Tuesday, April 10, 1945

The Charlotte News

Tuesday, April 10, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that tanks and infantry of the 84th "Railsplitters" Division of the Ninth Army had advanced into Hannover, a major road and railroad hub, and reached a point on the autobahn 120 miles from Berlin. According to German reports, Hannover was encircled. German reports stated that American units bypassing Hannover had reached Salzgitter, site of the Hermann Goering Iron Works, 115 miles from the capital and 17 miles from Brunswick, a major aircraft manufacturing center.

The British, encountering stiff enemy resistance outside Bremen, having flanked the city, had crossed the Aller River and taken Verden, on the way to Hamburg, 50 miles distant.

To the south, the First Army armor advanced 24 miles to the left of the Hartz (or Harz) Mountains, the range containing the Brocken, to a position 60 miles from the Elbe River, just to the south of the supply base at Nordhausen, also 115 miles from Berlin and only 150 miles from the Russian siege lines against the capital. The First Army emerged onto the Thuringian plain to join with the Third Army, south of the Hartz Mountains and Brunswick.

The Germans were reported to be employing night transport planes to try to rescue as many of the 100,000 trapped Germans in the Ruhr as they could.

There were now 62 identified Allied divisions fighting east of the Rhine, twenty of them armored.

More than 1,300 American bombers, accompanied by 850 fighters, hit seven jet plane bases in the vicinity of Berlin. Also hit were the ordnance supply center at Oranienburg and the experimental training airfield near Rechlin. Within the previous four days, fully 43 German airfields had been hit by Allied planes, destroying 366 enemy aircraft.

An attack the previous night by 600 RAF bombers also struck in the same area, hitting the U-boat assembly yards at Kiel.

On the Eastern Front, the Third Ukrainian Army was making substantial progress northwest of Vienna near Nuzsdorf, moving toward Linz, west of Vienna, and toward Munich and Prague, seeking to link with the Western forces and to close the gap against Germans seeking escape from Vienna. The exact position of the Russian forces was not reported. One wing of the Army was within 133 miles of Berchtesgaden, Hitler's mountain retreat.

Within Vienna, the Russians were seeking to capture the last blocks of the city still in German possession, and the fall of the capital was declared by Moscow to be imminent.

In the north, the final capture of Koenigsberg was reported, following a massive artillery barrage against the East Prussian capital. The Russian press greeted it as one of the great victories of the war in the East, following a prolonged siege.

In Italy, the British Eighth Army, supported by the heaviest artillery barrage yet delivered by the Allies on Italian soil, had crossed the Senio River, seeking to destroy as many of the German forces as it could before their retreat to strongpoints within the northern Apennines. Bridgeheads were established on the north side of the river, near Lugo. The Fifteenth and Twelfth Air Forces supported the operation in strength, flying several thousand sorties.

There were 25 German and six Italian Fascist divisions still in Northern Italy.

On Okinawa, bayonet-wielding Japanese in the southern area of the island continued to slow American progress of the 24th Army Corps of the Tenth Army, bogged down four miles from Naha. Two strong enemy counter-attacks were repulsed and a third was being fought the previous night. The 184th Regiment had retaken Red Hill the previous day after concentrating artillery fire against it during the night. Close quarters fighting had earlier resulted in the hill being recaptured by the Japanese.

Major General J. R. Sheetz, commander of the 24th Corps artillery, compared the battle in the area to the fiercest battles of the European war.

In the north, by contrast, the Third Marine Amphibious Corps gained up to 4,000 yards, cutting off Motobu Peninsula, having occupied about half of it the day before, overrunning the western shore of Katena Ko, encountering the while only scattered opposition.

Associated Press correspondent Robbin Coons, with the 24th Corps, forecasted, with considerable perspicacity, that it could take two to three months to complete the conquest of Okinawa. It would be another two months and eleven days. By contrast, Iwo Jima had taken 26 days to capture.

American planes attacked a Japanese convoy on the west coast of Formosa and along the China Sea coast in the area of Swatow. In all, ten enemy ships between Formosa and Borneo in the Dutch East Indies had been sunk in the operations.

Fighting continued on Luzon, in the area of Balete Pass and Baguio, as well as within the trap of the remaining Japanese in the southernmost section of the island.

Prime Minister Churchill, in response to a question posed in Commons, assured that no member of the British Commonwealth which had taken a neutral stand in the war would become a haven for Nazi war criminals. The inquiry impliedly suggested Eire, which had maintained throughout the war a neutral stance, though Eire contested its membership within the British Commonwealth. Eire had thus far not provided assurance that it would bar war criminals from its borders, but had stated that it would deport or keep out anyone who put in jeopardy its neutral status or was otherwise deemed undesirable.

War Production Board chairman J. A. Krug stated that war production might be cut as much as 50 percent, above the previously predicted 36 percent, within the first year following V-E Day. The change resulted from a meeting of the automobile manufacturers who assured that they would be ready to reconvert their assembly lines from planes, tanks, and war vehicles to civilian vehicles within hours or days of V-E Day.

Boeing in Seattle turned out its last B-17 Flying Fortress of the war, the 6,931st built at the plant, and began devoting its full production line to the B-29 Superfortress. All other Boeing plants would likewise switch to the B-29, while other manufacturers would continue to build B-17's.

A piece by Hal Boyle reports of the statements of an unnamed major general in the Wehrmacht, relieved of his command a month earlier, telling Mr. Boyle in Goettingen, Germany, that Field Marshal Karl von Rundstedt had been prevented by Hitler, against the advice of High Command military advisers, from going forward with a plan for invasion of England in June, 1940, immediately on the heels of the fall of France. Hitler had instructed Von Rundstedt instead to conclude the campaign in Yugoslavia and prepare for the attack on Russia. (That timetable stands at variance with established histories which contend that Hitler did not plan the Russian invasion until late December, 1940, six months before the June 22, 1941 invasion and six months following the fall of France.)

By 1942, Von Rundstedt had believed the time for invasion was past, that England had become too strong for it to work. Field Marshal Von Brauchitsch wanted to establish a holding line in Russia and then undertake the invasion across the Channel. The major general speaking to Mr. Boyle was charged with preparing sites in Holland which could be utilized as staging platforms for the invasion. Thousands of barges were moved into position. The project, however, was abandoned when the November 8, 1942 Allied invasion of North Africa took place. That, combined with the increasing RAF strength and presence across the Channel, the first thousand-plane RAF raids on Cologne and Essen having transpired in late May and June, 1942, made the plans unworkable for want of sufficient men and supplies, already stretched thin by the Russian and North African campaigns ongoing simultaneously in 1941-42.

The Germans had sought in North Africa to capture the Suez Canal, linking the Mediterranean with the oil rich countries of the Middle East and, potentially, with the Japanese via the Indian Ocean. The Second Battle of El Alamein had stopped the progress toward Alexandria and, from there, in summer, 1942, Rommel had begun his long retreat back across Africa.

In Los Angeles, the second trial of the paternity suit brought by Joan Berry against Charles Chaplin was proceeding, to determine the father of Ms. Berry's eighteen-month old baby. The first trial, concluding in January, had ended in a hung jury. The plaintiff's attorney stated that Mr. Chaplin had run "like a scared rabbit" when confronted with the process server while on the tennis court.

Maybe he thought the process server was a hound dog, or someone with a racket.

On the editorial page, "Our Red Brethren" comments on the warming relations with the Russians, now engendered the more with the denunciation of the 1941 neutrality pact with Japan, even if a fly in the ointment appeared regarding the three-vote issue in the proposed U.N. General Assembly and at the San Francisco Charter Conference.

Yet, and for all the past sins on both sides committed prior to the alliance struck during the war between the West and the Soviets, the future peace lay in continued amicable understanding between the Allied nations.

The editorial comments that, as a dividend, the West might come to understand the Russian stubbornness of will, put to good use in defeating Fascism.

"Wheat 'N' Chaff" finds it likely a salutary prospect, if one which might cost the editors some comic reading material, to excise from the Congressional Record, as proposed by North Carolina Senator Josiah William Bailey, the excessive rhetorical material included in it. While not so much causing delay of Congressional action, as most of the work was accomplished in committees, the drivel which often droned from the same orators' mouths on the floor of each chamber, session after session, tended to bedraggle the reputation of the body as a whole.

When the rhetorical exchange had degenerated in latter February to fisticuffs between Congressman Frank Hook of Michigan and Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi, it obviously caused loss of respect for all of the lawmakers.

"Take 'Em All" explains that an Executive Order of the President had extended the Federal minimum wage and maximum hour law to embrace, pursuant to regulation of interstate commerce, numerous businesses which performed only intrastate functions. As long as the business impacted interstate commerce, it was subject to Federal control. A cutter of timber for railroad ties was subject to the Federal regulation for the fact that the railroad tie would be used ultimately within the stream of interstate commerce, even though the business itself resorted only to parochial means to achieve its production stream. The notion applied to any business which dealt in material to be used on roads or railroads, electrical lines or telephone lines, anything, in short, having to do with interstate commerce.

While it was inherently unfair, suggests the piece, to have a business subject only to state regulations while another next door was subject to more stringent Federal regulations, the extension of Federal oversight in this manner appeared to stretch the Federal Government's power too far. The rational conception of the regulation was alright, but the tool used to accomplish it appeared to invade the province of States' Rights.

This type of dispute, of course, would characterize much of the debate, both in the Congress as well as in the streets and along the back roads and within the dark forests, regarding the post-war Civil Rights legislation, and lead ultimately to the most rampant and despicable forms of violence seen in the country during the Twentieth Century, not to mention the most irresponsible and vicious rhetoric out of the mouths of Southern reactionaries and the politicians who alternately courted them and actively stimulated their stupidity. It would go far beyond the area of labor relations, but it was all of a piece in the end.

As President Kennedy responded to Elizabeth Craig in 1963, whether Mrs. Murphy's boarding house would be subject to the newly proposed 1963 Civil Rights bill, that which became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, depends on whether and to what extent Mrs. Murphy's boarding house was engaged in interstate commerce.

The question now before the Supreme Court, anent the 2010 health care legislation, is whether the Commerce Clause powers, via the "necessary and proper" clause, the implied police powers of the Federal Government, affords to the Congress the power to mandate each individual citizen to have health insurance, for their individual benefit and the overall benefit of the society.

In contraposition, does the individual have the right, under the recognized right to privacy, or any other of the unstated rights recognized by the Constitution, the right, in short, to be free from John Bull, not to have health insurance?

We think it the latter case, even if it causes Congress to have to return to the drawing board and craft something better, more far-reaching, socialized medicine--the proper medicine for this increasingly corrupt society in which we live, which cares more for the dollar than for each individual, a system which tends, in the end, toward Fascism.

Practically speaking, it is a tough knot. For there are no guarantees that the current Congress, or even the next one, will be able to make any inroads at all on the grip of the insurance companies and the health industry at large, depending, as it does, on sick people and high drug bills to sustain itself in the high life it enjoys.

The best medical care, of course, is not to need medical care, by a proper diet and physical fitness. But, many are born with genetic difficulties which will impede those ends, not respond to that recipe as hoped. And, medicine ball, President Hoover's prescription, is no fun.

Yet, we posit, we cannot compel the individual to have health insurance, unless the individual shows up at the hospital and wants to use the facilities. Can the hospital, following the Hippocratic Oath, turn the person down, if without means to pay? Of course not. But can the patient sue and compel the hospital to provide treatment because the hospital is involved in interstate commerce? Congress can compel the hospital to treat the patient, and the courts may enforce the right of the hospital to sue the patient for payment, provided no other means of payment, such as by a Federal fund or state fund, exists.

The wise-acre among us will then, of course, say that if we cannot compel the individual to have health insurance pursuant to the Commerce Clause, then how come we can compel a small business person to follow the Civil Rights legislation, simply because they run a motel or restaurant which caters to traffic along the interstate highway network. The answer is self-evident. In the one case, the Government is merely stating that if a person opens his or her doors of business to the public generally, then he or she is not permitted to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin or ethnicity, as to whom he or she caters. The Government does not order the individual to do business in the first instance. The person is licensed by the state to do business and, in the context of doing business, the person may not discriminate. The person receives benefits from the interstate highway network in his or her business. At the same time, the person remains at full liberty to go home and refuse entry to whomever he or she wants, even on the basis of discrimination, and do so without government regulation or interference, short of warrant founded on probable cause issued by a judge or magistrate to law enforcement personnel employed by the state or Federal government.

That is quite different from compelling, under sanction of monetary penalty, an individual to have health insurance. It is an unprecedented extension of Federal power into our individual lives and an unwise one, impracticable in the end of enforcement. For should enough people refuse to abide it, there will be little means to enforce such a law when and if it goes into effect--until one shows up at the emergency room after the 1:00 a.m. car accident with a tennis racket protruding through the forehead.

There is a better way. We counsel the Congress, unless all of the present membership wish to be thrown out on their collective hindsides in November, to find it and let the Supreme Court off the hook, rendering the present case moot before a decision is reached.

Otherwise, the Republicans will be susceptible to the charge of playing politics with the health of all Americans. Not good, come November. For it was their fault in the last Congress for having to come up with this unsatisfactory compromise solution to a major crisis, one festering for decades, since the days of President Roosevelt. Don't blame President Obama and the Democrats in Congress for a valiant effort against Republican corporate bribe-taking shills for the insurance companies and drug companies, even if, as likely will be the case, the Supreme Court strikes it all down.

And, Senator Grassley, rather than sitting back and calling the President "stupid", as you did last week, why don't you, though fond for decades of instructing the American people, from your seemingly fixtured place on the Judiciary Committee, that you are not a lawyer, get busy with some of your fellows on the Committee who are lawyers and craft some health legislation which works for the people. Then, you may properly debate the issue, not until. Or, are you too afraid that you might be the one in the end who looks a little stupid?

"Not Yet" finds no problem with a ten-year prison sentence, commuted by the President from the twenty imposed by the military tribunal hearing the defendant's court martial, imposed on a soldier for his having allegedly uttered seditious statements regarding America's role in the war and the President. The defendant was a naturalized native of Eire who had joined the Army, or been drafted, the piece not stating which, and then proceeded to contend that the President and his "capitalistic mongerers" were enslaving the world by their actions in Europe and Asia, and that Japan and Germany had been justified in the war against the United States.

While plainly protected speech in the case of a civilian, the Army had found it seditious in the context of being uttered by a soldier.

Probably not. Certainly not meriting ten years in prison, perhaps some sort of general discharge.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, in debate on the work-or-fight manpower legislation, asking a question regarding the difference in present procedures versus those proposed by the bill.

Senator Robert Taft of Ohio answers by admitting that he was not familiar completely with present regulations and doubted their constitutionality. He asserts his belief that they were based, in part, on the Selective Service Act, on the premise that a man who was deferred from the draft because of war-essential work had reporting obligations to the Government to assure that he maintained that job status. But the Senator doubted whether there was power of Congress affirmatively to tell an individual where he must work.

Senator Guy Cordon of Oregon noted that the colloquy between the two Senators, both lawyers, suggested to him that if they could not understand the current regulations, it was unlikely the average employer and employee could do so, even though failure to comply with the regulations carried with it criminal penalties.

Drew Pearson reveals that, despite the American meat shortage, two million pounds of Argentine canned corned beef had been in storage in Mexico for more than two full years awaiting admission to the United States, held in limbo by British and American red tape. All surplus Argentine beef was required, as of late 1942, just as the beef had arrived in Mexico, to be the exclusive province of the British Ministry of Food as purchasing agent, and despite the fact that the U. S. Government had paid for it. But the British had refused to purchase the beef except at a too low price to satisfy the beef dealers.

The American hash manufacturers had estimated that the beef would provide four million pounds of fresh hash.

Guess it's going to be the Spam.

Mr. Pearson next reports of a change in policy by the War Surplus Property Board whereby the veterans would be provided priority by which to purchase surplus property of the Army. Prior to the change, the Army had sold the property in bulk to private enterprise who then jacked up the prices to double or triple the original cost, bilking the veteran who simply wanted to acquire some cheap equipment with which to establish a new business after service in the war.

He next tells of the employee at the Justice Department who received an inquiry from a citizen asking how long a dog had to be quarantined after arrival in the country from abroad. The employee was informed, after asking why the caller sought the answer from Justice, that the problem was one of immigration.

Lastly, Mr. Pearson reveals that some of the cigarette shortage in the country had been caused by cigarettes being sent to Sweden pursuant to treaty with the United States. Sweden was permitted triple its normal purchase, allowing export of 200 million cigarettes. Speculation ran that the high demand was the result of Sweden sending, as with its ball bearings, the cigarettes to Germany.

He concludes with a suggestion to new Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, that, unlike his predecessor, Jesse Jones, he publish the export figures of the country, that there would be no military value in maintaining these figures in secret.

Samuel Grafton explores the paradox of Allied occupation versus liberation in Europe. In Germany, the civilian population, like German prisoners of war, received Army rations because it was required by the Geneva Convention. But in France, the liberation was not of the enemy but of friends, and so there was no responsibility to feed them. They were left to fend for themselves, creating resentment of the liberating forces. Not only were they not fed, but the Americans used the bulk of the train system to transport military supplies and so prevented adequate transportation to supply the civilian population.

It was a paradox which was beginning to drive the French from any form of amity with the Americans.

Marquis Childs reports of the rare bit of humor to be found out of the war, coming a few days earlier out of Germany. A castle in Westphalia which housed the Princess Valerie Maria Arenberg, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein and great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England, had been requisitioned by the American forces, and so the Princess had been ordered to vacate the castle's 300 rooms and suffice within the 14-room annex. As a result, the Princess was in a stew, complained of the Allied bombing raids which had forced her to the cellar for refuge. And now, being evicted from her own palatial home, forced to the rude confines of a mere fourteen rooms. She began crying.

Apparently, the Princess was oblivious to the Nazi atrocities, something which, Mr. Childs reports from his recent trip to the German front, was a fairly common blindspot among the German people.

In Cologne, he had witnessed a German woman come to American headquarters and request the use of a jeep to visit one of her friends on the edge of the city. She thought it would be acceptable to the Americans because she had heard of their kindness.

A story had been revealed in a letter from a German woman to her husband in a Canadian prisoner of war camp, in which she told of having bargained with her neighbor for a pound of butter to rent her neighbor's husband so that she could abide her duty to the Reich to bear children.

Mr. Childs cites these examples as indicative of the job ahead by the Allies in trying to re-establish order within Germany following twelve years of Nazism.

A letter writer opposes the move by the Charlotte City Council to outlaw fireworks for their inherent danger and attractive nuisance to children. The previous Christmas, a young boy in Charlotte had lost a hand from an exploding piece of fireworks and his sister had also been injured. The woman ignores this fact and proceeds to suggest that the banning of dogs should take precedence over the banning of fireworks, that dogs injured more people including children. She was cognizant of the fact that dogs did not wag their tails as firecrackers, but that did not excuse their too often anti-social behavior pattern. And, the banning of fireworks would remove a training ground for future soldiers, as she bets that many of the young men fighting on the fronts had obtained valuable ordnance practice in dealing at a young age with fireworks.

So, she urges, ban the dogs before fireworks.

The difference, we opine, having once been bitten by one of the critters while a tyro, is that the pyro-tyros do harm to other children and bystanders, not just themselves, and, moreover, dogs rarely go rabid, are most usually gentle, unless provoked or of a breed bred to be defensive, and hardly ever explode in your hand or even close by.

In any event, fireworks are inherently dangerous in all cases. Dogs, not usually. On balance, the dogs win the argument. They can stay.

We have no objection though to making them go through metal detectors, just like the rest of us, before entering government buildings and the like. It would be unfair otherwise, for dogs can be just as erratic as humans if not carefully monitored and occasionally restrained.

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