Wednesday, January 31, 1945

The Charlotte News

Wednesday, January 31, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the First White Russian Army, moving on a 50-mile wide front, had captured Landsberg, 68 miles from Berlin, as well as Meseritz, Schweibus, and Zullichau, each to the south of Landsberg, by a distance of 24, 37, and 48 miles, respectively. Other Red Army forces broke through German defenses guarding Frankfurt at the Oder River. German reports indicated that the Russians had reached Soldin, 58 miles from the capital, and Zielenzig, 62 miles distant, placing the northern and southern columns of the pincers just 35 miles apart.

Soldin was 36 miles from Stettin and 60 miles from Koslin. Reaching Stettin would enable the forces of General Gregory Zhukov to isolate all of northeastern Germany.

Forces in East Prussia captured Friedland and Heilsberg, to the south of Koenigsberg.

German radio told of as many as five million Germans now fleeing the East to Berlin, some in columns 35 miles long. The broadcast urged civilians in the East to "strew sand and ashes and shovel the entire breadth of the road" to enable unhindered passage of the refugees through the snow. A Swiss report described babies and the elderly dying along the roads from exposure.

They could thank Herr Doktor Goebbels and his propaganda machine for the dissemination of fear and the consequent determination to flee the Red Army.

Herr Hitler, however, surely brightened their spirits with his message made in commemoration of the beginning of the thirteenth year of the Nazi regime and Hitler's Chancellorship, urging Germans to accept "boundless misery" as the price of continued resistance. He assured that Germany would fight to the death until "final victory crowns [its] efforts". He averred that the Russians were "exterminating" the German people by the tens of thousands in the East. He told of how "the Almighty" had saved him from Assassination in July, that God was on their side. He further forecasted that when "this most gigantic of all world dramas will have ebbed and peace bells will ring," Germany, would, as for the previous 1,500 years, still be king as against the East.

An observer for Der Bund, a conservative German publication, reported that the people maintained their silence in the face of the Fuehrer's remarks, a sign of passive resistance and their longing for peace. The Gestapo, it continued, prevented any mass uprising.

German nationals were delaying routine trips to Berlin on business on the basis of stated belief that significant events were imminent within the capital.

On the Western Front, white-clad infantry of the First Army crossed the German border through snow at two new places, a half mile west of Underbreth on the Siegfried Line, fifteen miles northeast of St. Vith, and east of Lanzereth, less than a mile from the Line, as the forces of the First and Third Armies combined to form an attack along a 35-mile front below St. Vith to the Roer River northeast of Monschau. The 78th Division moved through a gap in the line three miles west of Monschau, occupying a three-mile stretch of the Line between Simmerrath and Eicherscheid. The Ninth Division pushed northeast from Rohren to Widdau, on the south bank of the upper Roer River, three miles east of Monschau. The First Army forces included seven divisions, approximately 100,000 men.

The Third Army widened its bridgehead on the Our River to five miles and moved 1.5 miles into Germany, to within 12 miles of Prum on the Siegfried Line.

Some 60 divisions, half of which were armored, were being amassed along the front by the Allies, to take advantage of the dwindling defenses on the Western Front, subtracted of enemy forces being evacuated to shore up the Eastern Front.

Allied authorities had stated that 47 American combat divisions were now active on the Western Front. In addition, there were 14 British divisions, three Canadian, eight French, and one Polish, for a total of 73 Allied divisions opposing about 70 to 80 German divisions. Eleven of the American divisions were armored, 33 infantry, and three airborne. The page contains a list of the American divisions and their commanders.

From 500 to 750 heavy bombers out of Italy struck oil and rail targets in the area of Vienna.

On Luzon in the Philippines, Eighth Army troops, led by Lt. General Robert Eichelberger, landed from 150 ships at a point 60 miles northwest of Manila, adding to the woes of the Japanese trying to defend the city. The new landing forces cut off any chance of retreat to Bataan by the enemy, as the Eighth Army drove swiftly east toward juncture with the rapidly advancing Sixth Army, now just 30 miles from Manila. The landing took place without loss on Monday in Zambales Province, between the Santo Tomas River and San Antonio. No enemy planes attacked the convoy or the landing forces.

Olongapo naval base at Subic Bay was immediately placed under threat by the new forces as they sped eleven miles inland during the first day of operations, occupying San Felipe, San Narciso, San Antonio, San Marcelino, and Caetillejos. No enemy forces had been in the area since 1942, save for 300 Japanese passing south two weeks earlier.

A fire in a farmhouse in Maine tragically took the lives of sixteen infants being kept for war worker parents.

The fight in the Senate for confirmation of Henry Wallace as Secretary of Commerce had come down to a Democratic Party split between the liberals perceived as being led by Mr. Wallace and the conservative traditionalists led by Senators Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia, Walter George of Georgia, and Josiah W. Bailey of North Carolina.

Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley was seeking a compromise whereby the nomination would be sent back to the Commerce Committee for further deliberation pending the outcome of the bill before Congress to divest the Reconstruction Finance Corporation from the Department of Commerce, thus stripping the Secretary of much of his power at that time. Senator Claude Pepper of Florida had conceded that the only way Mr. Wallace could be confirmed was to have the RFC thus divorced.

Senator Byrd, however, sought a test vote forthwith.

Both Secretary of State Edward Stettinius and presidential adviser Harry Hopkins were reported to be visiting Allied Headquarters in Rome. Both Prime Minister Churchill and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden were absent from Commons. Together these reports fueled speculation that the Big Three conference was about to get underway.

Indeed, it was just two days from beginning with the President and Prime Minister, and had already begun on Malta the previous day in meetings between Allied chiefs of staff.

Fala was reported by the Washington Post to have been sent to Walter Reed Army Hospital for treatment from a bite inflicted during his honeymoon by his "blue-blooded lady love".

Major Warner Hall, public relations officer at Walter Reed, however, corrected the report, indicating that, while the First Scottie had indeed been treated for an external injury, he had not been admitted to the hospital, but was treated by an instructor at the Veterinarian school. Fala, he took pains to explain, had not occupied any hospital bed or caused the extrication from the hospital of any serviceman.

"Never!" exclaimed the major dogmatically.

Recently, Mrs. Roosevelt had told a group of sevicemen visiting the White House that Fala was in the country and that she hoped he was having his honeymoon.

The Man Who Would Be King, it appeared, had been rejected in his advances toward Mrs. Fala.

Ye Fala?

On the editorial page, "Signals Off" reports that the Charlotte City Council had declared a two-year hiatus before any decision would be made on extending the city limits. There were three principal reasons for the annexation: extending city services to those desirous of it; expanding the population of the city so that it could take its place in commercial appeal regionally; and allowing for planning by the City before certain areas would become heavily settled.

"Fumble, Fumble" takes a dim view of the United States Supreme Court having granted the petition for writ of certiorari to permit review of the deportation order against International Longshoremen's Union leader Harry Bridges.

The editors state that they were not so greatly disposed to see Mr. Bridges deported to Australia, but the process had dragged on so long as to present American justice in an unfavorable light. The original alleged justification for the 1942 order, that Mr. Bridges was a member of the Communist Party and in that capacity thus supported the violent overthrow of the Government, and so was excludable from the United States, had been lost. Now, it appeared that Mr. Bridges had changed his character. So, it asserts, the slow working of justice to insure protection of individual rights had served to frustrate the efficient working of the Federal will.

Well, that one is so much hogwash, so much so that we shall not dignify it further with counter-argument. It is simply, on its face, hogwash. Whoever wrote it should have been sent out to the country for a day to slop the hogs and clear their mind. Rarely did The News submit such a piece so devoid of logic as to be unworthy of comment, but this is one such occasion.

Reasonable minds could differ on the disposition of the case against Mr. Bridges, as the eventual decision would wind up in June split 5 to 3, with Justice Robert Jackson abstaining from participation. But to say that protecting someone's rights too much somehow disserves a speedy and efficient result at the behest of the prosecutorial arm of the Government, is to talk out of the hat and fundamentally misunderstand our system of jurisprudence, that the Government, functioning as prosecutor, or in the case of immigration, as enforcer of civil laws, is merely an advocate for a position before the courts. The individual is entitled to his or her defense. They are two opposing parties to a lawsuit, whether criminal or civil in nature. The sooner the country comes to grips with that rather simple and fundamental notion of American jurisprudence, a substantial portion of the country, even attorneys, not appearing to this day to grasp it, the better off we all shall be.

The Government is not royalty. It is a party with great power, but that does not make it royalty, nor does it render it the least bit superior to any other party in a given case.

Why else in hell did we fight a Revolution 230 and more years ago?

Go out and slop some hogs if you don't understand that basic idea. That's all you're good for until you do. You probably ought to be deported for failing to gain the most basic understanding of our system of government.

"Nazi Chicanery" comments on the exodus of German capital in the form of patents and inventions from the Reich, with Berlin imminently threatened with occupation by the Allies. The Germans were funneling these properties into Sweden for safe-keeping.

The piece expresses the hope that the owners of the patents and inventions, primarily in the automobile, chemical, and photographic industries, would not be allowed sanctuary and thus to profit from their country's war despite themselves. The piece favors seizure of the patents as part of the huge reparations which by all rights should be exacted of Germany to rebuild Europe.

"An Orphan Pair" finds the education and recreation departments of the city wanting of funding, such that they had to seek supplements from the annual gift to the City of $5,000 from the Charlotte Housing Authority, a gift which had been presented for three years running. The piece advocates that, instead of providing only a percentage of the annual revenue to the City to these two departments, they should be given a budgetary-based fund from which to operate, one which would not be thus subject to the vicissitudes of revenue collection in a given year.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Clare Hoffman of Michigan assailing the Administration for having sold into the slavery of unions the American workers and made the Government an organ taking orders from the CIO PAC. Future Speaker John McCormack of Massachusetts took issue with Mr. Hoffman's diatribe.

Mr. Hoffman allowed that he might delete a few of his comments from the Record after taking a couple of days to think them over. But he took umbrage at the idea that his skin was thin, as suggested by Mr. McCormack. He insisted it was as thick as that of a rhinoceros, would have to be to take the abuse of PAC and certain columnists.

Mr. McCormack retorted that Mr. Hoffman was so suspicious that he did not have pockets on his clothing, suspicious even, therefore, of himself.

Mr. Hoffman stated in reply that he had no pockets, perhaps, because he did not want anyone to put their hands in them, that he did not trust the New Deal. He then noticed that Mr. McCormack had his hands in his pockets.

To which Mr. McCormack responded, "Don't worry about me, brother. I have confidence in myself."

Drew Pearson discusses the disappointment of members of Congress at the supposed confidential meeting held with General George C. Marshall and Admiral Ernest King, chiefs of staff of the Army and Navy, respectively. They reported little which was not already well known to Congress, and the members came away with the belief that the meeting had been called to promote the work-or-fight legislation.

Admiral King had indicated that the Navy had suffered greater losses to the enemy in the Pacific than was known to the public, but that the secrecy also kept the Japanese from finding out the weak points of the American Fleet and so it still had to be maintained in confidence.

General Marshall spoke of supply problems having hampered the taking of France during the summer and considerably slowed operations on the Western Front generally. It had been the result of transportation issues, he stressed, rather than production problems.

General Marshall also explained the great suffering in London, seeking to draw comparisons between the blitzed areas and New York should the latter have been hit by relentless German bombing.

Marquis Childs describes what the British stolidly called an "incident", a V-bomb attack, the aftermath of which he witnessed in Southern England. The bomb had fallen just an hour before he arrived, at the edge of a cemetery on a street lined with cottages. One block had all of its cottages destroyed; in other adjacent areas, considerable damage had been wrought. The stench of death pervaded the air. Family members came to an established "inquiry point" always set up after an "incident", and stood in line for word of lost relatives. It was hard to provide information immediately because victims of the bombings were often literally blown to bits. A' times, only a finger bearing a ring remained. Digging in the wreckage sometimes lasted for days.

This incident had produced only a few casualties. But damage was significant to property. He stopped in on what had been a police constable's home, where he and his wife were sweeping up glass. He searched for an unbroken glass in which to pour Mr. Childs some beer. They took the whole thing in stride by this point and vowed to go on with their lives.

Mr. Childs reflected that some two hundred miles away across the Channel, men with technological expertise had pushed a button and sent into the air quite impersonally, without aim, this destructive device, landing in a peaceful neighborhood, quite remote from the war on the other side.

"It has the impersonality of a force of nature, and yet it is the end product of the most abstruse science and involved technology."

Samuel Grafton comments on the lack of understanding on the home front of what was going on in freezing Europe, where the civilian populace of France was suffering in the bitter cold, where even General De Gaulle had to wear two overcoats during an official conference for want of coal to provide heat. Food was also scarce, the rations being described as a cruel joke within the Paris press, made even worse by the fact that only a third of the allotted rations were able to be transported by rail to the French.

Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper, had caviled against women of the United States for wearing fur coats while men on the front froze for want of proper winter clothing. Often the letters from home to the men were more helpful than harmful in terms of building morale.

Mr. Grafton seeks to elevate the consciousness of Americans to the harsh plight, not only of the soldiers and the French civilians, but also of those all over freezing Europe without heat and with insufficient food to eat.

A perennial letter writer finds many in the country urging suspicions of the Russians, casting blame on them for every move, whether fighting or not fighting. He suggests these critics as potentially wrecking of the post-war peace.

Mr. Smith saw with clarity the situation of the future world to come.

Another letter writer decided that the feeble-minded children were offspring of alcoholics, and thus putting a referendum on the ballot to resolve the situation with prohibition would cure the state of its feeble-minded children.

We suspect it was more a function of the feeble education the State was then able to provide, ma'am, not so much the alcohol of the parents. For if your thesis had been true, most of the nation's children would have been in institutions for the feeble-minded, would they not have?

Hal Boyle, again with the 517th Parachute Combat Team, reports on January 28 of the funny feeling of a lieutenant who had ordered his men to pull back from "that hill", the hill at Col de Braus in the Maritime Alps of France. The unit had lost the hill after 22 of the 28 men deployed to take it had been killed or wounded in the action. They did not know how to lose. Nobody had taught them. Nobody expected such a result. The mission was to take out 22 enemy pillboxes which were thought to be empty. It turned out otherwise and they were cut to pieces.

The lieutenant, himself, had been struck by a grenade blast, causing him to bleed from his mouth and rendering his leg numb. Men fell every few steps as they advanced up the hill in the face of enemy fire.

One paratrooper, wounded in the face, dragged three wounded men back to safety. He received the Distinguished Service Cross for his bravery and duty.

Finally, with only six men standing without wounds, the lieutenant gave the order to pull back. He thought that he would be kicked out of the paratroopers for doing so without orders from headquarters. Instead, the battalion commanders commended him. Orders had been issued to pull back before the second assault on the hill, but the radio had been knocked out and the orders thus not received.

Two days later, two companies of more than 500 paratroopers took the hill, capturing eighteen Germans just in the first pillbox.

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