
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 16, 1994                   TAG: 9402150142
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Greg Edwards
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SHORT ON MEAT, EGGS AND POULTRY

Reports reaching Washington and government surveys raised the possibility of a far greater shortage of meat, eggs and poultry in the coming year than food officials had been expecting. Because of dwindling feed supplies, the war administration had asked for a cutback on hog, poultry and beef production; but farmers had gone farther than expected.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced flatly that Allied commanders in the Italian campaign had assured him Rome would be won. The announcement, at the height of the swaying battle on the Anzio beachhead and around Cassino, was intended to quiet mounting anxiety in both Britain and the United States.

As mud-spattered 5th Army troops grimly tightened their grip on the Anzio beachhead, their commander, Lt. Gen. Mark W. Clark, assured them that supplies were arriving for them. Their hold on the beachhead seemed firmer as a German attack had been repulsed with the aid of allied warships, which had shelled enemy positions.

Synthetic eyes, which enabled fighting men to see things ordinarily invisible, were being turned out by the hundreds in Cambridge, Mass., by the Polaroid Corp. The goggles, spectacles and other devices used a little-known plastic that sorted rays of light, letting in some rays and extinguishing others.

In one month a hostile Congress had all but battered the life out of a home-front legislative program that President Franklin D. Roosevelt laid before Congress on Jan. 11 as his pattern to speed the peace. Only two bright spots had come out of the legislation: a veterans' rehabilitation program and control of war profits.

Rep. A. Willis Robertson, D-Va., calling Americans "soft" and "flabby," appealed for the same hardness on the home front as needed by soldiers in battle. The nation's labor and war-tax program was inadequate, he said. "We deplore strikes, yet strikes continue," said the congressman, who also attacked inflationary wage increases.

The Allied command charged that the Germans had turned the famous Benedictine monastery on Mount Cassino into a fortress and therefore it might be necessary to assault it. Shortly afterwards reports were received that an artillery and air bombardment of the monastery had begun. The monastery overlooked the town of Cassino and dominated the road to Rome.

American forces occupied Rooke Island in the Dampier strait between New Britain and New Guinea with no opposition from the Japanese.

Johnny Revolta of Evanston, Ill., shot a three-under-par 68 to defeat Byron Nelson for the Texas Open Championship and $1,000 in war bonds.

An allied troopship had been sunk on an undisclosed date in European waters with the loss of 1,000 American soldiers, the greatest loss yet in a convoy of U.S. forces. The ship, carrying about 2,000 troops, was attacked at night, probably by a submarine.

In answer to the critical shortage of farm labor, war agencies called for the establishment of a mobile task force of 126,000 able-bodied experienced interstate and foreign workers, who would be shifted from area to area of critical need to assist local farm labor.

Powerful task forces of the U.S. Pacific fleet, accompanied by hundreds of carrier planes, launched the first assault of the war on Truk, Japan's mighty air and naval base in the Caroline Islands.

The National D-Day Memorial Foundation is selling commemorative bumper stickers for $1 and enamled pins for $5 as fund-raisers.

If you are interested in buying these items, write the foundation at 2551 Sweetbrier Ave. S.W., Roanoke, Va. 24015, or call 774-7045.

by CNB