Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 13, 1994 TAG: 9407120051
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Greg Edwards
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Virginia Democrats, meeting in convention in Roanoke, passed an unprecedented resolution calling for delegates to the national convention to oppose the nomination of Henry A. Wallaces for the vice presidency. Negro delegates from Roanoke and Newport News were denied a vote when the credentials committee invoked a long-standing rule that only white Democrats could vote in the state convention.
News had reached New York of the cold-blooded massacres by revenge-seeking German troops of virtually the entire populations of the Greek village of Distomo and the French village of Oradour-sur-Glanes and the burning of both towns. The combined attacks killed 2,000 civilians.
An attack by thousands of desperate Japanese, supported by planes and artillery, pushed American lines on Saipan island back as much as 2,000 yards berfore it broken up, Admiral Chester W. Mimitz reported. U.S. Marines would wipe out all organized resistance on the island before the week's end.
A Moscow report said that Adolf Hitler had taken over direction of operations in the West following his firing of Field Marshal Gen. Karl von Rundstedt from command of German forces in France.
British troops smashed into Caen, sweeping through 12 suburban forts and moving to within a half-mile of the city's center. Caen had been the British objective on D-Day, a month earlier.
A Gallup poll had revealed four main issues (two reasons for and two against voting for Roosevelt) that could determine the outcome of the upcoming presidential election: 1. Roosevelt had a wider knowledge of the war situation and could better handle it; 2. The middle of the war was no place to change administrations; 3. Roosevelt's domestic policies had been wastefully and inefficiently carried out with too much bureaucracy; and 4. No man should hold public office for as long as Roosevelt had.
Virginia would serve as a vast reservoir for war wounded with casualties arriving at the port of Hampton Roads and moved to hospitals within the state.
The 5th Army had captured Volterra, the last good mountain road hub guard the approaches to the Italian port of Livorno (Leghorn).
The Red Army caputured Lida, a railway junction south of Wilno, and took more than 1,200 towns on the central front as the Germans fell back in disorder across old Poland and Lithuania.
British and U.S. advances were reported on the Normandy battlefield but Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme Allied commander warned against overoptimism and predicted long and bitter fighting ahead.
U.S. troops, fighting off packs of counter-attacking German tanks, swept to high ground two miles from St. Lo. The Yanks engulfed 16 villages on the approaches to St. Lo and had driven to the crest of a low razor-back ridge overlooking the Norman road center. A day later with bayonets fixed they moved to within a mile of the city.
President Roosevelt announced that he would accept - "reluctantly but as a good soldier" - a fourth-term nomination from the upcoming Democratic convention.
More than 1,200 U.S. Liberators and Flying Fortresses dropped more than 3,300 tons of bombs on the German city of Munich in the second raid within a day.
Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the soldier's son, who had braved death in North Africa, Sicily, Italy and France died of a heart attack as he rested in a captured German truck in Normandy.
by CNB