Wednesday, December 19, 1945

The Charlotte News

Wednesday, December 19, 1945

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that President Truman had delivered a special message to Congress in which he recommended that the Army and Navy be joined under one Defense Department with a Cabinet-level secretary and that the individual chiefs of staff be headed by a chairman from one branch of the service with the Air Force becoming a separate co-equal branch.

Despite continuing Navy resistance to the plan, it would be implemented in 1947.

The Navy, meanwhile, issued an order to its personnel not to make further public comment on the issue except in Congressional testimony.

The President also stated that foreign policy ought be coordinated with military policy, so as to send consistent messages abroad.

In Moscow, it was announced that Secretary of State Byrnes would soon meet with Josef Stalin.

It was reported that Winston Churchill would sail to America in mid-January, where he would take a long rest on advice of his doctor. It was also stated that he would speak at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., on March 5—which would become his well-known "iron curtain" speech, with President Truman present on the stage with him.

The joint Congressional committee investigating Pearl Harbor received evidence in the form of a document from the War Plans Division of the War Department that as early as July, 1940, the Army had considered it "not unlikely" that Hawaii could become the target of attack by the Japanese. It was also believed, based on Japanese sources communicated through Brazil, that the Japanese might scuttle ships in the Panama Canal to block traffic from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The document had speculated that since Dunkerque had fallen, that the Japanese and Russians appeared to have settled issues regarding the Manchurian border, and that Germany might acquire the French Fleet with the fall of France in June, 1940, a diversionary attack on Hawaii was possible.

In consequence, Lt. General George V. Strong, then assistant to General Marshall, recommended that the Army alert both Panama and Hawaii, accomplished at the time, but withdrawn after several weeks.

The report does not indicate, however, that the abiding belief up to the time of the attack was that the most likely form of attack on Pearl Harbor, should it come, would be via submarine and sabotage, not by a concerted air attack, requiring an entire carrier fleet to traverse 4,000 miles of open ocean, an unprecedented feat at the time.

In London, John Amery was hanged for treason for having broadcast during the war on behalf of the Nazis. Mr. Amery was the son of the former British Secretary of State for India and former First Lord of the Admiralty, L.S. Amery. He had broadcast from France, Germany, Italy and other countries, urging the British to give up the fight, that Germany was defending civilization. He had no abiding interest in Nazism but, after the war began, was recruited by the Nazis from his place of residence on the French Riviera.

The UAW asserted its intention to stand firm on its demand for a 30 percent wage increase, having rejected the day before the Ford offer of a 12.4 percent increase to avoid a strike. The G.M. strikers had voted to continue their strike.

The Medical Examiner of Chelsea, Mass., issued his report saying that "Baby Ronald", the infant who had been reported by his mother as kidnaped and then found underneath a drawer in a china closet in the dining room of the family home, had died of asphyxiation, which may have been the result of his smothering after turning over in his crib following four separate attacks of pneumonia, at each of which he had inhaled food. The mother remained charged with murder despite lack of evidence of any violence involved in the baby's death. She had admitted to police that the baby had died four days prior to her false report, but contended it had been accidental. Her husband, a sailor, had been on duty on the West Coast at the time of the death.

In Sao Paulo, Brazil, a riot had erupted between local citizens and U.S. sailors of the cruiser Little Rock, after the sailors, having been drinking, began lifting the skirts of the young girls waiting for buses, not in the mood for winking. The locals did not appreciate the fact, began gathering, started whistling, which the sailors took to be approbation of their jack tar haar pact, soon found that it was signal of condemnation. A fight ensued. And, in the aftermath of the lack of par tact, there was plenty of red-faced consternation. Several on both sides wound up injured in the unfortunate perturbation.

A snowstorm snarled transportation in New York.

Four shopping days were left until Christmas, reminds the cat with the fiddle. "Hie! diddle diddle."

Freck Sproles relates that the Empty Stocking Fund had increased by another $560 to $5,568.94.

On the editorial page, "Time to Walk Out" discusses, as does Marquis Childs, the Congressional committee investigating Pearl Harbor and the Republican members' efforts to smear the memory of President Roosevelt for political gain. The President could only be faulted for not maintaining closer supervisory scrutiny of the Army and Navy commanders in Washington and their warnings to Pearl Harbor.

The committee had received evidence which might convince some, however dubious its probity, that the President deliberately inveigled the country into a two-front war. But for most, it had only shown how unprepared the country was for war, not the fault of President Roosevelt, but of isolationists in Congress who refused for years to go along with his recommendations for greater preparedness.

It was no wonder that the legal staff had indicated their intent after January 1 to withdraw from the committee as the entire scope of the hearing had been broadened to investigate the whole of the foreign policy of the Roosevelt Administration, not just those aspects with conceivable impact on the attack at Pearl Harbor. Such a task was far beyond the capabilities of a Congressional committee and the plainly politically vindictive motive had undermined any salutary purpose the investigation might have had to uncover facts about the attack.

The evidence of lack of Army-Navy cooperation in advance of December 7, 1941 was important for determining the necessity of a unified Department of Defense. But these facts had largely been swept aside for an attempt to indict the Roosevelt Administration.

The piece recommends that the Democrats on the committee also walk out at the first of the year, as a sign of protest of the committee's politicization, bent on the desecration of FDR's grave.

"A Shameful Memory" comments on the fact of the likeness of the Happy Warrior, Al Smith, not Hubert Humphrey, adorning the Christmas postage stamp, in remembrance of the 1928 Democratic presidential nominee and Governor of New York, who had died in October, 1944. The piece finds it appropriate as Governor Smith had truly believed in peace on earth and good will among men.

No one too much faulted him when he had joined forces with the reactionary Liberty League in his fading years, for he had suffered an electoral loss from the anti-Catholic bigotry of the nation at the time. In the South, his anti-Prohibitionist stand and his religion were the only issues discussed in the election. His scrutably clean public record and integrity took a back seat to these emotional bellwethers.

North Carolina had voted Republican in 1928 for the first time since Reconstruction. Of the 350,000 votes for Herbert Hoover, 100,000, it estimates, were based on Al Smith's Catholicism.

The editorial cannot resist a pun, based on Mr. Smith's fondness of puns, that those who licked him in 1928 were licking him again this Christmas. It hoped that the glue would remind those who had voted against him for reasons of bigotry that history had a way of vindicating those whom bigots readily condemn.

"A Basic Problem" finds a study conducted by the University of North Carolina, regarding rejected draftees during the latter stages of the war, to have turned up some counter-intuitive results: that there were more rejects among rural inhabitants than among city dwellers; that among the rural rejects, there were fewer among those employed on subsistence farms than on commercial farms; and that in Greene County, with the highest rejection rate in the state, 64 percent, the white rejection rate was substantially higher than that of blacks.

The study found positive correlation between education and fitness for service and attributed the higher fitness of city dwellers to better health care facilities than in rural communities.

Throughout the war, 44.8 percent of the male population eligible for the draft were deemed unfit physically or mentally to serve. It presented a forceful argument for better health care and education in the state.

We cannot pass up two little squibs following the column, the first of which says: "Two shootings by mistake in one north woods hunting party are traced to over-indulgence in the bottle and not knowing the gunner was loaded."

The second: "In a scenario which we are cooking up—if Hollywood cares—the romantic strangers meet via two walkie-talkies on the same beam."

We remind that General Nathan Bedford Twining—subsequently in 1957, as chief of staff of the Air Force since 1953, to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs under President Eisenhower, until 1960 when he was replaced by General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, who was forced by President Kennedy to resign, effective October 1, 1962, 15 days before the CIA alerted the President of the apparent presence of offensive medium-range ballistic missile sites in preparation on the island of Cuba—lived with his family in Charlotte at this time.

General Twining, incidentally, in 1947-48, was assigned the task of investigating UFO's as part of his duties at Wright Field in Ohio, subsequently Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. General Twining determined that the sightings of disc-shaped objects over the country was a real phenomenon, not fictive.

Senator Barry Goldwater, later on, wanted to know what was going on in this arena and sought permission to take a look into a secret room at Wright-Patterson, but was rebuffed harshly by General Curtis LeMay, then chief of staff of the Air Force.

We just point it out, for your edification. They may have somehow taken over a good portion of the mentality of the country, the aliens, that is.

In your heart, you know they were right.

Drew Pearson continues his revelation, begun the previous week, regarding the initially surreptitious sale by Douglas Aircraft in 1939 of the DC-4 blueprints to Japan, despite its violation of the policy enunciated by Secretary of State Hull.

He reprints a letter from the vice-president of Douglas, later a major general in the Army, arranging a visit by the Japanese to the Los Angeles Douglas offices.

The column next explains that the ten-nation Far Eastern advisory commission members were going to Japan by boat rather than by airplane because General MacArthur had told them to come two or so at a time for lack of accommodations. Thus, they chartered their own ship.

While the American automobile industry was bogged down in strikes, the French had produced 40,000 trucks during 1945 and doubled their coal production of the pre-war period. Their current fuel shortage was because they had imported 40 percent of their fuel, most from Germany, prior to the war.

It was rumored that Chester Davis would be brought back into Government as a replacement for John W. Snyder, reconversion director.

Stuart Symington was irritated over receiving all the blame for surplus property snarls while he had little control over the distribution end, effectively controlled by former Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones, who was handling from the background the Federal Loan Administration which oversaw the Reconstruction Finance Corporation which was handling the distribution of surplus property. Mr. Pearson predicts that Mr. Symington would soon depart.

Marquis Childs comments on the grilling which the Congressional committee investigating Pearl Harbor had given General Marshall, just on the eve of his departure for his difficult new mission as Ambassador to China, seeking to unify the Communists of Mao Tse Tung and the Chiang Government.

He comments that the Republicans wanted a scapegoat for Pearl Harbor, preferably President Roosevelt, to obtain political capital from the national tragedy of four years earlier which had hurled a reluctant nation into World War II. They persisted even in the face of public opinion indicating that the strategy was backfiring as well as objections by younger party members.

He points to the hypocrisy of the Republicans on the committee, Representatives Bertrand Gearhart of California and Frank Keefe of Wisconsin having voted against lend-lease in March, 1941. Mr. Keefe had voted against extension of the draft a month before Pearl Harbor, the bill having carried by only one vote. If the country had followed their lead, it would have been less prepared than it was, already taking a full year to bring production to a level to afford a potent fighting force in the Army and Navy. What was accomplished was the result of the efforts of both FDR and General Marshall.

Mr. Childs is optimistic that General Marshall could do as much in China as any other American at the time.

Samuel Grafton comments that for the first time since the beginning of the Roosevelt Administration in 1933, labor had broken with the Federal Government's position. It was unsettling and would take some time to become accustomed to the stance. It had caused CIO, AFL, and UMW to unite in opposition to the President's plan for fact-finding committees and a 30-day cooling-off period prior to a strike. It was the first time that the three major labor organizations had united on any point since about 1939-40.

The result was that conservative Democrats were now competing with Republicans for conservative votes out of labor. For the present, labor appeared to have no political home. It would thus not be surprising to see the formation of a third party from the left side of labor, perhaps formed through CIO as an outright political party.

President Truman's proposal had granted one of labor's primary demands, that it be allowed to examine the corporate books to determine profits and ability to pay raises. But the conservative Democrats in Congress were only willing to support the President insofar as he would propose restriction of organized labor practices.

The previous alliance between labor and the Democrats had forced each side to compromise to achieve cooperation. Since independent labor action was a liberal development, the conservatives may not have won, he ventures, the victory which they perceived.

A letter writer blames the problems pointed out by News columnist Dorothy Knox, that returning veterans were hard to keep on the job in Charlotte, on the propaganda campaign orchestrated by the National Association of Manufacturers during the war, that while the servicemen fought, the laborers at home were earning $130 per week, when actual wages averaged only about $30 per week. To provide incentive to veterans, disappointed at the actual state of wages on their return from overseas, NAM ought issue, he concludes, a disclaimer of its own propaganda.

Another letter writer presents an open letter to the City Council anent the national crime wave from which, he suggests, Charlotte would not be immune. The writer attributes the wave to relaxed tension after the war and the shortage of money which was more plentiful during the war.

He suggests as a remedy to establish a community center which would teach various arts and crafts, woodworking, leather craft, photographic darkroom procedure, drawing and commercial art, music appreciation, weaving, (incidentally, a hard Grammophon in blood on the tracks, Deutsche Bag), metal craft, clay modeling, paper dolls, model airplanes, wood-carving, and other things.

He wanted to keep the young people busy as a hedge against any delinquency.

Sounds good, but go easy on the model airplanes. As we have said, we used to build about one model car per week from ages 7 through 11, and, well...

We also wove pot-holders in that period. Did all the rest also, except for the paper dolls, the drawing and the clay, for which we have little aptitude.

But he is right. We never had to "grovel in the filth of alleys and the darkness of sidestreets at night", and probably all the result of our pursuit of those arts and crafts.

For, as they say, idle hands are the Devil's playground, on the merry-go-round, the slide, the see-saw, the swings, all the attractive nuisances which the Devil may fling.

...yeah, yeah, yeah...

Framed Edition
[Return to Links
Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i><i><i>--</i></i></i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.