Wednesday, August 30, 1944

The Charlotte News

Wednesday, August 30, 1944

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that two columns of the U. S. Third Army were less than forty miles from Belgium, one column reaching ten miles beyond Reims and the other moving toward Laon, and beyond toward Vitry-Le-Francois on the Upper Marne, positioning American troops between the escaping Germans and the Pas-de-Calais coast. Algiers radio reported that Laon, 36 miles from Belgium, had been occupied. Vitry-Le-Francois was only 96 miles from the German border and 45 miles from Verdun. Also taken were Chalons-sur-Marne and Les Grandes Loges in the northwest. Another German report had the advance as far as St. Duzier, 80 miles from the border, 20 miles southeast of Vitry-Le-Francois.

The British and Canadians meanwhile to the west moved 25 miles north of the Seine. Rouen was reported by the Germans to have been evacuated and was indicated taken by the Allies. Roads out of Rouen led to Le Havre, Dieppe, and the Somme Valley. The Second Army had outflanked Le Havre, as British troops took Neufmarche, 25 miles from the Longchamps River, and Manneville, both on the way to Pas-de-Calais.

The Allies now held 45 miles of the north bank of the Seine, from Louviers to Paris, as virtually all German resistance on the north bank had ceased.

General Omar Bradley, it appeared, was about to be given equal status in the command structure to that of General Montgomery in France, formerly head of all Allied ground forces. The British had the previous week objected to press reports which had insinuated this equality of status.

Hal Boyle was reported injured in a motorcycle accident during the American infantry parade the previous day down the Champs Elysees in Paris. Narrowly escaping more serious injuries, he would be laid up for three days with torn ligaments in his back. He had been taking notes in the crowd when a police officer lost control of his bike going 40 mph, wrecked into the adjacent crowd, the motorcycle then ricocheting and striking Mr. Boyle, throwing him into the air. Nevertheless, he filed his story before going to hospital.

Hundreds of thousands of Parisians turned out for the parade, some in tears. Lt. General Joseph Pierre Koenig and General Bradley laid a wreath on the grave of France's Unknown Soldier from World War I.

All mass transportation in Paris was still cut off, as was the hot water, because of fuel shortages. There was plenty of food, but a restaurant meal for three cost $50. All of the sniping by German stragglers had now been eliminated. France was controlled by three forces, those under the military governorship of General Koenig, those under General De Gaulle's civil government, and the U. S. Army. The French Committee of National Liberation had been moved from Algiers to Paris.

In the South of France, the U. S. Seventh Army moving up the Rhone Valley had reached to within seven miles of Valence, 27 miles above captured Montelimar, carrying them above the junction of the Rhone and Drome Rivers. The heaviest fighting was in the vicinity of Loriol, south of the Drome along Highway 7. The Americans were pushed back to the outskirts of Briancon in the Hautes-Alps, 90 miles north of Nice.

About 500 American bombers struck Kiel and Bremen, as well as the rocket coast in Northern France. The RAF flew missions in support of the Red Army, striking Stettin and Koenigsberg on the Baltic. Mosquitos attacked both Berlin and Hamburg.

The Russians had captured Ploesti and the entire oil region of Rumania, as well as being on the verge of taking Constanta, Rumania's largest port on the Black Sea. The German evacuation had been so rapid, in face of a 25-mile advance during the previous day by the Russians, that little razing of oil facilities and other militarily valuable installations had been accomplished by the Germans. Other Russian troops were within 29 miles of Bulgaria. The Army of General Rodion Malinovsky pushing into Transylvania continued its progress, but no precise detail was provided.

Pravda in Moscow reported that the Russians were demanding access from Turkey to the Dardanelles, while accusing the Turks of maintaining diplomatic ties with the Nazis despite the recent declaration of severance.

In Italy, British and Polish troops of the Eighth Army had moved to within fifteen miles of the Po Valley on the Adriatic front.

In Philadelphia, a North Carolina truck had been hijacked and $50,000 worth of cotton stolen. The empty truck had been located by the police. The cotton was nowhere to be found.

Perhaps the thieves had absorbed it all.

Unfortunately, Bob Hope is too dim to read today, not his fault, but that is the way it is, for now. We shall thank him for the memory anyway and await its fully being informed on another day.

'Twas something about Frances Langford singing in the USO show "I'm in the Mood for Love", whereupon one of the soldiers yelled that she had come to the right place, after which, in a game of poker, Mr. Hope lost his pants, which in the climate of the Pacific he did not need anyway. He slept on the tarmac.

On the editorial page, "Air Tight" criticizes, as does Marquis Childs, the seal on information coming from the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Georgetown. While the information was likely to be conveyed in generalities, as the process itself was likely to be cloaked, there was no need for complete secrecy. While the day to day meetings were understandably closed to the press to prevent leaks which might enable the Axis to foster from them beneficial propaganda, especially with respect to the smaller nations of Europe, it should not result in a complete block of information. The conferees could at least summarize the events taking place from time to time. Such would enable public confidence in the outcome.

"Service Vote" chronicles the continuing receipt by Secretary of State Thad Eure of absentee soldier ballots, now reaching 100,000.

"_____ Home" tells of Stephen Gary, president of the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce, telling its state convention that bureaucracy was not only a creature of the Federal Government, but was also a problem in local and state government.

While agreeing that city and county government in Charlotte and Mecklenburg could stand improvement, the editorial opines that, nevertheless, it was comparable to communities of similar size. An argument for consolidation of city and county functions under one roof to save duplication of effort and thus a lot of money, made sense.

"Run-Down?" agrees with the attacks of Thomas Dewey on the President's Cabinet, albeit not, as Mr. Dewey charged, for being querulous but rather for being inept. Save for Mr. Hull, says the piece, there was not a leading Democrat in the Cabinet. And Mr. Hull, at 73, was getting too old to be effective any longer at the post in such complex times.

The piece, presumably by J. E. Dowd, asks "the little reader", a favorite form of address used by W. J. Cash during his stint on The News, to provide responses for each Cabinet member, rating their individual job performances as either "first rate", "passable", or "unsuitable".

The members were Secretary Hull, Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Attorney General Francis Biddle, Postmaster General Frank Walker, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes, Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard, Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones, and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins.

Well, with the benefit of 20-20 after 67 years, rank them yourself and see how they did for our world, remembering that if it had not been for them, our world might not be here at all.

"How, Now" relates of the local head of the Federal Civil Service Commission having stated that at war's end there would be no significant immediate reduction of jobs with the Federal Government and that those who would be terminated would be aided in finding jobs in either the private sector or elsewhere in government.

The editorial, while realizing the problems of turning hundreds of thousands of government workers into the world without jobs, also cringed at the thought of this over-sized bureaucracy continuing to exist during peacetime.

Drew Pearson discusses the 200 men and women of the White House press corps whom FDR alternately charmed and chastised, regaled while teasing them about "dope stories"—not about drugs, just dopy stories. Since his return from the Pacific, he was meeting with more people than in the previous half of the year and was paying more attention to domestic issues than earlier.

Mr. Pearson turns next to Vice-President Wallace having just returned from a little publicized swing through the South, thanking his convention supporters and shoring up support for a probable 1948 run for the presidency.

The column then relates that Secretary of State Hull's opening statement of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference on August 21 had remarkably paralleled the opening delivered by President Woodrow Wilson in 1920 at the beginning of the League of Nations conference.

Next, he continues his report of the struggling Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada in his re-election bid. An isolationist, the Senator was pitted against Lieutenant Governor Vail Pittman, interventionist candidate and brother to the deceased former Senator Key Pittman, who had been in favor of intervention in the Pacific from 1936, had also favored a quarantine of Mussolini.

Senator McCarran would win, would go on to become a prominent witch-hunter of Communists after the war, including Owen Lattimore. Lt. Governor Pittman would be appointed Governor to complete the term of Governor Edward Carville in July, 1945, after Governor Carville appointed himself to succeed to the Senate seat of James Scrugham, former Governor, who had been elected in 1942 to succeed the successor, Berkeley Bunker, appointed in December, 1940, to the seat of deceased Senator Pittman, and then died in office.

And, just because we are feeling generous today to our little readers, we should point out that July 20, 1969 was six months after Mr. Nixon's first inauguration, and, coincidentally, the date on which the Eagle landed in the Sea of Tranquility on the lunar surface. It was also two days after the incident at Chappaquiddick involving Senator Edward Kennedy.

The White Album had been released November 22, 1968, even if we got our copy, we feel certain, in October.

The somewhat rambling column of the day then relates of the inside story on the resignation of Charles Wilson as vice-chair of the War Production Board, just as chair Donald Nelson had left on his trip to China. Before leaving, Mr. Nelson had held a pow-wow of the staff of the Board and sought to mend fences, only angering the more Mr. Wilson who had already determined that the carping he perceived from Mr. Nelson's staff had become unbearable.

Mr. Pearson adds that, in fact, the staff of Mr. Nelson had simply been acting out of loyalty to him, not out of disloyalty to Mr. Wilson.

The column concludes with a report of the plethora of letters sent to the press by British consuls at the request of the British Government, objecting to the statements of the U. S. Ambassador to India, William Phillips, urging the President to support India's independence, that it was singularly important to the morale of Indian troops fighting with the Allies in Northeastern India and Burma, an area of great import to winning the war in the Pacific.

Marquis Childs checks in with the Dumbarton Oaks Conference re the controversy surrounding the amount of press coverage to be allowed the proceedings as they transpired. The journalists protesting the blackout were not seeking admittance to each meeting, simply daily briefings. They especially were objecting to news leaks being provided to two favored reporters.

The British were said to be in favor of a more open policy, but the American State Department remained distrustful of providing too much news. There were advocates of liberalization within the Department, but Secretary Hull remained opposed.

Mr. Childs urges more open dissemination of information from the conference, that it would encourage public trust in the peace process while eliminating incautious rumor-mongering which could undermine public confidence in the outcome, so crucial to the ultimate direction to be followed in establishing finally the United Nations organization.

Some material of unknown authorship is not present on the page.

It is kind of like those golf balls at the sanitarium to which Mr. Hope visited in the movie, that is the Pebble Beach Country Club, we suppose.

To fill in a little more space, we should recount that, for a time, from 1986 through 2001, the Crosby Pro-Am Tournament, since 1936 in Pebble Beach, severed its affiliation with that country club and moved to Bermuda Run, just outside Winston-Salem. It was a bit of tough sledding though, and so finally returned to Carmel. The Beatles never showed at Bermuda Run.

Hal Boyle winds up again mainly wiped off the page, but tells of the prosperous lifestyle to have been enjoyed by those French who played ball with the Nazis. But they had to have the bankroll with which to do business on the black market.

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