The Charlotte News
Friday, January 5, 1945
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that, amid blizzard conditions and heavy fog, British Second Army armor and infantry on the north side of the Bulge line had gained up to 2,000 yards all along a seven-mile front, from Marche to the First Army right flank, having begun its drive at the northwestern tip of the line, reaching Waha. The Germans reacted by appearing to withdraw from this tip of the Bulge line, but it may have only been to regroup at Houffalize. Other British units attacked at Bure and Wavreille south of Rochefort.
The British had been acting as "silent partners" to the American Armies since the German offensive had begun December 16. Censorship had arrested mention of the fact to the American and British, though the German radio crackled with the news from the beginning. In an effort to mislead the Germans, those radio reports were dismissed as "fishing expeditions" by Allied intelligence—the same which had been misled into believing the gathering of enemy forces, which became the driving wedge into the Bulge, had been only for the purpose of German rest in the Ardennes.
General Marshall in Washington told the press that the new Allied offensive on the northern flank was just getting started.
The First Army made several gains extending to a thousand yards along a 17-mile front in weather which barely afforded any visibility. Arbrefontaine, 2.5 miles from the Laroche-St. Vith highway, had been captured, and gains made to the outskirts of Lierneux and below Hotton, as well as the staunching of a German counter-attack at Bergeval near Stavelot.
A staff officer at General Montgomery's headquarters stated the fight to be the hardest the British had ever engaged. The Germans were utilizing ski troops in some areas, were clad in white snowsuits. The terrain included snow-covered minefields across which the Allied troops had to transit.
The bad weather generally helped the Germans, enabling re-supply and reinforcement while air operations had to be halted.
The Third Army on the southern flank turned back seventeen German counter-attacks the previous day, most west of Goesdorf, fourteen miles southeast of Bastogne and four miles southeast of Wiltz in Luxembourg, and another heavy assault three miles north of Bastogne at Longchamps. But the position of the Army remained unchanged by 6:00 a.m.
The German drive against the Seventh Army in the Lorraine sector turned into a full offensive effort, as the enemy gained two miles southeast of Bitche, about 15 miles inside France, within 12 miles of the Saverne Gap controlling Strasbourg. The Germans had crossed the Rhine north of Strasbourg.
It was disclosed by Supreme Allied Headquarters that since December 20, the First and Ninth American Armies, and all other forces on the northern flank, had been under the command of General Montgomery. The British General had been "here, there, and everywhere" on the American front, personally issuing orders to American commanders. He had been well received by the American troops and officers who only wanted to stop the Germans.
The southern forces, including the Third Army of General Patton and one Seventh Army division, were under the overall command of General Omar Bradley.
Three Allied Armies, plus elements of the Ninth, now were pitted against three German Armies within the Ardennes in the thick of harsh winter weather.
Despite the bad weather, following a day of inactivity, a thousand American heavy bombers, escorted by 500 fighters, struck the German lines between Cologne and Karlsruhe. Prior to noon, the RAF, out of Holland, raided a German position near St. Vith.
The Russians continued to resist German efforts northwest of Budapest, in the narrow corridor twenty miles southeast of Komarom, to break through to the surrounded nine divisions within the capital. Within the city, the Russians had occupied another 400 blocks to bring the total to 1,400 since the previous Friday. The Soviets claimed to have knocked out a hundred tanks during the previous day's fighting.
A report issued that Daniel De Luce, A. P. war correspondent, had been denied inclusion in a pool of American correspondents to be allowed access to liberated Poland and its capital at Lublin, wherein presided the newly formed and Moscow-sponsored Polish Provisional Government. Lublin authorities had originally granted the request to Mr. De Luce and then, at the last minute, withdrew it, resulting in a storm of protest.
Although largely blacked out, a report indicated a major operation underway in the Pacific involving the Third Fleet, commanded by Vice Admiral John S. McCain, suggestive of affording cover for a major landing operation, as had similar operations in October prior to the October 20 landing on Leyte.
It was in fact the beginning of operations to make way for the American amphibious landing to take place on Monday in Lingayen Gulf on Luzon.
General MacArthur announced that during the first three days of January, American planes had sunk 60 Japanese ships at Manila Bay and Lingayen Gulf.
Admiral Nimitz had confirmed attacks on Formosa and in the Ryukyus Tuesday and Wednesday, as reported the previous day in detail by the Japanese, suggestive of a strong bombing operation over both Formosa and Okinawa. It appeared that more attacks had taken place the previous day as well.
In Burma, British and Indian sea-borne troops had taken the port of Akyab without opposition. The Japanese had reportedly about a thousand men on the island at one time, but had evacuated the previous night before the assault.
The North Carolina Legislature began its new session, extending the war bonus for teachers and introducing a bill to amend the State Constitution to afford equal rights for women, aimed at enabling female jury service.
The President disavowed knowledge of the reported proposed ban on conventions, to which rumor the American Transportation Association had responded the previous day providing its full support.
Drink up, Shriners. You appear safe after all.
On the eve of the annual State of the Union message to Congress, the President refused comment on reports that the House was planning to make the Un-American Activities Committee, formerly chaired by just retired Texas Congressman Martin Dies, into a permanent committee of the House. Though a snippet in today's prints, it would become, through time, within the ensuing four years, the focal point of a major firestorm, piloting a California Congressman elected in 1946 into the national spotlight.
Drink up, Shriners...
On the editorial page, "That Was That" looks at Governor Gregg Cherry's call for a statewide referendum on liquor to determine whether the 25 wet counties of the 100 total would remain under the auspices of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board or become dry.
The piece predicts that the Legislature would not call for the referendum at that time because 300,000 of the state's population were in the service and to hold such an election under those conditions would constitute a dirty trick. Moreover, the substantial revenue to the State and 25 wet counties from liquor taxes would not be relinquished without a fight, the State raking in from thirsts slaked 1.158 million bucks during fiscal year 1943-44, as the 25 wet counties collected 2.739 million in taxes. The added revenue lowered other taxes in the wet counties.
Even the dry counties benefited, for they could sell their confiscated illegal liquor to the ABC Board, as Mecklenburg had done to collect $27,483 during the previous five years.
"A Rebellion" tells of the alignment forming in the new House between Southern Democrats and Republicans, brewing trouble for the Administration on domestic policy. Their first act was to seek to make permanent HUAC, to become the first permanent investigatory committee in the nation's history. The call ignored all previous warnings that the Dies Committee had been a dangerous and dispiriting influence on Americans, probing into private lives for most usually purely political purposes.
The piece predicts that the move was a harbinger of hot times ahead in the 79th Congress and that HUAC would provide a good deal of the fire to ignite it.
It concludes: "If it develops that we have misjudged our new Congress in that field, too, we may as well prepare to harvest our whirlwind."
The piece could not have been more accurate, even it would not begin with a vengeance until the 80th Congress.
The interstitial little filler carries with it some macabre double entendre which you may gather for yourself, whether or not you partake of Dromedaries.
"Jail for Children" bemoans the state of the Juvenile Detention Home, which was in fact the old Mint Street jail in Charlotte, overcrowded and without sufficient recreation facilities for the youthful offenders it housed. The inmates received no stimulating reading matter beyond Argosy Detective Stories and were frisked for weapons when they entered, no matter their tender age of 11 or 12.
The piece states that were the conditions to persist, that if the county continued to treat juveniles as criminals, the community would be rewarded with a product ready to do its criminal business on the streets upon release.
"Words of the Wise" has among its entries several chestnuts of which you may read yourself. It being Twelfth Night for the second night in a row, we do not feel up to touching on each one. But we will report of the one from Mussolini in which he had stated that Fascism would, if necessary, step "over the more or less putrid body of the Goddess of Liberty". It would not be long before his own would be the putrid body of Fascism, hung up in an Esso station in Milan.
And we cannot pass up the one from Jonathan Swift in which he suggested that the mark of genius was that the dunces of the world were aligned in confederacy against its composer.
"One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea."—Walter Bagehot
Nietzsche believed that deep thinkers were more troubled in their hearts by being understood than by being misunderstood.
And, moreover: "The trouble with law is lawyers."—Clarence Darrow
Finally, the unkindest cut of all to any barber, courtesy of King Archclaus, via Plutarch.
Drew Pearson examines the importance of sound military intelligence to battle decisions, using as example the erroneous assumptions by G-2 regarding the build-up of German troops in the Ardennes prior to the initiation of the winter offensive compared to the counter-offensive launched by the Germans in northern Italy against the all-black 92nd Division.
In the latter instance, G-2 had assumed that the Nazis would view the all-black division as a weak, non-Aryan entity and thus hit at that point. In consequence, the division was prepared and capable of striking back, halting the offensive.
The First Army in Belgium, by contrast, had been caught looking, without adequate men and supplies to ward off a major offensive drive, a division without combat experience having been placed in the area, the Army thinking it to be a quiet sector, given the hilly and forested terrain.
G-2 had garnered a reputation as being none too swift in its predictions, having forecasted that France would hold in the spring of 1940, that Britain would fall in the fall, that Moscow would fall within a few weeks following the June 22, 1941 invasion of Russia by the Nazis. They had also not foreseen the three German-Italian divisions awaiting the American landings at Salerno in Italy in September, 1943.
Navy Intelligence had not realized that the Japanese had evacuated Kiska in the Aleutians, causing unnecessary bombing operations of an empty island for several days.
The problems had been attributed to the staffing of both G-2 and ONI with well-connected blue bloods. In response, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy had been authorized to clean house and reorganize G-2, which he had accomplished the previous spring.
Mr. Pearson next reports of Teamster Union leader Dan Tobin not wishing to be the replacement for retiring Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, even though he had actively sought the position in 1933. Then, however, Mrs. Roosevelt had persuaded the President to appoint a woman to the post to satisfy the large bloc of women voters in the country who had cast their lot with the President. Mr. Tobin had accepted that decision and continued to support the President nonetheless. The President had, eighteen months earlier, asked one of the three key labor leaders, Mr. Tobin, CIO president Phil Murray or AFL president William Green, to become the replacement Secretary. They discussed it among themselves and Mr. Tobin had stated his lack of desire any longer for that position. Mr. Murray and Mr. Green each believed membership of the rival organization would not accept either of them as Secretary.
Marquis Childs regards the surprise with which most Americans greeted the opinion registered by the London Economist that Britain should stop appeasing the United States. Most Americans did not understand that Britain had been so transacting its diplomacy, that, if anything, it had been the Roosevelt Administration overlooking the transgressions by Britain to the Atlantic Charter, in Greece, in Belgium, in Italy. The issue served to point out the sea of holy misunderstanding extant between the two countries.
What concerned the British was the Hull policy toward Argentina, severing diplomatic relations, a policy with which the British had agreed reluctantly, as well that they had earlier supported the President in distancing himself from General De Gaulle whom he personally found distastefully arrogant, though in doing so believed it to have compromised the British position with respect to France and thus the whole European scene.
But the overall problem lay in attitude, one which had made itself apparent at the recent International Civil Aviation Conference in Chicago when the British had intractably insisted at the last minute upon holding to its policy of quotas in international air routes after the war, while the United States wanted free and open competition, open to all nations.
The wealthy British were suspicious that the United States wished to reduce the country to a secondary or tertiary power. Britain, once ruler of the waves in the Eighteenth through early Twentieth centuries, was reluctant to give up its proud heritage, one of the late protectors of which had been Winston Churchill in his younger days.
Mr. Childs concludes that, while it was an inopportune time to be airing differences, it was at least salutary to have them out in the open rather than festering behind the scenes. At least the public of both nations understood the issues and that work had to be done to make accommodations.
A piece, utilizing a statistical abstract and analysis from the University of Virginia News Letter, finds, as had the UVA study, that the primary difficulty in college education within the South, causing it to lag severely behind the national average—3.8 percent of the adult population having a four-year degree while nationally the average was 4.6 percent—was bound up in the disparities between whites with a four-year degree and college-educated blacks within the South, only .96 percent of the latter having graduated college, and between urban and non-farm rural populations, with, respectively, 6.1 and 4.1 percent college educated populations, and rural farm population, with only one percent having acquired a four-year degree. The national average in the latter category was 1.2 percent and the national averages in the former categories were, respectively, 5.7 and 4.2 percent, each comparable and, in the case of urban populations, even inferior to that of the South.
Thus concludes the piece, eradication of the great disparity between Southern higher education of the population versus that of the nation lay in educating better the black population and that of the tenant farmers.
A table is provided with the percentages of college educated individuals for each state of the nation, separately stating the percentages for each of the four years of college completed and ranking them in their order by percentage of college graduates, the District of Columbia, California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah topping the list. North Carolina at the time was 34th in the nation and 5th in the South, preceded by Florida, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. Eight of the last nine states comprised the remainder of the South, interspersed only by Maine at 43.
Dang, son, if you're from Arkansas, don't even bother to apply. We'll take a Nevadan first.
A letter to the editor corrects a mistake in the News editorial of January 2 which had listed Louisiana as one of the remaining eight Southern states retaining the poll tax. A soldier hailing from the state who hated the concept of the poll tax was proud to announce that his native state had abandoned the insidious practice in 1934, though not the first state to do so in the South, as he suggested. North Carolina had abolished it in 1920. The News readily admits its error and states that Arkansas was in fact the eighth Southern state with a poll tax and had a 12.4% turnout at the polls while Louisiana had turned out 15.5% of the population.
It also noted that Maine still had a poll tax and had a turnout of 37.9% in November, about the equivalent of the national average turnout. The editors were at a loss to explain that particular anomaly.
Hal Boyle reports from Belgium on January 1 that during the battle of Krimkelt, two German Tiger tanks and one American Sherman had played
The Shermans had seen the Germans stalking them and instead, understanding the German vulnerability, began to follow the Germans, trying to ward off the second Tiger giving chase to the lone Sherman.
Initially, the bazooka-men were pursuing their quarry on foot, but finally, realizing the Tigers to be too fleet for them to track in that manner, ducked inside a doorway and simply waited, training their bazookas on a corner of the house until the first Tiger appeared, then sequentially knocked them out, as each rounded the corner.
In the same battle, a crew of Germans were trapped in their tank after a bazooka blew off one of its treads. When the crew refused to emerge, one American soldier climbed atop the tank, poured five gallons of gasoline down the exhaust pipe and lit a match, threw it down afterward. The Germans emerged--hands up.
Twelfth Day of Christmas: Twelve Drome
Framed Edition
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.