Thursday, August 9, 1945

The Charlotte News

Thursday, August 9, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page, surprisingly not in headlines, reserved instead for the Russian attack in Manchuria, tells of the second deadly atomic bomb, Fat Man, dropped by the B-29 "Bockscar", piloted by Captain Fred Bock, striking the Kyushu Island city of Nagasaki at 11:01 a.m. local time, 10:01 p.m. the previous night, Washington War Time, with a force of 21 kilotons, about the same as that of the Hiroshima fission bomb. Fat Man was an implosion-type device based on plutonium, the same as that of the Trinity test bomb on July 16 in New Mexico.

The report at the time was sparse, with less information than had been carried on Monday anent the dropping of the first bomb on Hiroshima. It was being speculated that more than one bomb may have been dropped on Nagasaki.

General Carl Spaatz speculated that Nagasaki, with jam-packed houses closely built throughout the city, might have been even more vulnerable to the bomb than had been Hiroshima. Nagasaki, however, was only 70 percent the size in population of Hiroshima, 375,000. Consequently, the loss in numbers of people killed in Nagasaki was smaller, estimated at about 40,000 to 75,000 from the initial blast, and more afterward, dying from burns and radiation poisoning.

Kokura had been the alternative target.

As the report continues on the inside page, it explains that Nagasaki had been hit by B-29 bombing raids a year earlier from China and again on July 31 and August 1 from Okinawa. The city was home to three Mitsubishi plants, one for ordnance, one for steel and arms, and one for electrical manufacturing. The bomb had struck between the ordnance and steel plants. The city was formed as an amphitheater of 12 square miles amid hills, situated on reclaimed marshland. The city was of strategic importance for shipment of both materials and troops. It had large shipbuilding and repair facilities used by both the Japanese Navy and merchant marine.

The crew of Bockscar had radioed that the drop had produced "good results".

General Spaatz reported that 402 B-29's had attacked four other Japanese cities the previous day and this day, dropping 2,300 tons of incendiary bombs, a little more than 10% of the yield of the single atomic bomb. Three B-29's were lost in those raids.

Admiral Halsey's Third Fleet, having taken a hiatus during the typhoon, attacked Japan anew on southeastern Honshu with more than 1,200 carrier planes, brushing aside the first air opposition encountered since beginning operations off the coast of Japan a month earlier. There were no ships damaged.

Admiral Nimitz announced that, for the second time in eight days, carrier planes had attacked Wake Island, in Japanese hands since shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The headline story of the day was the Russian attack in Manchuria from Siberia, beginning shortly after midnight, along a 2,000-mile frontier from east and west, while American planes and Chinese paratroops hit escape routes of the Japanese in China, and Soviet planes attacked in northern Korea and northern Manchuria. It was expected that the Japanese Kwantung Army would seek to concentrate their troops along the Yellow River to make a stand against the Russians.

The central part of the attack across the eastern frontier had taken place along a 300-mile line from Huton, just across the Russian border in Manchuria, to Hunchun, appearing to be headed for the key industrial center at Harbin.

The attack from the western frontier originated from Lupin in the northwestern elbow of the Manchurian border, about 500 miles northwest of Harbin.

The Japanese and puppet Manchuokuoan armies were both reported to be counter-attacking, according to the Japanese news agency, Domei.

Manchukuo extended to within 30 miles of Vladivostok. The Kwantung Army had been defeated by the Russians in an undeclared war in the area of Chankufeng, near the northern tip of Korea, prior to the start of the European war.

London reports estimated that the Japanese had two million men in northern China and Manchuria. There was no accurate estimate of the Soviet strength at present.

Manchukuo, having been overrun by the Japanese in 1931-32, as Secretary of War Stimson, then Secretary of State in the Hoover Administration had protested the aggression, was the breadbasket for the Japanese Empire—grains of orient pearl.

It also held oil and coal deposits which enabled its protective arsenal to be built.

It had been speculated in recent months that the area would be the fallback position for the Japanese from the home islands when life there became unbearable—which, short of surrender, with more atomic weapons promised, it certainly would have been, and likely still would be. Witness Bikini Atoll, later.

Salt. Salt is the way to store the radioactive waste, and salt it away. Carrots.

Leaflets were dropped over Japan by American bombers telling the Japanese people that Russia was now engaged in the war against them.

The Japanese leadership were said to be meeting to discuss counter-measures to the new threat posed by the Soviet Union, to present to the party and the High Command.

There were, however, other things on their minds at this stage. There would be no proposal of counter-measures.

Soviet radio broadcast that Russia was out to settle an old score with its arch-enemy, Japan. The Russo-Japanese war had preceded in 1906.

Soviet Foreign Commissar V. M. Molotov disclosed that, in mid-July, Emperor Hirohito had asked that the Soviet Union act as mediator in the Pacific war. The Emperor had received his answer.

Americans now have Big Bomb. You have rocket-bomb?

He had informed the Big Three leadership of the solicitation while at Potsdam, and also indicated that the Japanese refusal of the July 26 ultimatum of the leaders of the U.S., Great Britain, and China had rendered the Japanese proposal a moot issue.

Leading to the declaration of war by Russia was the speech by Stalin on November 7, 1944 in which he had denounced Japan as an "aggressive nation", notwithstanding the extant and continuing neutrality pact between Russia nad Japan formed in March, 1941, and also the decision in March, 1945 not to extend the neutrality pact for another four years. Technically, under that agreement, neither nation was to attack the other for at least a year following the expiration of the pact.

Russia saw its entry to the war as fulfillment of its Allied duty and to enable hastening the end of the war and preventing of casualties.

On another inside page, correspondent Jack Bell speculates that the entry to the war by the Russians would provide them inevitably a place at the peace table in the Pacific, which would enable Russia to determine which islands America would be able to have as military bases after the war. Presumably, Russia would now be bound by the Cairo declaration of late 1943, in which Premier Stalin did not participate, following the first Big Three meeting at Tehran.

The President gave a talk to the nation via radio on this night at 10:00 p.m.

In a press conference earlier in the day, he outlined a five-point program to hasten reconversion to a peacetime economy. The program included expanded production of materials in short supply for both military and civilian demands, limitations on the manufacture of products utilizing materials in short supply, control of inventories to avoid hoarding, granting priorities to eliminate bottlenecks in supplies, and allocation of scarce materials for the production of low-priced items deemed essential to the continued success of the price stabilization program.

The President also held a discussion on the atomic bomb with Secretary of State James Byrnes, Secretary of War Stimson, Manhattan Project head Major General Leslie Groves, Dr. Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. James Conant, president of Harvard Land Grant College, and George Harrison, once the president of the Big Apple Federal Reserve Bank, who had also contributed to civil engineering work on the Manhattan Project.

Hal Boyle, on the other inside page, writes from San Francisco regarding the First Infantry Division saying which had it that: "The good die young, and Peters will live forever." The statement referred to Lt. Col. Leonard T. Peters, headquarters commandant of the Fifth Corps during the latter stages of its march through Germany and Czechoslovakia. He was the Army housekeeper, making sure everything in camp ran smoothly. Col. Peters believed that General Washington had been the greatest general in history as he never used telephone wire.

Col. Peters, age 29, had to set up communications lines for ten camps and 1,150 officers and men in one month, all while the Corps was moving at a rate sometimes of fifty miles per day. Not only were phones having to be maintained, but hot meals provided to the men two to three times daily, guards posted, and everyone bedded comfortably.

He felt at the end that he could provide Ringling Brothers a few pointers.

Mr. Boyle had first met Col. Peters when he was a captain, during the North African campaign. He ran a Boston personnel agency in civilian life.

He prided himself on being a confidence man who cut red tape, got plenty of unexpected dishes to the men during the war, even steak and ice cream. There had been, he said, no lawsuits, in any event.

He chose his camp sites close enough to enemy lines that he could collect war souvenirs from the living enemy. He had been questioned by a battalion commander when he was laying out a site in Germany so close to the front that the commander had wondered at the choice. He had convinced the commander to let him have his way and his general had approved the insistence, as he had wanted the battalion moved forward anyway. Sometimes Col. Peters got so close to the enemy lines in scouting for sites that the scouting party had to engage in fights to return to their lines.

His cohorts in the enterprise, Private Irving Cohen of Brooklyn and Staff Sgt. Manuel Sylvia of New Bedford, Mass., had ordered so many Germans from their homes in setting up headquarters sites below Pilsen that one of them had said that when he returned home, he would likely be so accustomed to the practice that he would order his wife to vacate the house in twenty minutes as the Fifth Corps was taking over.

A little piece below Mr. Boyle's column relates that the censor's office at American headquarters in Guam had taken down a pessimistic sign which read, "Golden Gate by '48" and replaced it, in light of recent events, with, "Golden Gate by Sept. 8".

Soldiers from the East Coast had their own sign: "Old Gotham, Here I come, at the latest, by December 1."

The Golden Gate-bound men had the better prescience, even if a lone Japanese soldier held out in the Philippines until March, 1974.

And in Galway in Eire, Martin Ward had been elected king of 5,000 members of the gypsies who roamed in caravans mending pots and pans and selling horses and goats, the Tinker tribe. The group had gathered at Connemara—not the one in the North Carolina hills near Asheville—for a coronation ceremony. Only the Tinkers were invited. King Ward had beaten Patrick Dodd in the election.

Prizes included free meals and drinks anywhere in the kingdom, four horses, the best of the gypsy caravans, and the choice of Tinker colleens as a bride.

On the editorial page, "United at Last" comments on the Russian declaration of war on Japan, that it was not a "thundering answer to Port Arthur and Tsushima" of the prior Russo-Japanese war, though enmity between Japan and Russia went back to the days of the Tsars.

The breaking of the neutrality treaty, it suggests, was more characteristic of Soviet Russia than would have been its maintenance. The Soviets had always been practical in their alliances, such as its intervention in the Spanish Civil War and its protests at Munich in 1938.

Declaring war now was consistent with the United Nations Charter policy of opposing aggression and aggressive states. There would be those who would accuse the Russians of simply being opportunists, to be able to have a greater role in the Pacific peace and expand its power in the Pacific. But the fact remained that Russia had moved from one bloody war in Europe to this one and had made its sympathies known for some time.

It could act as the final straw to obtain Japanese surrender, even if Japanese fanaticism might cause it to continue.

The war, it concludes, had been inevitably shortened by several months by Russia's entry to it.

"Judge Parker Again" follows up on the editorial of the previous week, urging President Truman to appoint Judge John J. Parker, on the Federal District Court bench in Charlotte, to the Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice Owen Roberts, who had succeeded Judge Parker as the nominee in 1930 after Judge Parker was defeated for the nomination by a single Senate vote based on his alleged racist and anti-labor stances. At least two Senators who had voted against him, Senator Borah of Idaho and Senator George Norris of Nebraska, had subsequently indicated that, given his liberal record on the Federal bench, they would have changed their votes. The N.A.A.C.P., which had opposed him originally, had also stated that they would not do so presently.

Since President Truman had already indicated his intention to appoint a Republican, Judge Parker fit the bill. And he had something which was absent from the resumes of his primary competitors for the position, Senators Warren Austin of Vermont and Harold Burton of Ohio, who would get the nomination, judicial experience.

The appointment, it concludes, would rectify an injustice of fifteen years earlier.

"Up and Atom" suggests that the atom bomb would not long be maintained as a secret among the nations. The Nazi scientists had been on its trail before the end of the war.

While perplexed by the mysteries of the new weapon, the editorial was more perplexed by its limited use experimentally on Japan rather than showering the islands with multiple atomic bombs to drive home the point. It favored scores of the earth-shakers being dropped.

It asks: "Who suspects that the Germans would have held back their own atomic bombs—or that the Japs themselves would ever pause for a war of nerves if they stood in our shoes? If we've got 'em, and they're ready, why not shoot now?"

Of course, it must be borne in mind that this sentiment was offered before the devastating effects of nuclear fallout and radiation were known and understood. Had multiple atomic bombs been dropped, then the results to the entire planet could have been devastating within a few weeks, with the Pacific trade winds blowing the nuclear fallout to the Pacific coast, as surely as they had carried those explosive balloons from Japan in recent months.

So, the editorial, for all its sound logic, simply did not know whereof it spoke, understandably, given the shroud of secrecy which had prevailed throughout the Manhattan Project.

Indeed, some of the scientists had worried initially that the first test in the New Mexico desert might set up a chain reaction in the atmosphere and blow the whole planet to kingdom come.

That the planet survived all of the nuclear testing which went on during the Cold War is perhaps testimony only to the planet's insistence on survival, with or without human beings aboard the surface of its grand sphere, and man's final collective realization, slow as it may be coming, of that prospect, that the earth will do us in and plough us under should we collectively be unkind to it.

Out, out, d'Matom Spot.

"License to Steal" finds the problems regarding the absentee ballots of Davidson County during the 1938 Congressional race there and the 1944 general election to be instructive of the Legislature's insistence on keeping the absentee ballot alive to benefit Democrats and enable legalized stealing of elections through manipulation of absentee balloting.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record finds Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi urging President Truman, after he returned home from Potsdam and began cleaning house, to start at the War Department, to "stop the commissioning of Communists in the United States Army." The three primary responsibles, he contended, were Secretary Stimson, Undersecretary Robert Patterson, and Assistant Secretary John J. McCloy. He thought they should resign.

He claimed to have the lowdown through the House Un-American Activities Committee, of which he was the ranking member. Men of the armed forces were protesting these Commies in the Army trying to indoctrinate the men with Communism.

Drew Pearson again, for the second day in a row, looks at JCS Order 1067, the Joint Chiefs' approved plan for occupation of the American zone of Germany, which had been, until now, held in secret, unpublished, despite the President's authorization for same. Mr. Pearson airs it out.

He publishes another part of it this date. Again, you may read it as you please. We will take another few minutes off, along with Mr. Pearson.

Marquis Childs comments on the "earth-shaking" news of the development of the atomic bomb. It had been the most carefully guarded military secret of the war. Only a handful of men knew what was going on in the development of the bomb. Even President Truman, while Vice-President or as chairman of the War Investigating Committee as Senator, had not been taken into the circle of confidence on the Gadget.

For months, the Office of Censorship had been issuing warnings to journalists not to speculate on the development of such a device or that there was an ongoing race with Germany and Japan for its development, despite that the enemy must have realized the fact. Mr. Childs had heard General Eisenhower impart in April that the Germans were beaten but that he did not discount the possibility that they might come forth with a new weapon.

Rumors had abounded at times that Germany was about to deliver up the atomic bomb. "Fantastic stories circulated as to the lengths to which the Allies went to checkmate this possibility." It included boring tunnels underground, successfully, to interfere with the testing.

Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan had hinted of such a new weapon in January, as had Field Marshal Jan Smuts of South Africa on the eve of the San Francisco Conference in late April.

And now the "pillar of smoke and fire" which had obliterated Hiroshima was on the world stage as a "primeval force". It had brought about either a new world or the end.

While the bomb was secret at this point, it would likely not be long, he suggests, until the Russian scientists were able to develop their own version.

"The sad thing is that with one part of our mind we are still slowly struggling out of the Stone Age. On the technical side man has jumped up into the 21st century with Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon."

Many military observers would smugly comment that for every new weapon, a counter would be developed and that this one would be no exception. But, says Mr. Childs, that was no longer a reliable axiom.

Dorothy Thompson suggests that the Potsdam Declaration had been in some respects the final peace treaty with Germany. It rested on the assumption of guilt of all Germans for the war. But there was no reference to the concentration camps and the millions who had suffered and perished there, nor for those in Germany who had died for their resistance to the Nazis.

Ms. Thompson did not subscribe to the notion that State and People were one. It was bad doctrine, but also served as a warning: if Americans were ever to remain quiescent at criminal acts by their Government, they would be deemed complicit under the theory now being employed to punish Germany. Unless the Declaration were modified, she believes it would lead to a crime against "civilization, humanity, history, common sense, and the interests of Europe as well as the security and prosperity of the United States".

So, she asks, with the fact that the public and press had been barred from the meetings at Potsdam which had determined this Tripartite arrangement, what complicity the American people had in it. There had been no vox populi at work by any nation in its formation, only the leaders themselves.

She notes that, while the leaders increasingly shut out the people from the decision-making process, they also held the people increasingly accountable for their actions, a hallmark of dictatorships and becoming a reality within the democracies.

She warns that, as in dictatorships, the American people had slowly allowed their freedom of dissent to be eroded. When the American people had accepted "unconditional surrender", as decided between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill at Casablanca in January, 1943, as the only acceptable terms of peace with the Axis nations, they had surrendered their freedom to determine the conditions of the peace.

When Mr. Churchill, she continues, refused to accept the Atlantic Charter's application to Germany and Japan, he also did so with respect to Poland, such that nothing could guarantee freedom and independence now for the Poles.

Many observers believed the Potsdam agreement to have been appalling, but remained accepting of it as the best deal which could be formulated under the circumstances. It was time, she concludes, to stop sugar-coating the reality of such expedient corn flakes.

A letter writer from Monroe sees in the defeat of the Conservatives in Britain by Labor a movement toward the left which was healthy for world society. For with the death blow having been delivered to Fascism worldwide, the ultra-conservative part of societies would be running for "the tall timber" to escape the liberals, including Franco in Spain, Petain and Laval in France, and Senators such as Reynolds, Wheeler, and Taft, and columnists of the like of Westbrook Pegler, the isolationist interests, in America.

He posits that the new British Government would effect greater unity in Europe and Asia than had the previous Government and would cut the war with Japan in half, removing the fear of imperialism between Britain and Russia.

Something was cut in half, but not the length of the war.

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