The Charlotte News
Wednesday, May 30, 1945
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Company "C" of the Fifth Regiment of the First Marines Division had penetrated Shuri castle, the fortress at the center of the Japanese line on southern Okinawa, its keystone, and caught its Japanese defenders by surprise swimming in the surrounding moat. By mid-morning, the entire First Battalion had reached the castle, as other elements of the Fifth Regiment advanced southeast from Asato village toward the Naha-Yonabaru Highway, running east to west south of Shuri. The enemy garrison in and around Shuri appeared to be withdrawing.
The First Regiment of the First Marines was able to gain only a short distance, moving down Wana Ridge into the valley northwest of Shuri.
The 77th and 86th Army Divisions north and west of Shuri found the Japanese line still extant and were consequently unable to make headway.
South of Shuri, the Seventh Division pushed south of Chan into high hills a mile away, overlooking the south shore of the island.
The Sixth Marines virtually completed occupation of Naha, moving eastward across the Naha Canal, meeting stiff enemy opposition among the tombstones of the Christian cemetery in the southeast portion of the capital. There was also fierce opposition in the area north of Shuri fortress.
Lt. Col. Jackson Gillis, former Hollywood and New York actor, of the Seventh Division staff, stated that he believed the Americans could take at least half of the remaining enemy positions in southern Okinawa within a week.
Army and Marine casualties on Okinawa through May 23 totaled 5,332, and Navy casualties, 4,270, including all killed and missing.
On Luzon, it was reported that the Sixth Army had, after three months of fighting, completed its rout of the tunnel and cave system of the Japanese along the Shimbu line fortifications within the Sierra Madre Mountains east of Manila, as the 38th Infantry Division captured Wawa Dam intact. The enemy was withdrawing into the mountains east of the Marikina River.
In the north, the 28th and 32nd Divisions had effected joinder two miles west of Santa Fe in the Caraballo Mountains.
From Tokyo, reconnaissance photographs, gathered during Tuesday's raid on Yokohama, showed that 51 square miles of Tokyo lay in smoldering ruins, the result of dropping 8,500 tons of napalm incendiary bombs. Every target sought to be destroyed, according to Lt. General Curtis LeMay, had been.
The combined raids Thursday, Saturday, and Monday on Yokohama and Tokyo had dropped a total of 11,700 tons from 1,500 B-29's. Thirty-three planes were lost, thirty-one of them in the two night attacks on Tokyo, only two in the daylight raid the previous day on Yokohama. The latter raid had been attacked by 140 Japanese interceptors, of which 54 had been shot down by the accompanying Mustangs.
The Yokohama raid, according to Tokyo broadcasts, had left a quarter million Japanese homeless as 60,000 homes were destroyed.
They made a lot of claims, but could not utter two simple words.
The Navy stated that it had concern regarding men quitting their jobs in shipyards on the West Coast and that repairs of Pacific warships could be hampered by the continued exodus of vital workmen. The entire story could not be released for security concerns.
The French were reported to have bombarded Damascus the previous night, according to the Syrian and Lebanese legations. Heavy fighting was reported in progress within Damascus. Syrian artillery was reported to have been moved against the French legation and all French military positions within the city.
The British minister halted the bombardment, but firing was said nevertheless to be continuing.
What happened to the British minister was not explained.
The fighting had begun in Aleppo and spread to the south through Hama and Homs, reaching Derra, 60 miles south of Damascus near the Transjordan frontier. The natives at Derra were reported to have attacked French barracks. A train had been derailed between Hamdanieh and Kawageb. Thus far, a total of between 80 and 100 people had been killed in the fighting and 200 to 300 wounded.
The French Foreign Ministry in Paris stated that they would not welcome any outside mediation of the Levantian situation. The French wanted use of certain airbases and ports within the two mandates and a share in Mosul oil. The Syrian and Lebanese ministers in London responded that their countries would never agree to such conditions.
Iran's Foreign Minister demanded that all Russian, American, and British troops be removed at once from Iran. He cited a treaty between Iran, Britain, and Russia, executed in 1941, specifying that within six months of cessation of hostilities, the Allied forces would leave Iran.
A series of photographs shows the fate of three captured German spies wearing American uniforms and riding in an American jeep. They had been placed before a firing squad.
Virtually all censorship restrictions on the American press in Europe were lifted by Supreme Allied Headquarters, save for reports on major troop movements to active theaters.
In San Francisco, the small nations had obtained triumph on two key issues: garnering the support of the Big Five on a Canadian proposal that any nation whose armed forces were to be deployed by action of the Security Council would be included in the decision process on whether to take action; and the smaller nations, led by Australia, having overridden the Big Three and France 37 to 11 in committee to permit the General Assembly to have authority to discuss any matter within the sphere of international relations. The four powers had wanted to limit permitted discussion to matters concerning maintenance of international peace and security.
The two actions were seen as making it more likely that the smaller nations would ultimately agree to the veto power of the Big Five on the Security Council.
A proposal had been put to Secretary of State Stettinius by the French to give support to a plan whereby the existing agreements in Europe with respect to Germany, such as the French bilateral treaty with Russia, would not become subject to the U. N. Organization unless the signatory nations of the treaties wanted them to be.
The United States commemorated its 78th Memorial Day this date, without respite for either war workers or Government employees. Few of the 240 remaining Civil War veterans were said to have participated in the activities, the first Memorial Day following D-Day and V-E Day.
Incidentally, there is no stated reason in the history for the selection of May 30 as the original date for Memorial Day. Perhaps, it is as simple as the fact that it coincided with the birth of U. S. Grant's first son, Frederick Dent Grant, in
In any event, the date deliberately did not memorialize any particular battle or action of the Civil War. It was meant to memorialize peace, not war.
On the editorial page, "More Checks" tells of the increasing numbers of Americans who would be receiving benefits from the government in coming years. President Truman had just asked for extension of unemployment benefits to assist in reconversion.
The editorial determines that the country had to be prosperous even if it went broke doing so.
"A World of Ships" discusses the large increase in tonnage of ships in the possession of the United States. At the start of the war, it had 12 million tons of merchant shipping; now it had 62 million tons. How the ships would be used would significantly impact the future.
Lewis Douglas, Deputy Administrator of War Shipping, advocated open markets, without government monopolies on shipping and markets. Should America try to operate as much as 20 million tons of merchant shipping after the war, he argued, it would require 300 million dollars worth of government subsidies per year. Such a status would produce conflicts with other governments. The solution was to hold tonnage to ten million, carrying about 20 percent of the country's foreign trade. The rest of the tonnage should be sold or leased to other nations.
Emory S. Land, head of the Maritime Commission, wanted to retain 17 million tons, half of the country's foreign trade, and sell 10 million tons to foreign operators, keeping 21 million tons in reserve, scrapping the remaining seven million tons.
Somewhere in the resolution of these two views would likely be the future shipping policy of the country, an important issue in determining a proper balance in world trade after the war.
"Another Deal" suggests the prospect that President Truman would, if granted the power of reorganization by Congress, likely strengthen considerably the Labor Department, abolishing, as was mandated anyway within six months after the war, the War Labor Board and the War Manpower Commission, and enabling the Department to have some power held by the National Labor Relations Board, the duties of which had been undertaken during the war by the War Labor Board.
The piece reasons that otherwise, Judge Lewis Schwellenbach would not have given up his tenured position as a Federal Judge to become Labor Secretary.
It was likely that the U.S. Employment Service would be returned from WMC to the Labor Department, that some of the arbitrative powers of WLB might be retained after the war, and that Social Security oversight might come under the Department's purview.
Presently, the Department oversaw the Wage & Hour and Public Contracts Division, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Women's and Children's Bureaus, the Conciliation service, Labor Standards, and the administration of the Davis-Bacon Act, requiring that the Government adhere to established standards of wages and hours on public works projects.
The major issue lying ahead for the new Secretary was to work out a peace between the rival AFL and CIO and the Trainmen.
"Sylva's Doctor" expresses its approbation of the award of an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by Woman's College at Greensboro (UNC-G) to Mrs. E. L. McKee of Sylva. Mrs. Mckee had been the first and only woman to have been elected thus far to the State Senate, had introduced the state's child labor law, a nationwide model, and steered the state's Social Security Bill of 1936 through its passage. She had also been a member of Governor Melville Broughton's Board of Inquiry into the conditions at Morganton State Hospital, appointed in the wake of Tom Jimison's 1942 series of articles.
The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Daniel Reed of New York speaking against the bill to extend reciprocal trade agreements, arguing that the public had been deceived in 1934, 1937, and 1940 when the previous agreements were authorized, that each time the people had been told the purpose was to keep the country out of war, to increase exports.
He argues that there would have been no war with Japan had not there been the vast exports of oil and scrap iron and other key war materials. Then, to provide adequate defense after war came, the Congress was forced to suspend tariff duties on scrap iron and other materials coming into the country.
The trade agreements, he concludes, would never keep the country out of war, would only serve to build a false export record.
Samuel Grafton comments on the tired argument, left over from the days of Alexander Hamilton, that high tariffs were necessary to form trade barriers to protect American industry. It was a fine argument for the horse and buggy days, but not in the new era when America had in the previous five years of war out-produced the entire world, and at a time when the average worker was producing 30 percent more than in 1940.
The argument of the Republicans therefore in Congress to seek to defeat the extension of the reciprocal trade agreements, to afford the President the ability to relax tariffs by up to fifty percent and to establish agreements with nations on a give and take basis, was an anachronistic argument of a long bygone era.
Drew Pearson discusses the Soviet problem with Poland in terms of the U.S. relations with Nicaragua, Haiti, and Mexico 18 years earlier when the U.S. had sought to maintain economic interests in those countries through puppet regimes. The U.S. had learned in the interim that such maneuvering was counter-productive ultimately; Russia had yet to learn the lesson.
But the difference was that Russia had twice been invaded in 25 years through Poland by Germany whereas America had not been invaded through South America, Mexico, or the Caribbean.
Russian policy with respect to Poland had been fixed for six centuries, to have Poland as a buffer state to Prussia. The Prussians were not wholly German, were equivalently Polish, Russian, and Slavic.
When Foreign Commissar V. M. Molotov came to London in February, 1942 and to Washington in June to beg for opening of a second front to relieve the Russians, pressed back to Stalingrad, he still had insisted that Russia be given Poland to the Curzon Line of 1939, that boundary which Russia now asserted in 1945. At the time, the West was not ready to begin a second front in Europe, and although the British were willing to agree on Poland, FDR wanted to reserve the issue until war's end so that there would be no secret agreement on the fate of Poland.
Mr. Pearson analogizes the arrest in March of the sixteen Polish officers in Moscow to the Pershing punitive expedition against Pancho Villa into Mexico in 1916 after Villa and his band had killed sixteen Americans in New Mexico. The sixteen Poles had killed a hundred members of the Red Army, according to the Russians. British Ambassador to Russia, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr informed Anthony Eden at San Francisco that at least three of the Poles were Fascists and that the group represented a poor issue on which to make a stand. U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Averill Harriman, however, had not accepted the argument.
Ultimately, Mr. Eden sided with Mr. Harriman, that the issue was the handling of the matter by the Russians, that they were supposed to be acting in accord with the Yalta agreement, in consultation with the Americans and British with respect to any action on Poland.
The editors provide a piece on Syria and Lebanon, the French mandates called collectively the Levant States since World War I, now erupting in violence with the refusal of the French to leave Syria without concessions.
The piece reports that the French interest in Syria had spanned centuries, from a time when France dreamed of empire in India, with Syria as a stepping stone, a dream revived under Napoleon I and Napoleon III in the nineteenth century.
During World War I, the Syrians and Lebanese, the latter primarily Christian Arabs, aided the British in driving the Turks from southern Syria. They hoped for independence in return, but were instead made mandates of France. Neighboring Transjordan, Palestine, and Iraq became mandates of Britain.
The French had sought to disunify Syria through establishment of numerous separate administrations within the country. In 1925, a native uprising drove the French Governor from Damascus. In retaliation, the city was shelled, causing substantial loss of life and damage to property, an incident the Syrians had never forgotten.
During the thirties, the British gave up their mandate in Iraq, causing renewed demands for same to the French in Syria and Lebanon. In 1936, the French Government of Leon Blum made a treaty with Syria to grant independence but the French Parliament would not ratify it. In 1939, France gave to Turkey the Hatay section of Syria, a region in which the Turks were the majority ethnic group.
During the period of Vichy, 1940-1944, the French Syrian administration gave allegiance to Vichy, causing rumors of Nazi infiltration within Syria. In 1941, a French-British force occupied Syria, and French General Catroux, later in the year, declared Syria and Lebanon independent.
The Arabs claimed this latter grant was unconditional; the French insisted on their right to maintain economic interests, as contained in a constitution promulgated for the country at the time of this grant of independence.
The United States had recognized the independence of both Syria and Lebanon in 1943, and both were members of the United Nations, represented at San Francisco.
But France continued to insist that the independence was conditional, analogous to the independence of Canada and Australia limited by their membership in the British Commonwealth.
The primary economic consideration was the oil of Mosul, from which a pipeline ran to the Mediterranean. But, moreover, observers believed that at stake for France was its international prestige.
A worthwhile sermon from the previous Sunday by Dr. George D. Heaton of the Myers Park Baptist Church is presented, advocating that the learned of the world reach out to the unlearned in developing countries. Dr. Heaton found existing action to be that equating to isolationism.
The same he found to be true within Charlotte itself: the wealthy did not wish to drive through the impoverished areas of the city.
He cites Jotham's parable of the trees. The olive, the fig, and the vine each declined to be ruler of the trees. Finally, the trees turned to the bramble and the bramble accepted the position: "I will rule you and fire will spread throughout your community if you do not obey me,"—paraphrasing Judges 9:15: "'If in truth ye anoint me king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow: and if not, let fire come out of the bramble, and devour the cedars of Lebanon.'"
Just as Hitler had thus come to power, observes Dr. Heaton, so had Boss Hague in Jersey City and Boss Crump in Memphis.
The first rule of democracy, he asserts, was the recognition of the essential dignity of every man. It was a concept not derived from Greece but from Palestine, from Ahab speaking with Jezebel, his foreign wife. Ahab had wanted a poor man's vineyard, but the man had refused to sell for the fact of the vineyard having been the inheritance from his father. Jezebel counseled the taking of the vineyard by Ahab. Ahab refused and Jezebel arranged that Naboth, the owner of the desired vineyard, be stoned to death for blaspheming the king and God. She told Ahab then to take the vineyard, that Naboth was dead. On his way to do so, Ahab met Elijah who, having been instructed thus by God, questioned Ahab as to the moral rightness of his action, cursed him for it.
From this notion had come the assumption of justice for all, regardless of skin color, or the size of a man's purse.
Framed Edition
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