Monday, August 14, 1944

The Charlotte News

Monday, August 14, 1944

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Allies had trapped some 100,000 Germans, via the swift northern moving forces from Le Mans of General Bradley's First and Second Armies, still no mention being made of General Patton's Third Army delivering the spur to this movement. An aperture of available escape for the German Seventh Army had been narrowed to twenty miles, between Falaise, threatened by the British Second Army, and Argentan on which General Bradley's forces were converging from the south, as indicated on the map.

General Bradley discussed calmly from his headquarters the fact that up to nine divisions, the same sized force which had held Cherbourg against the American advance in July, were believed to be within this trap, nearly the entire remaining might of the Seventh Army.

The Supreme Allied Commander, General Eisenhower, urged all sailors, soldiers, and airmen to give their utmost to close the trap and not allow any of the enemy to escape, that victory in Western France was at hand.

The news white-out on the approach toward Paris continued, so confusing it was to the Nazis. If you can't read it...

Some 3,500 Allied planes struck targets in Southern Germany and throughout France, including support for the entrapping Allied forces in Normandy and the forces approaching Brest on the western tip of the Breton Peninsula. Up to 1,500 Flying Fortresses and Liberators hit Ludwigshafen and Mannheim in Germany, as well targets in Northern France, while 750 American heavy bombers from Italy struck Southern France. Several hundred RAF heavy and medium bombers hit Brest and the area around Falaise, the Nazi pocket of entrapment.

The Russians were moving in an enclosing arc, 15-17 miles from the south, menacing Lomza, vital Nazi communications link between Warsaw and East Prussia, gaining ground northwest of Bialystok, with another pincer moving to within 7-10 miles from the east, and a third, 30-35 miles from the north, in approach of the East Prussian frontier.

In the Pacific, Admiral Nimitz, having just returned from a consultation with the commanders on Saipan and Guam to relay strategy gleaned from the talks recently completed with the President and General MacArthur, announced the bombing of the Philippines, at Davao Gulf on Mindanao, for the fourth time in five days, stating that it might be possible to win the war without invading Japan, even though occupation would be necessary to secure a lasting peace. While in the Marianas, he met with Vice-Admiral Richmond K. Turner, mounting a huge new strike force based in Saipan, Vice-Admiral Marc A. Mitscher, head of the famed Task Force 58, and Maj. General Roy Geiger of the Marine Corps.

On Friday, announced General MacArthur, Chichi Jima in the Bonin Islands had been bombed. Paramushiro in the Kurile Islands, north of Japan's home islands, had also again been struck, utilizing bombers based in the Aleutians.

Secretary of State Hull, in advance of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, set to begin in Georgetown, D.C., August 21, stated that the Americans and British were basically in accord on the structure of the United Nations security organization and that the Russians had delivered, two days earlier, a statement of their goals for the organization, which the Secretary had not yet had time to peruse. It was announced for the first time that Moscow's Ambassador to the United States, Andrei Gromyko, would be the Russian representative at the conference rather than, as previously speculated, Maxim Litvinoff, the former Ambassador to the U.S.

On the editorial page, "Columbus" finds the discovery by Senator Robert Rice Reynolds that the bulk of the money to pay for the war was coming from the ordinary working man, not from the wealthy, who already had been reduced to receiving 8 cents of every dollar, was ten years too late in recognition. For in 1934, he had stated that the millions for the Bonus bill for World War veterans would come from the same place the Congress had obtained the seven billion dollars spent by the previous Congress, suggesting that he and his colleagues were soaking the rich to feed the poor. Now, Senator Bob had, alas, discovered the true source of all that money.

"N.C. Camps" discusses the demobilization of the war training camps in Eastern North Carolina and their prospects for conversion to civilian use. Camp Davis was being considered by Ford Motor Company as an assembly plant to replace the one closed in Charlotte at the start of the war. Such development promised great economic prosperity for the Eastern part of the state and was therefore welcome.

It remarks that the New River Marine base likely would remain as a permanent fixture on the landscape, also helping the economy of the Eastern part of the state, and would become the largest peacetime Marine training facility in the nation.

Becoming the still quite extant Camp Lejeune, it would be so.

"Progress" praises the establishment by Governor Broughton's Board of Control, overseeing the state's mental hospitals, of a cooperative arrangement between them and the University of North Carolina, whereby the University would, through its medical students, provide to the four hospitals psychiatric services as part of the students' clinical training. The program would provide a boon to the state's mental facilities, deficient in trained psychiatric personnel, and change them from merely custodial to remedial facilities.

"The Record" comments on the CIO Political Action Committee, having changed its name to the National Citizens PAC, putting forth literature across the country promoting its viewpoint, pro-Democratic. Regardless of its politics, it had convincingly made the case that the Democrats had favored overwhelmingly Lend-Lease when the Republicans overwhelmingly had opposed it; that the Democrats likewise had strongly favored lifting of the arms embargo prior to the war as the Republicans strongly opposed it; that the Democrats had favored arming merchantmen while the Republicans opposed the move; that the Democrats had favored the draft, keeping draftees in service, and maintaining Air Force appropriations, all while the Republicans were in opposition to these positions.

The case thus presented by the CIO PAC had shown decisively that the Republicans had been ill-prepared for the war, that the Democrats had foreseen its dangers and sought to prepare the country for them. It was a case which the PAC would make for the November election with its $700,000 fund for the purpose, and likely with great impact on the voters of the country.

"Easy, Now" finds Charlotte resident E. B. Vosburgh, Mecklenburg County publicity chair for the Republicans, to be indicating that Republican National Committee chairman Russell Sprague had been impressed by the growing support in North Carolina for the Dewey-Bricker ticket. Apparently, remarks the editorial, Mr. Sprague had been convinced by Governor Bricker's optimistic suggestion that North Carolina might prove fertile ground for Republican gains, along with several other border and Southern states—none of which would finally vote Republican in November.

The piece expresses considerable doubt that Governor Bricker was engaging in anything more than fanciful thinking and so Mr. Sprague would need likewise to adjust his sights.

Drew Pearson tells of the aide and secretary to former Premier Sikorski of the Polish government-in-exile in London, Hieronim Rettinger, having convinced in February the new Premier, Mikolajezyk, replacing General Sikorski, killed in an airplane crash, that he would return to Poland to join the resistance, even at age 57. When asked by the Premier how he proposed to get into Poland, he had responded that he would do so via parachute. He could not be dissuaded by the Premier by the fact of his age, or even convinced that he should first undertake some practice jumps over Scotland. And he performed successfully that which he proposed.

But in April, he had somehow obtained passage out of Poland and met with Premier Mikolajezyk in Cairo to impart the views of the Polish underground anent relations with Russia, which the Premier was about to discuss with Premier Stalin in Moscow.

Mr. Pearson next relates of General "Pa" Watson—no kin to Senator "Pass the Biscuits Pappy" O'Daniel of Texas, we assume—who, as a presidential adviser, was seeking to turn FDR against any notion of courting the endorsement of Wendell Willkie, despite FDR's other advisers telling him that Mr. Willkie, who had supported the President on seeking higher taxes for corporations and the wealthy and on foreign policy, would conceivably garner for him a million votes from independents and moderate Republicans. Thus, General Watson was, says Mr. Pearson, the best advocate for Thomas Dewey in the White House.

Meanwhile, word had it that Governor Dewey, in exchange for the key endorsement of the 1940 Republican presidential nominee, was promising Mr. Willkie a position as secretary of state in a Dewey administration—presumably in lieu of his campaign's chief foreign policy adviser John Foster Dulles, who most believed would become secretary of state should Mr. Dewey be elected.

Perhaps, he would have had two—not actually a stretch, as Sumner Welles and Edward Stettinius had been, in succession, as Undersecretaries of State, essentially co-Secretaries with Cordell Hull during the previous four years, especially given Mr. Hull's declining health.

The point, by November, would be moot as Mr. Willkie would die of a heart attack in October.

Mr. Pearson next recounts that isolationist Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota had won his Republican primary, doing so only by the narrowest of margins, 972 votes, through a sweep of McIntosh County wherein he carried virtually all of its sparse 1,368 votes. McIntosh County was populated almost exclusively by German families who had remained closely aligned with the Fatherland during the war.

Nevertheless, Congressman Usher Burdick, who had run a close third in the primary, had carried the county seat of McIntosh, Wishek, despite his being a strong anti-isolationist and anti-Nazi. He had swayed the voters by having dropped into the town on whimsy one afternoon, gone to a German pub, refrained from introducing himself, bought his German hosts sausage, and played rundum with them for several hours. After awhile, one asked whether he was Congressman Burdick, to which he answered affirmatively while appending the disclaimer that he knew he had no chance in the town, just wanted to drop in and have some fun. Now, friends of the Congressman wanted him to run as an independent in the fall election against Senator Nye.

Former Governor John Moses, the Democratic nominee, would defeat Senator Nye in November, but Senator Moses would die in March, two months after coming to office.

Marquis Childs examines the tremblingly perilous debt situation of Britain, having rung up twelve billion dollars worth of national debt to pay for the war machinery it had produced, much of the borrowed money coming from India. He uses it as example to show the importance of the cooperative arrangement recommended out of the Bretton Woods international monetary conference of July, to stabilize world trade by eliminating disparities after the war. In the case of Britain, lest it become necessary to establish a two-year barter system, similar to that which Germany was forced to undertake after World War I, at the direction of Dr. Djalmer Schact, with disastrous results and plentiful chicanery in the bargain, leading to the economic debacle out of which the roots of Nazism grew among the economically depressed people of Germany.

No less a traditionally conservative and laissez-faire advocate than The Economist in Britain had published during the winter an article setting forth the argument that world trade, while needing to continue to expand, nevertheless, to prosper without creating inevitable depressions as in the twenties, had to be planned by cooperative nations. Programs involving public works to take up the slack from private sector unemployment had to be implemented.

The nationalists and isolationists of the country, suggests Mr. Childs, would, however, likely cry that economic aid to Britain and other war-depressed nations in the post-war world would be mere handouts to prop them up. But, instead, such aid must be viewed by its long term ameliorative tendencies, to avoid economic depression by seeing to it that all boats would rise through mutual aid.

Are you listening, Tories of Great Britain today? Ms. Bachmann and other Republican advocates of smaller government sans tax increases on the filthy rich in the United States today?

It is a very elementary concept: tax the hell out of the rich, establish public works aplenty suited to the skills of the unemployed or underemployed in the society, and employ those persons without regard to political patronage, with as little Government bureaucracy to complicate matters as possible, and get the damned economy moving again.

It is so very simple, except to a bunch of idiots who cannot see the forest for their own precious little purblinded pocketbooks, in need of taking bribes from big corporations to stay in office, because they are too damned dumb to make arguments to the people they are cheating daily. Instead, they produce clever ads designed to manipulate the soft-headed by winks and curls of the eyebrows through coiffured hair-dos and fake tans.

Get over yourselves. We would rather see a woman, or a man, with purple hair and a bone through their nose who can deliver services to the people than a thousand Michele Bachmanns and Sarah Palins, et al. Who desire to look good and say little besides something like: "Hi, I am a good Christian woman. Vote for me and I shall provide to you good, Christian moral leadership, unlike those horrible, terrible, high-spending, high-taxing Democrats, because, after all, Jesus, we know, was a Republican conservative who favored no government spending for the poor and certainly no taxes at all on the rich or the better-equipped middle class to provide for the poor. He, like we, was a good Christian man. They say he also got high on wine, explaining why we need the uppers to get through the day and why our eyes are so wide when the little flashy-poppers come, yep, and why we cannot answer questions sensibly or keep facts straight when we talk. Vote for us. We are good Christian women, yep. Also, we support your right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, just like Jesus did. And, global warming may be a reality, what with the polar cap and the ice pack of Greenland melting by 25% during the last thirty years. But, we, being good Christian women, are not sure whether it is manmade or by God as an ordinary adjustment of nature, just more rapid than God has ever done before during the 10,000-year history of the earth, because of the need for another Flood to adjust things? You understand. We have, after all, the luxury of time to see if the ice won't re-freeze before causing the sea level to rise a couple of feet, or maybe 27, inundating sinful places such as New York City and Miami and other sinful coastal areas where women go around half naked. It is quite common to see the ice melting down at this rate in the space of thirty years. It has happened many times, but the scientists were not then advanced enough to understand this fact and so did not record it. And then those scientists were caught fudging their data, and so it is only logical to conclude that all of the data of scientists must therefore be fudged, too, and is no longer reliable, including pictures. It is God's will. If we are wrong, then we can all move to Iowa where people are good Christian people like us and will welcome us all with open arms, for the waters will not rise to engulf them, as they long ago receded to enable lots of corn to grow. And people should not cuss about it in Colorado either. That's just nasty. How did we get our positions? Why, the old-fashioned way, on our knees, and then standing up for ourselves, and destroying the reputations of the anti-Christ, those high-taxing, unprincipled, immoral, high-spending liberal Democrats, yep, just like Jesus did."

Dorothy Thompson, in a piece unusually beset by misspellings, writes of the Robespierre phenomenon—that the chief terrorist, after first executing the weakest of his opponents, then the collaborators, next his friends, finally himself—was becoming a manifested reality grossly set in Nazi Germany, with like results probably soon to follow. When Prime Minister Churchill recently had intoned, she suggests, against mixing idealism and ideology in the war because "ideology too often presents itself as an undue representation of ideas and may be incompatible with freedom", he meant that ideology was too rigid in most practical applications to be resilient to the vicissitudes of war, that only individual character, as Walt Whitman had suggested in the previous century, could be relied upon to release freedom from its bound fetters and locks. The Tory Churchill stood as the supreme democrat; the Democrat might be a fascist; the Prussian militarist had suddenly become, under Nazism, a rebel. Former labels for ideological boxes no longer could determine the character of the boxed individuals within them.

Field Marshal General Erwin von Witzleben had become the first German Field Marshal since Frederick the Great had created the Prussian military, to be executed by hanging, a particularly ignominious manner of death in Germany, not provided even by its penal code. Field Marshal von Witzleben had been the General who helped storm the Maginot Line in 1940 and thereby conquer France. He had, after July 20, however, suddenly become Hitler's avowed personal goat such that he had to be hanged from the gallows.

Herr Himmler had placed a bounty of a million marks on the head of one Herr Doktor Karl Goerdeler, former mayor of Leipzig.

What had happened in Germany? She responds that the Prussian Junkers had come to realize that the Nazi Party were not representatives of order and law in German society, but rather lawlessness and thuggery. From sworn representatives of the State, the military class created by Frederick the Great had now become rebels.

The hangman's noose for Hitler, it appeared, would soon be strung from the gibbet.

So Cash had predicted his eventual outcome on September 1, 1939.

Hal Boyle tells of troops from Wyoming, the Dakotas, Idaho, Texas, and Oklahoma, all a part of the 90th Infantry Division, having presented the first rodeo ever to come to Normandy. During a lull in the fighting, they had given their performance for the other soldiers and the French civilians.

By the end of the day's proceedings, they had found themselves more sore than after a hard day of fighting against the Jerries.

The cattle had been loaned by local farmers. The farmers' favorite part of the imported show from the Wild West of America, theretofore seen only in movie theaters of France, was the "wild cow milking contest", the particulars of which Mr. Boyle does not impart, perhaps all for the butter. But the farmers, he says, became more excited than the cows.

Maybe you had to live on a farm.

Dr. Herbert Spaugh this day uses the parable of Abraham, commanded by God to sacrifice Isaac, as example of the test which was met to avoid breaking the First Commandment.

The problem with that conception of the parable is that so many, especially of the generations of the world wars, took it literally to mean that the sacrifice had to be made to please God, as atonement for other sins cardinal or venial. For what was before their eyes, the death and destruction, the reduction, by an amalgam of science, industry, and perverted spirituality in worship of war gods in need of blood-thirsty satiation, to the very basest of man's instincts, pandemic over the entirety of the globe in stark relief, was that, no doubt, which God, Himself, had willed; not the Devil incarnate, not Hitler and his minions, not Emperor Hirohito and Tojo and their minions, nor their puppet masters, nor the militarists and arms manufacturers who drove the engine of war for their own aggrandizement and economic profit, but God. God had willed this horrible war, to teach mankind through sacrifice and sanguinary death incarnadine to obey only the one true God.

Not really. Unless Hitler and Tojo were God.

Our own view of it is that God was making a bit of an ass out of Abraham so that he would not believe every damned thing he heard on television or read in the newspapers, created exclusively by completely fallible man.

And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I. --Genesis 22:11.

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