 The city of Chicago is the scene of the 1944 Republican National Convention. Signs everywhere welcome delegates gathered to nominate a Republican candidate for president. Governor Bricker of Ohio, who was nominated candidate for vice president, and here is Senator Taft from Ohio, prominent among the delegates. The nomination of New York's Governor Dewey was conceded almost before the convention opened. Congressman Martin, permanent chairman of the convention, chats with former Governor Landon. He was the 1936 Republican nominee for president. Wendell Wilkie was the 1940 standard bearer. Chicago has seen many a political convention. Not since Abraham Lincoln was an election year happened to fall in wartime. But the war has not altered the established processes of democracy. 1057 delegates represent the nation's 48 states. 529 votes are needed to nominate a candidate. The trail of the sessions is broadcast by radio and by newspapers from coast to coast. Batteries of cameramen send pictures all over the world. No gathering is more colorful than an American political convention. National Chairman Spangler calls the meeting to order. He introduces Governor Warren of California, who delivered the keynote address. The Republican Party is pledged to full international cooperation for the war and the peace. In the Governor's Mansion at Albany, New York, 42-year-old Thomas E. Dewey waits for word from Chicago. His supporters nominated him on the first ballot as the next Republican candidate for president. In liberated Rome, city of two and a half million inhabitants, the people hail the new coalition cabinet made up of Italy's six non-fascist political parties. The cabinet is headed by the lifelong liberal Bonomi, seen here with Counts Forza. Clark's Colonel Charles Palletti, as Allied Commissioner of Rome, has pledged, the first thing I want to do is to make a real effort to get the fascists out. Signs proclaim a massive thanksgiving for the Allied victory. Men of the Fifth Army are first to attend religious services. Clark, Fifth Army commander, is greeted by the clergy as he leaves to join his forces fighting in the north. In the White House at Washington, President Roosevelt approves legislation to provide for America's war veterans in the peace to come. By law, federal loans, free schooling, job insurance and complete rehabilitation are among the benefits assured every man and woman in the service. Here is a typical center already established for convalescence. Here, men who have been discharged from hospitals come to receive aid in preparing them for civilian life. They have comfortable quarters and live very much like boys at school. Every facility for physical and mental therapy is used to help rebuild and recondition the men. Farm chores are welcome chores to men just back from the war. Somewhere in western China, 70,000 laborers report for a staggering task. The building of the airfield from which Allied airmen now are carrying the war to Japan. This is one of the amazing stories behind China's war effort. This shows how people with bare hands and the most primitive tools transformed areas of once swampy rice fields into firm, rock-bedded runways for the plains of the United Nations. It was the work, the sweat, the determination of a people who will never be conquered that carved from their lands the mammoth air drums from which the new B-29 Superforts took off to bomb Japan's home island. In China, no one is too young to be a patriot. The stones are brought by hand from a riverbed five miles away. Mixing earth with water lifted by treadmill, the Chinese contrive a sort of homemade cement. This holds the rocks firm, provides a foundation as solid as China itself. Time out for lunch. There's no working on an empty stomach. A 10-ton roller pulled by some 150 men is hauled over the runway. This is one of the giant new planes, the American B-29 Superfortress. Already they have blasted Japan's war industries. Their raids from bases in China may soon affect the entire course of the war.