Monday, September 6, 1943

The Charlotte News

Monday, September 6, 1943

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that against weak resistance the British-Canadian invasion force on the mainland of Italy had pushed inland ten miles to Santo Stefano D'Aspromonte, reaching the precipices of Aspromonte, translated Bitter Mountain. Other forces had advanced east of Bagnara along the east coast of and beyond captured Melito on the Ionian shore, while capturing three thousand Axis prisoners along the way.

A German broadcast reported the evacuation of civilians and military personnel from southern Calabria, site of Friday's landing by the British Eighth Army and the Canadian First Division. The broadcast also speculated on the prospect of another invasion to come, either at Corsica and Sardinia or at Puglie on the east coast of Italy.

A large RAF raid of about 700 bombers attacked Ludwigshafen and Mannheim along the Rhine, releasing between a thousand and fifteen hundred tons of bombs.

German radio reported a daylight raid on southwestern Germany by American bombers.

As the Red Army continued its westward movement along a 600-mile front from Smolensk to the Sea of Azov, a contingent of Russians had penetrated to within three miles east of Stalino, mining and industrial center held by the Nazis since October 21, 1941, as other forces approached the city from slightly more distant points from the north and east.

A map on the inside page shows the five points of penetration by the Soviets in the Ukraine.

In the Pacific, Olen Clements describes firsthand the landing on Saturday of Australian troops and American engineers on the Japanese stronghold at Lae in New Guinea, fifteen miles northwest of Salamaua, in the largest offensive operation of men and ships yet to occur in the Southwest Pacific. They brought jeeps, bulldozers, and steel mats on which to ride them, began cutting roads as soon as they landed. The troops had already advanced eight to ten miles.

Advances were also made in the Salamaua area with the intention of loosening the stalled offensive there with a trap of the Japanese by the combined forces approaching from north and south.

It was reported from London that the Germans were busy preparing southern coastal defenses in France, anticipatory to an Allied landing in the region.

It was estimated that half a million German infantry troops were in France. It was also estimated that 200,000 Frenchmen in the Underground would assist an Allied invasion.

The Washington Evening Star claimed to have received high level information indicating that General George C. Marshall was to be named commander-in-chief of the Allied forces in Europe to lead a Continental invasion from England. The report had it that General Eisenhower would get the nod to replace General Marshall as Chief of Staff of the Army.

The Star had received bad information. General Eisenhower got the appointment in December from FDR as commander-in-chief of the Allied forces in Europe. General Marshall remained Army Chief of Staff through his resignation at the end of the war at which point General Eisenhower was appointed Chief of Staff to replace General Marshall. Marshall became President Truman's Secretary of State in 1947 after a year-long mission to China to try to negotiate a coalition government between the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists under Mao.

Counseling against any spirit of renewed isolationism after the war, Prime Minister Churchill told an audience at Harvard that America "cannot rise to be, in many ways, the leading community in a civilized world without being involved in its problems, without being convulsed by its agonies and inspired by its causes."

Near Dubose, Georgia, a costly lesson was imparted at the scene of an automobile accident as seven persons who had stopped to look at the scene were killed and seven others injured when another car driven by a sailor, blinded by headlights of one of the stopped cars, plowed into the onlookers.

On the editorial page, "Meat Trouble" comments on meat being sold in Charlotte at above the legal ceilings established by the Office of Price Administration and OPA's poor job of doing anything to sanction such sellers and re-establish the ceilings.

"Murder Boom", in typical sardonic fashion for The News, chronicles the murder rate of the Queen City, until August, 1943 doing well for the year with only seven murders, a far cry from the days just two years and more earlier when Charlotte led the nation per capita for murders at 30 to 40 per year in a city of 100,000. But three murders had occurred in each of August and September, prompting the column to encourage the murderers to match the figures for the good ol’ days. By the end of the year at that rate, it concludes, Charlotte might yet re-establish itself as the nation’s leader in the gruesome arena.

"No Retraction" optimistically suggests that despite Churchill's statement that a second front in Europe would not come until it was assured of success did not necessarily preclude such a grand offensive prior to the end of 1943, that with the toe of Italy now invaded, many possibilities for invasion were opened from the south, into the Balkans, into southern France.

Raymond Clapper criticizes FDR and Cordell Hull for being overly timid of bringing forth a concrete policy statement regarding establishment of a post-war United Nations organization with an international police force to put down aggression. The chief concern appeared to be the reaction to these notions by Southern Democrats who were typically suspicious of such international organizations and their implications for preservation of United States sovereignty--a concern which many continue to have to this day, especially among Southerners, suspicious of creation of a world government.

Mr. Clapper, however, finds the timidity without reason as he listened to a radio broadcast by Senator Tom Connally of Texas, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, typical Southern states’ rightist, typical Southern conservative. Yet, the Senator advocated to his constituents the creation of the United Nations organization with an international police force to enforce the peace, that any concerns over preservation of sovereignty were unfounded, that all treaty commitments to some degree compromised freedom of action of the signatory nation, but for the preservation of world peace and prevention of a repetition of the bloodbath presently taking place in Europe and in the Pacific, it was worth the exercise of the sovereign power of the country to participate in such an international body with Britain, China, and the Soviet Union after the war.

Mr. Clapper laments that instead of providing such a firm commitment from the top, the President appeared more concerned about the recent statements of Drew Pearson critical of Cordell Hull for supposedly being traditionally anti-Soviet.

Samuel Grafton asserts that he does not agree with Drew Pearson's statement about Hull, for the truth was that there was no way to determine a consistent State Department policy toward either the Russians or the reactionary governments of Europe. He offers that the sensitivity of the President and State Department over criticism of the Department arose from this inconsistency and the inability to state with proper candor that the United States had opposed consistently any re-establishment of reactionary regimes, exampled by the recent rebuke of the Office of War Information for the broadcast asserting that King Victor Emmanuel was "a little moron" and that Pietro Badoglio was a "Fascist".

Drew Pearson looks at the issue of paying 80 cents per day to prisoners of war utilized as domestic farm laborers. The Farmers Union had joined other organized labor organizations in opposing the wage as encouraging unfair competition with conventional farm labor. The three other farm labor organizations, however, were expected to support the wage.

He also opines that the great evacuation by the Nazis of people from cities in Europe may have had as much to do with getting civilians who might be disloyal to Hitler out of the metropolitan areas where they could cause the most trouble as it was concern for the safety of the people.

He begins the column with focus on the problem being examined by Office of War Mobilization Director James Byrnes, that of over-procurement of items for the war now overstocking storage houses. He cites the current overflow of demolition bombs manufactured at the behest of the British early in the war, but sitting idle now when the trend was for incendiary bombs. The key question arising from the issue of the overstock of obsolete items was whether there was also misplaced emphasis on the drafting of fathers into the military to meet the quota for a 10.5 million-man Army by the end of 1943.

There were too many shoestrings, too many tanks, too many infantry weapons generally with the trend now turned toward airpower.

In other words, Mr. Byrnes had forty red, white, and blue shoestrings, and probably a thousand telephones which wouldn't ring. He had to find a place to get rid of these things.

Eventually, though it would take a couple of more decades down the road, they found it.

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