January 2, 1944;

THIS WAS REPORTED TODAY, JANUARY 2, 1944:

War is many things—a destructive concert of bombs and shells, a

clash of machines, and a man with a job to do. Here, armed with a

sub-machine-gun and a lot of moxie, an infantryman of the 82nd

Airborne Division leaves his foxhole to help intercept a German

patrol near Bray, Belgium. His buddy at the right covers him with

a .30-cal. machine-gun. In the clash that followed several Nazi SS

troops were killed and one taken prisoner.

U.S. Army Signal Corps Photo

At Least 181

Nazi Craft *

Shot Down

The Luftwaffe, making a new bid to cut down Allied air supremacy, suffered severe losses along the Western Front yesterday as it struck heavily at airfields in what was described by Associated Press as its greatest air assault in three years.

Swarms of single-engined lighters and some jet-propelled planes raked fields m

Belgium, raided the cities of Antwerp and Brussels, and strafed the mouth of the Scheldt. At a late hour last night, at least 181 of the raiders were reported downed.

Meanwhile, the Eighth Air Force carried its assault on German industry and transportation into its tenth straight day, as 800 Fortresses and Liberators pounded vital targets in the Reich.

The Eighth's heavies, escorted by more than 800 Thunderbolts and Mustangs, plastered an oil refinery at Dollbergen, northwest of Brunswick, other military

and industrial targets in north-central Germany, and went after rail bridges in

the Coblenz area. Early reports listed 17 fighters shot down battling the heavies.

Pays Heavily Everywhere

The Luftwaffe paid heavily all along the line. Lightnings and Thunderbolts of the Ninth Air Force tangled with 50 enemy planes over a U.S. airfield in Belgium, and knocked down 33 while losing only two. The RAF, tangling with 250 Nazi raiders over fields in Belgium in what the Second Tactical Air Force described as the biggest and most concentrated effort by the Luftwaffe it had encountered since D-Day, got a huge bag of 125, 84 by fighters, the rest by flak. RAF loses were four.

Pattern's Men

Deepen Stab

Into Salient

Dispatches covering operations a day-and-a-half old when filed through censorship revealed yesterday that Lt. Gen. George S. Patton's 3rd Army forces had gained up to six miles at irregular points on a ten-mile front along the southern flank of the German salient into Belgium and Luxemburg, moving up to the northeast between

Bastogne and St. Hubert, 15 miles west. While one part of his army was pushing into the enemy bulge, other units continued to beat off German counterattacks on both sides of Patton's corridor to Bastogne, which the Germans are seeking to capture and thus remove the gravest threat to their forces deployed to the west. Patton's' troops were reported to be about eight miles from Houffalize, a junction on the chief road used by the Germans to supply their troops in the bulge. The town is about

ten miles north of Bastogne and almost halfway between Bastogne and Manhay,

on the quiet northern flank.