Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that yet another large RAF raid, comparable to the thousand-plane, 2,300-ton bombing raid of Monday night hit Berlin Tuesday night. This time, losses were 20 planes, compared to 36 on Monday. All wire communication with Berlin was severed by the saturation of bombs.

Reports from Sweden estimated that 25,000 people had been killed in the raid of Monday night, as the intense heat from the bombs was reported to have literally boiled the asphalt. Observers were heard to liken the resulting chaos to an inferno.

Dante's Inferno, to be more precise.

In Italy, the Eighth Army gained six miles to take the town of San Angelo, a half mile from the Sangro River. Near the mouth of the Garigliano River, British troops of the Fifth Army met a large German patrol, inflicting heavy casualties while losing but one man.

Despite the recent setbacks to the Germans at Zhitomir, the Red Army pressed on toward both Kiev and Gomel, the fall of each appearing imminent.

In the Pacific, Admiral Chester Nimitz declared that the Gilbert Islands were now firmly held by the Allied forces, with virtual control having been seized of the three key islands of Abemama, Tarawa, and Makin. Makin had already fallen; Tarawa, with a key harbor facility, was about to fall; and mopping-up operations were taking place on Abemama.

In Yugoslavia, General Draja Mihailovic announced that his Chetnik forces had taken all of Montenegro. The Chetniks had been fighting Tito's Partisans in a civil war while both fought the Germans, even if Tito claimed the Chetniks were fighting at times with the Germans against the Partisans.

The Senate Military Affairs Committee, chaired by Robert Rice Reynolds, unanimously demanded a report from Secretary of War Henry Stimson on the slapping of the soldier in Sicily by General Patton. The report was summoned in conjunction with the request by the President to consider a permanent promotion of General Patton from his current permanent rank of colonel to major-general. His wartime rank was that of lieutenant-general, given him at the time he assumed command of the U.S. Army Second Corps in Tunisia in March.

Senator Reynolds indicated his belief that the matter of discipline of General Patton should be left to the Army, that in war nerves would fray.

Hal Boyle devotes his entire column, delayed from November 22, to the Patton slapping incident. He counsels that the Army was correct in reproving Patton but also, because of his talents and value as a general, in retaining his command. He had conducted the Sicily Campaign in 38 days after turning around the Tunisian Campaign, wresting it from the disaster of Kasserine Pass.

No one to whom Mr. Boyle talked in North Africa, neither foot soldier nor officer, save for one lieutenant, had voiced support for Patton in the incident. The lieutenant thought a good swift kick in the rear would do some of the soldiers good from time to time. A major-general had expressed a similar sentiment, while admitting that in the First World War, he, himself, had suffered from shell-shock as a young lieutenant.

A correspondent who had spent time in Nazi Germany before the outbreak of the war had stated that any general who slapped a private would have been immediately cashiered. Fortunately, the United States, both military and civilian, at the time had enough vivid contrast immediately before its eyes in the daily prints to understand the distinction and that it was not to become Nazi Germany, bent on Draconian punishment.

A lieutenant from Savannah had written a letter offering to change places with anyone dissatisfied with the rationed comforts of home. He offered up his Arab hut in North Africa or the foxhole which he expected would soon serve as his accommodation on his next European vacation, replete with all the comforts, air conditioning, plenty of running water, and mud walls.

The third in the series of articles on the FBI's counter-spying efforts, continued on the inside page, provides a series of light-hearted moments related by the G-men during their capture of various enemy spies.

Perhaps the most curious of these is the mention, somewhat out of context, of one Gulan Bogans who claimed, while walking down a street in Detroit one day, to have met Allah, causing Gulan to believe himself the incarnation of the prophet Elijah. Thereupon, the self-dubbed Elijah formed an Islamic organization and charged dues to everyone who joined, giving each member a new name. The vignette finds it funny that the members turned him in to the FBI when the dues became too large.

The reference is, of course, to Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam in its early days.

The largest fire in the history of Grand Rapids, Michigan struck a furniture company, causing enormous damage, but leaving only one fireman killed when he was hit by a falling wall which spread debris on the tracks of the Grand Trunk Western Railroad.

On the editorial page, "The Valiant" finds huge disappointment in the tarnished luster of General Patton's stars, unlikely, it predicts, ever to regain their shine, as Drew Pearson had also predicted in his Sunday broadcast first announcing the incident.

The column had always found Georgie Patton to be the best of the fighting generals. But now it recognized his clay feet and found them unlikely stuff on which could be inculcated in his men the fighting edge of tomorrow.

Yet, through it all, it would be so--and even more so than before.

The piece concludes that the decision on punishment, however, had to be vested strictly in the judgment of General Eisenhower.

"Hospitals"--scene of the next major feature film in which George C. Scott starred after "Patton"--comments on the efficiency of hospitals over time from the turn of the century, that costs had scarcely risen while care had improved.

Costs per day for a patient to stay had risen in forty years only from between $2 and $2.25 to between $5 and $6 per diem. Average length of stay in 1903 when the Wrights first flew was thirty days; in 1943, it had been reduced to 10. Thus the overall cost remained at about $65 per day. Mortality rate from hospital visits meanwhile had dropped from twelve percent to four percent.

Boy, is that one out of date.

See the George C. Scott film of 1971 for an update.

Nowadays, you're lucky not to be deemed an outpatient if you have suffered decapitation, or to escape with less than a bill of a million a day for a head cold. The average mortality rate seems to be ultimately about a hundred percent.

Stay away if you can help it. Tie a tourniquet on it, grin, and be happy, boy. You may not get well, but at least you won't die of pneumonia in the hospital, admitted with but a bum knee--as did a friend of ours at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland.

And the Republicans want to do away with the new health care bill, passed just in January, not just improve it but end it, so that all their rich contributors can continue to get rich off the sick, the dying, and the aging--while our catarrh gently seeps.

"No Triumph" contrasts the Nazis' taking of Samos, the last of the British-held Aegean islands in the Dodecanese group, as inconsequential when compared to the devastation wreaked on Berlin by the RAF in the previous six days.

The editorial finds the raids more significant than even the gains in Russia and Italy, for the bombs were striking the heart of German morale, and, thus, it predicts, the Germans would not be much longer in the war without internal collapse.

"Pro & Con" finds the issue of India's independence from Great Britain not quite so clear-cut as suggested in a speech in Charlotte by Dr. Anup Singh, who had suggested that one had to be either for or against the independence of his country.

The piece draws analogy with the colonial experience in America and the ill-fitted shoe of independence which the colonists were determined against the odds to wear, despite the probability that, bereft of the British Royal Navy's protective blanket, they would be beset by European marauders of all stripes. Yet, the determined nation plowed ahead and survived against the odds.

Would it be so with India? The answer was unclear.

Samuel Grafton opines that it was a meaningless question posed as to whether small nations ought have equal power with large nations at the peace table in the wake of the Moscow Declarations. It was tantamount, he says, to asking whether a mouse ought weigh a ton.

The real question was how to get the big nations to act in the best interest of the smaller nations and to provide the smaller nations with equal opportunity for economic development.

Those who favored equality for the smaller nations, he continues, were really seeking to deprive the big nations of power, but only in times of peace. The big nations' power was always deemed desirable in times of war.

Raymond Clapper again discusses the need to begin the transition of the economy back to a peacetime basis, capable of being done already in several industries on which the war did not depend. He even suggests that the auto industry might be able soon to resume production.

That one would still await the end of the war. New car production would not resume until 1946, four years after it suddenly was ordered by the Government ceased in February, 1942 in the wake of the attack at Pearl Harbor and consequent declarations of war on Japan and Germany.

Drew Pearson reports of an off-the-record excoriation of Budget Director Harold Smith by Representative John Dingell of Detroit--whose son currently serves in Congress, as he has continuously since 1955. Congressman Dingell thought it rather strange that the Army only spent seven billion dollars per month while it asked the Congress to appropriate 30 billion per month. He wanted to know, for instance, why the Army had bought up all the sauerkraut in the United States, that it was not preparing to feed the German Army. He wanted to know likewise why the Army bought the entire salmon pack at high prices and then sold off a large portion of it at the end of the season when prices were low. He further inquired as to why the Army purchased turkeys at 8 ½ cents above the ceiling price. He asked why the Pentagon Building, opened in 1942, had cost the taxpayers 78 billion dollars when the Congress had originally appropriated only 32 billion. Why had the Army paved over one lake and built another, paved forty miles of roads, constructed twenty-seven bridges, and altered the entire northeast corner of Virginia? He answered his own final rhetorical question.

The upbraiding had resulted in the Budget Director cutting the Army's sought appropriation by 13 billion dollars, as announced a few days earlier.

Whether the Navy would follow in having its budget slashed was yet to be announced from the stage.