Tuesday, March 27, 1945

The Charlotte News

Tuesday, March 27, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the First Army had pushed to a point 54 miles east of the Rhine, to within two miles of Wetstar after other contingents entered Wellburg, 244 miles southwest of Berlin, outflanking the Ruhr from the south, all against German opposition which had melted almost completely away, the Germans continuing to surrender by the truckload.

Don Whitehead reported that the only stubborn German resistance encountered thus far in the new offensive was by the First Infantry Division just south of the Sieg River at the southern boundary of the Ruhr.

Third Army forces approached Wuerzburg in Bavaria, 223 miles from Berlin, reaching Lohr, two miles away, and about a hundred miles from Soviet lines in Czechoslovakia. Mopping up operations were taking place in Frankfurt and German radio appeared most concerned about its loss.

The British Second Army had broken through German lines beyond Brunen, fifteen miles north of Duisburg, and were moving eastward nearly unopposed.

The Germans retreated in complete confusion. General Eisenhower, just back from visiting the Western Front, reported that he believed unconditional surrender would occur when the Western Allied Armies and the Soviet Armies linked, but not before. That, he also assured, would come soon, but bitter fighting nevertheless lay ahead, especially in the Ruhr and Westphalian plain, where the Germans had concentrated most of their Western defenses.

Hal Boyle reports of the autobahns built by Hitler proving his ultimate undoing as Allied Armies were able to race along these smooth ribbons uncontested at this point toward Berlin. Neither the Third nor First Army had yet met a strong German defensive effort in this latest drive and none appeared in sight. The Germans were laying down their arms so easily now that confidence among the American tank crews was high that the war would end soon, and without much further German resistance.

General Courtney Hodges had put together the largest tank task forces ever assembled for battle in this assault by the First Army. The only hindrances slowing the tank columns were minefields, roadblocks, and occasional anti-tank guns. When encountered, a section of the tank column would peel off and deal with the hazard while the main column continued to roll forward unimpeded.

Some towns had fallen so quickly that the residents had no time to erect white flags of surrender. Germans were caught outside their gunposts in many cases, taken completely off guard. After a few minutes of shelling, they gave up easily.

Advances were now averaging 20 to 35 miles per day. Despite the celerity of this pace, supply lines were keeping up with the columns and the men were receiving at least one hot meal per day in addition to the normal rations.

The RAF attacked with the new heavy 11-ton bombs submarine pens at Farge, northwest of Bremen, the first attack on the target. Weather curtailed operations over the Western Front. Other targets included a pair of benzol plants near Hamm.

The RAF and American planes of the Ninth Air Force the day before had knocked out German tank defenses just 40 yards ahead of British lines, destroying at least 50 German tanks of the 11th Panzer division.

On the Eastern Front, the Third Ukrainian Army had struck along the lower Raba River in northwestern Hungary, somewhere upstream from Gyor, the river running 20 to 23 miles from the Austrian border, 60 to 65 miles from Vienna. The offensive originated from Papa and Lovaszpatena, captured the previous day.

In the Silesian offensive, the Russians had captured Strehlen and Rybnik, the former being 21 miles south of Breslau and the latter fourteen miles west of Ratibor.

More than 200 B-29's raided Kyushu in the Japanese home islands, striking the aircraft assembly plant at Omura on the west side of the island.

Japanese broadcasts continued to assert the unconfirmed report that Americans had on Sunday landed on Okinawa, 400 miles from Japan, or on islands within fifteen miles of Okinawa, at Aka and Tokashiki. A map on an inside page shows Aka and Tokashiki.

That report was true insofar as these ancillary islands. In fact, the 500 residents of Aka and the 400 residents of Tokashiki would blow themselves up with hand grenades supplied by Japanese soldiers, on March 26 and March 28, respectively, to avoid capture by the Americans.

The only American confirmation thus far, however, was of air strikes against Okinawa. The guns of the Fifth Fleet had fired for three consecutive days on the island while carrier planes, some 1,250 in number, struck targets on the island, and a large force of B-29's from Saipan and Tinian hit Okinawa's airdromes. Out of the Philippines, planes flew missions against Formosa to the south of the island. All of these actions were foreshadowing of a landing on Okinawa, as they had been precursors to other island landings in the Pacific.

In the Philippines, the Japanese reported that the American forces had invaded Cebu. General MacArthur confirmed only that heavy air raids were taking place against the island, between Negros and Leyte.

In Japan, on the twelfth anniversary of the country's withdrawal from the League of Nations, it was reported that former Foreign Minister Hachiro Arita had formed an organization for the promotion of the idea of a twenty year war against the Allies. A Tokyo broadcast assured the Japanese that the war might even last a hundred years.

Thirty-three years to go. Will it ever end?

Argentina had finally declared war on the Axis and sought thereby recognition as one of the United Nations. It had finally become clear enough to Argentina that the Allies might win the war and that it would be better to be on the winning side.

A major narcotics ring had been busted in New York with the indictment of 17 individuals accused of selling, since March 5, 1941, four million dollars worth of opium and heroin received from Mexico.

The ring had sold the narcotics in New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, San Francisco—and Santa Cruz?

That's what it says.

At a White House press conference, newly installed Presidential press secretary Jonathan Daniels told reporters, in response to questions, that the President had requested that all foreign ambassadors and ministers remain at their foreign posts, as well as Cabinet officers in Washington, rather than attend the San Francisco United Nations Conference set to begin April 25. He cited the concern about the strain otherwise on hotel and dining accommodations with persons coming to the conference from all over the world. He stated that the advice had not been forwarded to members of Congress.

The statement fueled speculation that the President believed peace to be imminent, that it was the underlying reason for his advice.

On the editorial page, "Goodby Forever" laments the loss to the city and county of some $200,000 in back taxes when the ten-year statute of limitations would go into effect on October 1, 1946, pursuant to an act passed by the Legislature establishing the limitations period. Still, it represented only a fraction of one percent overall of taxes paid for the ten-year period and so was not a bad record.

"The Dardanelles" comments on the renewed desire by the Russians to have access through the Dardanelles to the Mediterranean, a desire since the Crimean War of 90 years earlier, and the refusal therefore to renew the non-aggression treaty with Turkey established in 1925, enabling Turkish control of the straits by the Montreaux Convention of 1936, at a time when Russia needed Turkish support militarily against Western European powers and so was willing to cede control of the Dardanelles to Turkey in exchange for this friendly relationship. But no longer was that amity needed by Russia and so the question of access and control in the Dardanelles would likely be raised by the Soviets at the San Francisco Conference.

"Tomorrow's Crime" points up studies which predicted a wave of juvenile delinquency on the horizon after the war. Dr. Richard L. Jenkins of the Chicago Institute for Juvenile Research found that anti-social habits learned by pre-adolescents and adolescents during the course of the war when parents were absent from the home, either in military service or in war work or both, would produce thousands of delinquents. To attenuate the problem required homegrown remedies meeting the wave before it took hold in the surf.

The sociologist had pointed out that there had been a similar increase in delinquency following the First World War.

Contrary to some popular belief, increased crime was unlikely among returning veterans for the fact that, while having been trained to kill, they also had been trained in discipline.

The editorial warns that the by-product of the war would likely, according to the studies, be with the country for years to come.

All they really wanted was a cheeseburger and some fries.

"Death & Taxis" comments on the two cases recently in the city involving cab drivers killing passengers. In one instance, a driver had killed a Morris Field soldier and in another, reported on the inside page that the indictment had just been handed down by the Grand Jury, a driver killed a passenger in a fight, the driver claiming that he had acted in self-defense when the passenger pulled a knife after the driver refused him entry to his cab for the two reasons that the man had been drinking and the cab was already occupied. The police in that instance, however, had found no knife on the victim.

The piece wonders at this sudden spate of homicides in cabs, unusual for the city, suggests that it might be better to require drivers never to have been convicted of any felony rather than merely limiting the good behavior time to two years before issuing a license to operate a cab. The driver who had killed the passenger supposedly wielding the knife had been convicted in 1940 under the White Slavery Act and in 1934 for housebreaking, but nevertheless had been approved for a license because of the passage of more than two years since his last felony.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Clare Hoffman of Michigan telling his colleagues of the charge by a constituent that the Congressman had misused Government funds to send out pamphlets which proclaimed, "Join the CIO and Help Build a Soviet America", a pamphlet prepared by Joseph Kamp, who had helped to establish the American Bund.

Mr. Hoffman urges his colleagues not to do anything on government time, such as calling one another to go out to social events, if the matter were not strictly business, for Walter Winchell and lawyer William Power Maloney would be after them relentlessly for such violations of standards.

Of course, he did not point out that his alleged misuse of Government funds went a little beyond a phone call and invitations to a friendly social chat.

Drew Pearson reports of some consternation within the Senate Military Affairs Committee regarding the promotions by the President of nine lieutenant generals to become full generals, including Generals Bradley, Devers, and Clark.

They asked General Marshall to appear to explain these promotions and why Generals Patton, Hodges, Patch, and Simpson, the commanders respectively of the Third, First, Seventh, and Ninth Armies, also lieutenant generals, were not receiving like promotions given their exemplary conduct on the Western Front. General Marshall had explained in closed session that they were subordinates of Generals Bradley and Devers and thus had been passed over for four stars. General Walter Krueger, also among those being promoted, was a subordinate to General MacArthur, but General MacArthur was a five-star general. In other words, it was not desirable to have generals of the same rank subordinate to one another in combat.

Of course, that did not explain the fact that the present situation had Generals Bradley and Devers of the same rank as their subordinates without any reported conflicts arising from that circumstance.

The Senators also expressed dissatisfaction with the promotions of General Joseph McNarney, deputy Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean and, until recently, deputy chief of staff to General Marshall, and General Breton Somervell, head of the Army Service Forces in Washington. They did not like the personality of General McNarney in his appearances before the committee, and never felt much respect either for his ability. The general had once established the rule that neither colonels nor lieutenant colonels, no matter how well-trained, could go overseas if they were beyond a certain age.

Mr. Pearson next reports of the United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Administration, under the direction of former New York Governor Herbert Lehman, having contradicted a State Department policy which urged the buying of goods from Spain as it permitted the sale of oil and gasoline to the Fascist Franco Government. UNRRA, however, decided to take a different stance and refused to purchase two million wool blankets from Spain on the basis that it was pro-Axis.

Samuel Grafton remarks sarcastically on the suggestion of three Republican Senators for solving the meat shortage in the country, raising prices, by going further to advocate the raising of the prices of everything to resolve shortages, including battleships.

He asserts that the only genuine way to solve the shortage was to win the war. To remove the meat issue from the wartime economy was a fool's game and would only lead to economic chaos. Indeed, more stringent price controls were needed to avoid inflation in the prices of other foods which would be in greater demand with buying power remaining constant as meat was scarce.

In fact, there was no shortage, as three billion pounds more meat had been produced in the previous year than in 1943. The problem lay in the unpredictable increases in the needs of the armed forces as countries were occupied and it became necessary to feed their populations. The Army had to procure three times more meat for each soldier than that needed by civilians because of long supply lines, spoliation, reserve requirements, and other contingencies.

Forgetting this big picture, he cautions, suggested that the war itself had been forgotten in some quarters.

A letter writer complains of the public nuisance created by the old quarry which had become attractive as a repository for trash, thus a breeding ground for mosquitoes and rats, thus, as scavengers sometimes picked through the trash for treasures, a transmission device for manifold diseases. The correspondent suggests that The News, in compliant sequence to a project appearing in the newspaper a few years before, send out a photographer to capture the extant abjection.

The editors replied that, in response, they had ordered a photographer to the scene.

Marquis Childs, reporting from General Eisenhower's office at Supreme Allied Headquarters, describes the General's office, possessed of little decor outside some family photographs, etchings of both President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, and maps of the Western Front, including a relief map of the Rhine sector.

The General spent more time these days touring the fronts in his motorized caravan than in his office. He never dropped in on his commanders without prior inquiry as to whether he could visit, never denied him. He also had access to his own plane.

General Eisenhower shunned personal publicity, patterning himself on the examples set by both General Pershing in the First World War and General Marshall in Washington.

The General had not forgotten his misguided prediction that the war would end in 1944, but based on reasonable reactions of the Germans in the face of ruin of their country. He now wondered whether Germany could ever recover from the utter devastation now present in German cities.

His own plans were not set beyond six months of fishing on a quiet stream following the conclusion of the war. General Eisenhower would ultimately do a bit more than fish during a good portion of the ensuing fifteen years.

Incidentally, we should record that, while the horse racing tracks had been closed for the winter at the request of the Office of War Mobilization, the NCAA basketball tournament at Madison Square Garden was not interrupted by the war, albeit a considerably shorter affair in those days, lasting only between March 22 and 27, consisting of but three rounds of eight teams. Oklahoma A & M, (now Oklahoma State Cowboys), and its star player Bob Kurland, this night carried home its first of two consecutive championships, this one won over runner-up NYU, 49 to 45. In 1946, the Aggies, coached by Henry Iba, would beat the University of North Carolina, coached by Ben Carnevale, appearing in its first Final Four, 43 to 40. The other two 1945 semi-finalists were Ohio State, also in the 2012 Final Four, loser to NYU, 70 to 65, and the University of Arkansas, loser to Oklahoma A & M, 68 to 41. The other four teams in the tournament that year were Kentucky, Tufts, Utah, and Oregon. The total attendance at the Final Four was 68,000.

The competing National Invitation Tournament, also played in Madison Square Garden and consisting of eight teams, concluding the previous night, was won by DePaul, coached by Ray Meyer, 71 to 54, over Bowling Green.

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