The Charlotte News
Monday, August 20, 1945
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that General MacArthur had provided through his staff the 25 pages of instructions to the 16 Japanese emissaries who had arrived Sunday in Manila, regarding the plans for safe entry to Japan by American occupation forces and the particular arrangements for signing the formal terms of surrender, to occur in the vicinity of Tokyo within ten days, weather permitting.
General MacArthur did not meet personally with the Japanese delegation which was headed by Lt. General Takashiro Kawabe. General MacArthur's chief of staff, Lt. General Richard Sutherland, dealt directly with the delegation. The emissaries were said to appear by their countenances not to relish the task of their mission. They departed Monday by plane back to Tokyo.
The Japanese General Staff protested to General MacArthur that the dropping of American paratroopers, assigned to provide humanitarian aid to Allied prisoners in Japanese prison camps, threatened the smooth cessation of hostilities. The teams had reported that General Jonathan Wainwright, the hero of Corregidor in spring 1942, was well and safe.
The nine six-man teams, which had informed of their peaceful intentions by leaflets dropped in advance of their Thursday entry, returned to their bases after making the check on the prisoners, ordered to leave by the Japanese as they had received no instructions from Tokyo on how to behave toward these teams—having, of course, no ability to think on their own, independent of the High Command and the Emperor, even in light of complete unconditional surrender six days earlier.
The teams took with them General Wainwright, who was expected to arrive shortly in Chungking, along with several hundred other prisoners, as their captors formally surrendered. General Wainwright had been held at a camp at Hsian, a hundred miles north of Mukden.
Domei broadcast a defiant statement from the supreme commander of the Japanese Army in Singapore, presumably Field Marshal Juichi Terauchi, that, while accepting the Emperor's surrender, they stood "prepared to crush" their enemies should they ever come to the occupied Southeast Asian regions, which included occupied China and Manchuria, presumably Indo-China. The proclamation by the commander condemned the use of the atomic bomb.
Nevertheless, all organized Japanese resistance was reported ending in Manchuria, as the Soviets took in 100,000 Japanese troops during the previous 24 hours. The garrisons at Mukden, Harbin, Hsinking and Kirin were all reported ready to surrender as Russian paratroopers landed in each city. The Red Army ceased fire as all Japanese offensive action had ceased.
Some of the towns along the front, some of which once had 20,000 inhabitants, had been uninhabited for several years. High weeds were growing in the main streets of these ghost towns, and grass inside the houses and stores. The town of Sanchagou, according to a correspondent, was so dead that not even a bird could be seen.
Another Domei broadcast asserted the fear of public disturbance amid a crippled internal state, the people wanting of food and shelter. One Tokyo newspaper stated that the leaders of Japan who had started the war were now useless and that the Government was having difficulty controlling parts of the military clique.
Al Misri, the newspaper of the Egyptian Wafd Party, nationalists, printed an editorial demanding clarification of remarks by Maj. General Benjamin Giles, the American commander-in-chief of Middle East operations, that the American command in the region would continue until services to the Far East would be discontinued. The editorial asserted that the continued presence of American troops in Cairo threatened Egypt's independence.
In Oslo, testimony was being introduced from Hermann Goering, Alfred Rosenberg, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Col. General Gustav Jodl, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, among other high-ranking Nazi officials, against Vidkun Quisling in his trial for treason for selling out Norway to the Nazis. In his opening statement, the prosecutor contended that he had captured German documents which supported the allegation that Quisling had met with Hitler in mid-December, 1939, and had received 200,000 gold marks from an anti-British company to take part in the undermining of Norway from within, prior to the German invasion in April, 1940, from without.
Quisling read a statement in his own defense, portraying himself as a patriot and prophet, proclaiming that Hitler was proved right, that Bolshevism, not England, had won the war. He demanded rehabilitation and indemnification for the harm done to his reputation.
"All asses give the dying lion a kick," he declared, in reference to the trial against him.
Duly noted. Shall we just change the lyric
Navy and Marine draft call-ups for September had been reduced from 22,000 to 13,000.
In Chicago, a man complained to police about a blowing horn during the early morning hours. It turned out that he owned the culprit vehicle, the horn of which had short-circuited. Whether the man blessed out the owner for disturbing his sleep was not related.
On Northern Luzon, a Filipino patrol of the 32nd Division waved a white flag at a group of Japanese soldiers who then displayed a white flag in response, but refused to come out of their positions. When informed by the Filipinos that the war was over and Japan had been defeated, the Japanese soldiers laughed and proclaimed it a lie, that they intended for the Filipinos to surrender to them.
Whether this problem will be resolved by 1974, we shall have to wait and see.
Speaking of changed lyrics, we confess that, for years, we had thought that the lyric was, "She's Phyllis Diller when she's dressed to the hilt..." or something like that. You know the song we mean.
Then we went to the Big Valley and found out the true meaning
On the editorial page, "A Full House" discusses the juvenile delinquents
The prime goal of the judge was to place the defendants in jobs or institutions and avoid sending them to the overcrowded juvenile home. But the Morrison Training School, the only state juvenile institution for blacks, had a capacity of only 200. The Eastern Carolina and Jackson Training schools for white juveniles had plenty of room.
This problem of overcrowding of the black facility made difficult the decisions of the judge as to placement of black defendants.
The piece urges that a facility was needed for black defendants in Western North Carolina.
By the way, we used to hear "tighter" as "China". We think that it may have had something to do with
"The Old Lady" observes that the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, the Bank of England, was about to be socialized by the Labor Party majority in Commons. It had been a private institution for 251 years, chartered during the reign of William and Mary.
Labor had long advocated taking this step but had never before achieved enough of a majority in Commons to accomplish it.
The directors of the Bank were analogous to the Federal Reserve Board in the United States, which worked closely with the Government. The Congress had submitted several proposals to place the twelve Federal Reserve banks under ownership of the Government prior to 1934, when Marriner Eccles became Federal Reserve Governor. Since 1934, because of the close working relationship with the Government, the proposals had largely vanished.
Economists were suggesting that government ownership of the Bank of England would lead to government ownership also of the Federal Reserve System to bring about alignment in world economy.
"First Secrets" reports four previously censored matters brought forth by Drew Pearson:
1) Three mutinies had taken place in the Army since V-E Day, at Cologne, Calais, and in England, with some casualties, though details were still unavailable;
2) A large Navy task force had been maintained at the mouth of the Golden Gate to San Francisco Bay, out of fear that there might be a kamikaze raid by the Japanese on the San Francisco United Nations Charter Conference, occurring between April 25 and June 26;
3) General MacArthur had criticized the Allied global strategy, stating that the North African campaign should never have been undertaken, that it was "absolutely useless";
4) General Marshall had lost a great amount of support and prestige in Congress near the end of the war because, on August 7, the day after Hiroshima, he had berated Congressional efforts to reduce the size of the Army, sought still to promote the needs of Army manpower, even though knowing the Russians were about to enter the Pacific war, as they did the following day, and insisted that the necessary points for discharge, based on time overseas, time in combat, age, and dependents, should not be lowered, further insisted that the Army would need to re-deploy seven million men, half of whom would go to the Pacific.
The piece concludes with the prediction that more such stories would soon begin to surface.
"Who's Inhuman?" finds that Hirohito's pronouncement after the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb, that it was "inhuman", only echoed down through history the reactions to every new form of weaponry, from the crossbow in the twelfth century, forward. Likewise, the nations had always sought to outlaw the newest weaponry, only to cave in ultimately to national interests. Each effort to ban the new weapons as inhuman ran into the paradox that war, itself, is inhuman.
Admiral Mahan, one of the foremost recognized American Naval experts, had stated at the first Hague Conference in 1899 that it did not make sense to regard gas warfare as particularly inhumane when it was acceptable practice to blow a ship apart, sending men to their deaths by drowning.
Maj. General Porter of the Chemical Warfare Service had stated in 1941 that all nations have laws against murder but none to tell how it should be committed. He had concluded that to attempt to regulate warfare is "to regulate a paradox".
The piece concludes by suggesting that most Americans would find little sympathy with Hirohito's complaint and would likely feel that the only regret was that he had not become more personally acquainted with the bomb.
We note that, as to General Porter's comment, it is not, strictly speaking, accurate. There are laws of self-defense and defense of others and justification regarding homicide, not then considered murder, defined as the killing of another human being with malice aforethought, to be distinguished from premeditation which is an additional element to cause murder to be in the first degree.
Killing a prisoner of war without justification, for example, in fact is an act of murder. Killing deliberately civilians, such as the exterminations of the Jews by the Nazis, was murder.
But killing in the context of active mutual combat, where national self defense or defense of other nations, not initial aggressors in a particular conflict, is analogous to killing in self-defense and defense of others in the context of individuals, and thus is defensible.
It is generally justifiable homicide to take lives in order to save more lives, such as the situation where a bomb is set to stop a fire from spreading to larger areas of a populated city, a practice that has occurred in the distant past—and constitutes a perfect analogy to the justification for the bombings of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, after the Japanese had been duly warned that they would face a rain of destruction like no other in history should they refuse to surrender, a warning provided by President Truman, Prime Minister Churchill, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek on July 26, and again by President Truman on August 7.
So, in fact, there are laws on the books, or in the common law, which specify when a killing is justifiable and defensible. And, under those laws, no one could call Hiroshima or Nagasaki murder. There was a way to avoid it. It was not a sneak attack performed during talks with the enunciated purpose of avoiding war when no hostile act had been undertaken toward the aggressor nation by the country attacked, as was the case of the attack at Pearl Harbor.
The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi discussing with Representative William Green of Pennsylvania the Rankin proposal as an amendment that veterans not be barred from work by union seniority and closed-shop rules.
The debate centered on whether the amendment had been debated properly in committee. Mr. Rankin assured his colleague that there had been debate in Philadelphia and he should have been there to participate in it.
Mr. Green assured that he was presently in the chamber to debate and that he took umbrage at the suggestion of Mr. Rankin that he was not there.
To which Mr. Rankin responded: "I merely said the gentleman was not there at the time."
Mr. Green stated that he had been in Washington.
Drew Pearson was on vacation. Henry Kaiser, the West Coast steel manufacturer and shipbuilder during the war, was the first to fill in for him.
He discusses his proposed draft for a bill for Federal legislation to achieve competitive health care. It would enable the FHA to guarantee 90 percent of the loans to build hospitals and allow physicians who had served in the military to take the benefits of the G.I. Bill and pool them for purposes of establishing group practice clinics in the United States. If ten doctors pooled $25,000, they could obtain a loan for ten times that amount to set up a medical facility.
He foresaw little Mayo Clinics dotting the landscape, "[f]ounded on the sound economics of prepaid medicine", enabling them to operate as business enterprises, supposedly, he offered, to improve the quality and expand the scope of medical services to the public.
Of course, Mr. Kaiser, being a good salesman, was able to sell this scheme to the country and, in our estimate, it served through time only to corrupt medicine into its current predicament.
We reflect back to the post-midnight experience we had some 25 years ago in taking our elderly neighbor, who had a fainting spell, to Kaiser, where he had another spell in front of the admitting desk, was on the floor convulsing. We informed the oblivious nurse at the desk of his predicament and she, slowly, summoned help, as if to say: "It not my job. What you bother me for? I do paperwork."
After a couple of tense minutes, attendants came to the aid of our neighbor and took him in the back. An hour later, we were summoned to the back where we stated to the doctor that it was our assumption that our neighbor would be there overnight. The doctor looked at us as if we were from another planet and stated: "Are you kidding? We get paid not to admit people. We will have him out in 3 to 4 hours."
Sure enough, we received a call at about 4:00 a.m., stating that he was ready to go, about three hours after his convulsing fit on the waiting room floor.
Fifteen years later, our neighbor died in the care of the outpatient facility of Kaiser, having gone in for relatively minor knee surgery, then contracted pneumonia.
So, to put it bluntly, we find that this concept of assembly-line medical care is good for one thing—the pocketbooks of doctors and medical personnel, but antithetical to the interests of patients. It thrives on malpractice in our estimate.
We will not bother to synopsize Mr. Kaiser's self-trumpeting of his car as it miserably flopped.
After discussing the hope of West Coast steel to stimulate industry and, rather than compete with the East, import more steel from Youngstown and Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas than before, he states that American business was climbing on a merry-go-round and hoped that the best man would get the brass ring—while the consuming public, as usual, got and gets the royal shaft.
Marcus Childs discusses the problems ahead in occupying Japan and converting the Japanese culture from its worship of the Emperor as divine to some form of democracy while insuring that the ability to make war would be permanently dissolved.
He informs that when OWI relayed to Japan the terms of surrender, the Japanese made no effort to jam the broadcast. But when news was broadcast by OWI that the Emperor was to be controlled by an Allied occupation government, the announcement was jammed by the Japanese.
"That was the stumbling block—how to tell the people that the divine power of the Emperor is to be subservient to a foreigner and a 'barbarian.' "
Mr. Childs indicates that, at one time, the American plan had been to occupy all of Japan, a task which would have proved difficult in the remote areas, where rebel groups could have formed and acted as snipers and saboteurs to the occupying forces. But, with the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, that plan had been altered to occupation of only selected points, presumably cities which were military and industrial centers, a much more practicable task.
As the peace had come so suddenly, there had been little time to work out concrete plans for the occupation. Mr. Childs reasons therefore that much of the occupation plan would have to be worked out as it proceeded.
A letter writer wonders why the opponents of making permanent the Fair Employment Practices Committee, such as Congressman Joe Ervin, did not attack, instead of minority support organizations, the chief proponent of the FEPC, the Federal Churches of Christ, which included most Protestant churches.
Another letter writer, a Navy lieutenant in Raleigh, expresses thanks to the newspaper for its advertising and publicity campaign for the recruitment of Navy Waves, female recruits. The recruiting office had received the "tear sheets" from the newspaper containing the advertising.
A third letter submits some anti-OPA verse. Sample:
No underwear, no shirts, nor shorts
We might, however, fit you in a
For everyone who's gone
We'll have plenty on the counters
But then, one day, he awoke to find that it was, indeed,
Harry Golden, in the fourth of eight synopses of famous trials, sets forth this time to examine the denunciation of Lucius Sergius Catiline by Cicero, Consul to Rome, in the Roman Senate on November 7, 63 B.C. Cicero claimed to have uncovered a plot by Catiline against the Roman State.
Catiline, a dissolute noble who held no public office, fled from Rome. The motivation for his plot had been to stop harassment by his creditors. The plot attracted many disgruntled politicians and persons in ill repute within the Empire.
The plot, set for November 12, 63 B.C., called for simultaneous assassination of all the leading figures of authority in Rome, setting fire to the city, and creating general chaos, out of which the government would be seized and Catiline to become its dictator.
The oration defeated the plot and saved the Roman Empire: "Listen, O Catiline, while I speak of the night before. You should now see that I watch far more keenly for the safety than you do for the destruction of the Republic."
One might reflect, however, as Mr. Golden does not do, on whether Catiline might have better served history by succeeding, in advance of the coming of Augustus, and, thereby, perhaps, saved the life of the yet unborn Carpenter of Nazareth, from his death by crucifixion as a traitor to Rome and a subversive.
Was Cicero to be admired or was he to be despised as merely a kowtowing supplicant to his Emperor Julius, preserving, by peroration, his own place in power?
How, O Cicero, do you answer?
Cicero, incidentally, also denounced Mark Antony.
Framed Edition
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