The Charlotte News
Thursday, July 26, 1945
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain since May 10, 1940, had at 7:00 p.m. resigned the post after returns of the July 5 election showed that the Labor Party had won a 2 to 1 landslide over Mr. Churchill's Conservative Party.
Labor won 381 seats in Commons out of 640, the first time in Britain's history that Labor had enjoyed such a clear-cut majority. The Conservatives won 193 seats. By comparison, the Conservatives had won 387 seats in the 1935 election, when they received 10.5 million votes to Labor's 8.3 million.
As Mr. Churchill rode to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation, he flashed his trademark V-sign for the last time as Prime Minister—that is, until October, 1951 when the Conservatives would once again achieve the majority and Mr. Churchill would serve again as P.M. through April 7, 1955.
Both Mr. Churchill and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden retained their seats in Commons.
It was now the task of Clement Atlee, who had served during the war until June 15 as Deputy Prime Minister in Churchill's Coalition Government, to lead the country in the post-war era, as well as instructing Britain's role in the war on Japan, known in the inner circles of the leadership by this point to be likely short-lived.
Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labor in the Coalition Cabinet, would likely succeed to become Foreign Secretary. Hugh Dalton, president of the Board of Trade in the Coalition Cabinet, was another possibility for Foreign Secretary. Either Mr. Dalton or Herbert Morrison, Minister of Home Security in the Coalition Cabinet, would likely become Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Chief explanation given for the surprise result was that Britons had become tired of wartime restrictions and simply wanted a change. People interviewed in pubs stated generally that they felt Mr. Churchill had done a splendid job during the war but, with the war in Europe over, it was time for a change. Some expressed hubris at the victory of Labor over the Tories. But even they expressed sympathy at the ouster of Mr. Churchill.
One pub patron stated that he would bet that "poor old Winnie...could stand a double Scotch right now."
Mr. Atlee, during the campaign, had favored independence for India, provided they could accomplish it for themselves, and pledged continued close relations with the U.S. and Russia. Little remarkable difference had appeared during the campaign between the Conservatives and Labor regarding foreign policy.
No journalist published in The News had made the call in advance. Few newspapers
One journalist, however, the son of the former Ambassador to Britain between spring, 1938 and December, 1940, writing specially for the Hearst newspapers from London, had suggested on June 23 that Winnie was possibly going to lose, for the reasons now being attributed as cause of the result.
From Potsdam, the United States, Great Britain, and China issued an eight-point ultimatum to Japan either to surrender unconditionally or be destroyed. The proclamation was signed by Winston Churchill, along with President Truman and Chiang Kai-shek.
Tokyo radio urged the United States to take a more lenient attitude toward the Empire, but also stated that Japan would definitely entertain surrender provided the unconditional aspect were softened. As long as the hard line was maintained, however, the Japanese were determined to fight.
Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew indicated that the policy of the United States remained firm, that only unconditional surrender would be acceptable.
More than 350 B-29's dropped more than 2,200 tons of incendiary bombs on the chemical center at Omuta on Kyushu, Matsuyama on Shikuku, and Takuyama, another chemical center, on Honshu.
The Third Fleet, having destroyed or damaged 24 Japanese warships in 17 days, pulled back to sea for a rest. The damaged ships included six aircraft carriers, three battleships, and five cruisers. British planes had probably sunk another carrier of the Kobe-class and damaged an old destroyer.
At 6:30 a.m., a rare earth tremor lasting, according to witnesses, between 10 and 45 seconds, had hit the Carolinas and northern Georgia, shaking up Charlotte ever so slightly. No damage was reported.
As we have previously pointed out, there is a fault, largely dormant, in the Appalachian Mountains.
Thus, do not be too surprised should, one day, you shake, rattle, and roll.
As we have also previously mentioned, just four or five days after the unusual 2011 earthquake which shook Northern Virginia and the nation's capital last August 23, Hurricane Irene blew threw and knocked down an oak tree in Arlington National Cemetery, one which had held fast to the ground since the first term of George Washington as President.
It is always worth paying attention to unusual and coincident circumstances brought on by nature.
On the editorial page, "A Reminder" remarks that several Senators, Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia, Robert Taft of Ohio, Carl Hatch of New Mexico, Carl Johnson of Colorado, and Allen Ellender of Louisiana, were concerned at President Truman's statement from Potsdam that the United States had no interest post-war in acquisition of territory. They believed that the President had apparently forgotten about the Pacific islands or that he was speaking only of Europe. They wished clarification and insisted that these islands be afforded for use as military bases.
The editorial finds the view generally correct, that the islands were necessary to prevent future re-militarization of Japan. It was not now the same Senate which had, in pre-Pearl Harbor days, refused to appropriate money for fortifying Guam.
But, it also asserted that the President had stated the matter appropriately and that everyone who had heard the statement understood what he meant.
"War's A Melody" comments on the effort of
The piece wonders whether, thus inspired, and with doses of Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra, the Nazis had really been imbued with the
It answers that it was unlikely. The better, more productive campaign was to see to it that the Nazi and SS butchers were tried for war crimes, convicted, and hanged.
Prohibition of Wagner, it concludes, would not work—"as is the case with the bottled brand."
—Psss. Ya, over here. Yank, I vill trade you 300 bottles of good Russian vodka seized on Eastern Front in Crimea for 50 recordings of Der Ring des Nibelungen, preferably Deutsche Grammophon. But, in pinch, I accept your inferior Columbia recordings. We meet at midnight at Remagen Bridge and make exchange. Okeh?
"A Holdout" finds the reluctance of Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson to accede to the request of Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes to release 30,000 miners from the Army to avert a coal shortage during the winter when coal was needed to heat Europe to be short-sighted. Mr. Patterson asserted that to do so would open the floodgates to all sorts of special requests of discharge based on occupation and would be unfair to other veterans with greater time in service overseas in combat.
The editorial suggests the similar need for the railroads to alleviate the shortage of personnel needed to operate the trains, overtaxed in transferring returning troops from the East Coast to the West Coast for redeployment to the Pacific.
It finds Mr. Patterson's objections to be outweighed by the expediencies at hand.
"The Second Time" reminds that the recent movement into Tokyo Bay by the American Third Fleet was not a new precedent, that in 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry had taken four warships into the bay, then called Yedo. The Japanese had then held a council of the Shogun. The Emperor had appealed to the shrines.
Nine years earlier, the Japanese had repelled Commodore Biddle with two ships, but now Commodore Perry had steam ships, which had been assembled as a force in the harbor at Okinawa.
Successful in the mission, Commodore Perry was praised by President Millard Fillmore, as the Fleet returned with seven ships.
The excerpt from the Congressional Record finds Representative John Rankin of Mississippi commenting on the report that Secretary of War Henry Stimson would resign his post upon the return from Potsdam of President Truman. He recommended that the President appoint as his replacement General George S. Patton, whom Mr. Rankin regarded as "one of the great dynamic men in public life today."
He recounts that he had spoken personally to General Patton when the General had dropped by to see him at the Capitol.
Unfortunately, the words, apparently, were too caustic to reprint clearly and so the reader will simply have to use imagination to sum it up—just what it was General Patton had to say to Representative Rankin of Mississippi.
We are certain that we have no idea.
Drew Pearson reports that before President Truman had departed for Potsdam, he had told his closest advisers that, to avoid a repeat of the heavy losses on Okinawa, he was going to solicit from the Allies greater participation in the Pacific war. Since going to Potsdam, he had reportedly pursued this goal, attempting to bring both Britain and Russia more actively into the war.
President Roosevelt had sought to tap the reservoir of manpower in India for the Pacific war by suggesting to Prime Minister Churchill that Britain grant independence to India to provide a greater incentive to the troops to fight. Churchill, however, was adamant that India remain a part of the British Empire.
FDR had been advised by Ambassador to India William Phillips that the Indian Army was purely mercenary and possessed of low fighting morale; the attitude of the people was worse.
To lend credence to the statement, it had been two years since the campaign to retake Burma and Malaya had begun in August, 1943, and Burma was still not clear of the Japanese, and Singapore remained in Japanese possession. In contrast, the Japanese had taken Burma and Malaya in three months following Pearl Harbor. Moreover, the British Indian Army consisted of two million men and the Japanese conquering Army had only been comprised of 300,000 men.
The State Department believed that the British had been at odds with the United States in providing these Indian troops for the fight, were busy spreading anti-American propaganda in India and anti-Indian propaganda in the United States. One form of it was to spread the rumor that Lend-Lease had been a program conceived by FDR to enable post-war control of its recipients' markets.
Moreover, at the start of the Burma campaign in 1943, General Joseph Stilwell's political adviser wrote a report in which he wondered whether the Americans would be going into Burma as merely silent partners to the British in re-establishing colonialism.
The State Department was of the opinion that President Roosevelt had never been tough enough with the British to achieve better cooperation with the British Indian troops. It left open the opportunity for President Truman to improve American resolve in this area.
Dorothy Thompson comments on two directly contradictory headlines appearing on Saturday in the New York Times and the Herald Tribune, the former stating that Interior Secretary Harold Ickes was going to send coal to Europe, the latter stating the opposite. The confusion, she posits, was a domestic and not a foreign problem.
Mr. Ickes knew that coal had to be provided to Europe for the long winter ahead lest there be chaos and political upheaval. The intent was not to bargain with coal to provide a bulwark against social and economic change in Europe, rather to avoid change coming in an atmosphere of severe want.
But, Mr. Ickes insisted, to enable coal to be sent required that 30,000 miners be released from the Army to man the mines.
The end of the war had not seen a return to normalcy in Europe as the fighting in most countries had taken the form of civil war, with the resistance movements having ideological as well as nationalist underpinnings. Collaboration with the Nazis and Fascists had been rampant. These two competing forces, collaborationists and resistance, were still on the landscape. The resistance wanted decisive overthrow of existing regimes, but represented only a small minority of the people in each country. Many among them opposed the coup d'etat as an agency of change. Only in Yugoslavia, under Tito, had the resistance movement achieved power.
So, at stake was whether change would occur peacefully or by violence. That was why the United States could not afford to allow Europeans to freeze during the coming winter.
Ms. Thompson hoped that Mr. Ickes would, in the end, not make the policy of sending coal dependent on the release from the Army of 30,000 miners.
Samuel Grafton comments on the conflict being seen by Europeans in American policy, providing for German industry to keep it productive at a high level so that it could aid in the supply of the Pacific war, while also seeking to cripple heavy industry in Germany to avoid it being able to wage war in the future, all at the same time as industry in formerly occupied Europe still suffered. The German industry being maintained was described as light, but included farm machinery and fertilizers, which could be transformed into production of tanks and explosives.
The appearance of an American policy which provided for the enemy and ignored allies was continuing. He suggests that if supplies were needed from Europe for the Pacific, then machinery from Germany should be transferred to France and Italy and the supplies produced there. No one would be bothered at the prospect of resulting unemployment in Germany. It made more sense than unemployment in France and other allied countries.
A letter to the editor finds The News and The Charlotte Observer of the same mind in opining that states' rights superseded human rights with respect to political power being exercised over the citizenry and excusing segregation.
It suggested that reporters be trained not to emphasize crime in the black community or to refer to blacks in an inferior manner.
It further saw the newspapers adopting the view that the Fair Employment Practices Committee, to insure equal job opportunity and equal wages, was a bad thing, and that Senators Clyde Hoey and Josiah W. Bailey, and Representatives Joe Ervin and Alfred Bulwinkle, in opposing FEPC, were acting in the best interests of the people.
To obtain rights, it reasons, blacks had to force the issue through legal action undertaken by the NAACP.
With hundreds of local laundry workers on strike for higher wages, the writer asserts that they had received no support from the two major local newspapers.
Daring the editors to publish his letter, he concludes, "Prejudiced, fence-straddling newspapers have worthless editors."
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