Saturday, March 17, 1945

The Charlotte News

Saturday, March 17, 1945

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Third Army, against light opposition, had fought into Coblenz in an amphibious assault across the Moselle River near its confluence with the Rhine, staged at 3:00 a.m. by the 87th Division, and by nightfall had cleared two-thirds of the city.

The 4th Armored Division, also facing little or no enemy resistance, cut off a northern escape route for thousands of Germans at Mainz, within the Saarland triangle, moving rapidly 40 miles southeast of Coblenz, crossing the Nahe River at Bad Kreuznach, 21 miles southwest of Mainz. Germans were awakened in some cases to be told they were captured as prisoners.

Two armored columns of the Third Army were seeking joinder with the Seventh Army, moving 10 to 15 miles southeast of Simmern, to within 50 miles of the Seventh Army lines north of Bitche.

The First Army took Koenigswinter and expanded its hold on the autobahn.

German radio announced that German mobile court martials had ordered the execution of a thousand German troops for desertion and other offenses.

More than 1,300 American heavy bombers and 750 fighters struck synthetic oil facilities at Bohlen, on the southern outskirts of Leipzig, and Ruhland, 30 miles north of Dresden, as well as benzol plants at Moblis, rail yards at Muenster, and a tank factory at Hannover.

A force of a thousand RAF planes the night before had attacked Nuernberg and Wuerzburg, while Mosquitos raided Berlin for the 25th consecutive night.

On the Eastern Front, tanks and infantry of the First White Russian Army moved forward against the reduced enemy bridgehead at Stettin, to within 4.5 miles of the city.

Eleven miles to the south, the Russians were bringing up pontoons to bridge the Oder in the vicinity of captured Griefhagen.

The Third White Russian Army moved closer to Braunsberg, reaching the port of Brandenburg, cut off from Koenigsberg, ten miles to the northwest.

A lull was reported along the 25-mile section of the Oder east of Berlin as both sides were bringing up reinforcements in preparation for major battle.

Another large 300-plane raid by Superfortresses had struck Japan, this time hitting Kobe, dropping 2,500 tons of incendiary bombs. Twelve square miles were destroyed, 75 percent of the city, second only in area to the 17 square miles of Tokyo which had been devastated a week earlier. The Mitsubishi factory and the Kawasake locomotive plant had been set on fire by direct hits. The dock area had also been turned to an inferno. All tolled, 36 miles of Japanese cities, including the five of Osaka and the two of Nagoya, had been destroyed within eight days. That area equaled 65 percent of Pittsburgh.

Another force of a hundred B-29's flew from India to hit Rangoon in Burma, suffering no loss.

On Luzon, the 33rd Division had moved close enough to Baguio, summer capital of the Philippines, to effect shelling of the mountain city, following a slow month-long 13-mile advance through difficult mountain terrain and blown bridges. The 32nd Division meanwhile was probing the mountains from the southeast. The 43rd Infantry Division continued its assault on the Shimbu Line east of Manila.

On Iwo Jima, the second of three airfields was now operational. The southernmost airfield, captured February 20, had been in operation since February 28. The third airfield had not been completed when the invasion began.

A report by the Weekly Economist out of England indicated that the Big Three leaders had agreed at Yalta to exact from Germany war reparations equal to four billion dollars per annum for twenty years to recompense damages done to Allied countries, plus restitution for what had been stolen by the Reich.

Because of a shortage of meat on the home front, it was announced from Washington that meat rationing would be reduced from a yearly average of 147 pounds per capita in 1944 and 128 pounds during the first quarter of 1945 to 118 pounds, the lowest level since a drought in 1935 had produced a severe meat shortage.

An inmate of a Concord, Mass., reformatory had escaped, utilizing a stolen automobile with a two-year old boy inside. The vehicle was later found abandoned in Cambridge with the child still aboard. The inmate was from Fall River, home of Lizzie Borden. The child was still intact nevertheless.

On the editorial page, "Allies" examines again the conflict between the Army and Navy in recruiting and drafting. Men under 17 were seeking first to join the Navy before becoming draft eligible at 18 for the Army, thus depleting a lot of the young material so badly needed by the Army for replacements at the front.

While the two branches cooperated well in battle, they had not done so in this arena. The piece again recommends the establishment of a single department embracing both branches and one single portal through which to enter the service, with assignment based on needs of each branch, determined after signing up.

Of course, the Department of Defense would be established in 1947.

"Millennium" offers a bit of doggerel to celebrate the come-uppance of two North Carolina Supreme Court Justices denied their tax deductions for travel to Raleigh from their hometowns on the basis of business expense, thus appealing the U. S. Tax Court decision to the Circuit Court of Appeals.

"An Expedient" reports of the continued American trade with Argentina despite its failure completely to sever ties with the Axis. Some 50,000 tons of inferior-grade coal was being exported monthly in exchange for needed flaxseed, even though American flaxseed producers had sought to keep out the Argentine competition before the war.

It was annoying to Florida and Louisiana residents who saw the coal being shipped to Argentina. But apparently the expedient need for flaxseed had overborne the general policy of non-recognition diplomatically and economically of Argentina.

"The Meddlers" objects to the State Senate having forced Republican Mitchell County to accept an all-Democratic school board, not even allowing Mitchell to put forward an amendment to have one Republican member of the board. The Democrats took the attitude that to the victor went the spoils. But the move smacked of putting partisan politics ahead of democracy in the area of education and suggested that the Senate Democrats did not deserve the absolute control they enjoyed.

"Last Verse" finds the news of the Nazi entreaty to peace delivered reportedly to the British, with the proviso that they were still strong enough to fight the "Bolshevik menace", to sound as more of the same propaganda and smack of the same obtuseness with respect to the American and British minds as the Germans had exhibited throughout the war.

No one but a fool would believe that Germany could fight Russia alone in the first place; no one but a fool would believe the Western allies would accept such a proposal. But apparently fools the Germans were in their time of desperation, as they had been from the outset of the war.

Of course, they knew from experience, too, that there were plenty of fools in the United States and in Britain, silly and moronic enough to believe the sincerity of the offered peace terms and make some political hay perhaps out of the rejection out of hand. It would, after all, by no means have been the first time.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Josiah W. Bailey of North Carolina debating the bill to establish the Missouri Valley Authority, similar to TVA, with Senator James Murray of Montana.

The two argued as to whether the bill had started as a fertilizer bill because, according to Senator Murray, the bill contemplated the development of fertilizer on a large scale, the reference having come up when Senator Bailey merely remarked that Senator Murray's comments would make more sense were the bill to have had such origins rather than, as Senator Bailey had remarked, beginnings similar to those of TVA.

Senator Murray wanted the bill turned over to the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry because of its experience with the type of legislation, but Senator Bailey believed that his desire stemmed only from the bill's mention of fertilizer.

Moreover, Senator Bailey objected that Senator Murray was trying to make an argument "inside" his own and that, if so, he would take his seat and let Senator Murray try, but that he wished the Senator would confine his remarks to questions and not "argue in and out" of what he was trying to say.

To that, Senator Murray stated, "I am not arguing in or out."

Senator Bailey, however, asserted that he did not believe the Senator.

Drew Pearson reports of the question on the minds of many American military observers as to whether Hitler would use poison gas and, if so, when. Most believed that he would not for fear of reprisal by the Allies with even more potent gas.

Moreover, if he started the use, the Allies could reciprocate in the Pacific where use of gas would mean a quick end to operations on islands such as Iwo without landing a single troop. Gas used in the home islands of Japan would be equally useful and deadly to the enemy. The United States would be virtually immune from gas attack.

He next reports of Ambassador George E. Messersmith, former U. S. Consul to Berlin, having warned the State Department early of Nazi activities, having warned of Swedish industrialist Axel Wenner-Gren's flirtations with Hermann Goering and the German Air Ministry as early as 1933. Wenner-Gren believed Germany would succeed in conquering at least eastern and southeastern Europe.

One of the first jobs of new Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace would be to pick a new undersecretary or have the present Undersecretary, A. M. Burden, remain in the post. Mr. Burden, however, had contributed $1,000 to the Dewey campaign the previous fall as well as $1,000 to FDR's campaign. He had wanted to demonstrate his neutrality, but, asserts Mr. Pearson, such had not been wise when he was a member of the Administration locked in a hot presidential race.

He had also made the contributions only after soliciting the advice of his former boss, Jesse Jones, who had recommended the action. That confirmed to the White House what it had believed all during the campaign after it had come to light the previous spring that Mr. Jones's nephew in Texas, George Butler, had led the Texas revolt which had planned for a time to give all of the electoral votes of Texas to a candidate other than FDR, as a protest primarily against the Allwright decision by the Supreme Court ordering the Democratic Party to allow black voting in the state-sanctioned primary.

Marquis Childs, still reporting from Athens, indicates that the calculated cost of returning Greece to working order would be 600 million dollars. The question was who would pay for it, given that Greece before the war produced few exports with which to repay the bill.

The United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Administration was sending in representatives to establish basic distribution of food and clothing. Some trade in small towns was being re-established, but in Athens, inflation ran rampant and a black market thrived.

The working class of the country had suffered mightily under Nazi rule, but many in the upper and middle classes had fared well and some of them still retained positions of authority.

Many people on the Right were killed or tortured or lost their property during the ELAS revolt and so now hated those on the Left.

And the British held resentment for the British and American press which had heavily criticized the British policy and attitude toward the ELAS/EAM during the revolt.

Samuel Grafton discusses the determination by Republicans in the House to cut off Lend-Lease aid at the end of the war, the House having passed an amendment, sponsored by five Republicans, to prevent use of Lend-Lease for post-war relief, rehabilitation, or reconstruction. These Republicans also wished to end price controls at the conclusion of the war. They saw the world in black and white as to war and peace.

But the end of the war would not provide the homeless European with a home or food on his table. And at home, the war would mean the loss of fat-paying war jobs for millions and thus probably a cut in pay, assuming a replacement job could be found. So, if prices suddenly went up, buying power would not only be reduced by that factor but by reduced pay as well.

Furthermore, the men in uniform would remain as occupation forces and would not be able to return home immediately.

Dorothy Thompson comments on the meeting at Suez of President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia on the way back from Yalta in February, that the meeting had apparently raised again the question of whether there would be a Jewish state formed in Palestine after the war. King Saud was one of the leading anti-Zionists, disfavoring such a state. The Prime Minister was bound by the Balfour Declaration, committing Great Britain to the Palestinian Jewish Commonwealth; FDR as well as the Republican Party were likewise onboard.

The Pan-Arab leaders had met in conference at Cairo after the meeting with the Western heads of state and determined to form loosely a Pan-Arab confederation, keeping entanglements to a minimum, and to offer a compromise of allowing 300,000 Jews to enter Palestine, to keep the Jewish and Muslim populations at parity, even if the Muslims would retain a majority. Presently, Jewish immigration to Palestine was limited to a total of 75,000 since 1939, that quota all but exhausted. While the offered compromise was ultimately not acceptable to the Zionists, it was better than nothing and so a decision would need to be made as to whether to accept it as at least a temporary solution.

Most Jews left, after the exterminations by the Nazis throughout Europe, lived in the United States and the Soviet Union. As immigration to both countries by Jews was limited, there was no other place for the remaining Jews of Europe than in Palestine. Ms. Thompson suggests that terms be included in the peace referencing the Jewish predicament and establishing the right of every Jewish citizen to have rights of equality in Europe.

She opines that the offer of allowance of 300,000 Jewish immigrants to Palestine was something to be considered, but the issue should not be confined to such artificial limits.

The page makes no mention of St. Patrick's Day, but we hope you had a nice one. We were busy writing love letters in the sands of Time.

7. But already, by implication, I have been taking you deep into the territory of a second great Southern characteristic which deserves to be examined thoroughly in its own right. I mean the tendency toward unreality, toward romanticism, and, in intimate relation with that, toward hedonism. And rightly to understand this tendency, we cannot begin better than by returning upon the simple figure which I have posed as the center about which the Southern pattern would be built.

A common impression to the contrary notwithstanding, the simple man in general rarely has any considerable capacity for the real. What is ordinarily taken for realism in him is in fact only a sort of biological pragmatism--an intuitive faculty of the practical, like that exhibited by those astounding wasps and bees celebrated by Jean-Henri Fabre--born of the circumstance that he has nearly everywhere and always been the driven slave of the belly, and confined to the narrow sphere of interests and activities marked out by the struggle for mere animal existence.

Relax that drive a little, let him escape a little from this struggle, and the true tenor of his nature promptly appears: he stands before us, has always stood before us in such circumstances, as a romantic and a hedonist. And this, indeed, inheres in the very terms of the equation. To say that he is simple is to say in effect that he necessarily lacks the complexity of mind, the knowledge, and, above all, the habit of skepticism essential to any generally realistic attitude. It is to say that he is inevitably driven back upon imagination, that his world-construction is bound to be mainly a product of fantasy, and that his credulity is limited only by his capacity for conjuring up the unbelievable. And it is to say also that he is the child-man, that the primitive stuff of humanity lies very close to the surface in him, that he likes naively to play, to expand his ego, his senses, his emotions, that he will accept what pleases him and reject what does not, and that in general he will prefer the extravagant, the flashing, and the brightly colored--in a word, that he displays the whole catalogue of qualities we mean by romanticism and hedonism.

What is thus true of the simple man in general was perhaps even more definitely true of the Southern frontiersman by the time of the coming of the plantation. In the half century and more since he had first begun to enter the backcountry, there had gone on a slow but steady sloughing off of much of even that simple heritage which he had brought from Europe. Ideas that had drifted obscurely within his ken in the old countries faded out here and were lost; his slim stock of knowledge continually dwindled; in time by far the greater number of him were literally in the intellectual status of Lula Vollmer's old mountain woman of our time, who knew of France only that it was "somers yan side of Asheville." And if this plainly does not apply to the better sort, if some of those with the best background managed heroically to preserve and pass on much, yet they too often lost ground.

--from The Mind of the South, Book I, Chap. II, "Of the Man at the Center", Section 7, pp. 46-48, 1969 ed.

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