Wednesday, January 3, 1945

The Charlotte News

Wednesday, January 3, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that, as new snow and rain fell across the Bulge line, Third Army armor moved 5.5 miles northeast of Bastogne, to the village of Bourcy, along the diagonal railway toward St. Vith, entering the outskirts of Michamps and a mile into the Maister Woods. Four miles east of Bastogne, other units gained a half mile to a mile in fighting around Ariancourt and Benonchamps while clearing Senonchamps two miles east of Bastogne.

Meanwhile, the Germans were striking anew in a dozen positions along the 70-mile front from the Saar to the Rhine, including the two-mile deep by five-mile wide plunge into the area southeast of Bitche. The Nazis had established also a new bridgehead across the Blies River east of Sarreguemines. A German communique, while admitting some forced withdrawals of the Nazis against the Third Army in the area north of Bastogne, claimed a favorable turn of events in Lorraine and along the Saar.

The twelve divisions of the Third Army had captured 7,825 Germans since the strike from the south against the Bulge line had begun December 22.

General Patton had sent a special message to his men thanking them for their superb effort during the previous 12 days of fighting, which he called unsurpassed in military history. He referred to the fact that the men had been forced to turn their front on a dime from the Saar Basin and move 20 to 100 miles to the north along the southern flank of the Bulge line, all in the harshest of winter conditions, the worst winter in 50 years in Belgium, the winter exposure itself enough to deplete and defeat the average well-conditioned person. Yet, these men had succeeded in arresting and turning back the Nazi offensive drive and cutting the supply route to save the brave men of Bastogne who had held their critical road junction against overwhelming odds between December 18 and 27.

In all, between December 16 and 31, the Allies had taken some 20,000 Germans as prisoners and destroyed or captured 400 tanks.

The Allies did not know it yet, but the final death knell to the German Army was being struck in these latter days of December and early days of January, with final defeat but four months away.

Despite the bad weather, 1,100 American heavy bombers, escorted by 600 fighters, struck rail and road targets in Western Germany for the twelfth consecutive day, dropping about 3,500 tons of bombs along a 150-mile stretch from Cologne to Karlsruhe, encountering only a lone Luftwaffe fighter.

The night before, the RAF had hit Nurnberg, Ludwigshafen, and Berlin.

In all of 1944, the American Fifteenth and Twelfth Air Forces out of Italy had dropped about 317,000 tons of bombs on Germany and the occupied countries, including Northern Italy, Austria, Rumania, and Yugoslavia, losing 3,412 planes and destroying 5,854 Luftwaffe planes. The Eighth Air Force out of England had dropped more than 450,000 tons of bombs on Europe during the year.

A report from January 2 told of the December 21-22 battle for St. Vith during which the nine-man crew of an American supply train had been taken by the Germans and, eight of them, one by one, shot in the back of the head by an SS officer moving alternately up and down the line which the men had been ordered to form. One man escaped, was shot in the neck, but was able to play dead for two hours, eventually making it back to American lines.

The incident occurred during the 36-hour battle for the road junction northeast of Bastogne, while an American armored unit alone fought off three German divisions until support arrived from the Seventh Armored Division, following the capture of the command post by a German patrol of 50 men.

The Russians captured 232 blocks of Pest on the east side of the Danube in the Hungarian capital, and 53 blocks of Buda to the west. The Russians held now about a thousand blocks of the city on both sides of the river. The Soviets estimated the defending garrison to be comprised of as many as 75,000 to 100,000 Germans and another 30,000 Hungarians, that 10,000 of the enemy had been killed and another 30,000 wounded thus far in the fighting.

In Polish Silesia, 35 Jewish engineers had sacrificed their own lives to destroy with explosives a rubber factory which had produced tires for the Reich. The engineers had been workers in the factory, saved from the concentration camps by the fact of their expertise.

On Monday, American bombers out of Leyte had again struck Clark Field at Manila in the Philippines and reached other targets 150 miles to the north. Another group of planes struck the Japanese base on Formosa.

Another B-29 raid took place against Nagoya on Honshu Island in Japan, the fourth such raid and the heaviest of the four, this time being directed for the first time from the new 21st Bomber Command headquarters on Guam, 150 miles south of Saipan from which the Superfortresses had departed. It was the first B-29 raid in a week and the first on Nagoya since December 22. Tokyo radio described the raid as comprised of 90 B-29's, striking also Osaka and Hamamatsu.

The 79th Congress convened and promptly took up proposed legislation to end draft deferments for men 18 to 25 who were engaged in farm work, a bill urged by the President and War Mobilizer James Byrnes. The group included 364,000 men. The President had warned that, unless the deferment were ended, the Army and Navy would be forced to take men from the next oldest age group, most of whom were married with dependents, most of whom were capable of handling war-essential jobs on the home front, including farm labor to supplant the younger farm workers to be drafted per the proposal.

The North Carolina Legislature convened for its new session and defeated a measure which would have ended the gag rule established in 1941, whereby it took a two-thirds vote of the Assembly to defeat a minority report from a committee. In other words, a super-majority of the main body of the Legislature was required to override committee action. Some members had called the rule undemocratic.

On the editorial page, "Bargain in Bail" takes up the cudgels again against an old malady, lightness of punishment for murders of blacks committed by other blacks. Solicitor John Carpenter, the local prosecutor for the judicial district, was pursuing the same policy as he had in earlier years. Two black men had been charged with a murder which Chief of Detectives Littlejohn had called the most brutal in several years. The men were jailed pending trial scheduled to begin January 8, but when the judicial term had ended, Mr. Carpenter had allowed the men each to be freed on $2,000 bail, cheap considering the charge.

After their release, the men had allegedly sought to intimidate a State's witness.

The editorial found Mr. Carpenter again wholly unsuited to his longstanding position.

"Free As a Bird" reports of an inquiry of newspaper publishers by the American Society of Newspapers, asking whether the Government had intruded on freedom of the press. The News discloses its response to have been in the negative, then proceeds to justify that response, indicating that there was plenty of room for the press to improve itself and plenty of room for criticism that the press, as an industry, was too beholding to certain commercial interests and so limiting of itself. But, in terms of actual Government restriction, it found none and assured, in the last months of World War II, that the press was "not only free, but...alive and thinking."

Yet, during the war, especially during the first year after Pearl Harbor, there had been numerous complaints in the press from columnists regarding both unnecessary censorship and, especially, delay in release of information, especially on events from the Pacific theater. Those complaints and their tenor, in time, however, subsided, as restraints were loosened or at least better explained to the press.

Still, occasionally, as with the delay of several months in reporting of the two friendly fire incidents over Gela Gulf and at Catania in Sicily in July, 1943, there surfaced during the war some carping regarding undue secrecy. The News both deplored and then, the next day, following explanation that the story had been delayed in British channels, accepted the suppression of that story, after the Catania incident had been revealed by Stars and Stripes and then picked up by Drew Pearson on April 19, with his follow-up account supposedly on April 20--the "curve ball" to which we alluded in April for the subject not being examined in the Pearson column printed that day on the editorial page despite The News editorial the following day having alluded to it, probably explainable by the fact that on occasion The News printed two Merry-Go-Rounds on a given day, one on an inside page, presumably to make up for Sundays when The News did not publish. The other curve was in the fact of leading us for a day to believe that the Government may have deliberately misled Mr. Pearson into printing the story, then denying it, when it was finally admitted as true.

The News had also opined in March, with regard to the Gela incident, that such deadly confusion, while tragic, was to be expected in war.

"Here" of April 19, incidentally, is now here. "Mr. Galaxy" is now here. "Fords" is now here, in a way.

"More Waste Paper" encourages residents of Charlotte to leave their scrap paper once again for the Jaycees to collect on Sunday, the first paper drive since August, when 600,000 pounds had been collected, surpassing the amount of other larger cities such as Atlanta. Paper was a necessary wartime commodity, for both packaging of supplies and for munitions manufacture and packaging.

"An Earl, Now" comments on the award of earldom to former World War I British Prime Minister David Lloyd George as he retired from the House of Commons after 54 years at age 82. While there had been some strange selections in the past to the House of Lords, suggests the piece, there had never been any more strange than that of Lloyd George. For he had been the most severe critic of the system of peerage in England.

But becoming an earl, offers the editorial further, would not change him or elevate him in his own view over the people he had so faithfully served.

"But an Earl he is. And this is what an Earl is:" proceeding then with a description of the various benefits of earldom, including: the best desserts and aperetifs, following first-tasting palates and sticky fingers of royalty, at official functions; not being triable for a felony except by his peers; having his children, though still commoners, being referred to as "Lord" and "Lady", and the eldest son being titled "Baron". He, too, enjoyed the title "Lord" and could sit in the House of Lords.

The piece concludes that, by all rights, he was certainly entitled to the honor but it was only happenstance that the honor granted him exclusive rights apart from the people he had represented.

Lloyd George would die on March 26 from cancer with which he already suffered.

Follows then "Words of the Wise", which include: the chauvinism of Oscar Wilde; the English-only requirement urged by Teddy Roosevelt; the endowment of great creativity and will to reform only to the poor, as insisted upon by Andrew Carnegie; the identity between language and ideas stressed by Noah Webster; the failure of the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution for its mistaken impression, according to William Hazlitt, that being rid of the "patrons and abettors" of the ancien regime would end tyranny and slavery, when it would have taken being rid of the entire human race; the present irony of a declaration sometime earlier by Commander Perry anent Japan and its need for tender help to see it through its adolescence in commercial trade; the mutual transparency provided through time in a marriage, as clearly stated by Helen Rowland; and the somnolence endued by virtue recommended by Friedrich Nietzsche.

Drew Pearson tells of the unveiling by Secretary of State Stettinius of his new State Department team. Mr. Pearson states that the most impressive of the members were the liberal poet, Assistant Secretary Archibald MacLeish, and Assistant Secretary and future Secretary, Dean Acheson, the latter retained from Cordell Hull's team and thus not in need of confirmation by the Senate as had been the other assistants, and so not mentioned in the prints until now.

The new Secretary had urged the citizenry to discuss foreign policy and then impart their desires to the Government, that the Government desired to implement the foreign policy most desired by the people.

The most frequent questions asked by the American Platform Guild, before whom the new team met, a group of lecturers from throughout the country, had to do with Great Britain. They sensed growing resentment to the Ally and so wanted to know what the State Department intended with regard to lend-lease, trade competition with the United States during the war, sometimes involving resale of lend-lease goods, and other such issues bearing on Britain.

In response to a question, Assistant Secretary Nelson Rockefeller stated that there were 200,000 to 300,000 Japanese in Brazil, but added that there were two million Germans within the country.

Dean Acheson agreed with the point raised that Brazil had never declared war on Japan because it wanted to retain the services of the Japanese laborers, who worked more diligently than native populations.

Mr. Rockefeller also admitted that the United States intended to "appease" Argentina, and that they were going to "catch hell from the left wing groups for doing it", Argentina being governed by a Fascist military regime and never having completely severed its ties with Germany.

Mr. Pearson ends his column with the reminder that the winter horse racing season was ending this date, per the request of the Government as imparted by War Mobilizer James Byrnes, to conserve fuel and tires consumed by patrons of the races. War Manpower Commission representatives were going to the tracks to encourage the 60,000 employees to join war industries, having already identified jobs in which these employees would be beneficial.

He informs that top professional jockeys earned from $50,000 to $90,000 per year, with the average being $10,000, the same as Congressmen. Some 15,000 men were stable tenders earning $50 per week. Exercise personnel earned $4 per hour, still substantial pay in those times when coal miners, for instance, earned about $48 per week.

Some 10,000 officials handled the parimutuel windows and otherwise operated the tracks, while another 10,000 worked at breeding farms.

He does not address, however, what was to become of the persons who relied on the parimutuel windows for their sustenance or at least supplemental incomes. But they were probably better off not being able to place their bets on a horse.

Marquis Childs reprints a letter from President Roosevelt to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, asking him to insure that no veteran returning injured from the war would be released back into the society until he had received full physical and psychological rehabilitation, vocational guidance, pre-vocational training, and resocialization.

In response, the Army had, beginning December 22, initiated expanded vocational training programs as part of its convalescent centers.

Yet, says Mr. Childs, the Army had not yet begun to treat soldiers as individual human beings rather than serial numbers, the worst complaint voiced by veterans.

Some veterans had written to him in response to his editorials earlier on this topic, and had refused to sign their names out of fear of some reprisal by the Veterans' Administration.

Dorothy Thompson continues her previous two-day study of why the Allies had been unable to effect a solid coalition, preventing effectively the surrender of Germany for its own confusion as to how it might be treated by four varying policies followed by Great Britain, the United States, Russia, and France. At bottom of the conflict among the Allies, she argues, was mutual distrust.

The Russians wanted to extend their power to effect security, not to make all of Europe Communist. They desired a weak and disorganized Europe which could not rise up to defeat the Soviet Union. This disorganization required constant strife.

The British wanted also to extend their power for the preservation of their security, especially in Western Europe, the Mediterranean, and in Africa.

The United States wanted to eliminate commercial rivals and effect trade expansion.

It was unlikely that a meeting of the Big Three leaders would change this competing scenario. And the European Advisory Council, comprised of members from each nation, already existed in London. The only thing which could work to effect such a change was a coordinated plan for peace which recognized the concept of democracy for all nations and put aside the concept of power politics.

She sets forth two conditions under which Germany could surrender with the belief that it would have remaining a semblance of its national identity. One was to insure an economic life to Germany after the war, not one where the country was either de-industrialized or overpopulated with displaced German populations from Western Poland, East Prussia, and Silesia. The second was that Germany could become the ward of an established world organization functioning under clearly enunciated principles, an internationalized state capable of caring for its own needs, even though stripped of sovereignty.

The surrender of Germany meant the surrender of its identity. But unless there were a larger identity into which it could be secure in merging, there could effectively exist no such conditions under which Germans could feel reasonably comfortable in submitting to unconditional surrender.

To force the surrender of Germany and then divide it four ways was not, she opines, a viable solution to the problem. It would only create in time conflict between the four powers and lead to disaster.

She concludes by saying:

I have written this and the foregoing articles with full responsibility, and full knowledge that I am crying against the wind. But I have also written them in the certainty that the wind will change, if we do not, and will blow back in our faces a hurricane of chaos.

At the time, Ms. Thompson could not know just how prophetic those words would be in the atomic age of the Cold War, and how nearly apocalyptic the notion would become in fighting a diplomatic war, with increscent threat of mutually assured destruction as its binding force against free radicals, over the political freedom of Eastern Europe, its flashpoint being centered in Berlin, nearly leading in October, 1962 to nuclear exchange.

The Cuban Missile Crisis should always be subtitled as the Berlin Missile Crisis, for any effort by the United States at that time to invade Cuba to remove the offensive missile emplacements would have led inexorably to an invasion of West Berlin by the Soviets, a move which would have triggered nuclear war. And, not realized at the time, some of Cuba's bases were already operational during the crisis period and an invasion would have, according to Fidel Castro himself, led to the launching of the missiles against the United States. The reason the Soviets ultimately placed the missiles in Cuba was not because they held such tenderness for Cuba but rather as a counterpoint to the presence in Western Europe and in Turkey of missiles capable of striking at relatively short and thus more accurate range the Soviet Union.

Hal Boyle reports from Germany on December 28 that one American private, hiding in a small village being overrun by German tanks and having heard that Germans were especially hard on prisoners caught with German souvenirs, decided to abandon his booty. He thus discarded 40 German marks down a drain, threw away some coins, and hid a German cap insignia and a billfold made from a German pack.

The private had also lost his dogtags and so quickly constructed a new set from cardboard so that he would not be accused of being a spy and consequently shot.

But, after hiding for eight hours, he was not captured, was able to rejoin his outfit.

Another private, after the tanks had left, decided to go digging for potatoes in a field. After collecting a few, he picked one up which seemed heavier than the rest, scraped the dirt off, to find it was a German anti-personnel mine. He carefully replaced it and tiptoed from the minefield, suddenly divested of his appetite for more potatoes.

Another private was firing against a German night attack from within his foxhole. He became so engaged in the battle that he continued firing for five minutes after the shooting otherwise had stopped. He was alerted to the end of the tête-à-tête by his sergeant who had crawled over to the foxhole, tapped him on the shoulder, asked him if he was enjoying himself, and, being informed that he was, nevertheless implored that he might please keep it quiet as the rest of the men were trying to sleep.

Tenth Day of Christmas: Ten Tale-Tellers Tea-Tolling.

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