Friday, November 16, 1945

The Charlotte News

Friday, November 16, 1945

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that a British military tribunal had convicted Josef Kramer, the "Beast of Belsen", along with 29 others, including guard Irma Grese, for war crimes in connection with Belsen and Oswiecim concentration camps. Fourteen others were acquitted and the charge against one man had been dropped. Sentences had not yet been determined.

In Soerabaja in Java, resistance of the Indonesian Nationalists to the efforts by the British Indian troops to disarm them and prevent further outbreaks of violence, was said to be slackening. Acting Governor General of the Dutch East Indies Hubertus Van Mook had called for the Indonesian Cabinet to meet with him to try to work out differences and prevent further violence.

From Paris, it was reported that General De Gaulle had sought to resign as interim President of France because of his inability to form a new Government in the face of a deadlock with the Communists. It was unclear, however, whether De Gaulle would actually tender his resignation or whether he had been persuaded to remain, an active effort being undertaken toward that end.

In the second day of testimony before the joint Congressional committee investigating Pearl Harbor, the focus was on whether the cruiser Boise had spotted the Japanese Task Force headed for Hawaii during the first week of December, 1941, but did not report it for an order to maintain radio silence. Two Republican members of the committee assigned Rear Admiral T. B. Inglis to investigate the matter and deliver a report to the committee. Representative Bertrand Gearhart of California indicated that he had heard that the Boise had made such a sighting and that an argument broke out onboard as to whether to break radio silence to report it, the captain eventually determining not to do so.

Another inquiry raised by Congressman Gearhart was whether it was true that General MacArthur in the Philippines had been given orders not to fire on the Japanese unless they fired first. The testifying witness, Col. Bernard Thielen, responded that he did not know of any such order, frustrating Mr. Gearhart.

Admiral Ernest King told the House Military Committee that rapid demobilization of the Navy had left it in a condition where it could not fight a major battle if it were called upon to do so.

As expected, General Eisenhower told the Senate Military Committee that it was imperative that the Army and Navy be placed under a unified command structure, in a single civilian-led department, to avoid another Pearl Harbor. To the criticism that Germany had such a unified command and failed, he responded that the unity was only within Hitler himself, that the air wing was under the command of Hermann Goering, that one of the reasons for Germany's defeat was the lack of unity between the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht.

In Fort Worth, Texas, the Baptist General Convention issued a resolution instructing Baptist colleges and universities in Texas not to confer honorary degrees upon anyone who condoned gambling and drinking, as did the President. At the same time, an officer for the Convention stated that he did not believe it would impact the decision of Baylor to confer such a degree on the President, but would only apply to future awards. The President had already cancelled a previously scheduled December 5 visit to Waco to accept the honorary doctor of laws degree from Baylor.

At the Labor-Management Conference in Washington, there was talk of formation of a third labor organization comprised of unions independent from AFL and CIO. John L. Lewis was mentioned as a possible head of such an organization, which could be comprised of as many as two million workers plus the UMW headed by Mr. Lewis.

In the 35th installment of the series of articles by General Jonathan Wainwright on his captivity on Formosa, he tells of Christmas, 1943 at Muksaq being much superior to the one spent in 1942 at Karenko. The men had been allowed to slaughter one of the hogs they had been tending, from which the Japanese allowed them the head, feet, and some of the organs, while they took the hams. The commander of the camp also sent along two turkeys.

The winter of 1944 was cold and bitter as the men still had tropical clothing and the barracks were built for tropical climes. At one point, he and Maj. General Edward King were approached by the Japanese Red Cross representative about making a film for the American Red Cross. When shown the prepared script, they refused, but eventually, on further consideration, to enable the showing of their emaciated condition, they agreed. The film, however, apparently was never shown as the appearance of the two men, despite considerable improvement from the previous year, remained too bad for the Japanese to show.

Randolph Churchill tells of his support of Zionism but found himself, along with other British pro-Zionists, embarrassed by the pressure being placed by President Truman on the British Government to open without restriction immigration of European Jews to Palestine. Mr. Churchill believed that such a policy would lead to great bloodshed in the Middle East. The few American troops in Palestine had been withdrawn when the British desired, contrary to popular belief, a strong American presence in the Middle East. America, he ventures, had to be willing to shoulder some of the responsibility of maintaining the peace in the region, not simply content to dispense advice.

On the editorial page, "On Sharing the Atom" applauds the agreement announced by President Truman and Prime Ministers Attlee and King to submit the atom bomb secret to the U.N., provided first that there would be reasonable mutual agreements to ban development of it for weaponry and provide for inspections to insure that end. While only a start on the road to peace, it at least offered the olive branch to the Russians, to induce them out of their shell of suspicion of the West and set forth a reasonable basis on which the technology could be shared. It was a definite step forward from the first enunciated stance of President Truman, that the U.S. intended to maintain the manufacturing secret unto itself, including, of course, Canada and Britain, already privy to the information by cooperation in the development.

"A Note of Appreciation" expresses its approbation of the season opening performance of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, sparsely attended though it was. While recognizing technical imperfections in the performance, albeit enhanced by the bad acoustics of the Armory, it had an informality and warmth which overcame the deficiencies.

The conductor did not stand on stuffy protocol but announced to the audience that a long initial delay in the proceedings was being caused by a tardy minister set to open the performance with a prayer, then, after further delay, asked whether there was a preacher in the house. Once, he paused the orchestra after it began accompaniment of visiting violinist Benno Rabinoff in a Mendelssohn concerto, stating: "I'm so tired I can't do this thing right. Let's start over."

With all of the limitations facing it, limited memberships, a bad facility, and few in attendance, the orchestra nevertheless maintained high standards.

"Epitaph for the Sixth Army" comments on the disbanding of the Sixth Army, without fanfare or acknowledgement for a job well done in the war. It deserved more, having served under General Walter Krueger in the Southwest Pacific, in New Guinea, the Admiralties, and the Schouten islands, before being the first landing troops to hit the beaches at Lingayen Gulf on Luzon, January 9, 1945.

"The Sixth Army has earned the peace of oblivion, and our eternal gratitude."

A piece from The Washington Post, titled "The Elephantine Outlook", delivers a synopsis of an article in the Republican National Committee's Republican News, in which was presented side-by-side accounts of President Truman's travel itinerary of October 6, intended to suggest fiddling while the Nation burned, and a "Citizen's Diary", detailing the mythic citizen's problems with the ongoing strikes across the country.

The piece finds that the comparison had, however unwittingly, disparaged marriage, county fairs, and poker, all three of which appeared on the President's itinerary of the day. It was on a par politically with the efforts to smear the Roosevelt memory with the charge that he deliberately invited the attack on Pearl Harbor to get the country into the war, if morally on somewhat a higher plane. But, at the end of the day, neither effort would prove productive. No one could charge President Truman with being lax on the job.

"The GOP is likely to be no more successful in the future than it has been throughout the past decade if it persists in sterile negation and a juvenile carrying of the argument ad hominem. American people are looking for an affirmative program."

Which is why talking to empty chairs and then hanging empty chairs high in one's front yard do not work either to win elections, even if all in the spirit of good fun and the historical interplay between the parties, "fun" in the latter case, in relation to the historically very real tragedy of lynchings and political assassinations being associated only in the minds of psychopaths who think that Dirty Harry was intended as a totally good guy, with simply a few flaws in his personality. Yet, it is all free speech and quite permissible in our society. Wisdom and permissibility, however, often are not teammates.

Drew Pearson examines the political prospects of General Eisenhower, being courted by both Democrats and Republicans for a possible run for the presidency in 1948. He was assumed to be a Republican, having come from Abilene, Kansas, where, to get anywhere, one had to be Republican, and having obtained his appointment to West Point via a Republican Senator from Kansas.

But young Dwight, at 19, in 1909, had given a speech at a Democratic banquet, had supported the candidacy of William Jennings Bryan, and was a registered Democrat. As a young man, he was said to favor a better distribution of wealth and champion the cause of the underdog.

In consequence, when the future President sought his appointment to West Point, he found himself with little political capital. J.W. Howe, editor of the Abliene News and leader of the local Democratic organization, advised him to obtain the backing of Phil Heath, editor of the Abilene Chronicle and spokesman for the Theodore Roosevelt "Square Deal" liberal Republicans, split at the time from the Taft conservative Republicans during the first year of the Taft Administration. Mr. Howe also counseled obtaining the endorsement of Charles Harger, editor of the Abilene Reflector, spokesman for the "Stand-Pat" Republicans—which might have acquired a wholly new connotation, perhaps, subsequently.

Young Ike believed and stated at 19 that the casting of the first vote by party was usually a correct one. He advocated at the time the principles of the Democratic Party.

A few months later, having garnered the endorsements of all three party organizations in Abilene, he received his appointment to West Point and never had since discussed politics publicly, it not being appropriate for an Army cadet or officer to do.

It all sounds a bit phony, given that it took highly partisan political endorsements, as, undoubtedly, it still does, to obtain the appointment in the first place.

Which may be why General Eisenhower was the last career military man to be nominated by either party.

One can draw, incidentally, a fair portrait of the military in World War II from the very individual and disparate personalities of General Eisenhower, General MacArthur, and General Patton, each mutually disliking the others, each, in his own fashion, an assertive, ambitious personality. Why then did they so profoundly dislike one another? Was it seeing in the mirror certain aspects of personality magnified which they saw more hidden in themselves and found not palatable? Or was it that they were actually three very different men, attached in a common cause, but for which, would have gladly fought one another in combat?

Marquis Childs discusses the sloth with which the Congress was moving to appropriate the 550 million dollars already authorized for UNRRA, necessary to feed Europe through the winter. The House had recently passed the appropriation but now the Senate was taking its time with the measure, after the House had taken an unconscionable amount of time. UNRRA had already been forced to cancel 50 million dollars worth of purchases of food and equipment, designed not only to feed Europe but to help it become self-sufficient again.

France, Belgium, Holland, and Norway were able to purchase food directly, and the United States had just announced through Agriculture Secretary Clinton Anderson an increased allotment of shipments of foreign food by 50 percent.

Italy, Greece, Albania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia were dependent on UNRRA. Italy had received 150 million dollars worth of lend-lease supplies from the Army, enough to tide it through the beginning of the year. After that, there were question marks.

The House had attached a rider to its bill requiring that press access be provided in countries receiving UNRRA relief to insure that it was getting to its intended recipients. While desirable in the abstract, it also would likely delay the provision of relief once finally appropriated.

Hunger, stresses Mr. Childs, could not wait indefinitely.

A letter writer, the research director for the National Council of Negro Veterans in Birmingham, tells of his organization, the first of its kind, founded in 1940 by veterans of World War I, pledged to preserve and promote the principles of liberty, justice and freedom.

Dorothy Thompson, prior to the announcement of the news on the front page of the previos day, discusses the proposals for disposition of the atomic bomb: President Truman wanted to out law it, that which she deems impracticable in light of the failure of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war, (albeit overlooking the fact that it had recently provided a legal basis for the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg to charge waging of offensive war as a war crime); Prime Minister Attlee wanted to turn it over to the U.N. Security Council, provided Russia would give a "frank statement of territorial aims and political policies", an agreement which would, she says, amount to nothing, as all action by the Security Council was subject to unilateral veto by the five permanent members; Albert Einstein proposed a world government formed by the U.S., Britain, and Russia to govern the use of the bomb, the Soviets to submit a constitution for the government, a concept which could never realistically be brought into being, already turned down at San Francisco and not even being used to govern Germany, as each of the Big Four governed separately its own zone of occupation.

General Hap Arnold had suggested that the armed forces of the Western Hemisphere be combined as a readiness force against rockets carrying atomic bombs at 3,000 miles per hour, which, she finds, "would only bring nearer a consolidation against us."

Ms. Thompson suggests, instead of any of these flawed plans, a worldwide plebiscite to be conducted by the U.N. to ask the opinions on complete disarmament of all air and naval craft, abolition of standing armies, and willingness to try to live with the world in peace. The result would then determine the U.N.'s mandate to govern.

She found it odd that no statesman had yet tackled the concept of peace from the standpoint of human reluctance to kill one other.

Of course, the problem with her plebiscite would be framing the questions without leading the respondent, not to mention worldwide variation in education and conceptual understanding of implications of the answers to such questions. Her questions failed to take into account for instance that in Palestine, Jewish youths were stoning bus drivers for not participating in a general strike, that Indonesian Nationalists were fighting the British Indian troops merely trying to disarm them, by use of lances, that in China, the Nationalist Government was virtually at civil war with the Red Chinese in the North, without whose considerable fighting prowess against the Japanese, the war in China might have been lost, that the Vietminh were bitterly opposing renewed French rule in Indo-China.

In short, much of the world in 1945, much of the world still in 2012, is comprised of primitive or relatively primitive peoples, not yet shed of the most basic tribal instincts left from days of fighting wild beasts and nature itself for food and survival, even if in many of those instances historically, having been sought to be restrained for imperialistic and exploitative motives and by use of primitive methods of force and violence, breeding, in turn, the urge to revolt against it, just as in the American colonies.

Actually, the President's plan was probably sound in 1945. While science could not be locked up and monitored to prevent the spread of the atomic secret, the fissionable material, limited in geographic sources at the time, could be carefully monitored by U.N. forces. The funding for development of the science could be monitored worldwide to prevent further extension of the science into the realm of weaponry. And, of course, the testing of atomic weaponry can be monitored, has been monitored since 1949, by seismographs. One cannot test an atomic bomb in a laboratory.

But, it was 1945 and the entire conceptualization of the atomic bomb was new to the people and full of quaintly false, as well as deadly accurate, notions. They were groping for a solution, a solution which has never thus far been satisfactorily found worldwide in 67 years. The interim fixes, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, banning atmospheric tests, and the two SALT treaties of 1972 and 1979, the START treaty of 1991, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996, have primarily impacted the West and the former Soviet Union, reducing the chance markedly for nuclear conflict on the world stage. But still, Red China, North Korea, and parts of the Middle East remain trouble spots, unwilling thus far to advance into the 21st century without tribal warfare or the threat of it being the order of the day.

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