Tuesday, July 4, 1944

The Charlotte News

Tuesday, July 4, 1944

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that, continuing through heavy rain and curtailed air support, the American First Army had pushed the Nazis back 1.5 miles along an 18 to 20-mile front. The position placed the Americans within 1.75 miles northeast of La Haye Du Puits, reaching Blanchelande. They also occupied La Poteries and St. Remy, three miles on either side of La Haye to the east and west.

As reported by Hal Boyle, despite the action, there was no failure to recognize Independence Day, as the Americans fired all of their guns at noon--into the German lines.

The British and Canadians advanced along a 2.5-mile front west of Caen, capturing Verson, four miles to the southwest. In their first major action since mid-June, the Canadians were fighting for Carpiquet airfield, a strategic hold of the Germans and key to taking Caen.

Spanish correspondents in Paris reported that the Nazis, in retaliation for the assassination the previous week by the Resistance of Vichy Propaganda Minister Philippe Henriot, were conducting block by block and house by house searches, with the aid of collaborationists, to ferret out Jews and members of the Resistance. They were being herded into an indoor stadium, the Cirque D'Hiver, crowded to the point of leaving only standing room in the facility.

With improving weather, albeit operating still through heavy cloud cover, about 500 American bombers hit airfields in northern and northwestern France. They met no German fighter opposition and only light anti-aircraft fire.

The night before, without loss, RAF Mosquitos, back in operation for the first time since Friday, hit areas in the vicinity of Paris and in the Ruhr Valley.

Up to 500 American bombers from Italy struck again at Rumanian oil facilities, this time hitting Brasov and Pitesti, the latter west of the main oilfields at Ploesti.

V-1 attacks continued on England, albeit on a reduced scale from the previous few days.

In Italy, the Fifth Army moved four miles north of captured Cecina to within 15 miles of Leghorn. Resistance was heavy.

The Eighth Army moved to within eight miles of the inland communications hub at Arezzo, as the Germans fled the Lake Trasimeno area.

In Russia, the Red Army advanced west from captured Minsk toward Warsaw and East Prussia, 150 miles away. Other forces were crushing the last of German resistance at captured Polotsk, the gateway to Lithuania and Latvia. Two more German generals were captured, bringing the total killed or captured on both the Russian and French fronts to 21 during the previous three weeks.

Tokyo reported that a U.S. Navy Task Force had dispatched aircraft to attack Iwo Jima and Chichi Jima in the Bonin Islands. An attack was reported the previous day and during this day on Iwo Jima. No immediate word of confirmation came from Allied headquarters.

The Allies were engaged at this time in operations to bomb and map out Iwo Jima in preparation for the subsequent invasion of the heavily fortified island in February and March.

On Saipan, it appeared Garapan was about to fall completely into the hands of the Americans, as the Japanese were abandoning the town and moving northward.

Allied Headquarters in Ceylon announced that the British, American, and Chinese forces operating in Northern Burma had killed 17,700 Japanese soldiers in operations since early in the year on that front. Five thousand of the troops were killed by Chinese acting alone while the remainder were dispatched by the combined forces.

American troops of the Sixth Army on Sunday had invaded Noemfoor Island off Dutch New Guinea and seized its principal airdrome. American casualties were de minimis while Japanese killed numbered but 47.

A wreck involving the Santa Fe Chief passenger train, moving too fast around a curve and down a grade near Flagstaff, Arizona, just before midnight, killed five passengers and injured 26.

On the editorial page, "The Doubts" indicates that correspondent James R. Young, author of Behind the Rising Sun and once a prisoner of war of Japan, had expressed reservations about the policies of John Foster Dulles with respect to Japan after the war. Mr. Dulles, expected to be the secretary of state in a Dewey administration, headed the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace whose policy statement on Japan ran that a liberal attitude without harshly punitive measures would insure a lasting peace with Japan. Stripping the country of military capability should not be permanent and should be undertaken carefully to avoid also destroying the country's industrial capability. A vibrant Japan economically was one in which the liberal interests, opposed to war, would thrive. Military tribunals at the end of the war should mete punishment to war criminals in a restrained manner, without retributive harshness.

Mr. Young deemed this policy, as much as the Hull policy, to place too much confidence in the power of the liberal interests in Japan without reckoning properly the degree of inculcation which the military tradition had exerted through time on the society. He believed therefore that Governor Dewey placed too much confidence in the judgment of Mr. Dulles.

Moreover, expresses the editorial, the Dulles plan would not accede to the demands the young American fighting men in the Pacific had expressed, as reported by the late Raymond Clapper in one of his last columns, published posthumously February 4, that Japan should never again be allowed to become a world power.

"New Push" greets the new American move down the west coast of the Cherbourg Peninsula, to consolidate gains and cut off the entire Peninsula from German control, to be another healthy sign of the German doom soon to come. That was especially so when combined with the strong line being held in the area of Caen by the British and Canadians, protecting the beachhead and preventing support for the Germans trapped on the Peninsula while establishing a bridgehead on the Odon River. Even more, the move coincided with the Red Army advance in White Russia to take Minsk, the armies apparently now headed toward Warsaw, Latvia, and Lithuania.

"Polio" comments that an epidemic of infantile paralysis was spreading across North Carolina, so virulent that a ban had issued against children under 15 entering public places. But many of the children were thus far heedless of the ban and were seen nevertheless out in public, thus threatening to exacerbate spread of the disease. The piece recommends, for the common health of everyone, the forcible detention of those found to violate the quarantine.

"The Trouble" recommends the advice of Dr. George Heaton, industrial relations expert, delivered to the Myers Park Baptist Church congregation, that labor strife derived from selfishness and insincerity on both sides of the bargaining table, that faith and determination to achieve fairness, rather than winding up with an involuntary agreement favorable to neither side, would best facilitate relations between management and labor.

Drew Pearson writes further of Stalin's two hour and twenty minute conversation with professor Oscar Lange of the University of Chicago, in Moscow during early May. Stalin had expressed the belief that Allied cooperation between East and West manifested during the war would continue afterward as a necessary concomitant for a durable world peace.

He argued, against the contrary opinion expressed by Foreign Minister Molotov, that there would be no socialism in Germany after the war, as the labor class who had voted against the Nazis in 1932 and 1933 had all been eliminated by Hitler and the party. Germany would have to be watched vigilantly to avoid a resurgence of Nazism.

When asked of his opinion on the German atrocities, he became emotional and described the Nazis as murderous barbarians, not human beings capable of rational compassion.

It was a certainty, Stalin further asserted, that there would be no Allied Military Government of Poland after its liberation, that the Poles were distrustful of Polish officers trained in the United States and Britain for the purpose. Many of the officers had sentiments which were anti-Soviet and pro-Nazi. He wanted to see therefore from the outset a government chosen by the Polish people, not one set up by the Allied military.

Mr. Pearson incidentally noted that the "AMG" designation had been shortened from "AMGOT", as originally dubbed, OT standing for "Occupied Territories". The truncation had been necessary to avoid among polyglots spit-polished confusion with a Turkish word, spelled identically, but meaning, argotically, "horse manure".

Of course, they could have just changed it to a more palatable Allied International Government of Occupied Territories, AINTGOT.

Dorothy Thompson again finds praiseworthy aspects of Thomas Dewey's acceptance speech at the Republican convention the previous week. He did not endorse the "back to normalcy" platform of the party but rather, to no applause, stated that he entered the campaign with no strings attached by prior promises. He did not criticize the New Deal except for inefficiency, while admitting it had supplied the country with positive contributions in its early years--again without applause.

He also criticized the Administration for not affording full employment except through war industry and promised to remedy that failing. The Executive Branch, he contended, had also been too secretive in its foreign policy commitments and discussions with the Allies.

Each of these primary points of criticism, opines Ms. Thompson, were valid. But Governor Dewey's biggest problem, she adds, was the millstone around his neck represented by the platform. Whether he would be permitted by the party to escape its confines remained to be seen.

Samuel Grafton criticizes the promise made by Thomas Dewey in his acceptance speech that the military would operate autonomously in his administration and should be doing so at present, without meddling from the civilian side of the government.

That was the problem with Germany, objects Mr. Grafton, that they had a military caste system which operated independently from the government.

The Constitution specifies that the President is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and as such exercises civilian control over it. The Republicans proposed to cede to the military these responsibilities in time of war. It was a dangerous concept and Mr. Grafton underscores that danger. The military has no policy without civilian control. One of the primary reasons for the structure is so that the people may express their democratic will over any military operations undertaken in the name of the country. The Founders, he offers, would have been profoundly shocked at the notion of a military command structure able to function independently, without civilian oversight and direction by the Chief Executive.

Marquis Childs, not unlike Tom Jimison on Saturday, albeit in less colorful presentation, reminisces of past Fourths of July during his youth, when times were simpler and enemies in the world were few and far away. There were more flags being flown and fireworks being thrown, it seemed to him. The gunpowder smell pervaded the day from dawn to nighttime.

Counter-intuitive to a time a month after D-Day, July Fourth in Chicago and throughout the Midwest in 1944, he indicates, showed few signs at all of celebration. Most of the people were at work in the war factories. The country could not retreat into that simpler time of earlier years. The enemies now were too determined, too powerful, too pervasive on the world stage for that time to return.

Dr. Herbert Spaugh reprints part of a story filed by war correspondent John Moroso, III, which had described on June 9 the establishment of the first temporary American cemeteries on the Normandy beachhead, "where the green grass is turned black from the fury of the high explosives."

Hal Boyle reports that the French who had been conscripted by the Germans to build the West Wall in France now were being employed by the Allies to aid in the removal of the obstructions.

An American private, who had not had an egg in five months since leaving the States, told of patiently waiting for a hen to lay. While on guard duty, he waited four hours, but finally got his prize, one fresh egg.

And so the last July Fourth during which the European war would rage, the last July Fourth of Franklin Roosevelt's life, had passed, largely somber, largely without fireworks except those of the actual rockets' red glare across the war fronts of the world, that which the celebration is meant only to recall to the conscious mind in vivid reenactment, with the purpose finally that the fire falls in diffuse colors of the rainbow, harmless to all sides.

Incidentally, we should note that someone removed from YouTube as a copyright violation the song "Strawberry Jam" to which we had linked, underlying "strawberries", in reference to the Samuel Grafton piece of Saturday, June 24, in which he had advocated that the Republican Party of 1944 make room in its tent for more "strawberries, eggs, watermelons, and pickles," meaning, we assume, more diverse viewpoints such as those held by Wendell Willkie.

In so linking, we did not mean to insinuate, of course, that Michelle Shocked was a strawberry or a Republican or should become one. Her publicly stated political views would appear to be in contrast to any such association. Nor did we mean to suggest any connection with John Edwards.

We have the album on which the song appears and have had it since its release in 1992, and think it a fine song, as we do all pieces of music to which we link, with possible exceptions made for novelty songs here and there, such as "Mairzy Doats", or novel renditions of songs, the criteria always being that either the performance is the best available exemplar of a piece of music referenced in The News of the day or that it has pertinence to a point being made and is a rendition both listenable and interesting, even including the one referenced February 2 by Mrs. Miller. (Only those over about age 55 probably remember Mrs. Miller, but that is okay. We must remember sometimes in order to forget.)

Nor do we upload any of the material at other sites to which we link. That is the fun of it, the serendipity, stumbling upon the snark of the day which fits as a piece of a puzzle into that which is printed in the pages of The News of 67 years earlier, as if two beings on divergent but parallel paths through the earth's circuitous ways meeting suddenly on the joining roads by happenstance after 67 years. Sometimes, that coincidence occurs internally within this site itself, sometimes between the site and external resources and by a process intuitive, not merely by directly looking up a reference to a person or event made in the print. Sometimes, because of personal experience, the interconnections are more interesting than the ordinary reader will understand and perceive, but always nevertheless understandable we think on a more general level. And, sometimes, too much may be read into them, quite unintended.

It is, of course, any copyright owner's legal right not to allow someone to upload to the internet a work under copyright. We suggest, however, careful thought before routinely denying such tacit or expressed permission, unless the work itself is presented in a light, vis-a-vis its original presentation, which the copyright holder views as offensive or contrary to the purpose of their work--which, when we see it, we avoid the linkage. (That does not include stupid and offensive comments made in connection with a presentation to which we may link, comments which run rampant on YouTube and are unavoidable, neither the fault of the artist nor the presenter of the work.) We try not to make our links suggest anything contrary to the intent of the original work, and if they should suggest that to an individual reader, it is the result of the reader's misinterpretation of our intent. Read it again when you are less tired and irritable, or off the medication. (Naturally, "The Horst Wessel Lied" and other Nazi songs to which we have once or twice linked are the exceptions to prove the rule, always to be placed in the overall context of the herein.)

Nor do we ever suggest that the writers and singers of the songs necessarily adhere politically or otherwise to viewpoints herein expressed. The works are separate and distinct; that they may interrelate is sometimes interesting but not necessarily indicative of anything beyond the striking at the crossroads of a universal chord of recognition, meant to be pleasantly confirming of that inexplicable serendipity abounding whimsically through the world, as when you see an old friend on the street at a location where neither would be expected to be at a given time.

To deny the use of copyrighted music on the internet only for commercial reasons is a bit chincy, we think, given the cost of CD's during the last 25 years, costing far in excess of their production costs, and given that presenting an individual song from an album can only help the sale of the album, or a compilation, especially of older works which no longer obtain radio air play on a regular basis and thus which may not be known to broad audiences of differing age groups, across the world, or even in the United States or other country of origin of the work. It is only via the internet that music will be heard throughout the world, and the internet does not a stereo system make such that playback, without a lot of cumbersome effort, may be had with the same level of experiential quality as by purchasing a CD or DVD. In the case of printed excerpts of a book, the same would be true.

Pirating, in the days of scanners, in the case of printed works, and CD and DVD recording devices, can be accomplished easily by sharing works among friends or even borrowing from well stocked libraries, quite apart from the internet. Thus, it is a bit silly to knock something off YouTube as a copyright violation, spiting only the record company and artist whose work may otherwise never be heard by the broader audience, especially inter-generationally, to bridge the olde incessantly troubled and troublesome gap, as afforded by the internet and its coordinators of information, though of varying levels of competence and art they may be. Indeed, among our favorite artists, those well-known to the public for decades, we often stumble across works not commercially available in the United States and which we had never before heard except on YouTube.

Except for that class of works not available in the United States for purchase, we make it a rule of habit, incidentally, not to reference works under copyright unless we already have them in our own collections, occasional rare exceptions being made for particularly arcane works and works from the 1940's and earlier. Even in those instances, however, copies of nearly all of the works referenced we have previously purchased and own.

In the case of the particular reference, we explain further, the serendipity developed quite by accident when we found the further comment on Governor Gregg Cherry as related by Jonathan Daniels, followed immediately in the same collection by the story related of Senator Sam Ervin during censure proceedings of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, in which Senator Ervin had made reference to the Top Knot Come Down sermon, the song's reference to Knott's Berry Farm jam being thus coincidental and made interesting for the fact of having been linked prior to the discovery of the anecdotes imparted re Gregg Cherry and Senator Ervin, as noted at the time.

But, moreover, the further coincidence occurs between the book and chapter of the Bible referenced by Senator Ervin, Matthew 24, and its reference in turn, in verse 15, to Daniel's speaking of the abomination of desolation, which in turn references Daniel 12, containing, as we have before mentioned, the number of days of the abomination of the desolation, 1,335, being, as we discovered in 1994, the exact number of days, inclusive, between December 7, 1941 and August 2, 1945, the latter being the date which Harry Truman specified as the earliest date for deployment of the first atomic bomb, that discovery being made one night, as we have said, through syllabication, and reversing of a couple of letters, to form Jonah-tan Daniel from Jonathan Daniels.

"Strawberry Jam" adds nothing to that more profound coincidence and so we lose little by its no longer being made available, save the entertainment value of the song.

And our grandma did indeed can and jar, as also noted.

We thought we would remark on it to avoid any confusion. Whether someone took some sort of offense at our linking to the song in the context linked and then decided to remove the song is not within our powers to know. As indicated, no association of any sort was intended beyond the fact of strawberries, and the notion conveyed in the song that getting beyond a corporate mentality requires individualism and individual initiative--that which we practice here everyday without pay. We still like the song anyway.

We also note that we have since discovered that "C", the wealthy contributor to the welfare of the baby in the case of former Senator John Edwards, in all probability was Bunny Mellon, centenarian and heir to the Listerine fortune. We did not realize that when the note was composed, as we have not until recently paid much attention to the case, and we did not include the note on that day, juxtaposed to the reference to watermelons by Samuel Grafton, with any connection thereby intended, the comments re John Edwards being solely brought to mind by the earlier piece of June 16 on Gregg Cherry's campaign finance statement, even if the mention of strawberries, no doubt, related to cherries and thus…

Not, of course, to forget to mention again "The Caine Mutiny", as well as Schweinfurt, airplanes, and Sweden.

It may all seem a bit fruity, but without fruit, the world would be a worse place, we opine.

In any event, as George Harrison said, we do not mean to infringe anyone's copyright. Just substitute this song for that one in your mind, under the link for "strawberries", and forget that we ever mentioned it otherwise. If you contend that you own a copyright to strawberries, then you should go to the subway on Wednesday morning at 3:00, look around; suddenly, you are found, in the mirror of the hazy, shady, lazy days of your own underground.

Framed Edition
[Return to Links-Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i><i><i>--</i></i></i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.