch whores while you're doing something else."

"The Block" provides tepid praise to the City Council for at least openly considering the problems of the black community of the city. The consensus had been that housing lay at the root of most of the problems but that there was no money available for housing until war's end, thus quietly tabling the problem no sooner than its troublesome head had been raised out of the dark.

The editorial finds this solution too pat and instead votes again for a comprehensive survey of the black community itself, along with its many neighborhood leaders, to determine first, with some precision, what the problems were before focusing on solutions. Black leaders had counseled that moving people from slums to housing projects would not eradicate the issues of sanitation and crime, that the problems would follow the people into the projects without better education and jobs in the offing as part of the transitional process.

The piece also finds it unbecoming for the city to put off the problem until after the war, that it could not wait until then.

Raymond Clapper looks ahead to the 1944 presidential election, suggests that the Democrats, if they were to nominate FDR, should opt for a significantly shortened campaign and convention in the first wartime election since the Civil War. Such only befitted the solemnity of such a war, omnipresent and supervening as it had been in American life for the previous two years.

The Republicans, by contrast, had an uphill battle against the President and thus would need a longer campaign.

The Democrats favored Chicago as the locus of their convention while the Republicans were leaning to Cleveland, to steer away from the isolationist wing of the Party in the home of Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick.

Mr. Clapper applauds the fact that, despite all of its fanciful folderol and jejune tickertape, such a tradition could persist in the midst of such a world war in which democracy itself was under attack by the forces of totalitarian fascism.

Drew Pearson looks at the investigation being launched by a new committee in the Senate chaired by Harley Kilgore of West Virginia. The War Mobilization Committee would examine the potential post-war distribution of patents developed from war research. Would they, as in the case of the aftermath of World War I, be turned over to a few large corporations to exploit? Or, as Senator Kilgore favored, would they go to the people to be used by large and small businesses alike? It had been, after all, the people who paid in the form of government taxes for most of the research. Also of concern under a similar microscope would be the ultimate disposition of Axis patents to be seized by the end of the war.

Mr. Pearson also relates of Senator Owen Brewster of Maine, while on the Senatorial trip around the Pacific, asking General B.B. Somervell, chief of the Army's Service Forces, the question why America was being asked to provide 75% of the war's oil when it only possessed 25% of the world's supply. He reminded the general that the British had substantial oil interests in the Persian Gulf area and that these logically should be tapped for use in the war now that the Mediterranean had been cleared for sea and air traffic. The general agreed and replied that the Army was sending refining equipment to Arabia as quickly as they could get it there.

The Senator, not satisfied, retorted that British refineries were already in place in the Persian Gulf and thus should be utilized for the purpose, that he had been informed that they could increase their output by 60 percent. Moreover, the crude of the Gulf states was sufficiently good that it could be pumped directly into the tanks of ships as "bunker oil"--that is the fuel for the ship--without the necessity of refining.

The conservative Senator believed that the state of affairs suggested a condition whereby the United States might otherwise find itself after the war virtually depleted of oil and dependent on the British for its supply.

Thus spake Zarathustra…

Samuel Grafton relates the report of Congressman Will Rogers, Jr. of California, on a trip to London, who had asserted that the Allies had for the moment lost their air supremacy in Europe to Hitler's thrust in production of fighter planes. Mr. Grafton thus questions, without willingness to try to answer, whether the Allies should not have launched a cross-channel invasion while their bombers enjoyed relatively unchecked latitude over German and occupied French cities.

He next examines the related report by James Reston of The New York Times that the Polish government-in-exile in London had indicated that the Poles probably would not object to Russia chasing the Germans into and through Poland provided that the Russians would renounce any territorial demands on Eastern Poland. Mr. Grafton finds this traffic jam of war a paradox which had to be resolved. He asks rhetorically whether the Poles would accept Russia stopping at the Polish border.

Finding the morass indicative of the old unrealistic dilemma with Russia, that they should fight for the Allied cause and then disappear after achieving the victory, he cites it as another reason why the Western Allies should already be invading the Continent en masse from the West, to avoid the prospect that Russia would get to the peace table first, with all the equity of war in their favor in seeking post-war spoils of victory.

The Russians, he reminds, wanted the Americans and British to open that second front in Western Europe. He was hopeful that the West would concur and thereby soon establish its own rightful stake at the post-war table in the process. The described congestion, he concludes, would continue until such a decisive invasion could occur.

He poses the question ultimately as to whether the war might have been won sooner had the British and Americans been able to enter France in 1943. It is an intriguing question, but one incapable of answer. Churchill had advocated the complete build-up of an adequate invasionary force in England before the move was finally made. He had also reportedly favored that the Americans comprise the bulk of that force. Regardless of the reasoning and who was responsible for it, it meant significant delay while Americans were being trained in both America and England. But neither Mr. Churchill nor FDR wished a repeat of 1940’s debacle at Dunkirk, or of the disastrous commando raid in August, 1942 at Dieppe.

In all likelihood, with 20-20 hindsight in store, what happened was the only thing which could happen with assurance of the results which did happen.

In any event, the Allies needed a general skilled as a traffic cop, utilizing his riding strop as the pointing device, to relieve the congestion of war.

They would find him again, in time--improvident slap in Sicily or no of a man suffering from malaria.

And, while the World Series took the day off to move the games to St. Louis, the Side Glances seems to pick up where the one the previous month on the chicks left off.