Thursday, January 11, 1945

The Charlotte News

Thursday, January 11, 1945

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Sixth Army troops who had landed at Lingayen Gulf on Tuesday had expanded their beachhead to 22 miles and had driven inland to capture twenty towns and villages and Lingayen airfield, moving to within a hundred miles of Manila without encountering significant resistance. The captured towns included San Fabian, Lingayen, Mangaldan, and Dagupan.

Reinforcements from the 14th Corps were strafed by Japanese planes and torpedo boats as the convoy carrying them sought Lingayen. The 14th Corps itself was pushing west from Lingayen and were within two miles of Port Sual.

Superfortresses of General Curtis LeMay's 20th Bomber Command out of India had attacked Japanese installations on the Malay Peninsula, with Singapore likely the target, last hit November 5. The specific target appeared to be the Japanese Fleet based at Singapore, seeking to thwart an attack against the American landings on Luzon.

Secretary of War Henry Stimson warned that, while the landings were accomplished with relative ease, the Japanese could now concentrate their forces on the northern tip of Luzon rather than having to guard against landings from the south out of Mindoro, and therefore a hard fight could yet lay ahead.

The Secretary also announced that an additional 7,999 Army casualties had been reported the previous week to bring the new total for the war in the Army to 564,351, still not including those casualties of the Ardennes offensive—which eventually would approach 70,000, most having already occurred. Of the Army casualties, 106,952 had been killed, an increase of 3,000 over the previous week. The Navy dead increased by 109 to a total of 31,441 out of the 82,029 Navy casualties.

Amid a continuing blizzard and nine-degree temperature on the Bulge line, the Allies captured La Roche, fourteen miles northwest of Bastogne, while British patrols reached Champion in the collapsing western end of the Bulge, cutting the road between St. Hubert and La Roche. The main force of the British Second Army was four miles from Champion, the town being thirteen miles from Houffalize, where it appeared the Germans were mounting a stand to protect the eastern half of the Bulge.

The weather was aiding the German retreat from the western tip of the Bulge and preventing a rout by the Allies. Impairing attempts to pursue them, the Germans were leaving behind buried in the snow wooden and plastic mines, harder to detect than metal.

On the southern flank, the Third Army gained high ground outside St. Hubert, fourteen miles west of Bastogne, and captured Harlange, six miles southeast of the road junction. The Germans meanwhile had evacuated St. Hubert, their southwest anchor.

Weather limited air activity to only a few Allied planes striking near St. Vith.

The Russians had gained control of three-fourths of Budapest, 3,300 blocks, as many Hungarian soldiers were beginning to surrender. The Germans had broken up the Hungarian units and attached them to German regiments to try to stem the tide. Fully 14,700 German troops and 625 tanks had been taken out of action by the Red Army in eight days, including 3,000 prisoners captured the previous day. The Russians had reached to within a mile of Komaron to the northwest, and were outflanking the German push toward Budapest to try to relieve the embattled German garrison.

In Italy, icy roads and deep snow were keeping action to a minimum in all sectors.

The American Eighth Air Force in Britain announced that no American jet planes, as stated in the Soviet press, were being used to intercept and combat the V-weapons of the Nazis.

A meeting of the Big Three, FDR, Churchill, and Stalin, was now expected to occur on or around February 1 in an undisclosed location. It would be held at Yalta in the Crimea, following a meeting on Malta with Chiang Kai-shek, the Russian leader still not wishing to meet with the Chinese leader for fear of being perceived by the Japanese as transgressing the Russo-Japanese mutual non-aggression pact.

It was being contemplated in Washington that nightclubs in Miami should be closed for the duration to curb absenteeism from war plants.

On the editorial page, "You and Billions" breaks down the national budget from fiscal year 1944-45, finds that of the 99 billion dollars, 49% went to the Army, 28.2% to the Navy, 4.1% to the Maritime Commission, in charge of merchant shipping, 1.4% to Agricultural Lend-Lease, 2.6% to executive war agencies, and another 3.5% to miscellaneous war expenses.

The total war expense therefore was 88.8% of the budget.

The revenue for it all came primarily from borrowing, 53.7%, personal income tax, 18.6%, corporate excess profits tax, 11.8%, corporate income tax, 5%, liquor tax, 2.1%, and cigarette tax, 0.9%, with the other 8% from an assorted array of taxes and contract renegotiations.

The country was spending thirty times that which it had spent during the Civil War, 4.5 times that during World War I.

And to add to the New Year's bliss, the piece informs that by June 30, at the end of the fiscal year, every person in the country would be in new debt to the tune of $1,820, with every family owing $6,915.

The Mississippian earning less than $500 per year on average had to cringe at that thought.

War was not cheap.

"Cash and Carry" tells of the sound basis on which North Carolina was transacting state business, with a budget surplus, yet spending three times more than ten years earlier, increasing state social services and spending for education.

Of course, it had a healthy liquor tax and a largely drunk population to show for it, plus one of the highest cancer rates in the nation from its manufacture of poison, another source of state revenue and that consequent fiscal stability.

Sometimes it is better to be broke and in debt than rich and decrepit of scruples.

"The Battle Ahead" predicts that the casualties to come on Luzon would surpass any experienced previously in a single campaign in the Pacific. For the Japanese would fight hard ultimately to preserve this central keystone component of their empire.

General Yamashita, indicates the piece, was undoubtedly preserving his men and materiel for an inland fight, realizing that the American landing force was too well-covered by ships and planes to try to resist on the beaches.

The editorial seeks to prepare readers for a long and bloody fight for Luzon, even if initial reports were favorable, stating only light casualties during the mass landings at Lingayen Gulf beginning Tuesday morning.

"They Didn't Say It", from the New York Times Magazine, provides several misascribed quotes through time.

Samples:

"Go West, young man," attributed to Horace Greeley, had actually first been indited by John Babson Lane Soule. Mr. Greeley tried to correct the misperception and give credit to the true author, but without success. And with a name like Mr. Soule, you would think that he would have rung the bell with the public. But Mr. Greeley was the most popularly known newspaper editor of his day, having been the Democratic nominee for the presidency in 1872 against President Grant. So, somebody had to say it.

"Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it," attributed to Mark Twain, was actually thought to have been first stated by Charles Dudley Warner of the Hartford Courant in Connecticut. But Mark Twain did say, says the piece, "If you don't like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes."

He is also reputed to have said, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."

Drew Pearson finds the President, Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, and head of the War Labor Board Will Davis each mad at War Mobilizer James Byrnes for having urged policy to Congress on taxes and labor without consulting with either the President or the two heads of the departments having to deal with those problems.

But the President could not do much about the situation, having urged Justice Byrnes to stay on as Mobilizer for the duration despite his desire to quit, especially after he was nudged aside in succesion for the second spot on the ticket, then the nomination for Secretary of State.

As we have speculated, however, since Mr. Byrnes would become Secretary of State in late June, it is entirely probable that Mr. Stettinius was essentially appointed to the job on a temporary basis, pending the end of the war and the availability of Mr. Byrnes. Mr. Stettinius would then become the nation's first Ambassador to the United Nations following its founding in the spring.

Speaking of the vice-presidency, we note also in passing that not a word has been mentioned on the editorial pages or on page one regarding Harry Truman since the Democratic Convention in late July. Not even after the election was there any report of the new Vice-President-elect. Within three months, the nation would begin to become well-acquainted with the Missourian.

Mr. Pearson provides some potpourri, among which is an item in which he tells of Republican House Minority Leader Joe Martin of Massachusetts having refused Connecticut Representative Clare Boothe Luce and Massachusetts Representative Christian Herter spots on the Foreign Relations Committee because both had voted against the extension of the existence of the Dies Un-American Activities Committee.

Apparently, within eight years, Ms. Luce would change her mind about such matters, criticizing President Truman for being hypocritical in attacking Senator Joseph McCarthy's finding a Red under every bush and toadstool in the country, including within the higher echelons of the Army and State Department. But she did not seek to justify Senator McCarthy and his smear tactics, just that they were no worse than that of President Truman and being used as a "smoke-screen" to hide the incompetency of Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Historians of credit might differ with Ms. Luce on the overarching point.

Dorothy Thompson sets forth a case that the nursing shortage in the military might be resolved better by greater stress on the need for volunteers than by implementing the discussed drafting of nurses. There were 265,000 trained nurses in the country, of whom about a quarter were above age 45 and not eligible for the Army. About 40 percent of nurses were married, though no figures existed to show dependents. Ms. Thompson estimates 49,000 had children.

She thus reaches a figure of 150,000 nurses eligible for military service. Of those, half had already volunteered. Of the volunteers, 43 percent had been released as not physically fit for the Army. A fair estimate of the remaining half who were fit was therefore pinned at 27,000. Some 10,000 were actually needed.

So, concludes Ms. Thompson, a draft was not needed to attract from this pool less than half of its number. She argues that only nurses who wanted to go overseas into battle zones would actually perform efficiently under such conditions of harsh warfare.

As a better remedy than the draft, she recommends public education to stop doctors from discouraging eligible nurses from volunteering and rather to encourage them, likewise to stop boyfriends in the armed services from discouraging their girlfriend nurses from volunteering, and that a better system of civilian hospitals be set up so that civilian nurses would not feel so needed in the United States.

Ms. Thompson points out that the Navy used trained sailors as nurses, always had. Better use of nursing personnel in the Army might lessen the shortage, utilizing non-nurses to do routine tasks of patient care not requiring medical training, more in the nature of the work of orderlies. That remedy, she offers, would benefit both Army and civilian hospitals.

Marquis Childs addresses the issue of the national service legislation proposed by the President in the previous Saturday's State of the Union message to Congress, finds it unlikely of enactment but that Congress would probably pass some form of "work or fight" legislation. Many Republicans, however, were skeptical of handing the President such broad power to draft labor.

In enacting such a law, a problem could arise with respect to anti-labor bias, fanning the flames of old labor controversies and prompting strikes.

The call for the national service legislation arose from the demands by the Army and Navy for increased supplies, complaining that both major warfronts were being retarded by the absence of sufficient ammunition and war goods. The Ardennes offensive had driven this point home, even if the President was saying that the German advance in the Bulge had been essentially arrested while the newspapers reported another story.

Overall, the President's message had seemed thin and full of generalizations, but that was to be expected because of the uncertainty of the moment in the war, and the upcoming meeting of the Big Three to plot the end strategy, both militarily and politically.

Samuel Grafton discusses the quintessential perfectionist who wished an end to power politics, even if it meant using the force of the United States against other nations to do it. This individual wanted the country to take a hard line stand against Britain and the Soviet Union insofar as each was perceived as practicing power politics in Europe. He neither trusted Churchill nor Stalin, nor even Roosevelt. This perfectionist favored internationalism but was suspicious of treaties between Britain and Russia or France and between Russia and the Balkan countries or France. He wanted all the nations in agreement on one treaty and would accept nothing less. He believed that, with a world organization extant, power politics would end forever in 1945. He set up the United States as prime exemplar of a unity formed from many disparate parts, forgetting the long struggle of the past in the country even to begin to approach such unity.

In conclusion, Mr. Grafton finds this perfectionist likened to someone who jumps out a window to show that he was in favor of fresh air.

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