Thursday, November 15, 1945

The Charlotte News

Thursday, November 15, 1945

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that President Truman, Prime Minister Attlee, and Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King had issued a joint statement agreeing that the atomic secret should be turned over to the United Nations to be used only for peaceful purposes. Sharing of the secret with other nations would be dependent on "effective, reciprocal and enforceable safeguards acceptable to all nations".

The British acting High Commissioner of Palestine, J.V.W. Shaw, warned rioters of punishment by death for continuing participation in disorder in Tel Aviv, entering its second day of unrest. The previous night, two Jews had been killed and 27 persons injured, while one person was killed and 50 injured this date. A curfew had been imposed but was not being obeyed. The rebellion was in response to the announcement two days earlier of Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin of Britain that there would be no change for the time being in Jewish immigration policy with respect to Palestine pending study by an as yet unformed American-British committee.

British Gurkha forces continued to attack the positions of the Indonesian Nationalists in Soerabaja in the sixth day of battle in Java, following the refusal of the Indonesians to obey the British ultimatum to lay down arms. There appeared no slackening of Indonesian resistance.

The first day of hearings before the joint Congressional committee looking into the attack on Pearl Harbor revealed diplomatic messages intercepted by American intelligence sent by the Japanese between July 1 and December 8, 1941. The report provides the text of one message from December 6, of no glaring import historically, a Japanese envoy discussing what everyone already knew, that war was nigh. The question remained when and where. Everyone knew war was coming.

General Eisenhower told the House Military Committee that he believed the Russians did not desire any war with the United States. But he also believed it desirable to have universal military training as recommended by President Truman. He stated that he did not foresee any war on the horizon or he would have jumped out of his plane over the Atlantic.

General Jonathan Wainwright, in the 34th installment of his series of articles on his captivity on Formosa, tells of being moved, along with 27 other senior officers, civilian governors and orderlies, from Tamazato to another prison camp on Formosa, Muksaq, on June 23, 1943. The other prisoners, numbering 89, had already been taken elsewhere on June 5. Initially, the men were treated better at Muksaq than at Tamazato. They received relatively large portions of rice with vegetables on the side, were promised fruit, soy sauce, catsup, tea, and sugar, as well as the right to purchase cigarettes and cigars. The apparent benevolence, however, turned out to be a ruse, as they found out within a short time.

Randolph Churchill discusses the statements, pursuant to American intelligence interrogation, of German Field Marshals Wilhelm Keitel and Walther von Brauchitsch, that the Wehrmacht could not have withstood an attack along the Western Front at the time of Munich, in September, 1938, had France and Britain then attacked. The Germans had only five divisions protecting the front, while 36 were committed to defense of Czechoslovakia. The statements flew in the face of the contention that Britain had been enabled by the extra year bought by Prime Ministers Neville Chamberlain of Britain and Edouard Daladier of France to build up its anti-aircraft defenses and fighter aircraft. The French Army alone, with 60 divisions available, could have pummeled the Germans at the time. Russia also might have been induced to enter the war—albeit overlooking the realization that it took Russia's ill-equipped forces in 1939-40 four months to defeat the ragtag Finnish Army.

Keitel, incidentally, would be hanged for war crimes in 1946 and Von Brauchitsch would die in 1948 before being tried.

Ford Motor Company sent a letter to the UAW stating that a new contract would need to provide the company with security against future work stoppages, including the right to damages, and urging that the present was not the proper time for a wage hike as demanded. It stressed that the future of the company depended on contract security.

In London, the Daily Sketch told the story of a man identified as J. Wilson providing a test ride to a member of Parliament and the Parliamentary secretary of the Ministry of Fuel, in a car fueled by atomic power, contained in a metal box three inches in diameter positioned where the engine would normally go. The riders were said to be positively radiant over the results.

Look for it soon in your neighborhood showrooms. You will know it by the glow.

On the editorial page, "The Baptists Raise a Point" comments on the Baptist State Convention decision to oppose the United States having a permanent diplomatic representative at the Vatican. They had not opposed the status during the war but now believed it entangled Church and State.

The piece supports the stand and does not believe it emanated from bigotry, but rather from a well-reasoned belief that Church and State ought remain separate.

"Mr. Stassen's Welcome Debut" tells of former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen having doffed his Navy captain's uniform and entered again the political realm, making a speech on atomic energy. He had visited Japan and seen the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but had come away believing that the bomb might become an instrument for enforcing the peace rather than recreation of Armageddon. He favored sharing of the secret by turning over the atomic bomb to the U.N. Security Council and closing America's atomic bomb plants. The U.N. would take the bombs and distribute them to five international bomber units directed to deploy them upon any aggressor nation.

The piece finds the suggestion, while flawed, a good starting point, and one which was concrete, unlike the attitude being displayed toward the bomb in Congress, treating it as a hot potato.

Mr. Stassen, it determines, was a novel Republican with a refreshing and welcome point of view.

"A Place for Conflict" comments on the strong showing by the Republicans in the state election in Virginia, while far from undoing the one-party system, at least making some inroads against it. The same one-party system existed in North Carolina. It finds the lack of a strong two-party system to be a reason for lack of progress in the South.

The one-party system had developed out of Reconstruction and the fear of black rule. But now that blacks had been or were about to be fully enfranchised in the South, the one-party system had lost its reason for being.

A piece from the Winston-Salem Journal, titled "The South's Practical Liberals", reports that Carl Sandburg had stated to a journalist in Michigan that he had no misgivings about moving from the North to the South, his new home near Asheville, at Flat Rock, saying that he had found the teaching in the colleges and universities more liberal in the South than in the North. Mr. Sandburg had visited the South many times and mingled with its intellectuals and ordinary people. His point of view on the South was not alone.

The piece suggests that rather than treating it as a pat on the back, however, it accepted the statement as a challenge to strive for greater liberalism, tolerance, and understanding.

Drew Pearson questions why General MacArthur got caught in December, 1941 losing 300 fighter planes and all of his B-17's when everyone expected war and that it would start in the Philippines. It was a mystery at which Republican Congressmen investigating Pearl Harbor appeared loathe to look. Mr. Pearson states that should they do so, they would find that the officer in charge of Clark Field had asked General MacArthur to allow him to remove the planes from the ground and was denied permission.

He next reports that a speech by John L. Lewis at a closed-door session of the Labor-Management Conference in Washington had drawn praise from both management and labor, as he championed higher wages and higher prices. It undercut the position of the President, that higher prices would nullify higher wages by raising the cost of living for the worker, and immediately would hurt white collar workers and teachers, who would not receive the wage increases.

Mr. Lewis was also telling steel and auto workers that they were not demanding enough wage increases, in an apparent attempt to create dissatisfaction with CIO leadership and enable him to take from William Green the leadership of AFL.

Finally, after reporting on various snippets from the Navy, Army, and reconversion, Mr. Pearson tells of the dedication of Roosevelt College in Chicago, a low-cost college which had formerly been the YMCA College, until an attempt to place quotas on black admissions had caused the faculty and students alike to stage a walkout, leaving the banks which controlled it without a college. Now, it had been resurrected.

Marquis Childs finds it ironic that Congress was investigating anew Pearl Harbor while breakneck demobilization was taking place and action was being delayed on the unification of the armed forces, central to the communication problems leading to the unpreparedness at Pearl Harbor. General Marshall and General Breton Somervell both wanted to retire but were being held in place, to their own embarrassment, planning for a post-war period in which they would not ultimately be military participants.

He again stresses that the Air Forces were being chopped back to 1939 levels, having been built up to the greatest air force in the history of the world during the war. Britain, in contrast, had just appropriated millions of pounds to establish an aeronautical research center near Bedford. A British jet plane had just set a speed record of 606 mph.

A letter writer responds to a letter written the previous week regarding churches and preachers fashioning their teachings to fit the pocketbooks of parishioners, to appeal to the wealthy for support of the church, thus blinking at greed and the creation of human misery by greed. The author states that such preachers and churches were not desirable.

A sergeant writes a letter from Fort Bragg, expressing disgust over the Army being told it could not move a hundred carloads of food and cigarettes from General Foods because of a five-week old strike by 1,500 workers. He wants to take a strike vote before the next war to see if it would be worth saving the workers.

Samuel Grafton suggests that the Congress might be stressing the strike problem too much, to the exclusion of other issues. It was fostering the illusion that the only thing standing between the people and post-war prosperity was the labor situation. Congressman Hebert of Louisiana had proposed a bill to outlaw strikes as a restraint of trade, the same theory used to outlaw strikes a century earlier, long since rendered passe.

One could better understand such antics by Congress were it the case that it had enacted a comprehensive reconversion plan, being held up by the strike. But the only thing Congress had done for reconversion was to reduce taxes. So the strike was simply being employed as a scapegoat to remove blame from Congressional inaction.

While the farmers were facing downturns from overproduction, the Congress did nothing to take the surplus to feed Europe. Likewise, it was doing nothing to meet the expected eight million unemployed predicted by spring. The same was true of export trade, where nothing had been done to put in place the machinery to enable it.

It remained too easy simply to attach blame for all of society's ills to the striking workers while letting the rest hang.

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