The Charlotte News
Thursday, April 5, 1945
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page and inside page report that Russia had denounced its neutrality pact with Japan, required by April 25 for the pact not to be renewed for an additional five-year term. The pact had been signed four years earlier, April 13, 1941, and ratified April 25. Speculation had run when the date was set for the beginning of the San Francisco United Nations Conference, coincident with the expiration of the time for denunciation of the pact, that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan or at least denounce the pact by that date. Technically, to participate in the San Francisco Conference, all nations had to renounce all ties with the Axis, including any neutrality.
The Russians explained to the Japanese that the world situation had radically changed in the previous four years, rendering the pact meaningless.
It was believed that the denunciation of the pact would be prelude to Russia's declaration of war on Japan. But, under the terms of the treaty, Russia was required to wait a year after the denunciation or until the end of the five-year pact to enter any war against Japan.
In Japan, meanwhile, the Cabinet of General Kuniaki Koiso fell, as Emperor Hirohito requested that Admiral Baron Kantaro Suzuki, president of the Privy Council since the previous August, form a new cabinet. The Cabinet was dissolved because of the crisis in the war and the failure of the Koiso Government to meet it since coming to power the previous July in the wake of the fall of the Tojo Cabinet.
Observers familiar with Japanese politics believed that the new cabinet to be formed would take on the appearance of a moderate or liberal body, designed to appeal to the American Government to enable peace tenders. Admiral Suzuki had been, before the war, an enemy of the extreme militarist clique of Tojo and Koiso, and was physically attacked, receiving near-mortal sword wounds in February, 1936, by the Army officers seeking to rid the Government of the councillors to the Emperor who had advised against aggressive action in the Pacific.
On
On the Western Front, Ninth Army tanks had crossed the Weser River in the vicinity of Tundern, had started down the roads leading to Hannover, about twenty miles distant, as the Germans retreated "pellmell" toward the Elbe, appearing to be evacuating Hannover. The Allied front on the Weser, held by four divisions of both the Ninth and the British Second Armies, extended 48 miles, from fifteen miles north of Minden, to Hamelin, home of the Pied Piper.
The Sixth Armored Division of the Third Army, after capturing Muelhausen in the Thuringian plain, had advanced eight miles to within 132 miles of Berlin in the Schlotheim area, 170 miles from Russian lines and 72 miles from Leipzig, just seventeen miles from Nordhausen. Another column captured Muehleberg, seven miles southeast of Gotha, heading for the Czech border.
A report on the inside page tells of an all black ordnance ammunition company of the Third Army Fifth Infantry Division having been massacred by the SS following their capture. Each of the men, the number not being provided, were discovered with a single bullet hole through the head. An eyewitness stated that two German officers forced one man to run through a field and then shot him as he did so. The same group of SS officers were implicated in the shooting at ambulances of a field hospital, killing a medical major and two medics.
The First Army began fresh attacks to eliminate the 150,000 Germans trapped in the Ruhr, advancing four miles on the eastern end of the perimeter. The Ninth Army divisions northeast of the Ruhr advanced up to 28 miles to capture Herford, Detmold, Bad Oeynhausen, and Neheim.
The Seventh Army was advancing through the last 34 miles to Nuernberg, where the Nazis had transformed the toy shops into arsenals.
The French First Army was twenty miles from Stuttgart, curling around the Black Forest and the last intact section of the Siegfried Line.
Fully 55 Allied divisions were now east of the Rhine, including nineteen armored divisions with up to 4,750 tanks.
Some 2,200 American heavy bombers hit targets in the vicinity of Nuernberg and Munich.
The night before, RAF Mosquitos again attacked Berlin and other targets.
On the Eastern Front, the Second and Third Ukrainian Armies had fought into Greater Vienna, as other forces crossed the Danube between captured Bratislava in Slovakia and Vienna, having apparently seized a Danube bridge intact, and having captured Bruck, twenty miles east of Vienna in the Bratislava Gap.
Two secondary airfields, one east of Baden, and the other south of Vienna at Schwechat, had been captured, and a third, at Zwoelfaxing, 1.5 miles southeast of the Austrian capital, was being threatened, as the town itself had already been captured the previous day. Tank battles were occurring within Vienna suburbs, in Laae, Eriaa, Rodaun, Inzersdorf, and Perchtoldsdorf, as the Germans had converted the deer park to the south of the capital into an artillery fortress from which the defenders fired heavily onto Russian positions on the other side of the east-west running Liesing River. Forging the Reiche River and the Liesing would enable the Russians to strike Vienna from the west, as well as from the south and east.
General Eisenhower informed President Roosevelt that he did not foresee a clean-cut peace involving unconditional surrender from the Germans, but rather expected there to be ongoing guerilla warfare
With the failure to reach an agreement on a new contract between UMW and the mine owners, the Government expected to take over the bituminous coal mines as U. S. Steel had already been forced to cease operation of thirteen blast furnaces for want of coal while twenty more were scheduled to shut down the next day, severely impairing the war effort at a critical juncture. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes indicated that he expected shortly to receive authority for the takeover from the War Labor Board.
In Flemington, New Jersey, American Tobacco Company stockholders left their annual meeting with only a pack to show for their efforts rather than the usual complementary carton. They would have to light their Pall Malls
On the editorial page, "Too Many Cooks" lists the various public functionaries and agencies dealing with veterans issues and suggests that the veterans were perhaps too well looked after, complicating provision of services in red tape. In any event, there is the list for you to peruse, a full column of it.
"V-E Prelude" speculates that the resignation of James Byrnes as War Mobilizer signaled that Washington clearly viewed the end of the war in Europe as imminent.
Despite it, however, the piece predicts that soon the Government would insist again that everyone remain on the job, that the war was not won, in repeat of previous see-sawing back and forth on manpower requirements and war production, first decreasing demands, then increasing them to meet various contingencies of the war. The resulting confusion had, to some degree, it says, validated Republican criticism of Administration policy on production and manpower.
"Nice and Quiet" reports that Charlotte was experiencing voter apathy on local elections, with the primary less than a month away. The reason, it opines, was that the war took precedence in the average voter's mind over all other issues, but also because there really were no great local issues to be resolved. The previously warring factions of the City Council had staked out common ground under the leadership of Mayor Baxter. And the unpopular procedure whereby elections were held ward by ward for council membership had recently been eliminated, which eliminated with it the sectional head to head contests in the city. Now, the top seven vote-getters from the city at large would form the next council.
The election, it concludes, was likely to be dull, and thus satisfactory.
"Answer in Kind" comments on a decision by Federal Judge E. Yates Webb to suspend sentence on a minister found guilty of sending letters threatening to burn down the First Baptist Church of Thomasboro, of which the Reverend Samuel Kelly Brazil, the defendant, was, himself, the minister. He had sent such a letter to himself. Judge Webb, stating it to be one of the strangest cases he had heard since coming to the bench many years earlier, had merely added the condition that Reverend Brazil not act as minister any longer to any church in Mecklenburg County.
But, the Reverend was already a minister for a church in Greensboro and so, the condition being moot, the piece wonders how the people of Greensboro felt about the sentence.
The editorial does not explain whether the letters sought money to avoid the church being burned down, but the Reverend had been charged with extortion.
The excerpt from the Congressional Record finds Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee explaining why he could not vote for the conference report on the manpower bill. He stated that, while he had tried to support all such legislation favored by the Army, the Navy, and the President, that the war had been fought with greater efficiency than any other in the history of mankind, and that the President had proved a terrific war leader, accomplishing the formidable effort while preserving democratic principles, he could not, at this late date in the war, support the manpower draft legislation. The food production by the farmers and the labor effort of industry had been, he insisted, nothing short of outstanding and there was no reason at this juncture to mandate the placement of manpower in these jobs.
Drew Pearson provides some insight into the thinking of Josef Stalin with respect to satellite countries, from a discussion had more than a year earlier with Cuban Ambassador Concheso, in which the Soviet Premier treated Cuba as a satellite of the United States and suggested that the U.S. should put more pressure on Argentina to renounce all ties to the Axis and join the Allies. Sr. Concheso explained that Cuba was an independent sovereignty and that the U.S. respected the independence of Latin American countries. But Stalin remained unimpressed.
The exchange explained the assumptions of the Soviet leader regarding satellite nations and why the Russians were insistent that Rumania, Poland, and Finland each have friendly governments to the Soviet Union. He believed that such smaller border countries owed a duty of loyalty to their larger neighbor and were to be considered satellites thereof.
Of course, in the case of Latin America, except for the Germans who had penetrated with economic interests decades before the war and the Nazis who sought to win the hand of Latin American countries in matrimony prior to the outbreak of the war, the United States did not face the same direct military threat across a relatively short expanse of real estate as did the Soviet Union with respect to Germany.
Mr. Pearson next comments on the apparent departure of James Byrnes from the Administration after having been a factotum of it for the previous three years, serving as the "assistant President" during the war after resigning the Supreme Court following just one Court term to head the war mobilization effort. He was said to be tired, in poor health, and in need of rest and a physical check-up.
His rest, as we have indicated, would be short-lived, as President Truman would appoint him in June to be Secretary of State and would appoint Secretary Stettinius, after only a bit over seven months on the job, to be the first American Ambassador to the United Nations. As we have speculated, it is likely that these changes were pre-arranged in November after the election so that Mr. Byrnes could complete the task of war mobilization in the European war, especially after the beginning of the Ardennes offensive on December 16—which, Mr. Pearson states, was the triggering event in the decision of Mr. Byrnes to stay on for the time being.
In any event, Mr. Pearson speculates that Mr. Byrnes was leaving, in part, because he was dissatisfied over being promised things by the President which he had never received, one being the vice-presidential nod in 1944, the other, the prize as Secretary of State. This consternation had been manifested, according to the columnist, by only remote communication with the President in the last several months, by telephone only, though his office was in a wing of the White House.
Relations had appeared healed when the President invited Mr. Byrnes to accompany the delegation to Yalta. But while he had been absent, Bernard Baruch, a fellow South Carolinian, had criticized Mr. Byrnes for ducking out on the confirmation hearings of Henry Wallace as Commerce Secretary and on the hearings being held on the work-or-fight legislation, that generally he was not being tough enough.
So, concludes Mr. Pearson, stinging from these slights and rebukes, and tired, he was going home.
It may be that President Truman was able to coax him back with the offer of the position as Secretary of State, or it may be that the whole matter was pre-arranged by President Roosevelt, keeping it secret from the public and press to avoid undermining the authority of Mr. Stettinius, as merely an interim appointment, at such a critical juncture in international relations.
Samuel Grafton discusses the increasing fascination of the American people with the prospect of the charter drafting to go on at the San Francisco Conference. But many problems, especially between the West and the Soviet Union, remained to be ironed out: whether there would be recognition of the London Polish government-in-exile or the Soviet-backed Lublin Government, and whether either or both or only one would be seated at the Conference; the dispute developing among the smaller nations with respect to voting, whether the other nations besides the Big Three would approve the Yalta accord to allow the Soviet Union three votes, treating the Ukraine and White Russia as separate entities.
The demands by the Soviets stemmed from a sense of both geographical and political isolation, still recalling their isolation at Geneva in the old League because of their being a Communist state. Understanding of that feeling, posits Mr. Grafton, must be kept in mind if the problems to be encountered at San Francisco were to be worked out to enable final agreement on establishing an international organization to maintain and enforce the peace after the war.
Marquis Childs also discusses the San Francisco Conference, suggests that it should be postponed because of the revelation of the secret agreement reached at Yalta regarding voting. He apparently had written the piece prior to the announcement two days earlier by the President that the United States would forgo the three-vote agreement, while standing by the right of the Soviets to have the three votes and the British Empire to have six. The smaller nations had already begun to object to the multiple voting format. (It remains unclear whether this voting extended to the Security Council proposal or whether it only pertained to Conference determinations; it has been stated both ways. Mr. Childs assumes it only regards the Conference.)
Prior to the disclosure of the secret voting agreement of the Big Three, the smaller nations had estimated that it would require six to eight weeks to construct a charter at the Conference. It was likely, therefore, that the peace would come in Europe in the meantime. Mr. Childs wonders what then would occur, as the various foreign ministers at the Conference, from France, from Great Britain, from Belgium, from Holland, would then need to return home, prolonging the debate that much more.
The Dutch had prepared a specific objection to the control of the conference by the Big Three plus China. And that had preceded the revelation of the weighted voting.
France, too, was feeling strongly the insult of being excluded from Yalta; they were bound to be incensed about the voting arrangement.
Yet another reason for delaying the Conference, he asserts, was that Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Ambassador to the United States, was charted to be the Russian representative in San Francisco rather than Foreign Commissar Molotov. Inevitably, Mr. Gromyko's subordinate position, having to work up the chain of command to achieve authority for agreement, would delay further the proceedings.
For all of these reasons, Mr. Childs advocates putting off the Conference until the summer or fall.
Yet, and despite the President's death a week hence, the Conference would proceed as scheduled.
The editors put forth the competing theories regarding the great retreat ongoing by the Germans in the West. One theory was that they were moving to the East because they would rather be captured by the Western Allies than by the Russians. Another was that they were simply no longer capable of defense on any front. A third was that the forces were planning to move to the south, into Bavaria, Austria, and Northern Italy to form there last stands.
That entire Alpine area, however, being mountainous, would be hard to defend. The job would be easier to the east of Switzerland, in Bavaria and Western Austria, but doing so would sacrifice the industry of Northern Italy.
The piece proceeds to provide the history of the
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