GERMANY: U-562 launched.

ROMANIA: Bucharest: Antonescu puts down the revolt of the pro-Nazi Iron Guard.

LIBYA: In one of the first tank battles in this arena, the British 4th Armoured Brigade pushes back Italian forces at Mechili. 8 medium Italian tanks are destroyed and one captured. The British lose one cruiser and six light tanks.

KENYA Tana River: With the fall today of the frontier post of Liboi, Lt. Gen. Cunningham is poised to advance from Kenya into Italian Somaliland.

At the same time South African troops are moving across Kenya's northern frontier districts to Moyale for an advance northwards. Cunningham's 12th African Division, made up of East, West and South Africans, has been pushing further south, heading for Jubaland (Southern Italian Somaliland). This is arid country, where thorn thickets stretch to the horizon, and tactics are reduced to tiny groups ambushing other tiny groups. Everywhere there are flies. "Hit them, hit them hard and hit them again!" Cunningham said when his action against the Italians began last month. Some soldiers assume that he meant the flies.

Six months ago Britain had one battalion and a brigade of King's African Rifles in Kenya. Now it has 75,000 men, mostly from African colonies, South Africa and India. Cunningham aims to cross into Italian Somaliland as far as the river Juba and the port of Kismayu, before a major advance further into the territory and onto Ethiopia after the rains in June.

Facing him is an army on paper of 100,000 Italian and 200,000 African troops. In reality it is less formidable. One-third is tied down by Ethiopian guerrillas, and another third is defending Eritrea against the British in Sudan. In addition, the Italians are so short of petrol that they cannot concentrate large numbers in any key spot.

General de Simone, the Italian commander who seized British Somaliland last August, is aware of this, and is forming a line on the river Juba to try to force the British into linear warfare where their mobility would be useless.

AUSTRALIA: The Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, leaves Melbourne, bound for Britain.

U.S.A.: Washington: The US has rejected an appeal from the Vichy government to admit Jewish refugees from Germany, of whom there are now many thousands in unoccupied France.

The Vichy government argued that Jewish refugees added to its food and relief difficulties, and asked the United States, either alone or in conjunction with Latin-American countries, to open its doors to German Jewish refugees. However, the United States declined to pass this request on to Latin-American governments for fear of seeming to put pressure on them. The United States has two reasons for declining to admit these refugees: firstly, it believes that refugees should not be distinguished on racial and religious grounds; secondly, no change could be made in the existing immigration laws with their system of quotas.

A US spokesman added that his government did not want to be a party to forced migration which might have "serious and unhappy consequences to the economic and social equilibrium" in the receiving states.

Knox writes to Stimson that the Navy expected the Army to bolster the defenses of Hawaii.

Chesapeake Bay: Roosevelt welcomes Britain's new ambassador, Lord Halifax, who has arrived in the battleship, King George V.