Monday, February 28, 1944

The Charlotte News

Monday, February 28, 1944

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in an attempt to flank the Germans holding Carroceto, ten miles north of Anzio, British troops of the Fifth Army VI Corps, while a British cruiser fired artillery shells onto the shore, stormed and captured two buildings which had been converted strongholds by the Germans, in the vicinity of the headwaters of the Moletta River, eleven miles above Anzio and southwest of Carroceto. It was the first of the fighting along the Moletta, which runs due east toward Carroceto to within a mile of the Via Anziate leading from Rome via Carroceto to Anzio.

The Allies also repulsed two light German attacks in the Cassino area on Sunday.

Although bad weather reduced air operations over Italy, on Sunday, A-36 Invaders flew a mission to bomb Littorio and Guidonia airdromes on the outskirts of Rome.

The British attacked, by both land and sea, German positions in Yugoslavia and off the coast of Croatia on Korcula Island, attacking by sea from the British destroyers Teaser and Tyrian at Vela Luka.

The record bag of the previous week, 644 German planes knocked down by the American raiders alone, not including those shot down by the RAF in night raids, had left the Luftwaffe in a desperate situation wherein they were now primarily dependent on new aircraft production for defense. The 18,000 tons of bombs dropped on aircraft manufacturing facilities of the Reich had enhanced the rapidity with which the Superman was downgoing.

The Navy increased the number of enemy ships sunk or damaged in the raid on Truk on February 16-17. The revised figures showed 24 ships sunk, six probably sunk, and eleven damaged, adding five sunk to the report issued February 20. The additional damage, ascertained via examination of aerial photographs, continued to negate any presence of carriers, as they had left the harbor between the reconnaissance obtained February 4 and the dates of the Allied attack.

Another raid on Ponape, 421 miles east of Truk, in the Caroline Islands, February 25, dropped 30 tons of bombs. Other strikes hit Nauru and some of the Marshall Islands.

A raid had dropped 112 tons of bombs on Rabaul on Friday, following the record-breaking destroyer hit on Kavieng Thursday. The bombers met only slight resistance from ground fire at Rabaul and, for the sixth straight day of bombing, no Japanese pursuers rose to meet the Americans. There was, however, some return fire from Kavieng, damaging two destroyers.

British and Indian troops got their first major victory over the Japanese in the Arakan sector of Burma, eliminating Japanese resistance from a force numbering originally 8,000 men. At least a thousand of the enemy force were dead and another 2,000 wounded.

In Russia, the Red Army was reported to be within ten miles of Pskov. To the south in the Dneiper Bend area, the Red Army had broken through several lines of German defenders at Apostolove and stormed into Novoront-Sovka, center of the Nikolayevsk region, wiping out a battalion of Germans. Broadcasts from Berlin indicated that the Russians had thrown more than 100,000 men into the sector.

A pair of decisions deemed newsworthy of the day were handed down by the Supreme Court. In J. I. Case Co. v. N.L.R.B., 321 US 332, the Court decided 8 to 1, with Justice Robert Jackson delivering the opinion, that businesses must, under the National Labor Relations Act, enter into collective bargaining with union representatives of labor, despite pre-existing contracts with individual employees. The collective bargaining would supersede those individual contracts. As rationale, the decision recognized the premise for collective bargaining, to enable group dynamic and pressure to obtain the most favorable terms of employment. Only Justice Owen Roberts registered dissent, though without delivering a separate opinion.

In another case, Stark v. Wickard, 321 US 288, the Court decided 6 to 2, with Justice Stanley Reed delivering the opinion, to reverse a decision of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals which had decided against milk producers who challenged an order issued by the Department of Agriculture that the producers, under the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act, had to pay fees for marketing services provided by milk cooperatives. The Court ruled that the producers were not so obligated under the Act and that the order was thus invalid. Justices Felix Frankfurter and Hugo Black dissented.

The order had applied to the Greater Boston area. We didn't even know her.

Fall River, Massachusetts textile mills, taken over by the Government on February 7 because of labor disturbances, were turned back to the private owners. They had managed to get labor up off its axes.

In Philadelphia, thousands of theater attendees and commuters, plus a hundred firemen and sixteen pieces of fire equipment, all responded to a fire in the downtown area late at night. The conflagration, threatening all of the City of Brotherly Love at the conclusion of Brotherhood Week, turned out to be brotherly enough, consisting only of a hole burned through a door in a basement.

Well, given that, we're sitting here thinking, matchbox hole in their door. The only thing missing was "[t]hat na fleshowar...tak oute ony muttone the neris or the nerecress."

Clyde A. Farnsworth, in the "Reporter's Notebook" column, not to be confused with the younger Clyde H. Farnsworth, longtime correspondent for the New York Times, presumably his son, reports from the China front, with the Fourteenth Air Force. He tells of General Claire Chennault's directive of secrecy over all operations and personal data regarding pilots, to protect them from the Japanese. Officers with knowledge of missions could not fly on the missions for the same reason, to avoid torture if downed and caught.

One Air Force sergeant, captured from a downed plane, was being hauled about towns along the Yangtze to parade as a captured animal, to raise morale of the Japanese fighting forces.

The fear was that a publicized flying ace would be treated with even greater dehumanization.

The men carried books containing Chinese characters to enable them to communicate rudimentarily with the Chinese if downed. But the Chinese, if caught helping Allied airmen, were severely treated by the Japanese.

Incidentally, if you miss Hal Boyle's slice-of-life reportage on the soldiers at the front, certainly often an interesting plunge, both as to the serious side of war as well as the more absurd and comic, he will return to the pages on May 18 after an hiatus to rest from sixteen continuous months abroad since the invasion of North Africa, November 8, 1942. He would, in May, travel to England to cover the invasion of the Continent.

On the editorial page, "The Farmers" discusses the plight of North Carolina farmers, 60 percent of whom were reliant primarily on manual labor to get their crops, especially true of tobacco and cotton. The Selective Service had instituted a nationwide requirement of 16 war units per farmer, increased from 12, to retain the draft exemption status granted farmers. The 16-unit minimum, however, was based on a mechanized farm operation.

Some 21,000 draft-age farmers could become subject to the draft, further complicating an already complicated farm situation, where women and children were often now forced to get the crops for the absence of the primary farm labor, long since drafted. The result could mean a shortage of food for the state.

Future Governor and Senator, then Agriculture Commissioner, W. Kerr Scott, was seeking a return to the 12-unit standard, at least for North Carolina.

We are not even going to comment, out of intense fear of another involuntary auditory invasion of our private inner sanctum here at the Tower, on the little squib which follows. Suffice it to say that littlef iller skilld iller whinzyd rest to bekilt.

"The Family" makes the case for FDR not having consulted Congress before laying forth plans for legislation, a trait which he had exhibited since his first year in office in 1933. Yet, the President who some Democrats touted as contrast to FDR's close-vested practice, Woodrow Wilson, had, in fact, exhibited much the same trait, poor memories of some in Congress notwithstanding.

We note that one of the items mentioned as being too unilateral of the President was his "forcing" on the 1940 convention the nomination of Henry Wallace as vice-president, replacing aging John Nance Garner. In those days, it was the convention's choice as to who would be the vice-presidential nominee. Sometimes, as in the case of the 1940 Republican ticket with Wendell Willkie and Senator Charles McNary of Oregon, deceased the previous Friday, the two candidates did not even know each other.

"The Silence" wonders where the carping critics were who, during the six-month struggle for Guadalcanal, found the Allied policy suicidal and predicted, at the rate of yards gained, that the Allies would reach Tokyo in the year 2200.

Now that things were moving swiftly in that direction with the capture of the Marshalls, the successful raid on Truk, and bombing of the Marianas, Saipan and Tinian, the piece figures the war with Japan could be over by March 15, and yet nowhere were to be found the former critics to revise their predictions.

We, of course, know where they went. They, such as Joe McCarthy, serving as a flight intelligence officer for missions over Rabaul and Bougainville at the time, were preparing themselves for the future when they could get on national television, ruin good people’s reputations with slander and accusations of being traitors, proclaiming the Democratic policy of the Government to be suicidal with respect to Korea and China, all tied together with Com-mmm-munism and Corruption.

--What did you say your name was? Mr. Lonergan? Oh, so sorry, Mr. Hairslip.

Samuel Grafton favors more open airing of the grievances anent the British, now being voiced by many commanders returning from various theaters of combat. Those from Burma and India were critical of the lack of a significant initiative from Lord Louis Mountbatten, whose appointment as commander in the theater had promised action. From Africa, there were bitter reports of British aggrandisement at work to establish empire to the exclusion of American economic interests; from the Middle East, there were reports of British action detrimental to American interests. The British also were in on the act, said to be resentful of the higher pay provided American soldiers. And overall, there was some degree of lack of coordination in operations.

Mr. Grafton leaves out the stir in the fall regarding the supposed insistence of Churchill that most of the Continental invasion forces be American, to enable adequate defenders remaining at home to defend Britain and because of the high cost paid by the British during the First World War, wiping out a good portion of that generation. The Prime Minister, the previous week, had indicated that the invasion would be undertaken by half British and half Americans, with most of the ensuing reinforcements to be Americans.

Mr. Grafton finds the insistence that not a word be spoken in the open of this resentment to be counter-productive. So had The Washington Post in an editorial. He concludes that to wait until after the war to deal with these concerns was merely to allow them to fester to the breaking point.

Drew Pearson discusses first the pending decision of Petroleum Administrator and Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes, in response to a request by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox to begin drilling operations in the naval oil reserve at Point Barrow, Alaska, needed for naval operations in the Pacific. No word had come from Secretary Ickes in three weeks since the request, whereas normally it should have taken no more than a week to respond.

Meanwhile, Standard Oil of California, Union Oil of California, and Tide Water Oil were urging Secretary Ickes to allow them to drill in the Southwest Peninsula where, between 1923 and 1938, they had undertaken drilling costing three million dollars and come up with only dry wells. This time, they wanted government support for the operations. A Standard Oil executive was an assistant administrator to Mr. Ickes. The Navy did not oppose the Southwest Peninsula drilling, so long as it did not interfere with the Point Barrow operation.

Whether the response would be, no, Knox, get your oil from Tide, neither Barrow nor folk, we shall have to wait and see.

Mr. Pearson next turns to the strange labor situation involving Muskegon, Michigan Borg-Warner factory worker, Tony Jankowski, a Polish immigrant who produced gun mounts. Not only did he fabricate them, but he turned them out at the astonishing rate of 30 per day, twice that of the average worker. His fellow UAW workers prevailed on him to curtail his output to accommodate the norm of 15, then, when he obliged, demanded that he reduce to thirteen, at which point he balked and went back to producing 30. In response, 41 workers walked off the job and the company summarily fired them.

In the ensuing case before the National Labor Relations Board, the company’s action was sustained, with findings that Mr. Jankowski was an efficient worker and that the company was well within its rights to fire unjustified strikers.

Concludes Mr. Pearson, it demonstrated the ugly underbelly of labor--that which one could call malingering, in preservation of the salad days, to combat that perceived as a return to the stretch-out system, Caesarian by nature. (Don't sweat it, though, if you happened to have originated in labor of different procedures; some of us simply have no choice in the matter.) It was even reported that in the midst of it all, some little pussyhead poured a mixture of sand, acid, and grease into the gas tank of Mr. Jankowski's car, ruining it.

--Hey, Tony. Give a listen. Hey, you makin' us look bad. What do you do that for, you dumb Polak? Why you want to show off? You want to wind up with the fishes or somethin'? You gotta stop wid da Mr. Efficiency routine, Tony. Hey, Tony, how many Polaks does it take to make 30 gun mounts in a day? The answer is "none". Cause you gonna be one dead none-Polak if you don't stop it. Hey, Tony, how many Polaks does it take to understand that you cannot show up American workers just because you're a dumb Polak? The answer is one, Tony, you. Hey, Tony, how many does it take to screw in the lightbulbs at the Ford plant at River Rouge? Forty-one. Forty to screw in the lightbulbs, and one to screw out da Polack. You like dose jokes? You gonna like 'em at the bottom of da river, after we feed you da same medicine we fed you car last week if you don't make a new work habit o' youself. Ye know?

Marquis Childs comments on the criticized structure of American Naval operations in the wake of the disaster at Pearl Harbor, too much decentralization being the greatest complaint, unlike the British Navy which had all operations centered in London. But the vast geographic scope of the Pacific demanded a different type of structure.

Admiral Nimitz, operating from Pearl Harbor, picked carefully his commanders, gave them a target, and then sent them on their way in radio silence, to act according to their own judgment as contingencies arose. There was something, says Mr. Childs, peculiarly American in this type of operation. And, it had proved highly successful in recent times, with the conquering of the Marshalls, the raid on Truk, and the taking of Eniwetok in the Marshalls.

Yet, a long hard road lay ahead to Tokyo, through the strong outer ring of defenses to the inner ring, even more tenaciously defended, that consisting of Manchukuo in China, North China, Formosa, and Japan proper. It would yet be awhile before the forces, needed finally to bring surrender of Germany, could be released to fight in the Pacific. And until that time, progress was going to be slow, as much of it depended on the type of operations necessary to conquer Rabaul and Truk, that is cutting off supply routes, repeated bombing and Navy raids, all in an effort to winnow defenses and finally starve to death the remaining defenders.

Meanwhile, continues Mr. Childs, in between playing "Paper Doll" and "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To", Tokyo Rose whispered softly to the fighting men to give up the fight and go home. There were no takers nor apt to be, but timing remained imperative to get the war done as quickly as possible, to avoid morale problems down the line in a prolonged war, dragging with too much sloth.

A news item indicates that a Senate Finance Subcommittee unanimously approved a bill proposed by Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, conservative Democrat, to eliminate funding July 1 for all executive bureaus not approved by Congress which had been in existence for more than one year.

While contending that the bill was not aimed at any particular Executive committee, Senator Russell responded that he would be happy if it served to abolish the Fair Employment Practices Committee set up by the President May 28, 1943 to eliminate racial discrimination in job hiring and pay in businesses engaged in war contracts.

The President declared that the directives of the FEPC were mandatory; but the Controller General had declared that they were only advisory.

A directive issued by the Committee to Southern railroads to quit discrimination by the end of 1943 was under investigation for its validity by a House committee chaired by Representative Smith of Virginia.

And, in Greensboro, an egg dropped by a pigeon struck an Army sergeant on the shoulder, but did not bounce. Whether that meant, in this sad story of an Army casualty in downtown Greensboro, that the movement was on his shoulder, we do not know.

But it was on the President's and, in our estimate, unlike Senator Russell, he shouldered it well and true to the Constitution, not in response to personal prejudice and whimsy worthy only of an illiterate lout--one who, in latter November, 1963, would seek, despite urging of President Johnson, to avoid service on the Warren Commission on the basis that he despised Earl Warren with a passion. Whether it served well to provide an independent streak, we don't know. But, to his credit, Senator Russell was one of the few members of the Commission who expressed considerable doubt in the conclusion that Oswald acted alone. As anyone who studies the evidence for very long knows, that is an astute observation, aside from any racial prejudices and anti-Communist xenophobia possessed by Senator Russell, born of his time and place of birth, in Winder, Georgia, November 2, 1897.

20 And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity, and the water of affliction, yet shall not thy teachers be removed into a corner any more, but thine eyes shall see thy teachers:

21 And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left.

22 Ye shall defile also the covering of thy graven images of silver, and the ornament of thy molten images of gold: thou shalt cast them away as a menstruous cloth; thou shalt say unto it, Get thee hence.

23 Then shall he give the rain of thy seed, that thou shalt sow the ground withal; and bread of the increase of the earth, and it shall be fat and plenteous: in that day shall thy cattle feed in large pastures.

24 The oxen likewise and the young asses that ear the ground shall eat clean, which hath been winnowed with the shovel and with the fan.

25 And there shall be upon every high mountain, and upon every high hill, rivers and streams of waters in the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall.

26 Moreover the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days, in the day that the LORD bindeth up the breach of his people, and healeth the stroke of their wound.

27 Behold, the name of the LORD cometh from far, burning with his anger, and the burden thereof is heavy: his lips are full of indignation, and his tongue as a devouring fire:

28 And his breath, as an overflowing stream, shall reach to the midst of the neck, to sift the nations with the sieve of vanity: and there shall be a bridle in the jaws of the people, causing them to err.

29 Ye shall have a song, as in the night when a holy solemnity is kept; and gladness of heart, as when one goeth with a pipe to come into the mountain of the LORD, to the mighty One of Israel.

30 And the LORD shall cause his glorious voice to be heard, and shall shew the lighting down of his arm, with the indignation of his anger, and with the flame of a devouring fire, with scattering, and tempest, and hailstones.

--Isaiah 30:20-30

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