Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 5, 1994 TAG: 9401040180
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Greg Edwards
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In recognition of the sacrifice of the region's veterans, we take the following look at a selection of World War II headlines from the South Pacific, Europe and the home front for the week of Sunday, Jan. 2, through Saturday, Jan. 8, 1944:
Red Army troops crossed the prewar Polish border in pursuit of demoralized German troops who were throwing away their guns, Moscow reported.
In the holiday football bowls: Southern California used the pass to win their seventh Rose Bowl football game in as many tries, 29-0, over the University of Washington. Steven Van Buren, Louisiana State's 200-pound halfback, gained 172 of LSU's net 181 yards in leading the Tigers to an Orange Bowl victory over Texas A&M. At the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, Georgia Tech pulled out a fourth-quarter 20-18 victory over Tulsa's Golden Hurricane.
The Office of Price Administration announced another pork bonus, validating spare stamp No. 2 in ration book four for the purchase of five points' worth of fresh pork and sausage from Jan. 2 through Jan. 15.
Royal Air Force Lancaster bombers rained 1,000 tons of bombs on Berlin in a ninth major assault, bringing to 14,000 tons the amount of bomb weight dropped on the German capital since an obliteration campaign opened Nov. 18.
The armed forces disclosed that they had a powerful new chemical weapon against body lice, the carrier of typhus fever. All production of the chemical DDT was limited to Army and Navy uses, but experiments revealed it was deadly to a wide variety of animal and plant pests - offering the possibility of postwar use.
Chinese generals acknowledged 54,000 casualties in a month of fighting against the Japanese, who they asserted lost three-quarters as many men.
American Federation of Labor President William Green demanded that U.S. Army chief of staff Gen. George C. Marshall show proof of his assertion that labor troubles may have upset the U.S. war timetable.
A federal grand jury in Washington indicted 28 men and two women on charges that they engaged in a three-year plot to incite mutiny in the armed forces, unseat the government and set up a Nazi regime in the United States.
The National Football League appeared ready to push its frontiers westward to San Francisco and Los Angeles. There was even talk that after the war the league might be split into two separate major leagues like baseball.
The Germans' supply traffic through the big railway bottleneck at Turin in northern Italy was disrupted, and a ball and roller-bearing works at nearby Villar Perosa was shattered by a heavy and accurate onslaught of U.S. flying Fortresses.
Although the American people gave the Selective Service draft boards a high vote of confidence, the number of people who thought the boards were handling the draft fairly had declined, since the drafting of pre-Pearl Harbor fathers had picked up, a public opinion poll revealed.
American Marines at Cape Gloucester, New Britain, threw tanks, artillery and aircraft into a determined drive on the Japanese positions at Borgen Bay.
Football fatalities were showing a marked decline. Only 10 deaths charged to football were reported in the United States in 1943 and not a single one due to injuries in a college game.
The U.S. Army Air Force and the Royal Air Force disclosed that a new "rocket" plane had emerged from their joint engineering laboratories, capable of extreme speeds at high altitudes without using standard propellers. The plane was powered with jet propulsion engines.
The fortress village of San Vittore, just six miles from Cassino and the flat plain leading toward Rome fell to Gen. Mark W. Clark's 5th Army after three days of desperate, no-quarter street fighting with a German garrison.
Prohibitions against the use of iron and steel in 1,200 of the most common civilian products was to soon be lifted, War Production Board sources reported. Included in the list of banned items were coat hangers, bathtubs, flashlight tubes, lipstick holders, pie plates and mop wringers.
by CNB