The War

Last week World War II flared up in battle, destruction and death on every major front around the world.

In the Western World, men's hearts and minds were pinned fastest to the blood-soaked Normandy peninsula, where the original beachheads of the Allied invasion were being widened and deepened in savage combat. From within Occupied France came fragmentary reports of patriots rising to fight their German oppressors.

Air war ranged over Europe from the French coasts to Berlin, to the Balkans, where 1,000 U.S. shuttle planes plying between Italy and Russia bombed Nazi targets.

In Italy, tough Allied troops pursued the beaten Germans northward, 70 miles above liberated Rome.

After weeks of ominous quiet the long Russian front stirred. A major Red Army offensive in the north, to knock Finland out of the war, rolled through heavy defenses in a 15- to 25-mile surge reminiscent of the windup of the "Winter War" of 1939-40.

In the Adriatic, Allied and Partisan forces raided the Yugoslav island of Brac, wiping out a German garrison.

On the other side of the world, Japan felt the weight of U.S. power as a big naval task force struck by sea and air into the Marianas Islands, while heavy bombers from the South Pacific area attacked enemy bases in the Carolines. On Biak Island, a long step back toward the conquered Philippines, U.S. troops captured one key airfield.

On the Asiatic mainland, the Chinese captured Lungling, drove closer to the reopening of the Burma Road. Farther east, bitter fighting raged around the beleaguered Chinese city of Changsha, and from the south, around Canton, the Japanese launched another drive into the heart of China.

On this front especially there was danger of enemy gains that might prolong the war for months, even years. Elsewhere men watched the mounting pace of war, wondered how long combat could be continued at such violent pressure, wondered if the flames of 1944's summer might not mark the beginning of the end.