Monday, July 30, 1945

The Charlotte News

Monday, July 30, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Third Fleet had renewed its attacks on Japan, as Task Force 38 bombarded Hamamatsu, three miles inland, with a thousand tons of shells. Some 1,500 American and British carrier planes ranged over Honshu from Kobe to Tokyo. B-29's struck six of the eleven foredoomed cities of Japan on Sunday. The planes reported no opposition.

On Saturday, heavy strikes on Kure and Sasebo naval bases had heavily damaged the battleship Haruna, damaged an aircraft carrier, and probably destroyed a cruiser. The Haruna was thought to have been sunk by the late Captain Colin Kelly, early hero of the war, who reported sinking the vessel on December 10, 1941, the day he lost his life.

As already understood since Thursday, Premier Suzuki of Japan had formally rejected the Thursday ultimatum of President Truman, former Prime Minister Churchill, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

Australia had refused to join the ultimatum because it considered it too lenient toward Japan and complained that it had not been consulted.

Meanwhile, Maj. General Curtis LeMay, General Carl Spaatz, and Rear Admiral D. C. Ramsey each warned the Japanese that they would face overwhelming attack by land, sea, and air were they to refuse to surrender forthwith. Admiral Ramsey stated that invasion was nigh, had effectively already begun with the naval and air blockade and shelling of the home islands by Navy ships.

At Potsdam, Prime Minister Clement Atlee, President Truman, and Premier Stalin moved toward conclusion of the conference, as they placed finishing touches on a draft agreement. The presence of Mr. Atlee as Prime Minister, rather than as observer as during the first nine days of the conference, had made no noticeable impact on the proceedings.

During the weekend, the Senate had approved the U. N. Charter with only two opposition votes, providing the President with leverage in the final phase of the conference; he could, with probity, now inform the leaders of Russia and Britain that the old isolationism in America was dead and that international cooperation was the overwhelming desire of the people.

According to documents seized from the home of German General Helmut Reinecke, propaganda chief for the German Army, 1,911,300 German soldiers had been killed, severely wounded, were missing or prisoners, in all branches of service during the war. Of these, 1,419,000 had occurred on the Russian front.

Most official estimates after the war, however, have German casualties, including those on the Russian front, substantially higher, in the multi-millions.

Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, lead American prosecutor for the Nuremberg War Tribunal, stated that unless there were cooperation of the British, French, and Russians in the effort to begin war crimes trials, America would act unilaterally.

From Mondorf, Luxembourg, it was reported that top Nazi prisoners were decompensating under the pressure of confinement and interrogation. Hermann Goering, Robert Ley, Julius Streicher, and Hans Frank, Nazi chieftain of Poland during the war, were all within the grip of insanity.

Dr. Frank, for instance, had arrived at the prison wearing only a pair of lace panties, went about shouting, "I am a criminal."

Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel had written to General Eisenhower protesting the confiscation of his baton.

Admiral Karl Doenitz did not want to be photographed with a black number across his shirt and also had protested that treatment to General Eisenhower.

A sector of Berlin was reported allocated to France for administration.

Wartime tax evaders were going to be ferreted out, warned Attorney General Tom Clark, Secretary of the Treasury Fred Vinson, and Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson. The impact of black marketeers on food supply was especially troubling.

Eugene Segal provides the first of six pieces in a series of reports on the Nationalists Party, led by former North Carolina Senator Robert Rice Reynolds. The series was written for the Scripps-Howard Newspapers and provided specially to The News. The first installment tells of the attempt by Senator Reynolds to amalgamate the various dissident groups of the country and bind them within the new party.

The hallmarks of the party were racial hatred, exploitation of labor strife, and glorification of dictatorships. The party was seeking to impact the 1946 Congressional races and muster steam to affect the 1948 presidential race. Mr. Segal equated their means to those of the Nazis in their quest for power during the 1920's. They had infiltrated groups with perceived grievances against the Administration, including farm organizations and unions. They had also formed two veterans' organizations, to try to woo returning veterans to the cause. Also included was a youth movement in several Midwestern states. The group had also obtained the support of some church groups.

The Nationalists were attracting to their cause many foreign nationals from countries occupied by the Soviets.

Above all, the group was anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-black, and anti-alien.

Ostensibly, they favored traditional political avenues to power, but an ex-convict was organizing hoodlums in the Midwest to enable force to be brought to bear on their behalf.

In Berlin, a soldier had married his bride, an Army WAC sergeant, in a civil ceremony the previous Monday. An elaborate church ceremony, to be held the following Sunday, had been cancelled, however, when a woman claiming to be the groom's wife, with two children back in Chicago, had suddenly surfaced to protest the marriage.

The Army forgot to tell the wedding guests that the ceremony had been cancelled, and so they sat listening to wedding music, sat waiting for the bride and groom, sat until they realized that no one was going to show up.

The groom informed his superior officers that his wife had been listed as dead; he had been so informed by the Red Cross. Apparently, the information was erroneous.

The Army insisted that the WAC sergeant was oblivious to the problem and her name would be cleared of any wrongdoing.

We hope, for the sake of the wedding guests, that the music, at least, was well chosen.

On the editorial page, "Bingo vs. Bango" comments on the South Carolina Governors' tradition to send out the Governor's own police force, the Constabulary, to arrest crimes of vice and corruption, such as gambling. For all the zeal, such an effort did not lower the rate of violent crime in the state. It still ranked sixth among the states in numbers of murders and third in aggravated assaults.

"A Demurrer" reports of the decision by the American Legion to acquiesce to the directive of the Office of Defense Transportation, banning conventions to save excessive travel. The Legion had done so, however, only reluctantly, asking the director of ODT whether he stood above the Legion.

The inevitable answer to their query was in the affirmative.

It remarks that the decision to lift the ban on horse racing for the summer was capricious, but the Legion had to abide the same rules as everybody else—except the horses.

The Legion was not, as it contended, a "whipping post". Since refraining from travel was a patriotic act, the Legion's reluctant acceptance of the exigency had been surprising.

"Mumbo-Jumbo" finds isolationism still dangerously breathing in the denunciatory speech by Minnesota Senator Henrik Shipstead against the U. N. Charter, just passed over the weekend with two dissenting votes, one of which was from Mr. Shipstead. The Senator had found it a war-mongering document, whereby the United Nations would have a collective police force to be sent to arrest aggression, thus causing war, not preventing it.

The piece finds the logic shallow, that the effort would be to stop large wars, even if it meant having a small one of the moment. It reasons that Senator Shipstead would have deplored such a decision to use force against Hitler to repel the Nazi in Czechoslovakia or Poland, to stop the Japanese from entry to Manchuria, or Mussolini from conquering Ethiopia.

"Give Fats a Break" finds it pitiful that Hermann Goering had suffered a heart attack in his prison cell in Luxembourg because of an electrical storm on Friday night. He had lost the masterpieces of art he had plundered from the museums of Europe. And now he had suffered a heart attack just as the Allies were preparing to try him for war crimes.

Perhaps, the ghosts of Coventry and Rotterdam, or Dachau and Buchenwald felt pain for him.

The thunderstorm had shaken his sensitive system, for he was simply not accustomed to violence. He enjoyed the pleasures, instead, of bombing women and children, strafing refugees along the roads.

The pitiful sight suggested the need, for this compassionate human being, to provide empathy in return, and cancel, or at least postpone, his trial until he felt better, less shaken by the thunderstorms.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Raymond Springer of Indiana telling his colleagues that, initially, following V-E Day, the people were gladdened to hear the news that the Japanese diplomats and military personnel in Germany had been taken into custody and held prisoner by the U.S. Army. The 193 arrested had been transported to the United States and placed in a detention facility, but in a rich man's town in Pennsylvania.

He finds it repulsive that such was the case, that Pennsylvanians objected to this preferential treatment, and wonders at how the 35,000 Americans who had been held captive by the Japanese under torturous conditions, many times to the death, would react to the story.

Drew Pearson examines the British election, finds Labor to resemble the Democrats more than typical Socialists. They had their conservatives and their liberals, just as the Democrats.

Clement Atlee was relatively poor, had, until 1935, earned a meager income. He enjoyed gardening, puffing his pipe, was not a forthright leader, but more of an impartial middle of the roader.

Inside the party, his greatest rivals were Herbert Morrison and new Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin. Mr. Morrison was Cockney, liked to dance, had one eye, a quick wit, and headed Labor in London. Mr. Bevin was a hard-headed union boss with dictatorial powers over the Transport Workers, but, outside the union, believed in negotiation and compromise. He had called a general strike in England in 1926, in the wake of a harsh defeat by Winston Churchill.

Ellen Wilkinson would also be a force in the new Labor Government, disliked the colonial policies of the Government, had been in the thick of the Black and Tan revolt in Ireland, had led hunger marchers on London during the depression. She had defended King Edward's right to marry Wallis Simpson, which had ultimately cost him the throne.

Arthur Greenwood would also be a powerful figure. He had been responsible for the limited slum clearance which had taken place during the Coalition Government of Churchill. He was known as a good bureaucrat.

Mr. Pearson next remarks that Army and Navy strategists in the U.S. would not mourn the defeat of Winston Churchill's Government as they had believed they had been overruled by him many times, such as in the decision to invade Sicily and Italy following the North African campaign, as decided at Casablanca in January, 1943. Churchill had wanted to go into the Balkans while the American General Staff wanted to begin preparations for a cross-channel invasion. Mr. Churchill stated that Britain would only commit 30 percent of the troops to such an invasion because it had already lost a generation of young men in World War I. The compromise was to invade Italy.

Many believed that the decision had prolonged the war by a year.

Marquis Childs explores the growing trend in Congress to try to wrest back from the military the power ceded to it for the duration of the war. Recent example was the urging by Secretary of Interior and Solid Fuels Administrator Harold Ickes to discharge 30,000 coal miners to relieve the shortage of personnel in the mines so that coal could be sent to Europe during the winter and avert a revolution. Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson had nixed the proposal on the basis that it would be unfair to place the miners ahead of men with longer service and combat duty.

Another example was the proposal to have scholarships and fellowships for students showing an aptitude in the sciences, and to provide deferments for them from the draft. Selective Service had stated that such deferments were not possible.

The military generally had been able to steer Congress in the direction it wanted during the war, but there was growing frustration at this status. With Secretary of War Henry Stimson rumored to be preparing to retire, a new Secretary would have ahead the task of seeking to regain the civilian control of the military. It would be a large task, given the authority to which the military had become accustomed.

Ultimately at stake was preservation of the Constitution. It was a primary reason that many Senators had grown reluctant to approve compulsory military service after the war, on the ground that doing so would continue to provide the military with power to drive policy.

Samuel Grafton examines the British election, finds it not to be indicative of the sky falling, as many isolationists in America no doubt would think. Britain was not going Communist because it had heavily swung to Labor and away from the Conservatives. Persons who thought so should check themselves, as the Fascists in Spain had bemoaned the results of the election in Britain, and birds of a feather...

He explains the change by the fact that the Tories had been faulted all along for having started the war in the first place, and so the heroism which Churchill had displayed so admirably during the war had been diluted by the bitterness felt regarding that which had preceded—the Chamberlain Government's policy of appeasement, the Baldwin Government's policy of looking the other way while Hitler rearmed and fortified Germany, seeing it as a bulwark to Communism. All through the war, there had been grumbling about the Conservatives' pre-war policy.

With the war over in Europe, the Tories had sought to return to the pre-war period and were not therefore anxious to dismantle German war industry or to try German war criminals. They had also been amicable to the fascism of Italy and those champions of it in Greece.

The most remarkable thing about the change in Commons was that none of the Big Three nations could now be said to be ruled by reactionary forces. Agreement therefore among the Big Three leaders should prove more easily accomplished. They would not seek to prop up powerless kings across the European landscape.

Labor would be seeking to raise the standard of living of the average British workman, a person who bicycled to work, could afford no car, or even a refrigerator. By doing so, there would likely be a stimulus to the entire British economy. So there was reasonable hope that the election would not bring about the end of the world, and that the world might even be improved by it.

No, it was the end. Fabian's No. 1 now occupied 10 Downing.

A letter writer expresses the belief that too much print had been expended in response to the individual who had written on July 19 that African-Americans were not in need of greater wages because they had a lower standard of living, and thus the laundry workers' strike in wartime merited sending the workers to the front, with minimal training.

The original letter writer then responds to the many responses, contending that he had been misinterpreted, that his letter had been directed to the issue of labor unions and strikes, and was not intended to be an indictment of blacks as a race. It had just so happened, he says, that most of the laundry workers were black.

Another letter writer also comments on the original letter, stating that the writer's intent had been to divide soldiers and labor. He cites Proverbs 25:17-18: A man that beareth false witness against his neighbor is a maul, and a sword, and a sharp arrow.

Finally, a fourth letter writer lists the things most unpopular: Hirohito; Okra, Daylight Savings Time; the cigarette shortage; the war; City administration; the laundry strike; 102 degrees; rationing; and...

This night, the men of the Indianapolis, after having their ship shot out from under them by a Japanese submarine, those who had survived the long first night and first scorching day on the high seas, adrift, awaiting rescue, surrounded by sharks, gradually starving, parched with thirst, could find no comfort, no offer of respite from the moment which defined each darker passage into the worsening ordeal.

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