The Charlotte News
Tuesday, March 20, 1945
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that German defenses in the Saar had completely collapsed before the encroaching might of the Third Army, outflanking both the Siegfried Line and the the Hunsbrueck Line in the Saar and Bavarian Palatinate. The Army had moved to within four miles of Kaiserlautern, within nine miles of Mainz, and 23 miles of Ludwigshafen. The Army had also captured Alzey, 23 miles northwest of Mannheim. The Third Army was but a little more than twenty miles from the Seventh Army in the area of Kaiserlautern, to which the Seventh Army was approaching from the south.
The Third Army had taken 8,355 German prisoners the day before, a one-day record by any Western Allied army. The Eleventh Armored Division, alone, took 6,700 prisoners. The total for the day by all armies was expected to reach 15,000 to 20,000 captives.
The Seventh Army had moved completely through a stretch between Saarbruecken and Zweibruecken.
The First Army had overrun more than forty villages and moved to the outskirts of Bonn on the Rhine's east bank, reaching Andernach, solidifying its hold on a stretch of 24 miles along the Rhine on the Remagen salient, reaching to within eleven miles of Ehrenbreitstein, directly opposite Coblenz.
Some 50,000 of the original 80,000 of the German First and Seventh Armies had become casualties during the previous week of fighting, within the trap of the American Third and Seventh Armies between the Moselle and Rhine.
About 400 American heavy bombers had attacked oil refineries, submarine yards, and port facilities in the area of Hamburg.
Some 500 RAF planes hit the Western Front, striking Hamm and Recklinghausen on the northern edge of the Ruhr. Some 5,000 German vehicles had been destroyed in the previous day's sorties along the front.
The RAF also again hit Berlin, for the 28th consecutive night, as other bombers hit south of Coblenz and at Hannover.
Hey, dummy, it's time to give up. War is over. Kaput. Soon to be kaputsky. Even Blondie knows it's over.
No? Okay.
A page-sized map on an inside page provides large detail of German cities and towns.
On the Eastern Front, the Third Ukrainian Army had moved past Tata to within 12 miles of Komarom on the Danube, 45 miles northwest of Budapest, 84 miles from Vienna. Another drive had been initiated in Upper Silesia, taking Neustadt, 25 miles west of the Oder. The attack stretched along an 80-mile front.
The First White Russian Army in the north had captured Altdamm, suburb of Stettin, four miles east of the city. Stettin was said by the Russians to be on fire, but more and more Germans were pulling back into the city. The Germans had breached dikes of the Frisches Haff.
The pocket of trapped Germans at Koenigsberg had been reduced to a little over a hundred square miles, 18 miles in length and seven miles in width, the Russians within a mile of Braunsberg and three miles of Heiligenbeil. A late Moscow report indicated that the Russians had captured Braunsberg, 32 miles southwest of Koenigsberg.
An unconfirmed Japanese report stated that Task Force 58, with about fifteen carriers parked 300 miles south of Shikoku Island, was sending out bombers to strike Japan for the third straight day, this time hitting Kobe and Kure on Honshu. Admiral Nimitz had confirmed an attack on Kobe on Monday, following the Sunday attack on Kyushu Island.
In the Philippines, the 40th Infantry Division of the American Eighth Army invaded Panay, between Mindoro and Negros islands, from the southern end of the island, landing at Tighauan, seizing Cordova four miles inland, and moving toward Panay's capital and central airfield at Iloilo. No Japanese opposition was encountered except a small force on the road to Cordova. Cheering Filipinos greeted the landing forces. Panay became the 25th Philippine Island to be invaded.
Other forces landed on Malamaui Islet, twelve miles south of the southwest tip of Mindanao, and adjacent to Basilan Island, invaded on Friday, further securing the approaches to captured Zamboanga on Mindanao.
Lord Wright, chair of the United Nations War Crimes Commission, announced to the House of Lords that Hitler and other major war criminals would be treated as "murderers, assassins, thieves, torturers, and the like".
The Archbishop of York had opined to the House that the major war criminals should be identified and shot on the spot, avoiding spectacular trials.
Louis Lochner, continuing with his report from an anonymous source who claimed to be part of the July 20 plot to kill Hitler, explained that Heinrich Himmler, with a view toward becoming Chancellor, had cooperated initially with the plot but then withdrew, stating that he had played a role to get information on the plotters.
According to the informant, Himmler had sent Johannes Popitz, Prussian Finance Minister, to sit in on the conspirators' meetings, but then claimed, after the plot had failed, that Popitz had approached Himmler with the plot and that Himmler simply had feigned complicity to gather information and foil the conspiracy.
As already known, Col. General Ludwig Beck, former Chief of Staff of the German Army, had been the spiritual and active leader of the plot, Col. Count Claus Von Stauffenberg, missing an arm and leg from World War I, having planted the bomb underneath Hitler's chair.
If the informant's information was accurate, then Himmler had obviously let the conspiracy play out without informing Hitler.
John L. Lewis and the UMW appeared headed for a deadlock in negotiations regarding a new contract with bituminous mine operators, the old contract set to expire April 1. The topic of discussion was a demand for a ten-cent royalty per ton of coal mined and housing demands by the miners.
Caesar Petrillo's penchant for royalties had, as the editorial page had indicated the previous week, proved catching to the coal miners. If musicians were entitled to royalties from the play of music recordings, why, why not miners for mining coal? Dishwashers per dish washed? Shoe-shiners for each shoe shined? Form a union, get your royalties. Step right up. Every Man a King. Thank you, Huey, and pass the Fertilizer.
But what about scholars? Should not scholars get royalties for every single word written, every word read? How about bonuses for whole sentences? Why, of course. Pay up, taxpayers. You owe back wages.
On the editorial page, "The Undefeated" remarks that the Germans no longer needed to be told that they were losing the war and that defeat was imminent. They could now see the flaming ruins of cities in their midst. The Western Allies controlled a fifth of pre-war Germany, the Russians, 100,000 square kilometers. Since January 12, the distance between the Eastern and Western Allied Armies had been reduced by half. Ten million or more Germans had been killed in the war.
The crippled country had made it through the sixth winter of war, but spring promised death at some disputed barricade.
Yet, the people of Germany remained defiant and contemptuous of the Allies. It must be kept in mind, reminds the piece, at the end of the war. The raw material for future Nazis was still present.
"Null and Void" finds it appropriate that the Florida Supreme Court had refused to abrogate a closed-shop labor contract pursuant to the new anti-closed shop amendment passed in November. The ruling effectively rendered the state constitutional amendment a nullity.
"A Dry Peace?" comments on the campaign by the WCTU, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, to incorporate into the international peace treaty at war's end a fifth freedom, freedom from alcohol, to guarantee all nations the right to make and enforce laws governing traffic in drugs, including alcohol.
The editorial indicates that the nations of the world would not understand this attempt, that they had long ago accepted alcohol and learned to live with it, would point to the great experiment of Prohibition as a failure demonstrating the futility of any such attempt at regulation.
It is, after all, why we have the Fifth Amendment, applicable in all circumstances, except where either express or implied consent has been provided to waive it, as when one drives under licensure by the State or otherwise seeks to use the public highways and by-ways for vehicular transport, potentially endangering the lives of others would one be drinking while so operating vehicular transport on the highways and by-ways regulated by the State or Federal Government or a combination thereof.
"Big Stick" finds commendable one aspect of the Savannah River Authority proposed in a bill sponsored by Senators Burnet Maybank of South Carolina and Richard Russell of Georgia. They had candidly stressed electric power as the reason for the Authority. The Administration, by contrast, had always placed the emphasis on flood control and navigation, downplaying electric power as only an ancillary benefit derivative of the dams built to achieve the primary purposes.
The Government's entry to the field of production and distribution of electricity had chased away much of the private competition, unable to compete with the Government. The piece recognizes that there had been plentiful abuses by the Power Trust through time, that perhaps the entry of the Government to this field was especially apropos. In any event, it finds that as long as no one was entering the field of production of electricity, unless the Government did so, maximum extension of electricity would not take place.
"Easing Off" provides indicators that the war boom was gradually beginning to end, as North Carolina showed 1.2 percent fewer employed workers than in the previous month while wages fell 3.6 percent. Since North Carolina, however, had a relatively small proportion of war industries, its adjustment to peacetime would be less precipitous than in other states. The trend of economic slowdown would likely, it predicts, continue through the coming year, with consequent lowering of the tax base from which the State could derive revenue.
The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Harold Cooley of North Carolina defending the record of Henry Wallace during his confirmation process as Secretary of Commerce, now completed with confirmation. He compliments Mr. Wallace for his nearly eight years as Secretary of Agriculture, from 1933 through 1940, having been a great benefit to farmers.
Congressman Reid Murray of Wisconsin offered that Mr. Wallace's tenure had seen a glut of unnecessary regulation on farms and farming and that other eras had produced greater income to the farmer. He then goes on to provide apparent praise of Mr. Wallace as Secretary of Agriculture, deploring the vilification of him on the House floor. He inquired of the Democrats whether any of them remembered the predecessor to Mr. Wallace, so great was the effort and result which he had accomplished in eight years.
Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi responded, simply, "Wallace", presumably referring to the father of the new Secretary of Commerce.
But, Henry C. Wallace had died in 1924.
Anyway, it's possible that Mr. Murray and Mr. Rankin were drinking.
Drew Pearson reports of Field Marshal Sir Henry Maitland Wilson having told friends in Washington that he and other Allied military officials had discussed the Pacific war with the Russians while in Yalta and explained to them for the first time the importance of the Burma theater. He contended that the Russians, to that point, were not aware that the Japanese had planned to invade India through Burma or that the recapture of Burma was necessary to re-establish land-based supply routes into China to keep it viable in the war.
It was the first confirmation that Pacific strategy had been discussed at Yalta. The President, Prime Minister Churchill, and War Mobilizer James Byrnes each had said that it had not. But Field Marshal Wilson had also indicated that the Allied leaders were not present when these matters were discussed among military officials.
He further indicated that 50 German divisions had been kept busy in Italy and Yugoslavia. He told of the problems he had encountered with General Mikhailovitch, who had disobeyed a direct order by Field Marshal Wilson to bomb the Salonika-Belgrade railroad to cut off a German retreat, leading to the Allies' rejection of him in favor of Tito and the Partisans.
The Field Marshal also contended that the Italian farmers were responsible for the economic plight of the Italians, as they sold food on the black market for huge profits, causing inflation.
He stated that the Russians had not interfered either in Greece or Yugoslavia. But he also reported of considerable dissatisfaction in Russia with the way the British had handled the situation in Greece with respect to the ELAS, and that the Russians viewed the British-chosen Prime Minister of Greece to be a quisling.
Samuel Grafton addresses the gluttony of Americans during the war, eating more than before the war, consuming an average of 3,367 calories per person per day, 141 calories more than prior to the war. Americans stood alone among the Allies in this gain in weight during the war. Meat consumption, prior to the recently instituted meat ration reduction by OPA, had been at 147 pounds per person per hour—no, per year, compared to the pre-war average of 134 pounds. He offers that the statistic did not necessarily imply that every American was eating more meat but that more Americans were able to afford meat than before the war.
In any event, the conclusion was that the meat shortage was the result of American rise in consumption, not sending the meat overseas to the Russians, as had been contended by Senator James Eastland and others in Congress.
The nations around the world, barely able to obtain subsistence diets, were bound to notice this great disparity and find objection in it. The Greeks had but 700 calories per day of food intake, the French, 1,900, Belgians eating such scant portions that some dressed as Germans to obtain the larger Geneva Convention mandated prisoner-of-war rations. The French picked through American military garbage for leftovers—maybe some primo pâté.
Americans needed to engage in self-examination and realize that such bounty not shared would inevitably precipitate dissension among the nations after the war.
The American ship-building program was being cut back even as blame for shortages of food and supplies in the liberated countries was being cast on the shortage of ships with which to transport the provender. The French had been promised in 1944 two million tons of food; 262,000 tons had been delivered.
It was time for soul-searching among Americans, to realize that they were being gauged for their gluttony by the suffering Europeans.
Marquis Childs examines the Allied Military Government takeover of Cologne, starting without electricity, water, heat, or communications.
First, they had to release the political prisoners left behind by the Gestapo, which included women and children of several nationalities. For five days, they had been without food or water. Seven were dead, and, in several cases, living prisoners were locked in with the dead. Mr. Childs had witnessed their release and describes its impact as indelible on his memory. Their faces had uniformly borne a look of disbelief at the sight of freedom at long last. Many wept. Some laughed. Some could barely walk. They all looked at the prison walls from the outside for the first time.
The reasons for their imprisonment covered a wide range: giving food to Russian slave laborers; refusing to spy for the Nazis; listening to verboten BBC broadcasts and reporting on them to friends.
One 19-year old, Odette, had been beaten many times, but her face contained a look of stolid courage, a triumph of spirit over evil.
A fresh mound of earth in the prison courtyard contained the seven bodies of the prisoners found dead and those of three who had died after the Americans arrived. One of the released prisoners fashioned a crude cross and stuck it into the mound.
Dorothy Thompson reports that a commission of fifteen European or American-European scholars, from ten European countries, had appealed to President Roosevelt and Congress to endorse the creation of a European Confederation following the war. Prime Minister Churchill was believed already to be onboard with the idea.
The Declaration of European Interdependence had as it goals that the Confederation should form a united armed force to protect all peoples of Europe against aggression and tyranny, that no Fourth Reich would be allowed to begin in Germany, that the Confederation would protect all Europeans against racial, social, and religious discrimination while guaranteeing civil liberties and cultural autonomy, that a social bill of rights would assure freedom from want, one of the Four Freedoms of the Atlantic Charter, that inter-European trade barriers should gradually be eliminated and a single European market formed with a common currency and coordinated transportation system, and that the Confederation would protect democratic constitutions of the member states.
Ms. Thompson opines that the Confederation was essential to solve the problems of Europe after the war, to prevent Balkanization and falling into the same anachronistic traps of weak states, subject to spheres of influence and aggression by more powerful states, ultimately leading to another war.
NATO and the European Common Market would adopt many, if not all, of the goals of the Declaration. The Warsaw Pact countries, headed by and within the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, would become problematic, however, in allowing for European union during the course of the Cold War. But, as we have stressed, the paranoiac tendencies of both sides, East and West, with respect to one another after the war, contributed to this tug of war during peacetime, with Berlin as the potential flashpoint in the nuclear age.
But, short of arresting British subjects and American citizens who held virulently anti-Communist views, fueling and baiting the Communists consistently through the latter 1940's into the 1970's and beyond, there was no method by which the Cold War realistically could have been avoided. The Soviets had an interest in protecting their Western borders against future aggression, with the long and bitter memory intact of millions of dead from the German aggression beginning in mid-1941. The Americans and British had an interest in protecting the sovereignty of nations throughout the world, including Eastern Europe, against aggression by a greater power.
Thus, the stakes were set and the fences built, with the guard dog on each side being the omnipresent threat of thermonuclear war, as well as conventional weaponry, coupled with the concept of mutually assured destruction to hold each power in check.
A soldier writes a letter to the editor to complain of Charlotte not having special rates for servicemen to attend movies. Miami, where he had subsequently been stationed, was not a friendly town to soldiers, but nevertheless extended 25-cent special rates for
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