Friday, March 16, 1945

The Charlotte News

Friday, March 16, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the First Army had cut the Frankfurt-Ruhr autobahn in a second place, following the report of the previous day of the first slice. The Remagen Bridgehead had been extended to 13 miles in width as Rhoendorf and Steinshardt, six miles to the east of Remagen, were captured, extending the depth of the bridgehead to that point, after a two-mile advance to the narrow Wied River. Fighting was also in progress in Strodt, Breninscheid, and Reifert, the latter five miles beyond Linz.

American forces repelled a German tank attack four miles northeast of Linz at a point where the bridgehead was 6.5 miles in depth, the deepest point of penetration. The troops also gained two miles to move into Koenigswinter, within three miles of open plains to the Ruhr.

The Third Army had pushed twelve miles beyond the Moselle River and indications were that the Germans were rapidly evacuating the Moselle area.

A German military commentator, Captain Ludwig Sertorious, was heard in a broadcast to express concern at the "fluid situation" caused by the combined threat from the First Army extending the Remagen Bridgehead and the Third Army moving now rapidly between the Moselle River and the Rhine Valley, with tanks moving against the Great Bend of the Rhine at Bingen west of Frankfurt, Weisbaden, Mainz, and Dramstadt.

The previous day, an American 650-plane raid had hit the Reich's Army Staff Headquarters at Zossen, twenty miles from Berlin, the first strike against this target. Another raid of like strength, reported the previous day, hit Oranienburg, to the north of Berlin. In all, 1,350 bombers and 750 escorts had participated in the two raids.

The RAF the night before had hit Berlin, as well as Hagen within the Ruhr and oil refineries at Misbourg.

On the Eastern Front, the Russians had begun a new attack on German positions east of the Oder River in the vicinity of Stettin. The fall of Kolberg, Pomeranian port on the Baltic, 63 miles northeast of Stettin, was said by the Russians to be imminent.

In East Prussia, a seven-mile breakthrough to the shore of Fritsches Haff on the Baltic, dividing some 200,000 German defenders of the Koenigsberg area, had been accomplished.

East of Berlin, the Germans reported the Russians to have begun the surrounding of Klessen, to the west of the Oder, 33 miles east of the capital and midway between Kuestrin and Frankfurt. Still, however, Moscow had not confirmed the crossing of the Oder River.

The Navy announced that Iwo Jima had now been fully taken by the Marines, as all hostilities had ceased at 6:00 p.m. Friday, following a 25-day campaign begun February 19. The Third and Fifth Division Marines had broken through to Kitano Point at the northern tip of the island finally to eliminate all further opposition.

The announcement also stated that 4,189 Americans had been killed in the campaign, with 15,308 wounded and 441 missing, for a total of 19,938 casualties. Many of the wounded, however, had already returned to action. By comparison, the Americans had suffered 16,525 casualties on Saipan in 24 days of fighting begun in mid-June, making the taking of Iwo the most expensive operation in lives and casualties to date in the Pacific war. It would be substantially exceeded, however, by the campaign for Okinawa, to begin in latter April.

Within the previous several days, fully 30 crippled B-29 crews had been saved from probable loss by being able to land on the Motoyama airfields captured on Iwo. Iwo cut the return leg to Saipan and Tinian in half, from 1,500 miles to 750 from Japan. Likewise, of course, the taking of Iwo's airfields had eliminated the threat of Japanese bombing raids on the Marianas airfields from which the B-29's were flying.

Richard Bergholz—the reporter eventually for the Los Angeles Times to whom the failed California gubernatorial candidate in November, 1962, primarily had directed his infamous statement, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore,"— reports from Luzon that the 43rd Infantry Division had advanced in a wedge two miles into the Japanese Shimbu Line, fifteen miles east of Manila, and cut off the escape route for thousands of Japanese troops.

A new skip-bombing technique, used in dam-busting previously, was utilized to direct bombs into the mouths of tunnels and caves where the Japanese had holed up.

Sixth Infantry Division commander, Major General Edwin Patrick, was killed in his foxhole on the Shimbu Line by enemy machinegun fire.

On Mindanao, enemy artillery fire and electrically controlled land mines, used for the first time by the Japanese in the Southwest Pacific, had slowed the American advance from Zamboanga to the north. The 41st Division captured Pasonanca, five miles inland, while the beachhead was widened with the capture of Manicanan on the east and San Ramon on the west.

A surprise American raid had struck a Japanese airfield at Bangkok, destroying 39 enemy planes.

Concern was such in Japan that Premier Koiso was now being allowed to sit in on meetings with top level military officials, an unusual move in the Japanese General Staff structure.

President Roosevelt announced his intention to hold firm on the selection of only eight American delegates to the United Nations conference set to begin in San Francisco April 25. African-Americans, labor, and the enlisted men of the armed services had been seeking representation at the peace table. The delegation would consist of Secretary of State Edward Stettinius and four members of Congress, including two Republicans, plus Thomas Dewey's chief foreign policy adviser during the late campaign, John Foster Dulles, future Secretary of State under President Eisenhower.

The President, now with but four weeks left in his life, told reporters also that he had heard nothing with regard to any proposed peace initiative advanced by the Germans, as reported out of Stockholm the day before, tendered to the British legation there. Shortly after the press conference in Washington, the British in London confirmed receipt of such an offer of armistice through Dr. Fritz Hesse, once the attache to German Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop while in London.

The British also confirmed that they had ignored the communication as another Nazi attempt to sow the seeds of division between East and West, as the offer carried with it the suggestion that Germany was still strong enough to fight the "Bolshevik menace", the implication obviously being that Germany would declare a ceasefire in the West in exchange for a free hand against the Eastern Front.

Obviously, any serious consideration of such a proposal would have been lunatic, even assuming that the Western Allies had any intention of allowing Germany to fight Russia. Assuming Germany could have beaten Russia without Russia receiving Western aid of air cover and supplies, the obvious history of Hitler would have predicted that he would have then turned on the West once again at the conclusion of hostilities in the East, just as he had planned from the beginning, just as he had sought to do in June, 1941 when the predictions by his military commanders were that Russia would fall within six weeks, premised on their weak performance in the war against Finland in late 1939 through early 1940, leading to Hitler's decision to attack Russia, made in late December, 1940.

The President also was asked about whether the American zone of occupation of Germany had yet been redrawn since Yalta. He responded that he had heard nothing about it since the conference and was glad to be reminded of it. The original agreement was that the United States would occupy a southern zone while Russia would occupy the eastern section, with Britain occupying the north and west. Subsequently, the Big Three determined to allow France a zone of occupation, necessitating the redrawing of the lines.

Query whether the German reports of the previous couple of months, seemingly gleeful to announce the close approach of the Russian armies toward Berlin, well before any confirmation from Moscow, was in the deliberate hope of stimulating old anti-Soviet passions and paranoiac fears within the United States and Great Britain, with the ultimate intention of exploiting these reactions to obtain a more favorable peace or to sow the seeds of disunity among the Allies, per the British statement of intent in the tender of peace terms, as well as within the United States, as some of the citizenry were being heard to question why the Russians had not advanced further on Berlin, fueling suspicions of the old Communist nemesis.

A celebration occurred in San Francisco at the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero as 334 American soldiers, 59 officers and 275 enlisted men, returned home from captivity on Luzon following their capture at Bataan and Corregidor in April and May, 1942. The previous week, 275 men had returned home.

On the editorial page, "Next Step", commenting that the Roosevelt Administration had remained remarkably free of the taint of scandal which had beset many prior Administrations, stressed that, nevertheless, the recent revelation that members of the Commodity Credit Corporation had provided insider trading information to stock market speculators deserved harsher consequences than had thus far been meted out, only their firing.

Obviously, opines the piece, they had not provided the information without expectation of lining their own pockets and thus should be indicted and prosecuted as ordinary criminals.

"An Antidote" expresses the hope that the counter statement by U. S. Chamber of Commerce president Eric Johnston to correspondent W. L. White's diatribe on Russia, Report on the Russians, would receive a wide readership. Both men had been to Moscow together, with Mr. Johnston providing consultation on American business practices and capitalism, while observing the Soviet system. He had come away impressed with what he had seen, that the efficiency of Russian industry would bode well for the future. Mr. White, by contrast, had nothing but bad things to say of the Russians and Communism, and his work was receiving undue attention from the public. Many had criticized it, but Mr. Johnston had only rejoindered that it had presented exclusively the bad side and neglected the good aspects of the society.

"G. I. Delegates" again voices support for the presence of three service men, each representative of a branch of American service, within the American delegation to the United Nations conference. It opines that they could speak eloquently of the nature of the enemy and what type of punishment they ought receive for atrocities. These men should be enlisted men, not officers.

It cites the example of Sgt. Alexander Drabik of Holland, Ohio, a butcher before the war, who had been the first across the Remagen Bridge. While he would likely not have anything in the nature of slick rhetoric to impart to world leaders, he could say in plain words what was on the minds of millions of service men who had fought in the foxholes against the enemy.

Apparently, this piece had been written before the announcement on the front page indicating that President Roosevelt was not going to permit expansion of the delegation. Undoubtedly, his thinking was that if one group received representation, then other individual groups would demand equal opportunity to be included. If soldiers were included, why not representatives of peace groups? There would have been no end to it, even if the sentiment expressed by the piece is valid.

"Nor Iron Bars" suggests more effort by North Carolina Assemblymen at emulating the excellent prison record established at Pennsylvania's Rockview Penitentiary, with but a 13.6 percent rate of recidivism from its released inmates. The Assemblymen had recently visited a prison camp and come away complaining about the fine food being served the prisoners, better than that available to the free population during the war.

The Pennsylvania prison insisted on rehabilitation and job training during the period of incarceration. North Carolina had 550,000 prisoners in its penal facilities, who would one day be released. The Assembly, it suggests, therefore needed to pay more attention to this model of rehabilitation and its salubrious results than registering complaint regarding the serving of food which was too good.

The old rigid, cross penological model, with punitive ends exclusively in mind, had been proven faulty and only likely to turn out criminals rather than reformed prisoners.

The maxim, based on human nature, still, as always, holds true.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative August Andersen of Minnesota debating continuing subsidies to the Commodity Credit Corporation, explaining to Representative Robert Rich of Pennsylvania that the last Congress had sought to stop the subsidies, but the President had vetoed the bill.

Representative Rich responded that the President had in 1932 promised to assure that the Department of Agriculture would be reorganized to provide more services for the money expended on it. He cited this promise as hypocritical in the face of his policies supporting increased farm subsidies.

Mr. Andersen pointed out that 913 million dollars of the bill in question was reserved for consumer subsidies, not the farmer. If the consumers were to be subsidized, then farmers also had to receive subsidies to be able to sustain buying power comparable to the rest of the society.

Mr. Rich offered that the farmer needed better prices assured for his product and the elimination of subsidies. For the farmer would one day have to pay in taxes for those subsidies he received today.

So, Mr. Rich wanted inflation-producing prices and wage raises, not government subsidies to make up for price and wage controls.

Drew Pearson comments on the failure of an underground to have ever developed for long in Nazi Germany since 1933. Initially, Hitler's purges of the Socialists and Communists, as well as many millions of anti-Nazis having fled the country, combined to winnow the ranks of potential underground movements. An effort in 1934-35 had been wiped out by Himmler through rounding up and murdering the members. In 1936, another effort, more secretive, had been attempted, but that, too, had been eliminated. In 1938, the Communists had managed to penetrate Hitler's inner circle which guarded him, but Stalin had never approved Hitler's assassination--undoubtedly understanding that tit for tat would then become the rule of the day.

The best hope for such an underground revolt at the present time lay with the six million foreign slave laborers, most Russian and French, who had been impressed to build fortifications on the Eastern and Western Fronts and to work in military factories. During one of the recent heavy bombings of Berlin, several of the workers had escaped and blown up war plants, hiding in the rubble of the bombed-out buildings. Other guerrilla tactics were reported to be ongoing.

He next reports that the British had been discovered to be funding a separatist movement in Sicily, seeking its independence from Italy. Britain had even supplied little American flags to the population which bore the slogan "49th State", campaigning for adoption by the United States.

Sol Bloom, Congressman from New York, chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee, song writer, importer of Little Egypt, had recently celebrated his 75th birthday. Three parties in his honor were held, at one of which he was asked by a woman named Violet what his favorite flower was. He responded that it was the violet, because of the fact that he had sold violets on the corner of Kearny and Market Streets in San Francisco during the 1890's.

He was heading to San Francisco to the United Nations Conference and said that he would stop by the corner at Kearny and Market and sell some violets at the fountain.

Marquis Childs, reporting from Athens, relates of a remark by a Briton he had encountered in Greece, that it was unclear whether the Allies had defeated the Germans in the countries liberated. He meant that the destruction had been so complete by the Germans that it was unclear whether the liberated countries could begin to build democracy, as was the case in Greece.

No one was defending British policy in Greece, except with the tepid proviso that, without British authority, matters would have deteriorated to a worse state, as the seeds for revolt were already present before the liberation.

That which had proved astonishing was how little British intelligence understood the situation brewing beneath the surface in the underground prior to the liberation. They knew plentifully of the Germans, but nothing of the Greeks.

Had they known, they could have initially brought in a substantial force to make it plain to the ELAS that there was no hope of a successful revolt. As it was, the small British force which was initially deployed was nearly driven out, had no chance to put down the growing revolt. But manpower problems, with men needed both on the Western Front and in Italy, had prevented greater numbers.

Samuel Grafton wonders as to what Aryan dunderhead let the Bridge at Remagen be taken without contest, akin to "Siegfried slipping on a banana peel in the middle of the second act, or Brunnhilde losing her stockings."

It had to be an Aryan, he assures, as there were clearly no Jews allowed at the front to guard the bridge. It must have embarrassed America's anti-Semites and race-haters, he suggests, to see their acknowledged world leader taking a pratfall at such a critical moment.

He further posits that the trouble went deeper than merely the crossing of the Rhine at Remagen. For in Mein Kampf, Hitler had belabored the point that it had been a stab in the back from Jews and labor unions which had caused the First World War to be lost by Germany.

Germans only needed to look to ruined Cologne to realize how different this war was going to be at its end compared to the previous one, and understand thereby plainly what Hitler had meant when he assured the outcome would be different.

The pre-Nazi German society had managed, despite its parliamentarianism, its socialist activities, and labor unions, all of which Hitler had abolished, to emerge from the previous war intact with dwellings left to live in and a society. It was not so under the Third Reich.

The editors compile a set of facts on the Fair Employment Practices Committee, formed by President Roosevelt to insure equality of opportunity between the races for jobs within the Federal Government and in private businesses with Federal Government contracts, and those businesses engaged in war industry, whether or not they had Government contracts. Created in June, 1941 under pressure from various black organizations, the FEPC had functioned first under the aegis of the Office of Production Management, later becoming the War Production Board. It became an independent agency in May, 1943.

While there had been several attempts during the previous Congress to de-fund the FEPC, it had survived and gained in political favor to the point that, now, before the House and Senate were bills to make it a permanent agency of the Government. The bills were intended also to broaden the scope of the committee's powers, extending jurisdiction over all employers employing more than five persons and to labor unions. It would also allow issuance of cease and desist orders by the committee which would be enforceable through the contempt powers of the courts.

During 1944, the FEPC had dealt with 3,835 cases and settled satisfactorily 36% of them. Of the cases, 80% had alleged discrimination against African-Americans, with most of the remainder against Jews or aliens.

Advocates of the new legislation argued that the employment of blacks would be most affected by the reconversion process after the war as gains in black employment had been most significant in the war-related industries.

Both party platforms in the 1944 election had included planks to make the committee permanent, albeit more generally stated in the Democratic plank than the specific commitment made in the Republican platform, the dilution in force of the former being the result of the necessity at the time to placate the Southern reactionaries--just as with the present-day Republican Party, following the white flight from the Democrats to the suburban Republicans during the 1960's and 1970's.

A piece by Louis Graves from the Chapel Hill Weekly laments the fact that the Duke and U.N.C. student bodies were exercising their artistic skills on the stadiums of each respective school during the couple of days prior to football games between the institutions. "Beat Dook" was seen in and around the Duke Stadium, now named Wallace Wade, and "To Hell with U.N.C.", in and around Kenan Stadium in Chapel Hill.

The practice had even extended in recent times to statuary and columns of buildings on the campuses, following some enterprising work by U.N.C. students on the Greensboro Woman's College campus statue of Washington Duke, followed by like treatment on the memorial halls on the Chapel Hill campus.

Mr. Graves suggests that the student government undertake to remind through student leaders the need for responsibility during the couple of weeks before such games and employ police officers to maintain the security of the campuses against vandalism.

Well, that's no fun.

In any event, we extend our sympathies to Duke for its loss tonight to Lehigh in the first round of the NCAA tournament of 2012, even if, should you read our notes again of the last few days, with a view toward the subliminal, you will clearly see that we predicted the outcome, as always we do during this tournament, with uncanny, nearly unerring, accuracy. This year is already proving no exception, including prediction of both of our team's first two opponents, before the tournament field was set up, not to mention, sadly, their loss last Sunday in the A.C.C. Tournament. We really have no control over these things. They happen quite without our conscious input, making it all the more reliable, once one understands the code.

How, you say, skeptically and sarcastically, do you contend that?

University of Vermont Catamounts.

Creighton University Bluejays.

It's really rather simple.

There was also the result predicted from the first-round game of Vermont, expressed by Jasper Lamar Crabbe, our close friend who provides us with all of the inside scoop with respect to the tournament.

Any more questions, weasel?

You ought to know all the answers already, anyway. YOU gave us the education, you and your daddy and granddaddy before you, in your pointy hats, down by the river, while you were roasting the nigger, that night, that being not long before your daddy got the bookkeeper at the Ford dealership fired because he happened to notice a discrepancy on the books, that being the tell-taler of the other set which your daddy helped to make and keep under wraps, like the too early arrival of the 1958 models, to finance the activities of your little Social Club there by the River. Thus found out, you had to cover it all up to make sure of your continued train of power, just as with the Link-caw. Too bad you had to be so indiscrete as to tell us the whole tale through time, every last drop. It really did not have to be so.

But, as to murder, we suppose, as they say, the Truth will out. The Spirit insists upon it. We guess you did one thing wisely enough. You selected the messenger bird quite rightly.

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