Monday, February 19, 1945

The Charlotte News

Monday, February 19, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Marines had this date at 9:00 a.m. invaded in full force Iwo Jima, moving 600 yards up rugged slopes from the established beachhead, 2.5 miles in width, penetrating the airstrip lying between Suribachi Yama and the northern end of the island, facing heavy Japanese artillery and mortar fire in the process despite bombardment by the Fifth Fleet and B-29's. The Japanese guns were hidden in caves and thus hard to locate.

Vice-Admiral Richmond K. Turner, commander of the operation, stated that there were "considerable" Marine casualties of the Fourth and Fifth Divisions, led by Lt. General Holland Smith, comprising the invading force, but that progress was satisfactory. Admiral Chester Nimitz described casualties as "moderate" and also termed progress satisfactory in the initial stages of the invasion.

Marines of the Fifth Corps advanced from the south and east beaches, reaching the bomber strip.

Admiral William Halsey, in Washington on a visit, expressed the belief that the Japan had no choice now but to bring its Fleet out from protective home waters to engage battle, something the Americans had wanted for the previous two years. The Admiral also predicted that the landing on Iwo Jima would not be so tough as had been the landing on Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands in November, 1943.

In Manila, the Americans had freed virtually the entire city, having liberated some 7,000 civilians in the southern sector within the ruins of the Philippine General Hospital south of the Intramuros district; but the Japanese still clung to part of that walled district. Liberating the hospital area involved some of the most intense fighting of the battle for Manila.

Found among the liberated civilians were the bodies of 60 Catholic priests, women, and children, within the Maldate district, bayoneted and shot by the Japanese a week earlier. A survivor told of the sudden raid upon the ruins of the building where the priests and those to whom they had given sanctuary were staying. The Japanese broke into the building at noon and an officer suddenly gave the command to begin the slaughter.

Mopping-up operations by the Americans were transpiring on Corregidor as the Seventh Fleet came to the entrance of Manila Bay to bombard the enemy on the shore of Cavite. The Friday landing on Corregidor had cleared Malinta Hill, and the east entrance to the underground fortress had been sealed by a landslide after the Navy guns loosened the earth surrounding it.

On the Eastern Front, the First Ukrainian Army reached the area southeast of Lauban on the Quels River, 62 miles from Dresden, and eight miles southwest of Naumburg, captured Sunday, against strong German counter-attacks in Pomerania and Silesia, ensuing the movement of German reserves to the East, resulting in heavy defensive fighting by the Russians along a front from the Czech border to the Oder bend southeast of Berlin.

On the Western Front, pursuant to a surprise attack the night before, Scottish infantry and tanks cleared two-thirds of Goch, a Siegfried Line center for eight highways. Casualties were heavy on both sides. Only a fourth of the northern sector of the town remained solidly in enemy hands. The German commander was caught literally in bed, discovered with a leg wound believed to have been self-inflicted in an effort to avoid reprisals against his family for having been caught off guard.

To the east, the British were within 25 miles of Duisburg in the Ruhr Valley and within 16 miles of Wesel. British and Canadian troops fought to within a mile of Calcar and to the southern edge of Moyland Woods, also with heavy casualties suffered on both sides.

To the south, the Seventh and Third Armies made gains of up to two miles.

Eleven hundred American heavy bombers struck rail and industrial targets in Western Germany, hitting Muenster, Osnabrueck, Rheine, and Siegen. The RAF the night before attacked Berlin.

The Fifteenth Air Force out of Italy flew sorties against Vienna, Graz, and Klangenfurt in Austria and naval facilities at Pola and Flume on the Adriatic coast of Italy.

A report out of Bern indicated that Hitler had ordered Marshal Albert Kesselring, commander of German forces in northern Italy, to evacuate the region and that withdrawal was in progress.

Two cotton yarn spinning plants were to be established in Charlotte and nearby Mount Holly to meet the shortage in yarn for Army and Navy needs.

In New York, though OPA had promised retailers a fresh stock of cigarettes to accommodate the baited breath of awaiting customers, the stock's materialization failed and the customers continued in want, sans their coffin nails.

On the editorial page, "Musical Tempest" remarks on the Local 802 of New York's American Federation of Musicians, the controversial union headed by Caesar Petrillo, having taken the position that Shakespeare's The Tempest was a musical, subject thus to AFM rules, requiring the hiring of a certain complement of musicians.

The rendition of the play then running on Broadway did have a musical score running throughout its performance, including four short songs, albeit lasting less than thirty seconds, sung by Vera Zorina, playing Ariel, and Canada Lee, playing Caliban.

The result was that sixteen union musicians, each being paid $92 weekly, had to sit in the pit for each performance, even though not required for the musical score. The union rule applied to all theaters which accommodated as many as a thousand patrons. If classified as drama instead of a musical, the play would have required, per union rules, only twelve union musicians, each paid $65 per week. The total difference in wage was $1,472 per week versus $780, nearly twice as much.

The piece then quotes from Much Ado About Nothing: "Flat burglary as ever was committed."

"Butter's Rival" comments on the bill before the State Legislature to amend the law requiring that oleomargarine be sold only in its naturally uncolored state, with coloring to be mixed in by hand by the consumer.

The dairy farmers had managed successfully to lobby for the original bill, defeating the efforts of the peanut oil and cottonseed oil producing farmers who wanted the oleo at parity of color with real butter.

The piece thinks the Legislature ought come down on the side of the consumer and pass the newly proposed bill to allow adding of the color at the point of production. It reminds that butter was naturally white and thus also had to be colored.

Of course, the color added in those days to oleo was naturally suspicious to the dairy farmers, as it was Red.

Got milk?

"A Correction" amends the editorial of the previous week which had set forth its objection to the Mecklenburg County delegation to the Legislature having supposedly put forth a proposed constitutional amendment to change the Federal income tax structure to a flat tax of 25% of all income, eliminating the progressive tax structure, causing the middle and lower tax brackets to be hit hard while enabling the wealthy to escape much of their tax burden. The proposed amendment had been approved by 18 states thus far.

The editorial originally had asserted that the entire Mecklenburg delegation had signed onto the proposal. It turned out that only one Representative had proposed the amendment and it was unlikely he would even present it to the Legislature, far less likely that, should he do so, the Legislature would pass it. The rest of the delegation was not on board.

The editors were happy to report their previous misunderstanding of the facts, resultant of a reporter's error.

"Out of Joint" reports of the extension of the commission appointed to study the imbalance of populations among North Carolina's judicial districts, resulting in solicitors appointed to each such district to prosecute criminal cases having a disparate case load, the district covering Mecklenburg and Gaston Counties handling 2,000 criminal case per year while another district handled only 300, yet with each solicitor paid the same state-mandated salary.

The commission study, begun in 1941, had been interrupted by the war, on the consequent belief that facts would change with the returning veterans such that statistical surveys of the districts would not provide a true indicator of the number of arrests until after the war.

The piece supports the work of the commission and believes its perpetuation was a necessity to insure future efficiency in an area sorely lacking in the more populous district comprised of Mecklenburg and Gaston Counties.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record finds Representative John Rankin of Mississippi commenting on the pamphlet being mailed out by American Communists with a speech by Earl Browder, seeking to align Abraham Lincoln with the philosophy of Karl Marx. Mr. Rankin wanted to assure that were President Lincoln still alive, he and Jefferson Davis, who, he reminds, had fought in common with Abraham Lincoln during the Black Hawk war against their common enemy, would be wholeheartedly in support of the soldiers fighting abroad in the present war.

Representative Alvin O'Konski of Wisconsin, being a Polish American, commented on the Yalta Conference by calling it the "crime of Crimea" for allegedly denying to 100,000 Europeans, of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Rumania, Finland, Poland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, their freedom. He remarks that on Lincoln's birthday, the conference had denied this freedom, amounting to an "international crime of the ages for which the world will pay a heavier price than we paid for World War No. 2". He saw this crime of Crimea as being heartening inevitably to Hitler and Goebbels.

FDR, he proclaims, had gone to Yalta with four aces and was bluffed by a pair of deuces. Only Moscow, he believed, had reason to rejoice at the outcome—with the pair of deuces.

Of course, the gentleman, for all his bravado and emotional outpouring and pouting, the same sort of politically motivated pronouncements and paranoia which would lead to the Cold War, blinked the reality of the time, that Russia was saving British and American, especially American, lives by the truckload every day that it pursued the war on the Eastern Front, moving at a much more torrid pace toward Berlin than was open to the Western Front action, considerably, however, in complement to one another, with Russia able to succeed by the fact of Lend-Lease goods and ample air cover from British and American planes paving the way in saturation bombing of German manufacturing centers, in massive thousand-plus plane raids for nearly three full years.

Nevertheless, Russia could have at this point made its terms separately with Germany and rested its lines. That it was willing to continue the fight, having shoved the Nazis well outside the Russian borders, made it an indispensable ally and its demands for buffer territory necessary of respect to avoid the prospect of another future war with Germany or some other Western aggressor, as perceived by the Russians, in an age where obviously jet and rocket technology would be the next steps to accelerate the contingencies of war.

There was no way to take those four aces, assuming the analogy at all valid—which it wasn't—and play them without stirring a controversy that would have resulted in a far less stable situation in Europe than the one which resulted and led to the Cold War—a 45-year long tension to which the Republican-Southern conservative Democratic bloc contributed mightily in creating, purely for political purposes and to perpetuate a war industry after the war for their persistent fear of "socialism" embodied in the New Deal, rather, to enable full employment, substituting their loving embrace for militarism of the fascist stamp. They had rather have devoted the Treasury to the creation of terror weapons to meet the stimulated fear of the bogey du jour to achieve low unemployment than to risk any hint of "socialism" via constructive, progressive programs such as were inaugurated under the New Deal at a relative paucity of taxpayer money from the common trough.

Coincidentally, ten years after this date in history, SEATO, the Asiatic counterpart to NATO, as created by Eisenhower Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in conceptual concert with Vice-President Richard Nixon, as a Southeast Asian treaty organization designed to act as bulwark to Communist China, formally began its life and times.

Drew Pearson relates of the tawdry episode involving Senator Clyde Reed of Kansas, arriving at Bethesda Naval Hospital for some non-emergency care, partaking of the $5 per day stay available to members of Congress. The hospital was packed with Navy servicemen and was short-staffed. After waiting a few minutes at the desk, the Senator abruptly demanded service, after which the woman in charge of the reception desk, daughter of the late GOP Congressman Clyde Kelly of Pittsburgh, asked the Senator if he would like to go ahead to his room via the elevator. He shot back that he did not expect to carry his own bag, and so Ms. Kelly had to lug the heavy bag up to his room.

This sort of conduct, remarks Mr. Pearson, was causing considerable resentment among the staff and regular patients of the hospital.

He next informs of an unusual state effort to defeat a Federal treaty, as undertaken by a lobbying group for the California Legislature, which had appropriated $50,000 for the cause of seeking to defeat Senate approval of the treaty negotiated by former Secretary of State Cordell Hull as his last act as Secretary during the fall. The treaty was with Mexico, dividing irrigation rights between the nations from the Colorado, Rio Grande, and other tributaries. The treaty had been in negotiation since the Coolidge Administration and had finally been signed between the nations, with approval of five of the seven Colorado River states, except California, with Nevada abstaining.

Marquis Childs, still in Paris, again addresses the condition of France as the war drew to conclusion.

Americans visiting Paris stayed in heated hotels and ate black market food at high prices, then concluded the supposedly harsh conditions of France to be exaggerated to obtain aid. But Mr. Childs asserts that he had spoken to American and British observers who reported that underneath the surface France was indeed in an abject state, not literally starving to death, but in want because of the lack of restoral of the system of production and distribution. The problem would affect the country's future status three to six months hence unless a remedy were fashioned.

The long-term threat of famine and inflation could lead to one of the extremes of either Communism or Fascism to fill the void. The remedy lay primarily in resolving the need for shipment of greater goods to supply the civilian populace of France; but the determination had apparently been made in Washington not to increase supply, for want of shipping priorities for the military, until the end of the war. So, the issue depended on the speed with which the Allied armies could conquer Germany.

For the present, the French were stuck on a diet of less than 1,400 calories per day from food purchased on the open market, about the same available intake as that during the German occupation.

Samuel Grafton reports of the chaos ensuing the 1944 Stabilization Extension Act passed by a coalition of Republicans and Southern conservative Democrats, prohibiting the extension of Government subsidies to maintain low food prices, except as specifically authorized by Congress following June 30, 1945.

The result was that certain types of foodstuff, such as flour, could not be calculated as to price for the fact that, in that case, the millers depended on a four-month lag time between grinding and delivery of the flour. As they could not know whether they would continue to receive the present subsidy into the next fiscal year, they could not calculate their price beyond June 30.

The reason, opines Mr. Grafton, for this state of affairs was that this bi-partisan bloc sought to end both subsidies and price ceilings as soon as the war would conclude, thus keeping a tight rein on the duration of the inflation-stoppers.

He reminds of the threat of inflation looming post-war, that after World War I, inflation rose twice as fast in the ensuing twenty months as during the war. If repeated, the price of American goods would be so high as not to be competitive on the world market after the war. Real property sought by returning G.I.'s for the purpose of farming or opening a small business would be too costly without Government help.

With wages in the automobile industry having risen only by 4.5% since 1942 when production of civilian vehicles ended, there was talk of raising automobile prices by 95% from the 1942 models. The wage earners would not be able to afford them. That was a typical scenario across the board.

Hal Boyle, in Germany, tells of a private who talked his way out of German capture and convinced his nine German captors to surrender to him. He had been taken prisoner while as a medic tending the wounded in the Second Division sector. When American artillery shells started hitting the area, the Germans took the private and sought refuge in a dugout. The private spoke no German and engaged the German soldiers nevertheless in sign language communication, explaining of the wonders of New York and Chicago and how well the German prisoners of war were being treated stateside.

The Germans then posted a sentry outside the pillbox to assure that no other German soldiers would happen by and, when the shelling ceased, they trooped off with the private into captivity.

A unit of five American soldiers had built an elaborate dugout, replete with stove, lights, telephone, radio, and bunks. One night, a blizzard covered the entrance to their palace and froze the door shut. The phone still worked and they were able to call their fellow artillerymen to their aid. After a half hour of digging, they were liberated from what might have otherwise been their palatial grave.

A private from Amarillo, Texas, could not understand how the mail could pass through German lines to reach him. He had left behind two letters in Wirtzfeld, Belgium, at the start of the Ardennes offensive in mid-December. He assumed the letters were lost. He had just, however, received a reply from one of the addressees.

A letter to the editor appears from former Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones, noting his having kept abreast of the "editorial attitude" displayed in The News toward his time as Secretary, then urging that he had done his best to oversee the Reconstruction Finance Corporation loans of the prior 13 years. The letter did not address itself to any specific criticisms made by The News and thus may have been a form letter drafted to all such newspapers critical of Mr. Jones's tenure.

The editors noted that, while they had been critical, in light of the comparisons being drawn between Mr. Jones and Henry Wallace in terms of their relative business skill and experience, they had not intended to impugn his motives as head of RFC.

Having thought we had seen the last of the material on "Ode to Blaze", yet another brief offering is printed from E. Fosdick Swoose and J. Throckmorton McGillicuddy, indicating their agreement with the sentiments expressed by the Ode's author but excepting that his poetry "stinks".

The editors note that the pseudonymic correspondents were not alone in their reaction, but that several writers had expressed their profound disagreement with the sentiments of the Ode's author while finding his poetry quite admirable—an apparent remark wry on the poetic efforts of those ironic, yet irenic, catchers who had written one too many couplets in reply.

Another correspondent urges the leaders of the country, to improve what he regards as failing diplomatic efforts, leaving victory to be achieved militarily in the war, to read Ulalume by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe.

So we shall.

And, having done so, Mein Herr, we conclude that you must keep your Nazi sympathies less overt, your argument, should there be any beyond pure emotion evident, less covert, should you hope to convince anyone that you are more than the Hunter in seek of the Dear, the whipping cream in search of a dessert, the Edgar in quest of a Leer.

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