Saturday, July 14, 1945

The Charlotte News

Saturday, July 14, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Third Fleet was striking Japan for the first time, setting fires in a steel center at Kamaishi on northern Honshu, 275 miles north of Tokyo, as 1,000 carrier planes struck nearby targets. The forces attacked at close range, within rifle shot of Honshu, against little opposition. Shelling continued for two hours. The Imperial Iron and Steel Works was demolished, as Hokkaido Island, which supplied it with coal, was hit from the air.

Everything would radically change in the Pacific war on Monday.

The Chinese had penetrated Indo-China for the first time, battling the Japanese forces which had occupied it since July, 1941. The U. S. Air Force had attacked Khang Phu, 19 miles southeast of Caobang and four miles from the Indo-China border. The town had been twice taken and lost, then abandoned when the Japanese counter-attacked from Caobang.

Other forces moving eastward from Liuchow toward Kweilin had made gains, heading toward Hsiujenhsien. Preliminary indications were that the Japanese who had landed southwest of Amoy on June 30 were beginning evacuation of the entire depleted garrison at Amoy.

On Borneo, the Australians had advanced to within nine miles of the Sambodia oil fields.

Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal named Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher, Pacific carrier task force commander, as deputy chief of naval operation for air, succeeding Vice Admiral Aubrey Fitch, to become superintendent of the Naval Academy. Rear Admiral Frederick Sherman succeeded Vice Admiral Mitscher as commander of the First Carrier Task Force. Vice Admiral John Towers was named to succeed Vice Admiral John S. McCain as commander of the Second Carrier Task Force of the Third Fleet. Secretary Forrestal stated that the shakeup had no special significance, but was a routine variation in commands.

The non-fraternization policy between American troops and German civilians had been relaxed.

The fifth entry from Hermann Goering's notebook, unfortunately mostly obliterated, tells of a dispute in 1938 regarding the showing of German movies abroad.

A feature appears on the fresh writings of General Maurice Gamelin, commander of France's Army from 1935 to May 19, 1940, at the time of the German penetration of the Maginot Line, prior to which France was thought to be impregnable and possessed of the greatest fighting force in Europe. The feature would begin Monday.

It states as prefatory to the series that General Gamelin blamed Marshal Henri Petain for the failure, for his having maintained a defensive policy. If France had continued to fight from England and Africa, he further stated, and had his orders been obeyed, it might have regained the initiative. The Maginot Line had never been completed and had many weak points, giving the French people a false sense of security. During the "phoney war", after September, 1939 and the invasion and conquering of Poland, until April, 1940, France was handicapped by the neutrality and unpreparedness of the Low Countries. There had also been intra-Army disputes regarding the development of tank divisions which had hampered the country's preparedness.

Hundreds of Britons at Dover watched the convoy carrying President Truman to Antwerp from which he would catch a plane flight to Berlin. His convoy was now being escorted by British ships, with destroyers on each side of the Augusta and its companion ship Philadelphia.

Dive bombing night birds in the Chicago area had attacked a man and his dog, again. The details were so gruesome that the print faded away. When leaving your house in the vicinity of Chicago, be sure and check the sky above.

They wait and watch your every move, and then report it back to the flock.

At last report, they were plotting a move of part of their contingent to the vicinity of Bodega Bay in California. But that was not confirmed by the High Command.

On the editorial page, "Couple of Wimpies" finds a House bill authored by John Rankin of Mississippi and a companion Senate bill authored by Pappy Lee O'Daniel of Texas, to guarantee veterans the right to work regardless of whether they were members of a union, to be highly dubious. Their motivations appeared to be, not to insure jobs to veterans, but rather to inflame passions between labor and veterans and thus seek to divide and destroy the labor movement.

The G.I. bill of rights and many union contracts guaranteed veterans the same job they left, without loss of pay or seniority. While greater preference probably would need be given veterans, they should not be allowed to buck the entire union system and thus create animosity with existing civilian workers

"Cabinet in Balance" remarks on the Roosevelt Cabinet which had become easy targets for the American public, now having been winnowed out by President Truman, with only Harold Ickes and Henry Wallace remaining of Roosevelt's appointees.

None of FDR's Cabinet was a former member of Congress and six were New Yorkers, another from the East, only three from the Midwest, none from the South or West. Now, it stood in much better balance in both departments.

The changes had rippled through Congress as the President was enjoying good relations with the body, as echoed in the mostly positive debate on the U. N. Charter.

"A Martyr Offers" reports the selection of Representative John Wood of Georgia as the House Un-American Activities Committee chairman, replacing Thomas Hart, having served in Congress for four years in the early thirties and then coming back the previous year. He promised change, that the committee would operate "fearlessly and fairly", without witch hunts or whitewashing. It was the first time, says the piece, that a HUAC chair had agreed to "lay off the witches".

He could do no worse than Martin Dies or Mr. Hart, especially the former, who had chaired the committee for several years before his retirement in January. If he were to follow his precepts set forth and the true mission of the committee, then the country would be well served.

"Sop for Japan" tells of Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana still wanting to work out an early peace with Japan by way of appeasement, discouraging kamikaze raids and encouraging surrender by allowing Japan simply to quit its captured territories and return home still armed.

The piece believes that Senator Capehart apparently could not understand the term "unconditional surrender", the firm policy since Pearl Harbor, fully confirmed between Roosevelt and Churchill at Casablanca in January, 1943. An armed Japan would mean inevitably future war after it would have a chance to rebuild its military. He did not understand that pummeling Japan to its knees and then sending in invasion forces was necessary to prevent future conflict. Unconditional surrender would mean substantial additional sacrifice, but it had to be accomplished.

No one dared think or dream that just one month from this date, Japan would accept the terms of unconditional surrender. It would be a fateful month for the world, a month with which we still very much live, even if not in the imminent danger from that month's fruits with which we once lived until 23 years ago.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, and Senator Ernest McFarland of Arizona discussing the U. N. Charter. Senator Barkley and Senator McFarland agreed that they would not wish Senator McCarran to be able to read their minds on all subjects including the Charter at hand.

Unfortunately, the second half of the colloquy is out of the reach of our feeble eyes to discern and so you may try on your own to glean from it the additional chestnuts of that surely informative debate.

Drew Pearson remarks that President Truman constantly refrained to his old Senate colleagues of his loneliness. At Independence, however, on his way back from San Francisco, the President had enjoyed himself with old friends, playing poker with the "Harpy Club", Independence businessmen, founded in 1925.

Mr. Truman was given the honor of dealing the first hand and naming the game. He chose seven-card stud.

Seven of the nine players folded, save for the President and a coal dealer, John Hutchinson. Mr. Hutchinson was dealt two jacks showing and one down. The President bluffed Mr. Hutchinson into two raises of the bet, having two queens showing and only a nine and seven down. Mr. Hutchinson then drew a three, Mr. Truman a queen.

Mr. Truman took home the $1.65 pot. Damn.

He next discusses the plan to revise the 85-point requirement for discharge from the Army, scheduled for June 27, but still without action almost three weeks later. The Air Force had set up its own requirements and was releasing men in surplus with only 42 points or 58 points or 70 points, depending on rank, the lower ranking officers being in greater supply and therefore being discharged with fewer points. But enlisted men still had to achieve 85 points and were increasingly angry at the situation.

The enlisted men believed that the generals did not want the Army scaled down, to prevent many of the 1,600 generals from being forced to retire.

One of the groups most frustrated were the men who had physical disabilities, who could not go abroad to rack up service points and were therefore stuck in their jobs likely until the end of the war.

Mr. Pearson next tells of Henry Morgenthau having speeded his own resignation when he found out that President Truman intended to replace him as Secretary of the Treasury with Fred Vinson after V-J Day. But the President had actually planned to wait until that time to do so.

Finally, he corrects a past column in which he had named "Commander Rivers" as the commanding officer of the U. S. S. Pittsburgh, which had been instrumental in saving lives off the stricken Franklin eighty miles off Honshu, when in fact he was Commander Riverto, one of the few Philippine officers in the Navy.

Dorothy Thompson discusses President Truman's trip to Potsdam to meet with Prime Minister Churchill, Clement Atlee, and Premier Stalin, indicating that a preliminary meeting was already taking place in Berlin between the Big Three military leaders. The stakes were very different from the prior two Big Three meetings, at Tehran in November-December, 1943 and at Yalta the previous February. Now, the determination was not just to crush an enemy but also to effect the peace in Europe. Conflicting motives and greed for territory would inevitably arise.

Transportation, postal service, telegraph service, and radio were not capable of being divided by zones and thus an overall plan of cooperation between the occupying Big Four forces had to be coordinated.

Britain and America were permitting no political activity in their zones. Russia was allowing it. There was already active party life in the Soviet zone among Communists, Social Democrats, and the Christian Democratic Union, the latter a more conservative party. Each had its own newspaper through which to disseminate ideas and platforms. In the American zone, the only press was a feeble one, without editorials, written mostly by Americans.

Ms. Thompson concludes that the zone which would first release political action had a head start.

Marquis Childs also discusses the Potsdam Conference, but from the standpoint of the Pacific war and the many unanswered questions begged from it for resolution.

The first consideration, as Russia was still officially neutral in the war, was the role of Britain, and, second, whether American troops would be used in mop-up operations to take the British, Dutch, and French possessions back from the Japanese.

Britain was desirous of having its own Fleet in the Pacific, but it had conflicted with the desires of the U. S. Navy who wanted to complete the job itself. The explanation was that the British could not adequately supply their own fleet, at least insofar as the American Navy was concerned. And that would only increase the considerable demands being made on American supplies.

A revision of the command structure in the Pacific was ongoing, with plans for the British to take control of the Southwest Pacific, just north of Indo-China and south of the Philippines, presently still part of General MacArthur's command. The American Joint Chiefs had reportedly provided their approval to the plan. And it was believed that President Truman had also given his tentative approval.

Tom Jimison submits his last piece for The News. He would pass away during the first week of September.

He reports on the fact that on July Fourth, a piece poking fun at Dog Days had appeared in The News, (presumably, this editorial of June 30), a piece from which he derived "great distress and mental anguish" for its having labeled as superstitions the established facts regarding these Canine days. It showed a lack of respect for the traditions followed scrupulously by the elders.

Haywood County, the most enlightened place on earth, understood well the significance of the ascendancy of Sirius during this dangerous annual passage of forty days.

"It is a time when snakes go blind and strike at everything they hear. It is a time when the dew is pizen and the night air is noxious. Mad dogs roam the country, and they are super-charged with hydrophobia. A light abrasion or cut on the hand or foot may cause lock-jaw or ankylostema of the ankle jint. It is a period fraught with unseen dangers and nobody should take any chances. Iffen the weather bureau wants to ignore these hidden dangers, let it do so at the peril of its personnel."

The varmints of the Great Smokies sensed the approach of Sirius, he assured. "Whring wharms hold their breath on the banks of lonesome creeks, doves call in melancholy tones to their mates, _____ owls betake themselves to the dark coves to scratch for _____ and yaller sarsaparilla, and ___________ mourn for their first-born on the high ridge."

The Dog Days would be hot and dry or hot and humid, depending on how the first day of the cycle went. If hot and dry, fishing success would be dependent on spitting tobacco juice on the bait before...

Well, you read the rest. We shall try at some later point to do better justice to Mr. Jimison's last offering by providing a better version of it.

In any event, he was, in this eloquent elucidation of the freighted dangers of Dog Days, quite the seer, as always he was, especially though in this period of 1945. The forty days to which he refers are July 3 through August 11, by the Old Farmer's Almanac.

But, as we have explained previously, the real issue, perhaps, was rather the period between the 1,290th day and the 1,335th, that period in which the Sacrifice was set up, those forty-five days between June 18 and August 2, to be precise. Even Mr. Jimison, however, with his special antennae on matters in the ethereal realm of the mystical and nearly, but not quite, illusory, could not have been aware of that counting cycle at this point.

We have our own thoughts, however, as to whether President Truman was aware of it.

A prompt letter to the editor regarding the previous day's reprint of the "Pass the Peanuts" piece from the Winston-Salem Sentinel, as re-printed in The News of January 17 and 24, 1941, emergently explains what a "riser" is as it pertains to chalet de necessite argot. The letter writer explains that he or she (the name being cut off at the bottom) had heard of a riser in reference to city chalets but not with respect to country or farm chalets.

Apparently having previously lived in New York (maybe Harry Golden?), the writer indicates that there were chalets, ten or twelve strung together in rows, in the rear of New York tenements, substantial in their construction, not skimpy as the rural versions.

In the Mediterranean and Euphrates neighborhoods, the walls separating the chalets rose only about five and a half feet of the total eight feet to the ceiling, a sort of drafty affair, it would appear. In the Celtic and Saxon neighborhoods, the wall stretched to six feet in height, still a couple of feet shy of the ceiling.

Beware the seven-footers.

As one entered the door, there was an iron lever on the right, about shoulder height. That was the riser which worked to raise and lower the slab.

He explains that there was considerable "speaking in tongues" regarding the riser because the slab was all of one piece...and unfortunately, the letter then fades away. Sorry.

We think that the letter writer was mistaken in an honest effort to explain this mystery. As we indicated just yesterday, it is the built-in cigar holder. Let the debate end there.

Anyway, the riser was a hell of an idea.

But, we would like to know, for a certainty, exactly what the slab was.

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