World War II Chronicle: February 9, 1944
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Sports on page 11, featuring a boxing column by Grantland Rice… The landing at Anzio caught the Germans totally by surprise and could have put defenders on their heels and opened the door to Rome, but Maj. Gen. John P. Lucas spent several days consolidating his beachhead instead. General Lucas knows more about fighting than we do, and 80 years later we have all the intelligence he would have killed for at our fingertips. Was the hesitancy of the command, which as the correspondent points out on page 24 includes Fifth Army boss Lt. Gen. Mark Clark, understandable given what they knew at the time? Or was it a blunder that instead of driving the Germans back, let them switch to the offensive in Italy?
George Fielding Eliot points out in his column on page six that the German counterattack wasn’t successful, and he suggests that if Lucas ordered his force to push for Rome they might have been destroyed…
Speaking of surprise, Alexander de Seversky has a column recommending the United States hold off on using the new B-29 bomber until they can conduct mass attacks. Using these giant bombers — he indicates these secret planes are twice as big as the B-17 — too soon will give the enemy time to figure out the superfortress’s capabilities instead of overwhelming our foes (see page 25)… Another war correspondent writes about the now-declassified Nazi radio-controlled glider bombs, which are a major threat to Allied shipping (page 29). In fact, one of these primitive cruise missiles sunk the British troopship HMT Rohna last November, killing over 1,000 American service men…
Evening star. (Washington, D.C.), 9 February 1944. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1944-02-09/ed-1/