The Charlotte News

Wednesday, November 14, 1945

TWO EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Jerusalem, Jewish youths stoned bus drivers protesting their continued operation of buses during a twelve-hour general strike called by Jews in opposition to British-American policy announced by Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin the previous day. Otherwise, the strike was successful and without incident. The Jewish press in Palestine found the statement of Mr. Bevin to be lacking in the proposal of President Truman that 100,000 Jews be admitted immediately to Palestine. Mr. Bevin had stated that immigration quotas would remain unchanged until the matter could be studied by a joint American-British committee, as yet unformed. At the time, Britain governed Palestine under a League of Nations mandate.

Fighting continued in Soerabaja in Java as British Indian troops repulsed attacks by Indonesian Nationalists, killing more than a hundred and suffering half a dozen casualties. The object of the attack had been the Kota railway station and marshalling yards. The Indonesians were using Dutch-built pillboxes to launch their attacks. The estimated number of Indonesians opposing the British in Soerabaja was placed at between 15,000 and 18,000, many armed with spears.

Two Japanese generals accused of supplying arms to the Indonesians, Maj. General Moichiro Yamamoto and Lt. General Yiuchiro Nagano, formally surrendered to the British and were taken to Singapore to face war crimes charges.

Secretary of State James Byrnes stated that discussions between Russia and the United States regarding a joint Allied council to govern the occupation of Japan had reached an impasse regarding whether there would be a council as in Berlin, requiring unanimity to implement policies. The Russians had originally been amenable to a plan favored by the United States, whereby General MacArthur would have final say in the event of disagreement on policy, but now had backed off that arrangement, insisting on the rule of unanimity. The rule had been responsible, said Mr. Byrnes, for inefficiency of administration in Germany.

It was announced that General Marshall would retire as chief of staff of the Army on November 19, to be succeeded by General Eisenhower. The expected change spelled potential problems for General MacArthur, against whom General Eisenhower was said to hold a longstanding grudge, having been dismissed as MacArthur's assistant in the Philippines before the war. Collier's correspondent Quentin Reynolds related that during a gin rummy game with Eisenhower and General Carl Spaatz, he had asked General Eisenhower whether he knew General MacArthur. The General had replied: "Know him!" Hell, I studied dramatics under him for four years."

The 34th installment in the series by General Jonathan Wainwright on his captivity on Formosa tells of his being marched, along with 116 other officers and men, to the Karenko railroad station on the morning of April 2, 1943 where they boarded a slow-moving train which managed only 50 miles in seven and a half hours. They were let off at a military camp near Tamazato, south of Karenko. Eight officers, including General Wainwright, were assigned to four small rooms and the rest were crowded into barracks with conditions nearly as bad as those at Karenko.

At Tamazato, however, there were no beatings as at Karenko. But the daily regimen of a small portion of rice and watery soup remained the only nourishment. On April 12, Red Cross supplies snatched from the men at Karenko were sent along to Tamazato, including food and shoes, the latter to replace the wooden clogs dispensed by the Japanese. On April 14, after the Japanese had gone through and stolen much of the supplies, the remainder were apportioned to the men. Their systems had become so accustomed to the rice and soup that the food did not settle, but, even so, provided strength. General Wainwright's weight jumped by seven pounds in just a week, to 132.

The men were visited by Japanese representatives of the Red Cross, but their captors had briefed them in advance on what they could and could not say. They were prohibited from mentioning the bad treatment and food, and so they told the representatives that they were being treated well. The Red Cross inspectors paid no heed to the appearance of the prisoners, emaciated and forlorn. The armed Japanese sentries standing nearby insured that the men could not depart from the script, lest their treatment would be made worse.

Congressman John Taber of New York, along with other lawmakers, protested the policy on auto pricing put forward the previous day to the Small Business Committee of the House by OPA director Chester Bowles, asserting that dealers were capable of absorbing all of the price increases to be allowed manufacturers to hold consumer prices at or near 1942 levels. The Congressmen accused Mr. Bowles of trying to coerce Congress "on a racketeering basis" to accept the pricing policy.

No one had yet pointed out that the 1946 models the consumers would be able to buy were identical to the 1942 models, saving the manufacturers the cost of retooling.

At the Labor-Management Conference, industry was preparing a comprehensive statement on all outstanding issues of dispute. Meanwhile, U. S. Steel refused, until OPA acted on the pending requests to allow increase in steel prices, to meet further with the Steelworkers Union representatives, as urged by Labor Secretary Lewis Schwellenbach to work out their differences over a demanded $2 per day increase in wages across the board. The head of U.S. Steel contended that the wage increases would cost 225 million dollars per year, more than the profits of all steel companies.

Charlotte planned to hold a large parade on December 7, to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The local Fire Chief urged the City Planning Board to incorporate into its plans the future expansion of the Fire Department to handle the increased needs brought on by planned city expansion.

In Oroville, California, the 25-year old married lover and bride of Ellsworth Wisecarver, 16, was headed back to Long Beach with her two children, denied permission to see Ellsworth before parting in such sweet sorrow. She was aglow, however, with the belief that Ellsworth still loved her. She repeated her intention to divorce her soldier husband and marry Ellsworth, the young man who could make love better than most men 35, having already eloped at 14 with another married woman with two children during 1944. She was released from custody after the arrival of her brother, two sisters, and her father. Ellsworth was still being held in custody in Oroville pending arrival of his parents.

In Pottstown, Pa., having nothing to do with the stoned bus drivers of Jerusalem, a posse had been formed to comb the woods for a mysterious beast, "The Thing of Sheep's Hill", which made twenty-foot leaps, cried and screamed as a baby, and stole chickens. A neighboring property owner said that police and hunting parties trespassed on her property at night and took pot-shots at shadows in the dark. She suggested that she might start some shooting herself.

Four casualties among the posse had occurred, two from errant bullets and two in a car which swerved when the driver became frightened that The Thing was in their path.

John Hipple, a Montgomery County farmer, claimed to have seen The Thing, "like a big cat". After he shot at it, "it leaped twenty feet into the air and, screaming, disappeared."

John Wojack of Pottstown also had seen it, giving a "shrill cry", then bounding leaps of at least ten feet in length.

The Thing had been described as a bear, a panther, a puma, a wild chow dog, and a black fox.

Be on the lookout.

It could be a baby which likes chicken. It could be Ellsworth, or at least his doppelganger.

In London, a woman was ejected from Commons after she began shouting, "Mr. Bernard Shaw is God's right-hand man."

It could have been worse. She could have reiterated something said by General Patton.

On the editorial page, "Hope Blooms in the Fall" comments on renewed good will in the world after all of the dismal events occurring since war's end. Cordell Hull, vilified in September for supposedly having dragged the United States into the war with a sinister plot to allow the attack on Pearl Harbor, had now been awarded the Nobel Prize. Clement Attlee had come to Washington to suggest that the atom bomb be turned over to the U.N. Dr. Lise Meitner, who had taken the secret of the atomic bomb with her when evicted from Germany before the war, had been given a visiting professorship at Catholic University.

To add to these positive turns, the story had come from Russia, in the wake of Foreign Commissar V. M. Molotov's speech of the previous week celebrating the Revolution of 1917, that Mr. Molotov had stopped in a receiving line after the speech to toast A.P correspondent Eddy Gilmore, asked him to what they should toast, eventually agreed to a toast on reciprocity in the removal of censorship.

The piece finds these developments to be hopeful signs and that the fears of the country with respect to Russia appeared as empty as Mr. Molotov's glass of vodka after the toast.

"The Pearl Harbor Indictment" opines that a constructive inquiry into Pearl Harbor, to investigate the breakdown at the time in communications between the Army and Navy in light of the pending debate on joinder, and to bring into view obvious civilian and military lapses in judgment, would have been a good thing, with wartime censorship now gone.

But it had devolved, even before the joint Congressional committee of inquiry had convened, into a political sparring match, in which Republicans were seeking to find facts convenient to their desired ends for the 1946 and 1948 campaigns.

The isolationist Chicago Tribune, for instance, had editorialized that the facts were known regarding the "blackest page in American history" in which "President Roosevelt and his administration invited the Japanese attack", deliberately withholding adequate warning to Hawaii, sacrificing "3,000 Americans". "All this they did to have war." The Tribune had recommended impeachment of all remaining officials responsible, and to "bring them to the bar", apparently meaning indictment for treason as well.

The editorial finds this irresponsible rhetoric, not based on fact, to be nevertheless a sign of things to come from the Republicans who were bound to exploit whatever scant factual data could be found to bolster such a conclusion, to tar and feather the Roosevelt memory with it in the hope of winning seats in Congress in 1946 and the presidency in 1948.

It recognized also that Democrats could weave their defense from the same facts, that no one would benefit from such partisan bickering. The hearings were fated to become a showcase, it believes, for no more than that and would be better postponed until another, "cooler moment".

A piece from the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, titled "Kluxery's Itching Palms"—having nothing to do with the Jewish youths and their stones in Jerusalem—states that it was like turning the clock back twenty years and "peering through a window on a buried yesterday" to find a report of a fiery cross burning on Stone Mountain in Georgia and that the new Grand Wizard, Samuel Green, claimed Klan membership at 20,000. He had stated that it would not be an interstate clandestine organization as in the twenties, but intrastate this time around the Red Circle. It would, he proclaimed, also be law-abiding and would prosecute its own members should they violate the law—especially, presumably, if they happened to be black, Catholic, or Jewish.

It asks the perplexing $64 question, the question of the next two decades and more: "What is to be the mission of the new kluxery?"

It answers that it had staked out its avowed mission to fight Communism, by way of protecting "the home and chastity of white womanhood".

The piece describes its enunciated principles as unchanged from the 1920's when it sold itself to literate and illiterate alike in the South in its crusade against blacks, splitting the Democratic National Convention in 1924 between the forces of William G. McAdoo and Al Smith, resulting in the weak compromise candidate, John W. Davis, eventual loser to President Calvin Coolidge.

Some of the old Klan had done stretches in the pen, and, it ventures, while difficult to imagine that it would attract new suckers to its cause, so fresh still in memory, it would bear watching should flush times be followed by fallow times. In lean times, people sought scapegoats and the Klan answered the call. Dues and gowns supplied the coffers of the aspiring wizards, kleagles, and kligraffs, developing therefore itching palms.

"Will there be new suckers? There are many reasons for believing that the racket is kaput. But nobody may be sure. A sucker, it has been said, is born every minute. And there have been many thousands of minutes since the Klan of the Twenties doused its burning crosses and went to sleep."

Drew Pearson comments on General James Doolittle having critcized the Navy the previous week, presumably for its opposition to joinder of the armed forces, and then cites a previously concealed incident occurring during General Doolittle's command of the Eighth Air Force in Europe. On January 2, 1945, General Doolittle had given the order to bomb a railroad viaduct in the center of Bad Kreuznach by demolishing the surrounding buildings so that the debris would make the railroad impassable. There were two hospitals near the point of impact, so near that the bombing crews knew it would be impossible to carry out the orders without destruction of the hospital. The raid was led by the 490th Bomb Group, of which the lead bombardier was Flight Officer P. K. O'Donnell. One of the hospitals was hit in the destruction of the viaduct, just as Flight Officer O'Donnell had predicted. Acting strictly according to orders, he was awarded "Bombs of the Week" by his superiors.

Subsequently, a citizen of Bad Kreuznach strangled to death an American M.P. during occupation, giving as his reason the bombing of the hospital.

It should be noted that Kenneth P. O'Donnell, Special Assistant to President Kennedy, was also a bombardier during World War II, but apparently a different individual.

He next relates of the first meeting of the Far Eastern Advisory Commission at the State Department, taking place behind closed doors. Inadvertently, the participants, including Secretary of State Byrnes, Lord Halifax, the Chinese and the Dutch Ambassadors, the Australian Foreign Minister, H.V. Evatt, as well as others, had left the key to the door on the outside of the room. A veteran reporter on Chinese affairs, Joe Chiang, decided to lock the door from the outside. When one of the entourage sought to leave, they found themselves locked inside. Eventually, one of the other journalists present in the hallway obtained the key and unlocked the door. One of the reporters stated to Mr. Chiang that he had thought that China believed in the Open Door Policy.

Mr. Pearson then tells of the push in America to adopt the metric system and its having been used for half a century as the basis for all U.S. measurements, the Bureau of Standards maintaining a carefully guarded meter and kilogram in a vault as the standards for all measurements.

The primary measurement standards for the kilogram and the meter were maintained at Sevres, France.

Many were citing it as a precedent for control of the atom bomb, just as an international commission controlled uniform measurement standards.

Marquis Childs comments on the fact that, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, American corporate wealth had doubled since 1939, giving corporations 48 billion dollars of working capital compared to 24.6 billion six years earlier. Overall assets were valued at nearly 100 billion dollars compared to 54.6 billion in 1939. Another major jump in working capital was predicted for the end of 1945 with unused excess profits tax credits to be utilized and tax refunds provided.

In consequence, the stock market was going strong. Most firms would have plenty of capital with which to build new plants without issuing new stock.

The figures suggested that taxes had been too low during the war.

Meanwhile, the final Victory Bond drive was meeting its goals to raise eleven billion dollars. Redemptions of war bonds had been on the increase since V-J Day, with the end of the war boom and loss of war jobs and overtime pay, many having been left in need of the redemption value, having placed their surplus income during the war in bonds. But, says Mr. Childs, the more money which could be devoted to war bonds, the better was the chance for solvency, both as individuals and as a nation.

A regular letter writer from Shelby predicts a bull market in December on Wall Street, lasting into 1946, which would be a boom year. There would be no post-war panic or crash. The Dow Theory, he says, was still going strong, had not failed, and was fine. That is THE DOW THEORY.

Samuel Grafton, bearing the by-line of Dorothy Thompson, discusses the interconnection between attitudes of the people on domestic affairs with those on foreign affairs. The full employment bill was tied inextricably with the outlook on foreign relations. Universal military training would take two million men per year from the labor market, easing pressure on full employment. Thus, it was not imperialist motives, as claimed by the Russians, driving this engine, but rather concern over full employment plus a foreign policy of drift.

Russia was able to offer security to its workers, enabling it to achieve success in foreign affairs. The full employment bill would provide similar security to Americans.

But since these were matters too painful to consider, the country looked to the atomic bomb for its new security in foreign affairs.

A letter writer remarks on an article by former Associate Editor Burke Davis from November 10 regarding the proposed outlawing of over-the-counter sale of bromides without a prescription. Apparently, there had been some deaths caused by bromide poisoning, though most, according to the writer, had been from faulty prescriptions, not self-administration. The letter writer remarks that many people smoked too much and drank too many soft drinks and asks whether they ought not therefore be subject to prescription.

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