Monday, December 31, 1945

The Charlotte News

Monday, December 31, 1945

TWO EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of State Byrnes stated in his radio broadcast the previous night that the United States would remain in the top policy-making position in Japan despite the agreement at the foreign minsiters conference in Moscow that there would be a four-power administrative council, the Big Three plus China. He also stated that there was a near agreement on the policy toward Iran and was encouraged about future prospects.

General MacArthur, earlier on Sunday, had issued a statement saying he was not consulted on the Moscow talks and had no responsibility for the outcome.

A fourth foreign ministers conference would take place in conjunction with the first meeting of the United Nations, to be held in London in January.

The Chinese Government in Chungking countered the Communist proposal for a mutual ceasefire in the civil war with their proposal that General Marshall, newly named Ambassador to China, act as arbiter in the peace negotiation process and that a military inspection mission, possibly composed of Americans, be named to act as impartial observers of any armistice finally achieved. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek had called upon the Communists to join in a meeting of political consultants beginning January 10 to attempt to form a unified Government. There was no immediate reaction from the Communists.

In Batavia in Java, the British were holding 743 members of the Indonesian Police for questioning in connection with recent kidappings. Another 55 persons had been arrested on suspicion of terrorist activity, bringing the total number of arrestees to 250 within recent days. Some 2,000 Dutch Marines trained in the United States were set to disembark from a ship arriving the previous day at Batavia. Intermittent fighting continued at Semarang and Bultenzorg, where Indonesian snipers had killed two British Indian troops and wounded two Dutch internees.

Admiral Harold Stark, chief of Naval operations in 1941, told the joint Congressional committee investigating Pearl Harbor that Admiral Husband Kimmel had been adequately warned of a pending attack prior to December 7, telling him on November 23 that neither the President nor Secretary of State Hull would be surprised by a Japanese surprise attack, but added that he did not give it the weight which others did.

He also felt that neither the President nor the Congress had properly supported his efforts to bolster the strength of the Pacific Fleet prior to Pearl Harbor, seeking a 25 percent increase in size in January, 1941, the Congress limiting it to 11 percent.

The Admiral had urged entry to the war when Germany attacked Russia, June 22, 1941, hoping that both Germany and Russia would exhaust each other in the war.

He further disclosed that President Roosevelt had issued an order on May 22, 1941 to prepare an expedition of 25,000 men to take the Azores, deemed crucial to prevent the Germans from establishing a foothold from which they could more easily launch submarine attacks and potentially take control of Brazil.

Admiral Stark had written Admiral Thomas C. Hart on November 7, 1941 that the United States was already in the Atlantic war by dint of the convoy system, extending as far as Iceland.

In Nuremberg, the released documents of Adolf Hitler, drafted April 29, 1945, calling Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler traitors, caused a stir among the twenty defendants. The trial remained in recess until Wednesday. Herr Goering expressed no surprise at Hitler's charges against him, as he had been arrested by the SS and SA in Berchtesgaden on April 23. He was, however, surprised at the level of distrust Hitler had at the end for Himmler. The other prisoners expressed varying degrees of surprise at the language used, that Hitler believed Goering and Himmler had brought "irreparable shame" upon the country by negotiating with the enemy without his knowledge and by attempting to seize control of the State. The documents had named defendant Arthur Seyss-Inquart as the successor Foreign Minister to Joachim von Ribbentrop. Herr Seyss-Inquart claimed that he did not know of the appointment previously.

To the end, Hitler exhorted the Government to resist "mercilessly the poisoner of all nations, international Jewry." He believed that National Sozialism would again emerge in Germany one day.

After extensive questioning by British intelligence officers of German prisoners present with Hitler in the bunker in Berlin during the last days, it was determined that the account of Hitler's death by suicide with Eva Braun had been accurate, placing his death at around 3:00 p.m. on April 30, about 36 hours after the marriage. The woman test pilot Hanna Reitsch had arrived with General Ritter von Greim early on April 29, not April 30 as previously believed. Messengers were dispatched on the morning of April 29 to take two duplicate originals of Hitler's last will and his political testament to Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz in Flensburg and Col. General Ferdinand Schoener, Supreme Commander of the Army.

The State of Kentucky ordered the sealing of the main entrance to the Pineville mine shaft which had exploded the previous Wednesday and trapped 31 miners, 20 of whom could not be rescued and had been given up for dead. There were seven survivors, one of the eight men rescued alive having died. Sealing the mine would smother the fire and enable recovery of the bodies. Fires and methane gas had blocked efforts at further rescue. One man who had served in Europe during the war broke into tears trying to describe the conditions of two of the miners who had been rescued, one already dead and one having since died.

The News named C. W. Gilchrist, chairman of the Charlotte Planning Board, the city's Man of the Year.

The final report on the Empty Stocking Fund established a record $7,056.03, $5,598.86 of which was disbursed to provide Christmas for 4,500 needy children of Charlotte plus an additional 1,742 individuals and families, the remainder being set aside as a base for 1946. All expenses for the Fund were borne by The News each year.

On the editorial page, "Invitation to Murder" examines again the lynching of Jesse James Payne in Florida in October, said on Saturday by Governor Millard Caldwell not to be classified as a lynching. The piece finds his statement to be an absurd justification for murder, based on the idea that it would have been hard on the five-year old victim of the alleged assault by Mr. Payne to have testified. The Governor appeared to approve of lynching as the solution to this difficulty.

Moreover, he refused to take action against the Sheriff who admitted leaving the jail unguarded, because, the Governor said, the Sheriff was the responsibility of the people who had elected him.

The editorial does not profess to know what effect the Governor's statement would have in Florida.

"But we do know the effect it will have elsewhere in the South—it is a belly-blow to the thousands of Southerners who have labored over the years to erase the stigma of lynch law from their region, and who had every reason to believe they had, even if they had not completely eradicated the practice, at least made it unrespectable."

"It Works Both Ways" finds the reaction to the news of the results of the foreign ministers conference in Moscow to be more significant than the actual results, involving control of atomic energy, resolution of the Balkans issues, and the establishment of a four-power commission over Japan.

Rather than editorial sighs of relief, the primary reaction had been to tally up the score of who won and lost—as explored also by Samuel Grafton. Most of the protest was directed at the four-power commission over Japan because the Pacific War had been won almost exclusively by the efforts of Americans, thus, went the argument, empowering Americans exclusively to determine the terms of occupation.

But such a view was inconsistent with the final report of General Marshall before retiring as chief of staff of the Army, stating that the war in the Pacific had been fought primarily as a holding pattern until the end of the war in Europe could release resources and manpower to the Pacific. America did not want Russia to enter the war until after the European war was won. And the Russians lived up to their bargain, declaring war on August 8, interceded by the dropping of the atomic bombs.

If America were to base involvement in occupation by Russia on the extent to which it had contributed to the Pacific war, then America would have little or no right to input in the Balkans—not precisely an analogous situation, however, as American bombers bombed relentlessly in the latter year of the European war the Ploesti oil fields in Czechoslovakia and other such crucial targets in the Balkans, in considerable aid of the Russian ground war, also aided substantially by American Lend-Lease.

The piece suggests that the argument to divide the war into two unrelated theaters was an extension of the old isolationist line, a position which was dangerous and illogical. It did not fit with the United Nations conception of one world.

The view was driven by the old mutual suspicions between Russia and the West. The success of the conference had therefore to be measured in terms of its having eliminated such suspicions. On that basis, the editorial provides it "no better than a middling score".

A piece from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, titled "Moonlight on Brown Hills", sets forth in prose, reminiscent of Thomas Wolfe, an exposition on the way the short days of December make the country appear.

Sample: "Up and down the valley roads and from the roads that twist along the hillsides, lights shine from farm homes. In the distance is a cluster of lights along the town streets. It is lonely, quiet and peaceful, and over all the brown hills that one senses rather than sees looming up to the horizon is the beautiful soft dimness of moonlight."

Drew Pearson tells of the complicated task of snow removal around the Truman home in Independence in preparation for the President's Christmas visit. The Secret Service had begun the task, followed by the Chamber of Commerce pitching in to complete most of it, followed by the State Highway Department coming to shovel snow from the rear driveway. Then, Bess Truman came out onto the porch and sternly admonished the men about dumping gravel onto the yard. When they replied that the Highway Department had sent them, she retorted that she didn't care, that they must at once stop shoveling. She told the Secret Service not to allow anyone again to shovel snow from the drive. They agreed.

He next tells of the Senate Military Affairs Committee issuing recommendation to the Army, before seeking peacetime conscription, to cut out the system of favoritism extended to West Point graduates and to make it more accommodating and attractive to enlisted men.

In Augusta, Ga., for instance, a sale of surplus Army weapons was restricted to officers of the Army, leaving out both Navy officers and enlisted men of both branches.

Another example was the accumulation of money for officers clubs during the war, much of it from temporary officers, then utilizing the money to build luxurious facilities after the war for the permanent officers.

Marquis Childs comments on the vast savings aspect of combining the Navy and Army under a Department of Defense by eliminating duplication. The costs of a post-war military would continue to be enormous, and added to this cost, under the President's proposed peacetime universal service, would be the training of a million young men per year.

The Navy worried that the Department of Defense would be headed by someone indoctrinated to the Army point of view, as present War Department Secretary Robert Patterson. He had deferred too much to the Army generals in such important matters as nuclear energy, relying on General Leslie Groves for advice, as in the bad decision to order the destruction of Japan's cyclotrons, which could have been harnessed for American research.

Eventually, the first Secretary of Defense would be the present Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, appointed by the President in September, 1947.

Samuel Grafton examines the Moscow conference, suggests that it did not lend itself to the scorecard method of weighing tit for tat as to who had come out ahead of the game. The biggest net result was that it appeared to have saved the U.N. by restabilizing Big Three interrelations.

During the first meeting in London in September, ending in failure, Mr. Byrnes had sought to vote down the Soviets. He had brought with him at the time John Foster Dulles, anti-Communist and Republican adviser to the U.N. Charter Conference delegation in San Francisco. In Moscow, by contrast, Mr. Byrnes had devoted himself to establishing a partnership again between the three nations.

The conference made no significant changes, but rather recognized Russia's role in the post-war world and that new changes had already been made. Such was evident in the recognition of Yugoslavia and the approval of the four-power commission over Japan.

The way, he offers, to world respect was to aid in the formation of democratic governments in places such as Italy, Greece, and Spain. It was not through trying to score match points in a conference. The Russians, he ventures, appeared to understand that notion better than the United States.

A letter from Representative Robert Ramspeck of Georgia thanks The News for its editorial of November 30 setting forth accurately the type of Congressman he had tried to be during his sixteen-year tenure in the House.

A first lieutenant in Manila writes a letter, enclosing an article from The Daily Pacifican, the Army newspaper of Manila, setting forth some of the facts and figures regarding the clogged transportation system slowing the return home of veterans with adequate discharge points, for months a source of gripe by the men.

The manager of the Pee Dee Electric Membership Corporation writes a letter from Wadesboro anent the slow process of providing electricity to rural areas of the state and why it was taking so long to electrify the farms.

A letter writer from Lumberton tells of reading the "most silliest and sickening" story he had ever read in the otherwise excellent newspaper, referring to a piece by former Associate Editor Burke Davis on the people of Charlotte flocking to Fort Mill, S.C., to buy liquor. He wanted to read no more of Mr. Davis's "rot".

The editors respond that they thought Mr. Davis had handled the story well, and that it was an important story, but that it surely was the "most silliest and sickening" sight to see, Charlotteans having to flock to Fort Mill to drink. They hoped that within a year, Charlotte would adopt the ABC system and enable Charlotteans to remain in Charlotte to drink.

The most troublesome year of 1945—victorious, defeated, short-lived happiness mixed with trepidation over the coming of the atomic age, the rocket age, and what to do about it, expectant over the new U.N., troubled by its seeming surrender of sovereignty to an international police force, victorious in January in the Battle of the Bulge after the initial bloodbath and the wearisome days at Bastogne in December, 1944, furious bombing campaigns over the cities of Europe, crossing with surprising ease the Rhine at Remagen in March, frustrated at being told to halt and back up to enable first the Russians to secure Berlin from the East, in the Pacific, the return of MacArthur to Luzon in early January, the securing of Manila in February, the taking of the stubborn southern portion of the island, the costly battle for the little eight square-mile volcanic island known as Iwo Jima in March, cutting off Japanese air attacks on the new American bases on Saipan and Tinian secured in the summer of 1944, shortening the distance to Tokyo and other Japanese cities on the perilous return B-29 flights, becoming increasingly regular and furious in the first six months of 1945, practically destroying every major city of Japan by June making fresh targets difficult to find, the death struggle for 90 days on Okinawa between latter March and latter June, the last major battle of the war, the rapid events of the inauguration of President Roosevelt in a simple snow-encrusted ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House on January 20 for his fourth term, the Big Three Yalta Conference in the Crimea in February, the death of President Roosevelt on April 12, the country becoming accustomed to a new President, largely unknown to Americans prior to his accession to the high office, the shooting in Milan of Mussolini on April 28 and the capitulation of Northern Italy on May 2 to end the war in Italy, the suicide of Hitler and Goebbels on April 30 and the sudden and complete collapse of the Reich as the Russians closed in on the remains of the Reichstag in battered, rubble-strewn, and burning Berlin, the unconditional surrender of Germany on May 7-8, the U.N. Conference in San Francisco from April 26 through June 25, the successful test of the world's first atomic bomb near Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, coincident with the beginning of the Big Three Potsdam Conference outside Berlin, the surprising and largely unexpected news of defeat on July 26 of the Conservative Party and Winston Churchill, replaced in the overwhelming victory of Labor by Clement Attlee, the dropping of two atomic bombs, on Hiroshima on August 6 and on Nagasaki on August 9, the end of the war in the Pacific on August 14 and the immediate beginning of the long and tedious task of demobilization and reconversion, amid tangles with labor, desires for faster elimination of price controls, desires for faster discharge of soldiers and sailors entangled in red tape and snarls in transportation home, housing shortages, a controversial new investigation into Pearl Harbor by the Congress following release in August of the Army and Navy Board reports conducted in July 1944 and held up until the end of the war—ending with reversion generally to politics as usual, with the President immersed in a whirlwind of doubts, not only stimulated by Republicans eager to make political gains in 1946 and 1948, but by his fellow Democrats as well, especially those of the South, after having enjoyed a generally convivial reception from the nation during his first four months in office.

All of this and more occurred in the fateful and troublesome year of 1945, which, by its end, had sown the seeds of two future, devastating civil wars, in Korea and in French Indo-China, had developed a host of issues, Jewish settlement in Palestine, Iranian independence from the Big Three, with Soviet support being given to Insurgents in Azerbaijan Province against Government forces, the fight for independence from the Dutch by the Indonesians in Java, questions regarding the governments established in the Balkans, in Finland, in Poland, in the Baltic States, and in the manner of occupation of Germany and Japan, the latter going smoothly, the former being full of bumps in the road, with starvation being faced by millions of Germans and millions of Europeans generally, the whole of it overarched by a gradual decay from the end of the European war in Soviet-Western relations, underscored after V-J Day, with the West appearing for the nonce to play keep-away with the atomic secret, to the increasing consternation of the Russians.

It was certainly not the happy-happy, unified land or world which is so often pictured in the picture books or in the picture shows at the end of the war. It was a time for reflection, for re-adjustment, for pain and frustration, pent up for four years and more among the nations during the war, to manifest itself, sometimes petulantly, sometimes violently, sometimes with indifference and resignation to absence of change, after all, after years of world war.

It was a time. And it passed into history this night in 1945, with not too many tears to see it depart and sink into the misty waters of time, as surely as the Indianapolis had sunk the night of July 29, eventually, together with the sharks and dehydration, claiming 880 men, after delivering critical parts for Little Boy to Tinian.

And the world, it might be said, at least for the foreseeable future, having lost some 50 million of its inhabitants to the war in the span of eight years, with the capability now, according to the scientists, to wipe out twice that many in the space of an hour, would never again be quite the same.

Even the parting "Side Glances" for the fateful year could not resist an atomic bomb joke.

Happy Seventh Day of Christmas and Happy New Year.

May America be far less violent in 2013.

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