Monday, March 26, 1945

The Charlotte News

Monday, March 26, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the 30th Infantry Division of the Ninth Army had broken through German lines on the Lippe River east of Dorsten, 17 miles east of the Rhine, and was waging a heavy tank battle while outflanking Duisburg. The Army was surging ahead toward the Ruhr.

The Third Army besieged Frankfurt am Main, crossing the Main River bridge at Aschaffenburg, 22 miles southeast of the city, moving to within 250 miles of Russian lines in the East, 235 miles from Berlin and the paper-hanging son of a bitch. An unconfirmed report stated that Frankfurt had been entered, the last confirmed reports the night before having placed the troops within six miles of the city. The Army captured Darinstadt.

The First Army advanced 22 miles northeast of Coblenz, pushing through German lines and out of the Remagen bridgehead.

The Seventh Army had cleared all of the west bank of the Rhine in the southern sector of the front.

British paratroopers drove to within a half mile of Brunen, six miles northeast of Wesel. The British Second Army crossed the Issel River, captured Rees, and moved into the Westphalian plain.

The Third Army had captured 301,478 prisoners thus far while the First Army had taken 299,916.

A wave of gloom had swept across Germany at the news of the relative ease with which the Allied forces had crossed the Rhine. While dispirited, however, the people reportedly were unlikely to be able to effect any internal revolt which would lead to an early peace. Notwithstanding, in Vienna, Austrian-distributed leaflets urged anti-Nazi demonstrations, and reports stated that 60,000 people had fled into the hills to avoid conscription.

It was now springtime for Hitler in Germany.

About 300 American bombers hit two oil plants at Zeitz, and a gun factory and armored car plant at Plauen, in southeastern Germany near Leipzig.

The Germans reported that Russian bombers struck Berlin.

The 15th Air Force hit targets in Austria.

Lt. General Ira Eaker, chief of the Mediterranean Air Forces, stated that the Luftwaffe was virtually grounded for lack of fuel, averaging a mere twenty missions per day to the Allies 2,000 sorties.

The day before, the Americans began raids seeking to hit underground factories in Germany, bombing oil storage dumps between Hannover and Brunswick.

Prime Minister Churchill had visited the Ninth Army front on Sunday and was visiting the Second Army front on this date. While performing his inspection on Sunday, a shell had hit just 50 yards from his position, in the vicinity of Wesel.

On the Eastern Front, the Russians confirmed the beginning of a new offensive by the Second Ukrainian Army, north of the Danube in Slovakia, and that Banska Bystrica, across the Hron River 75 miles north of Budapest, had been captured. The drive, the fourth aiming at Austria, was about a hundred miles southeast of the forces attacking Ratibor, near the Moravian gateway into the German inner redoubt, an area reported to be where the SS had been stashing weapons and supplies for a final stand.

The Germans reported that the Russians were attacking west of Kuestrin toward Seelow, 25 miles east of Berlin. No confirmation, however, had yet come from Moscow regarding any new movement on that part of the front west of the Oder.

A premature report from Japan indicated that a large carrier task force was landing American troops on Okinawa in the Ryukyus. The invasion would not begin, however, until the following Sunday, April 1. Preliminary artillery fire and bombing, however, were transpiring.

The landings were reported to be at Toka Shima and Aka Jima, small islands west of the southwestern tip of Okinawa. The task force reportedly consisted of 15 carriers, 11 battleships, 10 cruisers, 32 destroyers, and numerous auxiliary vessels.

Okinawa was considered another strategic island which would enable American air strikes on Japanese-controlled Formosa and the Japanese home islands to the north, while cutting Japan's supply lines south to the Dutch East Indies. Okinawa is 75 miles in length and from three to fifteen miles wide. Most of the population and the Japanese fortifications were in the southwestern portion of the island.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the complaint by Governor Ellis Arnall on behalf of the State of Georgia, alleging that the railroads had conspired to fix discriminatory freight rates, discriminating against Georgia, as well as the other Southern states, vis à vis the rates charged to Northern states.

On the editorial page, "A Burden for Max" comments on the new role of former North Carolina Governor O. Max Gardner as head of a twelve-person board to study plans for a guaranteed annual wage for American workmen. On the board with him were Chamber of Commerce president Eric Johnston, Philip Murray of CIO, Albert Goss of the National Grange, and Labor expert Anna Rosenberg.

The annual wage had been proposed for a decade and had become a hot topic within labor circles. The answers which they reached would impact into the future the economy of the country. Questions remained as to how it would affect corporate profits in boom times and depression, how it would affect labor initiative.

Whether they decided in the end just to catapult a rabbit across a field and shoot it dead, we don't know. But we do have questions, little girl, as to what that was all about. Would you care to explain? without cue cards, that is.

No, really, we would like you to do so and believe the networks ought press you severely on the issue, until you either defer to your handlers, call it all a joke, or run home in frustration. You look tough. We bet it is an act.

Is it in reference to the Tea Party? Is your name Alice? Are we all getting small? Have your handlers been consuming mushrooms, by chance?

If we were you, we would watch out for the guy wielding the gun. He looks dangerous, perhaps psychotic.

Wait, haven't we seen you before somewhere? You don't have a sister?

"Killing Blows" predicts that the end of the Third Reich, 988 years ahead of schedule, was likely to occur within the Ruhr rather than in Berlin, apropos if so, for the fact that the war had been fueled from that locus of industrial centrality within the Reich.

The Remagen bridgehead, effected just 18 days earlier, even the landings at Normandy on June 6, now paled beside the tremendous thrusts of the weekend past by the several Allied Armies into the German defense lines, beyond the Rhine and into the Ruhr. The Third Army had crossed the Rhine without hearing a shot fired by the enemy, only encountering artillery after two hours on the other side. The Ninth Army had teamed with the British Second in the north to move toward the Ruhr. Berlin was now some 70 miles closer than it had been just a week earlier.

Concludes the editorial, "The house of evil is falling."

"No, Not This!" reports on the revelation by Chapel Hill Weekly Editor Louis Graves that Dr. Morris Goldring, a New York physician, was a radical fifth columnist who prescribed a too facile solution to the cigarette shortage in the country: He had condemned smoking as unhealthful. Fighting men had a better chance of recovering from abdominal injuries, the doctor informed, were they not smokers. Tobacco companies implicitly admitted health problems caused by smoking with their ads promising their cigarette would cause less throat irritation than the competitors. Dr. Goldring finally imparted the practical suggestion that smokers not pursue the habit during working hours, thereby cutting consumption in half.

Mr. Graves had looked through the misty veil and found that the next step recommended would be complete abstinence, a fate worse than Communism. North Carolina might dry up and blow away, not being then in Kansas anymore.

The ediorial, however, finds no worry from the propaganda as it refused to listen, being a devotee of St. Nick for many years, it assures, less worried of throat irritation than lines before the tobacco shop.

"Crisis of Empire" reports that Burma, an intriguant out of Milton Caniff's "Terry and the Pirates" comic strip, had caused the illustrator to seek approval from the British Government as to whether he could clear her of her past indiscretions given that she had been wanted by British Intelligence for her intrigues in the Burma-China-India theater. So, Mr. Caniff had written Sir Harold Butler, the British Information Ministry representative in Washington, inquiring whether the Empire would have objection.

The piece asserts the belief that Prime Minister Churchill would assuredly call a vote of confidence in Commons to resolve the pressing issue.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record finds Senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia stating, during the prior debate on the now-defeated nomination of Aubrey Williams to be director of the Rural Electrification Administration, that the tenor of the debate had devolved to the point that listeners might believe themselves back in the days of religious bigotry in the country, when a Baptist was forbidden to land at Boston and when the right to become a citizen depended upon one's religion.

Mr. Williams was being skewered as an atheist, even if Drew Pearson, a Quaker, had defended Mr. Williams in an earlier column as a God-fearing man.

Have we advanced very far since that time of which Senator Kilgore related? at least in some quarters.

Drew Pearson comments on the anger of Major General Norman Kirk, Surgeon General of the Army, following his return from the Pacific theater where he had inspected Army medical units. When he had arrived on Leyte, General MacArthur refused to provide him access to Manila on Luzon, where the most important current medical work in the Pacific was taking place. The limitation was not imposed out of concern for General Kirk's safety, as General MacArthur's wife and son had joined the General in Manila. General MacArthur had also refused permission to the commanding medical officer in the Pacific to remain in Manila, though he had allowed a visit.

The medical officers were upset by thus being deprived access to the medical facilities in Manila, some saying that it was costing lives.

Mr. Pearson next reports of the talk already surfacing with regard to the Congressional races of 1946, both party chairs excitedly greeting the prospect of those elections, the Democrats seeking to enlarge their majority in the House, the Republicans hoping to take it over. Robert Hannegan, the Democratic chair, had called on President Roosevelt shortly after his return from Yalta, complaining that the Cabinet was not lending much help to the process of funding for the upcoming election cycle. The President suggested that Mr. Hannegan call representatives of the Cabinet, with the exception of the Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy, into a meeting. Mr. Hannegan then did so and asked that the Cabinet officers urge that the 500 persons working in non-war agencies of the Government contribute to the Democratic Party on the premise that the President who had given them their jobs was a Democrat.

At the meeting, Assistant Secretary Dean Acheson represented the State Department, while Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard, Postmaster General Frank Walker, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, and future Supreme Court Justice, longtime friend of Lyndon Johnson, then Undersecretary of Interior, Abe Fortas, also attended the meeting.

Justice Fortas would be appointed by President Johnson to become Chief Justice to replace retiring Earl Warren in 1968, but the ensuing political firestorm brought on by a coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats, wanting a conservative Chief, combined to derail the nomination, prompting Justice Fortas within the ensuing year to resign the Court, providing incoming President Nixon with two early nominations, which he filled with the appointments of Warren Earl Burger and Harry Blackmun, the latter following the controversial failed nominations of Clement Haynsworth and Harrold Carswell, both Federal judges in the South, appointed by President Eisenhower.

Justice Blackmun, initially appearing conservative in his opinions on the Court, often pairing with Chief Justice Burger, a fellow Minnesotan, eventually became known more as a liberal, having delivered the majority opinion of the Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973.

Marquis Childs, reporting from Paris, tells of his quick trip through the war areas, spending early morning in Rome, having breakfast in Naples, an early lunch in Belgrade, then dinner in Paris, and the following evening, traveling to Cologne, three days after the occupation there had begun. The Army and Air Forces went to great length to assure that the press obtained access to the fronts as desired. Public relations officers were assigned to journalists to aid the process.

In Paris, the Hotel Seribe had been set aside for correspondents and Supreme Allied Headquarters often sent over officers with special knowledge to brief re developments in the war. Information officers were supplied at all times to confirm the most minute details of the battle fronts.

The attention received by certain generals or units was a direct function of how aggressive the public relations officers for these generals and units were.

Sometimes, there were flaws in the system apparent, as after the Ardennes offensive had begun December 16, when a news blackout prevented access to the developments, many journalists having complained that the blackout was unnecessary.

Too little account was taken by the public relations officers, according to observers, regarding the relations between the French, civilians and military, and the American Army. The resulting isolation of the two groups from one another tended to distance the American Army from French life, resulting in misunderstanding on both sides. The French believed that their needs for food and other essential supplies were being neglected. The military officers believed that the French people unnecessarily complicated life amid war and its inevitable restraints on providing normal services and supplies.

Mr. Childs suggests that bridging this gap in communication was one of the more important things to be achieved in the area of public relations in Europe, with ramifications for the post-war period.

Samuel Grafton remarks on the surfacing of an old trend in America, the conflict between desire for order and hatred of too much government control. Americans were fond of talking about freedom, both domestically and on foreign soil. Yet, voices had arisen against the Bretton Woods accord, to establish controls on international currencies to insure their stability, thus promoting freedom, while, at the same time, vigorously appearing to support the Dumbarton Oaks agreement to establish a United Nations organization.

At home, Americans wanted to be free from price controls so that they might have a party with their new-found wealth created during the war, unmindful of the inflationary trends which such sudden release of controls would inevitably spawn.

The rest of the world looking on, he suggests, must have been doing so in some degree of consternation at the sight of this irreconcilable dichotomy running through American thought and action.

A report compiled by the editors indicates that a strike vote among bituminous coal miners, to be held Wednesday pursuant to the 30-day notice of strike required by law and provided by the UMW on February 26, would permit the strike of the miners should the contract negotiations with management fail by the deadline of April 1. Even should the contract impasse be resolved, the miners would likely take off work for a few days in between contracts, as was traditional.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics had reported that during 1944, 8.5 million man-days had been lost by 2.1 million workers involved in 5,000 strikes, an average of four days per worker per strike. The bituminous coal miners had averaged 43.1 hours per week of work in December, 1944, compared to 35.7 hours two years earlier. They earned an average of $50.39 per week in December, 1944 against $38.25 in December, 1942.

Incidentally, we congratulate the Spartans on a season well played and are sorry to see it having ended a little early. We predicted the Spartans' latter two opponents, unfortunately perhaps predicting the result in the last match also. But, finishing as they did, despite a more impressive prospectus at the beginning, is not worthy of complaint without less than lack of good faith and credulity. There is always next year and we hope to see a little bit more advancement, a couple of matches further on, perhaps. But, all things considered, better than two years ago. We shall endure until next November. In the meantime, good luck to all four of the remaining schools in the match. May the best team win.

No breakfast in New Orleans at Cafe du Monde this year. C'est la vie.

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