Reading the paper on September 28, 1944.
In the first Allied setback since D-Day, the British effort to seize the Rhine River bridge at Arnhem, in the Netherlands, has failed after a nine-day battle.
In a nighttime operation, 2,400 surviving British troops escaped through German lines in small groups and were evacuated.
1,200 wounded British men, along with 4,000 dead, were left behind.
The Arnhem operation was an attempt to create a northern route into Germany which bypassed the German Siegfried Line defenses, opening an Allied attack route into Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley.
One British soldier who was captured near Arnhem but later escaped told reporters about an argument he and others from his unit had had with their German captors.
When the Germans asked why the Allies had bombed the civilian targets of Berlin and other German cities, the British soldier had replied that ‘they had started it first’ with the Blitz bombing of London.
These German captors refused to believe that London still stood, having been convinced by German propaganda that Nazi ‘robot bombs’ had completely destroyed the city.
For the third day in a row, British and American heavy bombers struck industrial and rail targets across Germany, cutting resupply lines to German forces defending against the Allied advance towards Berlin.
The 1,100 American and 1,000 British aircraft flew through heavy rain and hail, dropping their ordnance through thick cloud cover while under attack from Luftwaffe fighters and ground-based anti-aircraft artillery.
Wing Commander Johnnie Johnson, Britain’s leading fighter pilot, has shot down his thirty-eighth German aircraft.
Soviet forces are tightening their encirclement of Riga, the capital of Nazi-occupied Latvia, in their broad assault against German positions in the Baltic States.
British commandos led an Allied raid on Albania, occupied by Italian forces since 1939, in the drive to eliminate Axis strongholds in the Balkans.
Patton’s Third Army is engaged in an assault against the German stronghold of Metz.
The US Office of War Information said that, considering Japan’s manpower and war supplies reserves, at least one-and-one-half to two years would be needed to defeat Japan after Germany’s Nazi regime has fallen.
‘The surface of Japan’s ability to resist Allied attack has barely been scratched,’ the officials said.
Officials in New York City reported that almost 840,000 men from the city have joined the nation’s military services since military registration began in October 1940.
In marking yesterday’s four-year anniversary of the Axis alliance, the Nazi foreign minister Von Ribbentrop said:
“[S]hould the enemy succeed in temporarily setting foot on German soil he may be assured that absolute hell will spring up about him.
“[T]here is only one [German] motto: to stand by each other more firmly, to fight to the last, to capitulate never.”
Three days earlier, Hitler had ordered the creation of the Volkssturm — the people’s storm — a militia of men ages sixteen to sixty not then serving in Germany’s military.
Meanwhile, Americans returned from German POW camps in a prisoner exchange report that, based on conversations with their German guards, most Germans, especially older ones, were war-weary ‘and were hoping for the Allied invasion of France long before it happened.’
Yesterday, sixteen Americans received the Distinguished Service Cross for their actions in Normandy on D-Day, 113 days ago, in an awards ceremony in a forest along the Siegfried Line.
Each had fought in more than a dozen battles and traveled more than 500 miles since then.
Said a commanding officer at the ceremony:
“For every boy getting a medal there, thirty in their outfits are dead or wounded since invasion day.”
A disagreement has emerged in France over the number of Germans who may still remain in liberated Paris.
Estimates range from 1,500 to 100,000.
The French resistance claims the higher number, as evidenced by the sound of nighttime gunfire, and say this continuing German threat justifies keeping their militia units armed.
US officials claim the number of residual Germans is very low, considering the scarcity of food in Paris, and they say the nighttime gunfire mostly comes from the French partisans, themselves.
Vice President Henry Wallace, campaigning for FDR’s reelection in November, told shipyard workers they were more likely to have postwar jobs under a Democratic administration than under the Republicans.
Thomas Dewey, the Republican presidential nominee, ratcheted up his attacks on FDR, telling an audience in Vinita, Oklahoma:
“We have 10,000,000 men coming home from this war…
“who want to come home to a country where they are not ordered all day long what jobs they have or may not have
“by an all-wise groups of brain-trusters who sit in ivory towers in Washington and think they know how the American people want to live.”
In sports yesterday, the Boston Red Sox broke a ten-game losing streak to defeat the St. Louis Browns 4 to 1.
The defeat dropped the Browns from a first-place tie to one game behind the American League-leading Detroit Tigers.
The game was played in St. Louis last night in a field of mud after the afternoon start time was delayed due to a five-hour rain.
Sand was thrown on the diamond.
FDR will travel to the Red Sox’s home, Boston’s Fenway Park, in six weeks to make his final campaign speech before the November election.
And finally, you can escape the war by going to the movies.
And, reflecting the somber times, many are light-hearted.
Among the choices:
“And The Angels Sing,” with Dorothy Lamour and Fred MacMurray; and
“In Society,” with Abbott and Costello.
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I’ll see you on Monday.
— Brenda
Banner image: Soviet assault on Riga, Latvia, September/October 1944.
Stories from the New York Times.
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