Reading the paper on December 7, 1942, the first anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack.
The US Army now has one million troops stationed in sixty-five nations or islands around the globe.
The Chief of the US Army in Hawaii predicts that Japan will strike the islands again ‘when circumstances permit.’
But he warns that his men “are impatient for action” and such an attack will be ‘repelled with disastrous Japanese losses.’
In a radio broadcast, the Japanese Foreign Minister said ‘the US had the nerve to demand that Japan break the Axis Alliance, an unreasonable demand which made the decisive destruction of the US necessary.’
US Navy officials replied by noting that the destruction of portions of Japan’s naval fleet over the past year had brought close the time when Japan’s occupation forces in the Pacific Islands will be starved of supplies.
In a speech, Admiral Nimitz, the commander of the US Pacific fleet, recounted US naval victories in the past year at Midway, in the Coral Sea and in the Solomon Islands.
He noted that the Pacific sea lanes were now safe for the transport of American men and supplies to the war zone and said most of the ships damaged in the Pearl Harbor attack “are on their way back to the fleet.”
Four hundred Allied bombers and fighters conducted daylight bombing raids over industrial targets and airfields in occupied France and the Netherlands yesterday, dropping ordnance whose explosive shock could be felt in Kent, England.
Meanwhile, desperate fighting continues in Tunisia, where Allied forces, aiming to oust German and Italian occupiers, are hampered by inadequate air support due to a lack of nearby Allied air bases.
Allied troops are heavily engaged in New Guinea and on Guadalcanal, where the Marines have eliminated five Japanese bases recently.
The Mexican Defense Ministry has announced its goal of training 1.6 million men in modern warfare techniques by the end of 1943.
Draft registration dates have been set for all young men reaching age eighteen, and draft boards have been ordered to stop inducting men who have passed their thirty-eighth birthday.
The Marines on Guadalcanal have returned a battle-hardened thirteen-year-old Wisconsin boy to a stateside base after discovering his true age.
He had enlisted more than a year ago soon after his twelfth birthday.
The chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee disclosed that, as of December 1, 1942, 42,635 American servicemen were missing in action.
Most are presumed to be prisoners of war.
The US government announced that, a year ago, the US produced 2,000 aircraft per month.
Now, the US produces five thousand aircraft per month.
Production increases are expected to bring that number to between eight and twelve thousand aircraft per month.
The League of Nations headquarters in Geneva reports a sharp increase in the birthrate in the US and Canada, while declines were reported in the European countries currently at war.
The New York Telephone Company will begin distributing 616,000 copies of its new, December 1942, Manhattan telephone directory today.
The book contains more than 450,000 listings.
The company asks subscribers to call “information” only when a telephone number is not listed in the directory.
The company reports that half of the 200,000 information calls it receives daily are for phone numbers listed in the book.
And finally…
In a notice posted today, Lee Shubert, the owner of Broadway’s Majestic Theatre, announced the closing of the play, “Native Son,” a drama depicting Negro life currently playing in his theater.
“I did this of my own accord,” Shubert told reporters. “I wanted to avoid trouble.”
A local Catholic bishop had written to Shubert recently, decrying the play as the “glorification of licentiousness and crime.”
New York Mayor La Guardia also received a letter with the Church’s complaint.
La Guardia told reporters, “I get blamed for everything.”
But by the next day, the closure will trigger an outpouring of support for the play and will bring objections on censorship grounds from the ACLU and the NAACP.
And Shubert will rescind the cancellation notice.
Right makes might.
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I’ll see you on Monday.
— Brenda
Stories from the New York Times.
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