Monday, July 9, 1945

The Charlotte News

Monday, July 9, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that B-29's struck five cities on Honshu: Gifu, Sakai, Wakayama, Sendai, and Yokkaichi. The details would not be released until return of the bombers.

Tokyo radio reported 200 American planes over Japan. According to the report, ninety Mustangs attacked Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe, Hamamatsu, and Toyohashi on Honshu, and Omura on Kyushu.

In the 39 days of June and early July, B-29's had dropped 42,250 tons of incendiary and demolition bombs on Japan.

Maj. General Louis Woods, Tactical Air Force Commander, stated that good targets were growing ever more scarce in Japan and the pilots had actively to search them out.

An American Liberator pilot, Major Wesley Werner, released from a Japanese prison camp, stated that the Japanese had begun in February to treat war prisoners significantly better than previously. The change had come with the realization that the Japanese would lose the war, as well as because of the report in February at the liberation of Manila exposing the atrocities which had taken place there during the three-year Japanese occupation. Major Werner had been imprisoned since February, 1943.

On Borneo, the Australians advanced in the area around captured Balikpapan. A column of the 7th Division advanced inland from one to two miles without opposition.

Chinese forces captured South Guard Pass on the border between China and Indo-China, as the Japanese retreated toward Dong Dang, south of the frontier. The whole of Kwangsi Province had thus been cleared of Japanese forces.

On July 1, the Chinese had recaptured Tanchuk, a hundred miles southeast of Liuchow. On July 2, Tengyun was recaptured, twenty miles east of Tanchuk on the West River. Enemy remnants at Mosun, 55 miles south-southeast of Liuchow, were wiped out. Japanese who had landed at Amoy on China's southeast coast had been driven thirty miles from the original landing point.

Associated Press correspondent Joseph Morton was reported by German prisoners of war to have been executed at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria on January 24 on orders from Heinrich Himmler's staff. Mr. Morton had been captured near Plonka in Slovakia on December 26 and subsequently taken to Mauthausen, fifteen miles to the east of Bratislava. He was shot along with nine other Americans and four Britons. The group had flown into Slovakia on October 7 to help stranded fliers in the area near Banska Bystrica. When captured, the group, along with a larger group of Slovak Partisans, many of whom had already died of starvation, disease, and exposure, had been traveling by foot for nearly two months, seeking to reach Russian lines.

Mauthausen ranked among the Nazi concentration camps as fifth in numbers of executed prisoners.

The redeployment of troops from Europe bound for the Pacific was moving along rapidly, with 336,000 Americans having been sent to the United States for redeployment, 200,000 having been transferred in June.

An inside page reports that the Allies remained deadlocked over how to arrange the occupation of Germany with respect to distribution of food and fuel to the British and American sectors. No one in Berlin, however, was starving, according to Col. Frank Howley, chief of the Military Government in the American Zone.

Big Three diplomats began arriving for the Potsdam Conference. For the first time, the report stated the specific location of the conference, in the suburb of Berlin. The conference would not formally begin for a week.

President Truman was reported on his way to Potsdam.

Former Secretary of State Edward Stettinius testified as the first witness on the U. N. Charter before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urging its ratification as an opportunity to construct a lasting peace.

The first of the excerpts from Hermann Goering's personal notebook appears on the page, continued on another inside page. The text is disjointed, discussing a meeting with Col. Moja of the German Air Ministry on July 11, 1938, and does not lend itself to summary, discussing various developments in the air war.

On the first inside page, the Reverend Peter Buccholz, a Catholic chaplain, tells Louis Lochner of the Associated Press that the 90 Germans who had been executed at Berlin's Ploetzensee jail by orders of Hitler for their alleged part in the July 20 plot to kill Hitler the previous year, were denied, by further order of the Fuehrer, all opportunity for spiritual comfort before they were marched to the gallows eight at a time to be hanged on August 8. Only as they made the death walk were they allowed any time with the chaplains. Some of them had been brutally tortured and yet maintained their dignity until the end.

Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon introduced a resolution to limit the President to two terms in office. His proposal would apply even if the President had served only part of one term. Eventually, the Constitution would be so amended in 1951 but would not apply to President Truman and would not prevent a President who served less than two years of his successor's term from serving two full terms.

Three marooned service personnel, a WAC corporal, and an Army lieutenant and sergeant, arrived in California from New Guinea after being stranded there since May 13 when their transport plane crashed, killing 21 passengers. The corporal denied rumors that she was running a dating service with the natives for the two male servicemen, that she was at all romantically involved, or that she had been offered the throne by the natives.

The sun, as indicated by Harry Golden on Thursday, entered total eclipse this date for the first time since 1932, visible in parts of Idaho and Montana in the United States, and otherwise visible as a partial eclipse in other parts of the country. The total eclipse was visible for 29 seconds in Montana at around 8:00 a.m. EWT. The next total eclipse visible in that part of the country was not slated to occur until 1954.

On the editorial page, "Money Worries" comments on the problem of too much cash in circulation in the country threatening ruinous inflation. While Washington appeared to take the attitude that wartime profits could not be prevented, the President was also guarding against the misuse of Federal funds within Government bureaus to avoid any sort of scandal.

"Correction!" comments on a release by NADMWAW, the National Association for the Defense of Motorists Who Ain't Women, which countered the City Police Department's report for June that, of 131 drivers involved in traffic accidents, only 15 were women. NADMWAW said that 97 percent of the 116 men involved in those accidents had been pushed into them by the actions of women drivers. Of these, 56 percent came directly from avoidance of erratic women drivers, while the other 44 percent were the result of psychoses brought on by women drivers, lingering shadows of memories from other willy-nilly incidents or from the persistent nagging of backseat drivers.

The piece states that the editors had sent in their dues to join NADMWAW, to stop the tyranny of false imputation of fault to male drivers.

"Traffic Jam" remarks on the poor condition of the railroads after being used so punishingly for the war effort. Yet, it did not explain why the soldiers being shipped to the West Coast had to ride in day coaches rather than Pullmans. It might be, as the Army contended, the result of German prisoners of war who were sick or disabled being allowed to ride in the Pullmans. But it appeared more likely that the use of Pullmans by civilians was at the heart of the problem. It recommends that the Office of Defense Transportation prevent civilians from using Pullmans unless they could show a specific need. The trains and their sleeping cars should be first reserved for the troops.

"Bad Business" suggests that the plight of King Leopold of Belgium, maintained under American guard in the Austrian Alps until it could be determined whether to allow him to return home where most of the people did not want him, underscored that royalty were no longer popular in Europe. When it had reached the point that the vox populi could keep a king from his country, it was plain that the days of royal aristocracy had passed.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Olin Johnston of South Carolina discussing with Senator Dennis Chavez of New Mexico and Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin and Senator Wallace White of Maine who is going to yield to whom and for how long, ad infinitum, to determine whether there was a quorum under Senate Rule XVI.

Drew Pearson again comments on the vast difference between the Washington desk detectives of Wild Bill Donovan's O.S.S. corps when compared to the heroic work performed by the O.S.S. men overseas in actual spy service. Mr. Pearson had recently revealed a document marked "secret" coming out of San Francisco, which had been nothing more than an explanation of social outings. Since, however, the O.S.S. had conducted an in-house search for leakers. Armed guards and paper shredders were now being used to prevent leaks. Holes had appeared in ceilings at the offices to determine what the workers were doing with their Oh So Secret documents.

Recently, a man had appeared at the Paris O.S.S. office to conduct an inspection, carrying a permit from Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy.

The OSS had sent a colonel, on the instructions of President Truman, to deliver to Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia jewels and documents recovered in Italy, which had been stolen by Mussolini's troops when they had invaded Addis Ababa. The colonel had only been permitted to go part of the way as the O.S.S. stated that they did not want their man in Ethiopia.

O.S.S. documents captured by the Japanese in Burma had been turned over to the Russians because they contained anti-Russian sentiments. O.S.S. operatives, he points out, were almost uniformly Red-baiters.

Marshal Tito had ordered all O.S.S. representatives out of Yugoslavia. The Russians had ordered the O.S.S. out of Rumania.

Mr. Pearson then comments on the tug of war between the O.S.S. and Army Intelligence, G-2, regarding who would interrogate the representatives of I. G. Farben, the German chemical conglomerate. These employees would be able to identify many war criminals and their contacts within the world of international cartels.

Marquis Childs discusses the attempts in both houses of Congress to derail the bill to make permanent the Fair Employment Practices Committee. In the Senate, Mississippi Senators Theodore Bilbo and James Eastland had sought to filibuster the bill to death, without success. In so doing, however, Senator Eastland had made one of the "most shocking speeches ever heard on the floor of the Senate", indicting whole races and the armed forces of the United States.

Senator Bilbo had been elected by only 91,000 total votes out of a population in Mississippi of 2.2 million.

In the House, two members of the Rules Committee, Eugene Cox of Georgia and Howard Smith of Virginia, had managed to keep the FEPC bill in committee through parliamentary maneuvering. The Rules Committee could be bypassed provided 218 members of the House signed a petition permitting it. But that would be difficult to achieve.

Another device used to forestall legislation was Senatorial courtesy. It had been utilized to block approval of plans for international airlines after the war. Senators Owen Brewster of Maine and Pat McCarran of Nevada favored a community company to operate for America in the overseas field. But the declared policy of the Government favored competition in both the foreign and domestic service areas. The two Senators had nevertheless managed to occupy the field to block desired Government policy.

A piece compiled by the editors speculates on the Japanese reports that an American fleet was forming in the Sea of Okhotsk between Siberia and the Kurile Islands and were bombarding towns on Karafutu, the southern Japanese half of Sakhalin Island, the northern half of which belonged to the Russians. The move suggested that Russia might soon enter the war against Japan.

Samuel Grafton indicates that it was difficult yet to know whether President Truman was a liberal or conservative. He thus far defied categorization. He was too tired to shake hands with the people of Independence upon his return home. He had ordered new clothes from New York. The folksy image which had been portrayed in the press therefore had another side.

Politically, he was demanding immediate ratification of the U. N. Charter, but warmly shook hands with leading isolationist Burton Wheeler at the conclusion of his address to the Senate. He had just appointed conservative James Byrnes to be Secretary of State. But he had also asked that the FEPC be made permanent. He had consulted with Herbert Hoover and with Harry Hopkins, polar opposites on the political spectrum.

It appeared that he was trying to be all things to all sides. But that was not such a bad thing in this time when people were unsettled on the shape of the post-war world, on Russia, and on the manner and speed with which reconversion to a peacetime economy would take place. President Truman was deftly playing the role of conciliator without playing favorites. In so doing, he did not appear to be drifting. Rather, "he rides."

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