Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 30, 1994 TAG: 9412070065
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS
DATELINE: WORLD WAR II: 50 YEARS AGO LENGTH: Medium
\ The war refugee board - three members of President Roosevelt's cabinet - released a 25,000-word report of bestial cruelty and murder by the millions in German extermination camps. The reports consisted of two eye-witness accounts of life in the Nazi camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. Each included estimates that more than a million and a half Jews from various European countries had been gassed and cremated between April 1942 and April 1944 alone.
Bayonet-wielding doughboys hacked their way out of the death-ridden Huertgen forest to the Cologne plain, breaking the enemy's fanatic grip on the approaches of the third city of the Reich while other Yanks streamed 11 miles through dismembered German defenses north of Strasbourg.
Lt. Gen. George Patton's Third Army fought its way deeply into Saarlautern, a Saar River basin fortress and industrial city.
U.S. fighter planes destroyed another four-ship Japanese troop and supply convoy bound for Leyte, raising to approximately 17,000 the number of enemy troops killed or drowned in attempts to reinforce the embattled island during the previous two weeks.
The War Labor Board rejected a steel union demand for a 17-cents-an-hour general raise, which would have broken the Little Steel formula, the keystone of the nation's wage-stabilization policy. The board, however, directed 86 basic steel companies to pay premiums for night work.
The Virginia Republican chairman said he opposed Democratic attempts to limit a proposed state constitutional convention to the single issue of giving servicemen a way to vote in the 1945 state elections. I.R. Dovel said the convention should also take up poll-tax revision and the popular election of state officials and judges.
The Roanoke American Viscose plant had secured a second army ordnance contract for the assembly of more than a million fuse boosters used to prime the powder charge in large shells.
A high government source reported that Secretary of State Cordell Hull had resigned because of poor health. Edward R. Stettinus Jr. was named Hull's successor.
Russian troops driving 18 miles inside eastern Slovakia captured important Axis strongholds.
Panic buying had helped create a national cigarette shortage. President Roosevelt, meanwhile, said a bronchial problem, not the shortage, had led him to cut back from two to less than one pack a day.
Maryland registered its first victory of the season, downing VMI 8-6 in a Thanksgiving Day game at Roanoke's Victory Stadium.
To date, U.S. forces had killed 277,000 Japanese at the cost of 21,000 American lives, the Office of War Information reported.
by CNB