The Charlotte News
Friday, January 26, 1945
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Russians had bypassed Poznan, pushing west toward Brandenburg Province, the eastern border of which was 91 miles from Berlin. The Russian infantry and artillery continued to fight for Poznan. East Prussia had been completely cut off from the remainder of Germany. Red Star, the Red Army newspaper, described the newly won positions as "the last road" to Berlin, that of which they had dreamed for three years.
Breslau in German Silesia continued under siege and its radio had gone off the air at 5:00 a.m.
The Russians were also closing in on Koenigsberg in East Prussia from two directions, east and southeast, capturing Allenburg, Bordenburg, and Taplau.
Military analyst Max Werner assesses the Eastern Front, finds the German options dwindling with East Prussia cut off and Silesia likewise no longer useable as a base for operations. The Germans did not have enough men and equipment to defend the entire Eastern Front and so had to make choices. Now it was faced with whether to abandon East Prussia or Silesia, its great coal reserve, or concentrate solely on the roads leading to Berlin. But if the Germans were to give up both of its flanks, then the center of the front could be severely weakened by outflanking maneuvers of the Russians. With zig-zag lines full of gaps and with the Russians gaining control of the Polish communications lines, the position of the Wehrmacht had become completely untenable.
On the Western Front, the Ninth Army, without suffering any casualties, seized 97 abandoned German pillboxes 10 to 18 miles inside Germany in the area of Lindern, and took back the last four miles of the Siegfried Line. With the British Second Army, the Allies now controlled the 40 airline miles from Holland to below Duren. Brachelen, long a trouble spot to the Allies, was captured. The Ninth was now 25 miles from Duesseldorf and twenty from Cologne. The Germans had inexplicably abandoned their fortifications and fled to the Cologne plain east of the Roer River.
The British, advancing more than a mile, were now one to two miles from the Roer River along virtually their entire Roer River front between Roermond and Geilenkirchen, taking Grebben, 28 miles from Duesseldorf.
Inclement weather limited air action.
The Seventh Army in the Alsace sector had cleared the Germans from the south bank of the Moder River, 16 miles north of Strasbourg. The Seventh had retaken all of the ground initially captured by the German offensive launched the previous day.
On Luzon, the Fourteenth Army Corps of the Sixth Army had captured Clark Field and adjacent Fort Stotsenburg. It was beginning to appear that the Japanese would not make a determined stand before Manila, 40 miles to the south. The occupation of Clark gave the Americans seventeen airfields from which strikes could be launched. There were few Japanese defenders left at the field when the Americans entered, but land mines and booby traps abounded. Some 5,000 enemy troops had evacuated into the surrounding hills to man artillery positions to try to keep the airstrips from being used. The Americans were in pursuit of these positions. Engineers had already been deployed to put the fields into shape.
The hardest fighting yet on Luzon had been encountered by American forces north and east of the Lingayen Gulf beachhead, especially in the town of Rosario, which had been partially occupied by the Americans after a day of fighting. On the west coast of the Gulf, the Sixth Army had moved five miles to capture the town of Santa Cruz.
B-29's struck Iwo Jima again, while Navy units shelled it for the second time since January 1.
The Senate let the Administration know that it had enough votes to defeat the nomination of Henry Wallace to be Secretary of Commerce should the Administration push the nomination to a vote before it was determined whether lending authority of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation would be divorced by Congress from the Department of Commerce.
The House Military Affairs Committee turned down an amendment to the manpower bill which would have provided statutory backing to the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which to this time had enjoyed only Executive Branch authority for its existence.
On the editorial page, "What a Relief" gives praise to North Carolina's new Senator, Clyde R. Hoey, for having signed the Fulbright letter giving the President the full support of fifteen Democrat and Republican freshmen Senators for creation of the United Nations organization.
No longer did North Carolina have to stand embarrassed by its former junior Senator, Robert Rice Reynolds, and his isolationist stands and ludicrous statements in support of them, whether condemning Britain and Russia or making foolhardy endorsements of nationalism during a time of world war.
"Criminals All" comments on the growing list of atrocities attributed in Belgium to the SS, from the Malmedy Massacre of December 17 to the massacre during the same period of at least a hundred civilians. Added to it was that described by the Belgian farm woman who had witnessed on December 17 eight Americans executed after being forced to dig graves for a dead German tank crew.
The editorial brands the SS as pampered criminals, not soldiers. It favors trying all of them for war crimes.
As indicated, the 73 of 74 Nazis convicted for the Malmedy Massacre, including 43 sentenced to death, were eventually released from prison because of overly aggressive prosecutorial tactics utilized in extracting their confessions and admissions implicating others.
It is, of course, easy to make the emotional statement that the men at Malmedy, the eight men who were shot one by one in the face the same day, never were provided a trial or rights of any kind. Why should their executioners have any such rights?
But the fact that the United States affords such rights, even to the most brutal and most corrupt, is what sets the society apart from Nazi Germany. Giving in to the bestial tendencies of the Nazis in exacting justice is precisely what the Nazi respects; it serves their grander purpose to debase humanity.
The Constitution enables us to rise above such base instincts.
"Take the Case" reports of the Meade Committee of the Senate, that which had been the Truman Committee, examining inefficiency and malingering at the Norfolk Navy Yard. Finding plentiful evidence of wasted manpower and inefficiency, one of the Committee members wanted prosecutions. But the Navy defended its record based on performance of the Navy Yard, having built a large aircraft carrier and repaired 2,458 ships in 1944.
The editorial finds that, on the whole, the Navy shipbuilders had done a splendid job. But it did not neutralize the ill feeling of the Senators at what they had heard.
"Beside the Point" reports of the House debate on the Senate confirmation of Henry Wallace. It had been a field day for Republicans. They typically started with pot-shots at Mr. Wallace and then took to lambasting the New Deal generally, even calling it communistic in intent, with President Roosevelt as its dupe.
Representative Clare Hoffman of Michigan took up the issue of Unconditional Surrender, his favorite pet peeve, and again suggested that the requirement stood as a barrier to peace and thus should be eliminated. Some of his colleagues joined him in making a plea for immediate peace as well as seeking to disallow use of American money to rehabilitate Europe after the war.
The same subject is continued in the Congressional Record excerpt at the bottom of the column—missing since December because of the recess and change of Congress. Representative Bartel Jonkman of Michigan—predecessor in the Congressional seat occupied, beginning in 1949, by Gerald Ford—is quoted as saying Henry Wallace was behind the philosophy of the New Deal, which was to thwart emergence from the depression, prolong the destitution of the country until the people would become convinced that only Government could run industry and commerce, that only Government could make long-term capital loans. With the power to investigate the public in the hands of Congress, everyone would shudder and fall into line.
Drew Pearson examines objectively the fast advance of the Russian Army on the Eastern Front and suggests that, while impressive, it was no more so than had been the American and British advance through Normandy and over France and Belgium during the period when they were most rested, in the summer months and into early fall.
The Russians had rested since the spring, enabling fresh troops and supply lines to catch up with previous progress. Soon, the Russians would encounter the German Todt Line and that would be the tale-teller, much as the Siegfried Line had proved in the West. The Russians had preceded their offensive with heavy artillery bombardment from big guns, much as the Normandy invasion had been preceded by heavy Naval bombardment.
Men returning from the front had expressed the opinion that the German and Russian soldier was better prepared in terms of ego. Each German enlisted man was singled out on his birthday, for instance, and an officer lit his cigarette.
Then, typically, he would be taken out and shot.
Americans, by contrast, were trained to suppress individuality. Americans had the best equipment but not the best support for their egos.
The Russians had copied the German system. In Russia, a man could advance from sergeant to colonel within a month, or be busted in rank by the same brevity if he made a mistake.
He could also be taken out and shot.
Morale in the U.S. Army, Mr. Pearson concludes, could stand improvement, especially with Blaze taking precedence over two enlisted men in air transportation and the son of Senator Wilbert Lee O'Daniel of Texas being allowed to take the officers' candidate school exam three times when most were washed out after a single failure.
Blaze and the son of the Senator perhaps should have been shot.
Dorman Smith, incidentally, finds Blaze taking over the barnyard from Fala and Mrs. Fala.
Mr. Pearson reports that servicemen were incensed that Congressmen who joined the Army or Navy received special treatment and were becoming veterans within 90 days, to bolster a claim to a service record. He cites the case of Congressman John Fogarty of Rhode Island who became a carpenter's mate, a rank higher than sergeant in the Army, the same afternoon he reported for duty. Then he was sped through channels to become certified for overseas service. The trick was that he could resign the Navy anytime he wished and return to Congress.
Who'll stop the rain?
Samuel Grafton suggests that those who had spent their time trying to figure out how to stop the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe had best turn to a more solvable problem, like how to stop the rain. With the new Russian offensive pouring toward the borders of Germany, already in German Silesia, and having cut off East Prussia, the Russians now had to be regarded with respect for their strength. How to stop Russia was solely the problem of Hitler.
Mr. Grafton suggests that he was probably moved to reflect on this notion by the fact of the Republican National Committee having voted to set up a permanent organization in Washington for the purpose of ferreting out the waste, extravagance, and bungling of the New Deal.
Similar to the passe stop-Russia problem, the New Deal, entering its thirteenth year, was here to stay and trying to formulate a plan to stop it was quite as useless as the other thing.
Marquis Childs, now in London, observes that the new Russian offensive overshadowed all other events in the war and in diplomatic circles. It would provide Stalin with greater bargaining power than he had ever before enjoyed when the Big Three Conference would convene shortly in Yalta.
The Allies, however, seemed no closer to reaching an understanding among themselves on any of the fundamental issues impacting the post-war world. The recent conference to organize transportation in liberated Europe had proved problematic, the Russians being hard to reach in Moscow, the Polish Provisional Government in Lublin being even more hard to reach. The situation did not bode well for the future.
Hal Boyle, reporting from the Ninth Infantry Division of the First Army, tells of the 376th anti-aircraft battalion which, having run out of supplies, brought them in through heavy snows by oxen pulling two ox carts. Some of the men jeered the odd looking sight but the "provisional supply train" got the food and mail delivered.
A private from New York City had to do some fast talking to hospital personnel to convince them that he was not a German prisoner of war. He had a pronounced German accent and bore a tag, "IPW", which stood for "interrogator of prisoners of war". He finally got through the language barrier.
A field artillery battalion had taken up a collection at 50 cents per day to be awarded the first soldier to get a 30-day furlough.
An anti-aircraft battalion, tired of having other anti-aircraft units claim credit for enemy planes they had hit, chose a novel way of insuring credit. Having shot down an enemy Messerschmitt, one of the men chased down the pilot through the woods, and once he captured him, made him sign a statement swearing that he had been downed by the unit.
A letter writer passes on a letter he had written to presidential adviser Harry Hopkins, suggesting that the President create a Consumer Department at the Cabinet level to deal with the problems of consumers. He also had a recommendation for the new secretary.
Well, Mr. Williamson, it took nigh on 67 years to accomplish, but President Obama has recently fulfilled your wish, even if not appointing your chosen nominee, and even if it is a Bureau rather than a department and so not quite Cabinet-level yet.
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