Tuesday, October 10, 1944

The Charlotte News

Tuesday, October 10, 1944

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the First Army had completely surrounded Aachen and had delivered to the Germans defending the city an ultimatum to surrender within 24 hours or be annihilated by concentrated air and artillery fire. The deadline was 10:50 the next morning. Three G.I.'s had carried a bedsheet flag of truce into the city to deliver the terms of unconditional surrender, ultimately provided to a young German first lieutenant.

The Army formed a 25-mile front along the approaches to Duren and Julich, leading respectively to Dusseldorf and Cologne.

The Third Army pushed back a German bulge in the Nancy-Metz area, which had extended from Fresnes-En-Salunois, fifteen miles north and east of Nancy, to Cheminot, eighteen miles north of Nancy. The bulge was now straightened.

The RAF attacked Bochum, a rail center in the Ruhr Valley, as well as Wilhelmshaven.

Bad weather limited U.S. planes to an attack on Euskirchen. Only eight planes were missing from the previous day's 2,000-plane American mission against Coblenz, Mainz, and Schweinfurt.

British and Greek troops had occupied Corinth without opposition. The Germans had already evacuated the city at the south end of the Isthmus connecting the Peloponnesus and the Greek mainland. Only 250 Greeks were found as defenders; they promptly surrendered.

The Allies began attacking the southern Albanian port of Sarande, a supply base for the Germans occupying Corfu.

Dingle Foct, Parliamentary secretary for the Ministry of Economics in Britain, related to Commons that Germany had exploited its satrapies to the tune of 26.4 billion dollars since occupation had begun in 1939-40 of France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Serbia in Yugoslavia, and Bohemia-Moravia and Slovakia in Czechoslovakia. Subsequent to the liberation of France, Holland, and Belgium, the exploitation rate would fall to about 1.84 billion dollars annually from its pre-liberation rate of 2.76 billion dollars.

The Russians poured artillery fire on Memel as two Soviet armies to the south moved toward the East Prussian city of Tilsit. The Russian forces south of Memel had reached the Baltic, cutting off German escape routes for the 150,000 defenders in Latvia and Lithuania.

To the south, the Russian armies had advanced to within 50 miles of Budapest, aiming at the Ruthenian highlands, seeking to join forces with the Fourth Ukrainian Army on the Czechoslovak border.

In the Pacific, the American forces invaded on Sunday against light opposition the tenth Palau Island of the campaign, Garakayo. The purpose of the raid was to eliminate enemy shore batteries which could shell American occupying forces on Peleliu.

Admiral Nimitz told reporters, hurriedly scribbling the details, of a major naval victory for the Allies over the Japanese Navy off the coast of Korea. The punch line was saved for the end: the battle had occurred in late June, 1592.

Musicians Union czar James Petrillo refused the entreaties of the President to dissolve the ban, extant since August 1, 1942, on making recordings and transcriptions for civilian use, despite having been ordered by the War Labor Board on June 15 to lift the ban, an order which the union had ignored. Mr. Petrillo had responded that before the ban would be lifted, the union insisted that RCA and Columbia sign the same contract which 105 other companies had signed.

Economic Stabilization Director Fred Vinson had determined that the War Labor Board's order in this instance could not be enforced because it did not relate to an essential war industry.

On the editorial page, "New Threat" comments on the country having become accustomed during the campaign to the charges and counter-charges from each side, until Alf Landon, the unsuccessful 1936 Republican candidate for the presidency, suddenly stuck his head into the mix and proclaimed that there could be no lasting peace founded on the New Deal economy.

But, it flew in the face of the Dewey endorsement of New Deal programs. Moreover, Governor Landon, himself, had found the nation's war production incomparable while at the same time contending that during the first nine years of his Administration, through the beginning of the war, the President had deliberately crippled American business.

In the face of such logic, the editorial could think of no rebuttal.

"No Machine?" comments on Governor Melville Broughton's statement that North Carolina government had been so good through the years because it was not dominated by a political machine. Governors were elected by popular will, not the will of machine pols.

Yet, says the piece, while finding no graft and corruption running rampant as in most machine-dominated realms, there was the issue of one-party rule in the state. And Dr. Ralph McDonald, the loser in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in the spring to Gregg Cherry, had campaigned against "the machine". Former Democratic Governor and Senator, now Mecklenburg Congressman, Cam Morrison, had vowed to bring a new deal in state politics. What were they then talking about? asks the piece rhetorically.

It was not clear that divine providence was, alone, truly the guide by which the voters cast their choice every quadrennial, and not instead freighted with the considerable influence of party politics, not dissimilar to machine politics, even if less nefariously oppressive while, behind the scenes, being nearly as manipulative through the use of chicanery and quelling of choice as tools to limit the vote, rather than muscle and stuffing of ballot boxes. Or, as with their Deeper Southern-crossed brethren, forced by the pangs of time into gravitational implosion, squelching the vote itself and refusing the franchise altogether to those intended by the Fifteenth Amendment to have it without reservation by the mere expedient of being a United States citizen, by birth or naturalization.

"Spastics" reports of News columnist Dorothy Knox, daily author of "I Believe Everything", having found two or three years earlier that North Carolina's health institutions had neglected the children who suffered from "spastic paralysis".

While most people thought them retarded, they were not, indeed often were exceptionally bright. But the paralysis affected their vocal chords and so their speech sounded as gibberish. So, the State's solution had been to commit them to an institution for the retarded and mentally ill, located at Kinston, the Caswell School, (or, in the case of the social custom of segregation of blacks, a single ward at the State Hospital in Goldsboro).

Ms. Knox had attempted to effect a remedy to the situation but got nowhere.

Now, however, there appeared some official interest, as the State Auditor had proposed to set aside a ward at the Orthopedic Hospital in Gastonia for the treatment and care of these children. The recommendation had been endorsed by the State Health Officer.

"They Served" supports the extension of the G. I. Bill to the men who had served in the Civilian Air Patrol during the war. There had been some 45,000 such men who had seen active duty, subject to Army rules and regulations, and had performed perilous work, about a hundred having been killed, helping to thwart the U-boat menace in the Atlantic, especially threatening during 1942. The Army and Navy had at the time inadequate forces to patrol and fight the menace, and the Civilian Air Patrol had stepped into the breach, reporting locations of U-boats and thereby enabling pinpoint targeting by the Navy and Air Force.

Drew Pearson, still in Baton Rouge, relates the inside story of the fall in July of the Tojo Cabinet in Japan. It was not only the result of the continued string of Japanese defeats in the Pacific, but also had been in consequence of Tojo's inability to control Japan's cartels, Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda. These four firms owned every major industry in Japan.

About three months before Pearl Harbor, the "New Economic Structure" was formed in Japan, not, as many observers had believed, an order whereby the military ruled business, but rather the opposite, in which several super-cartels were established to control each industry of the country. While theoretically set up as functions of the Government, the control was provided to the executives of the large companies. The iron and steel association was headed, for instance, by an executive at Mitsubishi.

This structure worked well in the opening months of the war after Pearl Harbor, but began to falter as more of the Japanese Navy and Air Force were being decimated by the American forces, requiring more production of planes and ships, which was not forthcoming. Tojo, in January, 1943, had sought more power over the associations, but the associations had refused.

He tried again in late 1943, by forming the Munitions Ministry which he ran, designed to unify production by placing it under the control of the Army. But the business associations resisted again and moved in on the power structure in November, forcing the addition of several businessmen to the Cabinet, neutralizing the Army's control.

Marquis Childs tells of the lack of impact on the eventual outcome of the election in California by the visit to Southern California of Governor Dewey. The state appeared headed for the Democratic column on November 7.

Mr. Dewey, in his speech at the Los Angeles Coliseum, had made a favorable impression among conservative interests in labor by his support of a broadened social security program. Yet, it was doubtful he had changed many votes.

Old Guard Republicans were disappointed in the line. They wanted an unreserved attack on the New Deal. They got instead a thoughtful analysis of its benefits and the need for extension of those benefits. They had desired more of the fiery anti-Roosevelt rhetoric displayed by Mr. Dewey in his recent Oklahoma City speech.

But in the end, given that there were twice as many registered Democrats in California as Republicans, no matter how the Governor had approached them, he was destined not to win the state. Furthermore, there had been a thorough effort to register new voters, displaced war workers, and the result promised a record turnout of 1.5 million new voters in the third most populous state of the country, behind only New York and Pennsylvania.

Samuel Grafton, still in Fort Worth, had talked to two CIO organizers. They didn't shout or holler, he reports, but were plenty sore at the Republicans, just as sore as the Republicans were at them. It was typical of the 1944 campaign in which the Republicans were the activists while the Democrats were busy but quiet.

In Texas, the Republicans had run on the single issue that the CIO and Sidney Hillman wanted to take over the state. But it had proved an ineffective line and so the Republicans had dropped it.

The ranchers and oil men were against the President, said one Texan to Mr. Grafton. The common people were for him. The former were angry, blindly so, disturbingly so, "heedless and bull mad"; the latter were not.

Hal Boyle reports from Heerlen in Holland on October 5 of the captured journal of a German civilian officer describing the retreat from Holland as "a disgusting sight" as the road from Maastricht to Aachen was filled with long columns of men and vehicles. The journal explained that Hitler had personally ordered the evacuation of Aachen, that Himmler had visited the front and found Maastricht without need of evacuation.

The railroad was supposed to have one train each day to Cologne.

The Americans had arrived in the vicinity of Aachen. Ten had taken communion at church on Sunday. The local people found the Americans different from the Germans who had persecuted the local Catholics.

A letter writer answers the gentleman from the previous week who espoused the belief that there had been no depression from which the Roosevelt Administration had to extricate the country, that the poor of that era had been simply the no-account, shiftless mendicants who had saddled their heirs with the bill for their lassitude and indolence.

Another letter writer takes note of a photograph from Paris appearing in The News, showing the marquee of the Hot Club, advertising a performance therein by Django Reinhardt and his quintet, including Stephan Grapelli, violinist. It was the first indication, says the author, that Mr. Reinhardt had survived the German occupation of France.

Questions of the Day: If the Hot Club had a counterpart in Anchorage, the Cold Club, and the two merged to form a cartel, Hotai-Koldai Klubishi, would the resulting Combination, the bundle of sticks thus formed, be a criminal enterprise for its inevitable tendency toward disorder in the universe by transference of heat from the Hot Club to the Cold Club? Would the ice-pack of the frozen tundra in Alaska thereby, through time, melt apace at an arithmetic rate? Or, is the transference of power from the Hot Club to the Cold Club one which would be democratizing, that is, on the square and levelling, of the universe and thus salutary? Or, since, according to the Bible, Jesus is always either hot or cold, but never lukewarm, is the transference of heat--by the laws of physics, always flowing from the Hot to the Cold, for the molecular inevitabilities in constant dynamism--, brought on by the cartelization of the clubs, anti-Christian? Should not the Hot always remain Hot; the Cold, always Cold, until the Day of Judgment?

And, returning to the front page, in celebration of the 33d birthday the day before of the founding of the Chinese Republic, War Minister Ho Ying-Chin favored at Chungking stringent application of wartime restrictions and such distribution of China's manpower to effect increased war production. In the face of adversity in the way of the war, he also urged the people to be strong and of good courage.

So, you may ask, was our little tour of organized crime, within the Grander Tour of the Universe, premeditated or simply spontaneous in its generation? The cold fact remains: We did not read ahead, per our usual course, at least not with any conscious intent so to do or awareness of it, if so. It all came about from "The Price of Tomatoes", nothing more, nothing less, plus a dash of Stardust to our memories. But, did we fall through a hole in the flag, down the rabbit-hole, in so recapitulating that time?

We remind again of our abiding empathy with the spastic. For, in the sixth grade, we were the only class member who could not perform, for the life of us, jumping jacks. Even the spastics of the class, those who could not play football or basketball worth a damn--we, ourselves, having great difficulty psychologically, for its hard ball, with the game of baseball, having no trouble at all hitting a tennis ball with a bat--could do them with aplomb. Did they learn them behind our backs, to make deliberate mock of our folly in being absent from the Day of Learning? Well, we went home and got about mending our dementia in this regard, studied our reflection in the mirror as we gradually coordinated arms and legs alone to make one complete jumping jack in slowed time, then, with graduatedly increscent celerity, repeated the sum of the action, until, alas, it became second nature as a whole movement, difficult though it was to achieve in space and time.

Which brings to mind the final Question of the Day: Was the Creation merely the result of God's inchoate, incompetently performed Jumping Jack, being learned through eternal precognition, with ignition steadily increasing heat to the cognitive processes, to form remedial wisdom with practice from the precedent spastic, spasmodic uncoordination, evolved from the embarrassment to the Spirit consequent of the a priori disorderly array, lacking aesthetically appealing geometric symmetry in movement, in witness whereof, finally, by determined bullish temperament, induced to concentric rhythmic circularity via the Flash?

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