General Douglas MacArthur has come ashore on Luzon, the main Philippine island, among the early waves of the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific war.

The assault troops, sprung from an Allied convoy of 800 ships, have met negligible enemy resistance.

They have established a 15-mile beachhead on Luzon located 107 miles north of the Philippine capital of Manila.

The campaign to clear Luzon of the Japanese, who have occupied the island for three years, is expected to take several months.

Doing so is the key, MacArthur declared, to liberating the entire Southwest Pacific because the Allies could then make use of Luzon’s harbors and airfields.

In Belgium, British and American troops, fighting in four-foot snowdrifts and forests, have made small gains, driving German troops back between a quarter and a full mile.

Snowy weather has grounded Allied aircraft, precluding tactical bombardment and aerial reconnaissance.

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September 18, 1862.

A day of great sadness.

Thousands of dead and wounded Americans lay on farm fields in southern Maryland.

The day before, McClellan’s Army of the Potomac and Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had met in battle along southern Maryland’s Antietam Creek.

23,000 men were killed or wounded in the one-day fight.

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Despite two weeks of Allied aerial bombardment, German forces continue to make gains across all of the Western Front, widening their surprise counteroffensive, launched on December 16, to push the Allies out of the German homeland.

The only exception is in Luxembourg and Belgium, where Gen. Patton’s Third Army has fought stubborn German resistance to make small gains.

The British have lost one of their best: Admiral Bertram Ramsay was killed yesterday in a plane crash near the Paris Orly airport which has been blamed on bad weather.

Ramsay directed the naval evacuation at Dunkirk four years ago and was the naval director of the D-Day landings last June.

In the East, street battles rage in Budapest between Soviet assault forces and elements of the 80,000 German troops encircled there.

Reports say the Soviets are now attempting to seize control of the royal palace.

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It is New Year’s Day 1790.

This coming July, the United States will be fourteen years old.

The Revolutionary War has been over for six years.

The Constitution, whose stated purpose is to ‘establish justice and insure domestic tranquility’ among the people, has been the law of the land for a year-and-a-half.

New York is currently the nation’s capital, but the federal government will move to Philadelphia in December.

Like New York, the Philadelphia location will be temporary.

Ten years have been allocated for the construction of a permanent capital city.

It will sit on a tract of land along the Potomac River which Washington has selected.

He’s has been the nation’s president since April, with John Adams serving as Vice President.

Washington lives in a rented house on Cherry Street in Lower Manhattan, along with his wife, two of her grandchildren, and seven enslaved people brought from Mount Vernon.

Sam Fraunces, the former owner of Fraunces Tavern, manages the President’s House, overseeing a staff of twenty people.

On this New Year’s Day in 1790, they are baking cookies and making cherry cordials for an open house.

Following the old Dutch custom still prevalent in New York, the President and First Lady will stand in their drawing room and greet well-wishers who line up outside for a chance to meet the President.

Large crowds are expected.

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The surprise German offensive begun on December 16, spearheaded by armored columns, has netted the German armies 51 miles of formerly liberated Belgian territory.

The two bulges of their armies have now merged.

The German objective, according to Allied Headquarters, is to reach the Meuse River 135 miles northeast of Paris, then advance on Brussels.

This comes despite increasing Allied resistance on land and in the air.

More German gains are expected.

Analysts credit the element of surprise with the German success, noting the parallel with the Japanese surprise attacks on December 7-8, 1941.

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It is March 1915.

And, American newspaper reporter Phil Rader has written a personal account of the Christmas Truce of 1914 for United Press International.

Rader was one of a hundred Americans who had enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in 1914.

On Christmas Day 1914, he was in the trenches of Northern France.

“We had been in the trenches for twenty days facing that strip of land, forty-five feet wide, between our trenches and that of the Germans,

that terrible No-man’s land, dotted with dead bodies, crisscrossed by tangled masses of barbed wire.

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It is 1915.

The poet, Robert Frost, is writing from his new home, a wooded farmplace in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

A stranger has come from the city and is asking about his trees.

“The city had withdrawn into itself

And left at last the country to the country;

When between whirls of snow not come to lie

And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove

A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,

Yet did in country fashion in that there

He sat and waited till he drew us out

A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.

He proved to be the city come again

To look for something it had left behind

And could not do without and keep its Christmas.

He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;

My woods—the young fir balsams like a place

Where houses all are churches and have spires.

I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.

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Hopes among dreamers that the war would end by Christmas have been dashed as the surprise German offensive through Belgium entered its fifth day.

This fight, which some are calling the greatest battle in American history, is Hitler’s last grasp at victory.

Hitler has disputed reports that it is German generals who are now in charge, with Berlin radio claiming Hitler personally planned and is now directing the operation.

Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler is said to have assumed personal command of German troops on the western side of the Rhine River in southern Alsace.

Reports say the US First Army has so far held the line at the Luxembourg border and has thrust against two German defensive positions.

The US Third and Seventh Armies report only slight gains in furious fighting.

Heavy Allied bombers have blasted road and rail arteries feeding the German spearheads, but poor weather, called ‘absolutely stinking’ by one pilot, has grounded tactical aircraft.

Belgian towns which the Allies had liberated are now under threat.

Roads are lined with civilians fleeing west and Allied troops heading east.

A slight thaw over the snow-packed forest has sent up a steamy fog which one reporter called, ‘a variation on Dante’s Inferno.’

American losses are heavy.

Wounded men are being picked up after hiding behind German lines for two or three days.

It has been a time of selfless courage.

‘Some of the boys holding the line stood right in there fighting until the German tanks ran over their foxholes and crushed them,’ one soldier said.

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It is December 1862.

A beloved father, prominent in his community and active in progressive politics, has died a sudden, violent death.

His daughter, a young woman in her twenties, is inconsolable.

The man was killed in action in a Civil War battle in Mississippi.

He needn’t have been there.

He was old and had obtained special permission to enlist.

But he believed in the Union cause and Constitutional values, so the permission was granted.

His death has shaken his community.

The President knew the family from his time in Illinois.

So, he writes to the grieving daughter…

… drawing on his own experience with loss: the death of his mother and the deaths of two young sons.

And in kind, measured words, Lincoln asks her to ‘give it time.’

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The US Navy Department offered ‘no comment’ to today’s Japanese report that its attack force sunk the battleship USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor six days ago.

Japanese air and naval forces continue their attacks on three sides of Luzon, the main island in the Philippines and the home of the capital, Manila, and American airfields.

The small US garrisons on Wake and Midway Islands continue to defend against Japanese attacks.

As the British fend off Japanese attacks in Malaya and Hong Kong, the US Navy said they ‘had no confirmation that the Japanese now occupy Guam.’

Meanwhile, preparations for a possible Japanese attack on Australia are underway.

Workers are digging trenches in Sydney and building pillbox defenses in Brisbane.

On the Eastern Front, the Soviet Union claims victory in its defense of Moscow.

Four hundred Russian villages, including many strategic positions around the city, have been recaptured.

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