Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 31, 1995 TAG: 9505310059
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
America's great B-29 Superfortress bombers had burned and gutted Tokyo along with Emperor Hirohito's imperial palace and the entire city would have to be rebuilt, Japan radio broadcasts said. American forces lost a record 19 of 500 bombers in the firebomb attack on the Japanese capital. The attack had been aided by 70 mile per hour gale-force winds.
Meanwhile, the Army Air Force announced that it was sending the Eighth Air Force from Europe to the battle against Japan under the command of Lt. Gen. James H. Doolittle. Doolittle was prepared to finish the job he had begun with his famous carrier-based raid in 1942.
The final cleanup of the old battlefields of Normandy was disclosing an appalling waste as salvage crews uncovered everything from Jeeps to bulldozers left behind as units had pulled out in pursuit of the Germans. The commander of the 17th ordnance batallion estimated that 47,000 tons of ammunition had to be reboxed, including 400 tons of nitro-glycerine staked out in one field.
Rep. Clifton A. Woodrum, D-Roanoke, was to head a congressional committee studying the controversial issue of whether American youths should be required to undergo a period of military training.
Sam Snead of Hot Springs won the 36-hole stroke play section of his 72-hole challenge match with Byron Nelson. Nelson, however, took the match-play part of the contest 4 and 3.
Top leaders of the United Nations conference in San Francisco were digging in for a showdown on the hottest remaining issue - a controversy between big and little nations over the right of the great powers to veto attempts to settle international disputes peacefully. Australian Foreign Minister Herbert V. Evatt was spearheading opposition to giving the "big five" nations veto rights.
President Truman met with former President Hoover at the White House to discuss the vast problem of feeding Europe's hungry millions.
Lord Haw Haw, a notorious British renegade who broadcast for the Nazis, lay captured and seriously wounded as British soldiers shouted at the hated traitor.
U.S. Marines, collapsing the entire western side of the enemy line on Okinawa, brought all of Naha, the island capital, under control and stormed into the formidable Shuri fortress.
Hopes for more civilian shoes and clothing were dimmed with the announcement by war production chief J.A. Krug that military demands for textiles and leather to fight the Pacific war would run higher in 1945 than in 1944.
Johnny Mack Brown, one of Hollywood's favorite Western stars, visited Roanoke and entertained theater-goers at the Roanoke Theatre and polio patients at Roanoke Hospital with various cowboy tricks.
A woman and five children who had been killed on an Oregon fishing trip on May 5 had been victims of a bomb attached to a Japanese balloon. They were the only reported fatalities so far from hundreds of bomb-carrying balloons the Japanese had dispatched toward the United States.
by CNB