Target: Oak Ridge

The twin pincers of the Southern organizing drives by the C.I.O. and the A.F.L. clamped on a major target. Moving through the rolling green hills of East Tennessee, both closed in hungrily on the 59,000-acre Oak Ridge atomic-bomb project.

Four A.F.L. unions opened offices in a Government-owned building. The C.I.O.'s Atomic Workers Organizing Committee passed out leaflets to the 21,000 who still passed through the nation's best guarded gates.

During the war all unions had agreed not to attempt organizing Oak Ridge workers. But now the battle was on, with Army observers attending union meetings. The C.I.O. boasted of 100 new members a day; A.F.L. claimed 50% of the plant, eliminated initiation fees to grab more members.

Other skirmishes loomed around workers in the South's leading cotton mills. Van Bittner, bulky chief of C.I.O. organizers, summoned a council of war next week at Columbia, S.C. to map regional strategy. "The cotton textile industry offers the widest field," said Bittner, naming North Carolina's Cannon towel mills and Georgia's Bibb Manufacturing Co. as redoubts to be taken.

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