Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Labor-Management Conference, with 18 representatives of labor and industry present, began in Washington to try to resolve the nation's wage-price dispute which had led since V-J Day to numerous strikes across the country. President Truman addressed the confreres, urging them to reach common ground so that the country could get on with reconversion. He wanted reasonable and fair arbitration to resolve the dispute if collective bargaining failed.

A dozen members of independent unions of professional and white collar workers, not invited to the meeting, set up a picket line at the conference, held at the Labor Department. The pickets did not seek to prevent anyone from entering the building.

As the conference began, 260,000 workers were idle across the country. In New Orleans, a general strike of 75,000 to 100,000 workers was threatened unless demands by Higgins Industries employees were met that Congress investigate the permanent closure by Andrew Higgins of his three war boat plants in the city, with 40 million dollars worth of pending orders still outstanding.

The labor troubles spread to Windsor, Ontario, where 20,000 workers at the Canadian Ford plant went on strike.

The Supreme Court declared moot the issue of whether the seizure of the Montgomery Ward plants by the Government on December 27, 1944 had been legal, and thus declined to hear the case, based on the Government having ended its action in October. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had held the seizure legal.

The Dutch, planning to introduce perhaps as many as 20,000 troops by Christmas, were attempting to obtain a small part of western Java from the Nationalists. While Java stood quiet, the Indonesian Nationalists were still prepared to fight. The British were torn between fighting the Nationalists and continuing to disarm the Japanese, who were arming the Nationalists. The Dutch did not want to accept American mediation of the conflict, on the premise that the Chinese, French, and Russians would then enter the negotiations and potentially want concessions in the Indies.

The Chinese Communists alleged American intervention in the civil war between the Communists and Government forces. The White House denied the contention. The claims, made in some detail by the Chinese Communist press, appeared dubious.

In Tokyo, Lt. Dick Ryan rode one of Emperor Hirohito's white horses, the first person outside the Imperial household to do so. The name of the horse was Hatsushimo, First Frost. The lieutenant asserted that he was the first white man to ever ride the animal.

Stars and Stripes reported that Le Havre cafes, restaurants, liquor stores, hotels, and private homes had been declared off limits to American troops after clashes between French civilians and American soldiers. No American troops from the base in Le Havre were allowed in the city unless accompanied by an officer. Violence had been transpiring for two months such that residents felt unsafe at night on the streets.

The 25th entry to the series of articles by General Jonathan Wainwright discusses the intelligence briefings undertaken of the Americans by the Japanese, conducted at Manila University, beginning May 14, 1942. They first wanted to know from General Wainwright where the Americans had buried the money. The General responded that 140 million dollars in paper money had been destroyed.

The Japanese refused to believe him and persisted for some time until finally being convinced that there was no large stash of cash. He told them that the silver had been taken to sea and dumped.

Upon demand, he recorded in writing his impressions of the Japanese military. He gave generally high marks for their efficiency, if finding it nearly fanatical, but low marks to their equipment. He and his aides refused to discuss the American plans for defense.

Major Tom Dooley, aide to General Wainwright, frustrated the Japanese interrogator so thoroughly that he stated: "I don't see how anybody as stupid as you can be an aide to a General! You don't know anything."

After the Japanese huffily left the room, the men laughed about the exchange.

Whether the Japanese hung their heads was not elucidated.

News reporter Martha Azer provides a story of two small children, forced to move from their home in Charlotte with their family, from Massachusetts, with no place to go. Their father was a World War II veteran, having served four and a half years in the Quartermaster Corps, most of it overseas. The house had no heat.

A woman in Newark was taken into protective custody after she had started tossing five, ten, and twenty dollar bills around a restaurant, the total having reached $1,236. She was transported to a hospital.

On the editorial page, "South Carolina's Democracy" reports that the anti-poll tax forces were marshalling figures which showed that in the poll tax states, only a small minority of voters voted the elected representatives into office. James Byrnes had been elected to the Senate in 1922, for instance, with only 4,000 of 300,000 potential votes in South Carolina.

"Still By the Back Door" suggests that the American political atmosphere, insofar as its uncertainty in foreign affairs, was akin to that of fall, 1940. The United States was already involved in the Chinese civil war by its transportation of Chinese Government troops, even if not yet fighting.

In the space where the excerpt from the Congressional Record normally appears is a Washington Post piece titled "Barking Up the Wrong Tree", discussing the labor disputes across the country stultifying the process of reconversion. The primary factor lacking, says the editorial, was the machinery by which the labor disputes could be resolved.

Drew Pearson discusses the early stages of the joint Congressional committee's investigation into the attack on Pearl Harbor, showing deliberate or unexplained neglect by the Army and Navy leading to unpreparedness at the time of the attack. He cites a top secret memorandum prepared by Lt. General George Grunert, withheld from the Army's board of inquiry report released in August, now leaked.

The memorandum began its recounting of events leading to the attack with the transmission by the Japanese on November 20, 1941 of a coded message to the Washington and London Japanese embassies to be alert to the broadcast of the "winds" messages, "East Wind Rain" to be broadcast as a weather report should war be imminent with the United States, other codes, on the contingencies of war with Britain, war with Russia, or war with the Netherlands. The point of the messages was to signal the embassies of the need for destruction of secret diplomatic papers and coding devices.

The report stated that the alert was received and decoded at ONI on November 22. Another Japanese message sent to Japanese Ambassador Nomura in Washington on November 20 had stated that November 29 would be the deadline for negotiations with the State Department, that after that point things "are going to happen". On November 28, a message was sent to Nomura stating that the winds message would be broadcast soon.

The report contended that on December 4, the "East Wind Rain" code was broadcast, along with the codes for war with the British and Dutch, and heard in Hawaii at 1:00 p.m. on that date. (It should be noted that this statement has never been confirmed. There is no documented evidence that the "winds" code was ever actually broadcast.)

At the same time, Tokyo instructed its diplomats in Washington to destroy all code equipment save a few pieces to receive a few last messages.

Those questioned by the Pearl Harbor Army Board stated that these messages had caused a flurry of activity by the Army and Navy in Washington, but still no adequate communication was made to Hawaii to prepare for war—again the operative wisdom at the time being that war would come either in the Philippines, Malaya, or the Dutch East Indies, not in Hawaii, 4,000 miles across the Pacific from Japan, believed at the time a completely impracticable, if not impossible, feat. (The primary motivating factor in putting the spurs to the Army and Navy had, by consensus, been instead the final breakdown of diplomatic talks between the Japanese and Secretary of State Hull.)

The secret report stated that the first knowledge of the broadcast of the winds message was received at the War Department on December 5 at 9:30 a.m. when Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes, chief of the Naval Communications Section, phoned Col. Otis K. Sadtler of G-2, Army intelligence, and informed of the broadcast.

A note indicates that shortly, more would be revealed by Mr. Pearson on this topic.

He next turns to the generally prevailing pessimistic view regarding the Labor-Management Conference, that few gave it a chance for success. The major stumbling block likely would be compulsory arbitration to resolve the wage-price dispute, otherwise irremediable. Some of the industrialists were said not to care whether the conference succeeded, as the current tax structure on the excess profits tax was not conducive to further industrial production during 1945.

John L. Lewis had been added to the conference as an AFL delegate on the expectation that he would join the UMW with the AFL, but then declined and so was attending the conference independently.

Marquis Childs conveys verbatim a letter from a twenty-year old soldier who had seen the ruins of Nagasaki. He described the three square miles where "everything was flattened", not just razed as in Berlin, but "flat". Occasionally, he had seen discernible objects, but generally there was nothing. He stood incredulous at the fact that one 40-pound bomb had caused such utter destruction of a once densely populated area of a city. The haunting thought was that if 40 pounds could pack such a force, what would a much larger bomb do?

Samuel Grafton relates that President Truman's relations with Congress had improved markedly since his speech the previous Tuesday evening in which he had attacked two House committees, Ways & Means and the Expenditures Committee, for sloth in handling the proposed bills on unemployment compensation and full employment. The Democrats had now united behind the President and the Republicans were united in opposition, a more acceptable state of affairs than that which had transpired previously, general drift. It was now the Republicans defending the inaction of the two committees, majorities of which were Democrats.

A letter writer, a soldier, states his opposition to a peacetime draft and universal military service. He also expressed solid support for the United Nations Organization and opposition to the idea of attacking former allies.

Another letter writer finds a previous letter writer's charge of October 26 against The News, that it was a purveyor of "ediotatic propaganda", to have surely taught the editors a lesson that they would not soon forget, that they now realized that it was the New Deal that ran up the 300 billion dollar debt, and that President Truman would allow everyone to freeze during the winter to appease the labor union gangsters.

She wanted to know, however, whether the correspondent would vote before or after she froze to death.

The New Dealers had indeed blamed President Hoover, as the previous writer charged, for the shortages of everything from cigarettes to mayonnaise.

Both are white, by the way.

She points the reader to a Life article by John Chamberlain in which he had charged that Pearl Harbor was in fact a Roosevelt trick, just as Ms. McGaha had charged.

We do not quite understand, however, why the woman suddenly seems to change her opinion in the last couple of paragraphs and fall right in line with the New Deal propaganda.

"Documentaries", incidentally, from September 22, 1945, is now here. We understand, by analogy to when we get very, very tired, that the medications you take regularly make it difficult sometimes to understand. But try to keep the hyperactivity, attention deficit disorder, and associated obsessive-compulsive behavior under control without inflicting its worst aspects on others, as the dumb little insignificant punk which you are. It makes, we assure, for a more stable and happier time for all, even you, Pat.

"Seoul", from August 29, is now here.