Wednesday, February 28, 1945

The Charlotte News

Wednesday, February 28, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the First Army advanced to within 6.5 miles of Cologne after establishing three bridgeheads across the Erft River, near Modrath, leaving only flat plains ahead to Cologne. The Army had begun encountering somewhat heavier enemy resistance on the east side of the river.

The Ninth Army, encountering only retreating German artillery, had moved to within artillery range of Duesseldorf, about 13 miles distant. The Army had outflanked Muenchen Gladbach and entered its suburbs.

The Third Army to the south captured Bitburg, important highway center. Tanks continued to encircle Trier.

More than 1,100 American heavy bombers struck five major railyards in Germany, at Kassel, Soeat, Siegen, Schwerte, and Hagen.

The RAF again struck the benzol plant near Gelsenkirchen.

On the Eastern Front, the Second White Russian Army, moving toward the Baltic, had captured the Pomeranian communications center of Neustettin, as well as taking Prechlau, the latter fifteen miles northwest of Chojnice in the Danzig Corridor. The Germans announced that the Russians had moved 30 miles northward from Neustettin to Pollnow, within 15 miles of the rail link connecting Danzig and Stettin, capture of which would sever the German escape route from eastern Pomerania and the Polish Corridor.

On Iwo Jima, the Marines were still encountering stiff Japanese resistance, despite their lack of reserves of water and ammunition, in the northern half of the island and at the northern tip of Motoyama No. 2, the central airfield on the island.

The Third and Fourth Divisions continued to inch forward in the area of Motyama No. 1, while no report came from the Fifth Division as to any progress along the left flank following its taking of Hill 382, 700 yards east of the coast.

As reported by the 21st Bomber Command of General Curtis LeMay, Sunday's B-29 raid of Tokyo had left 240 blocks, 667 acres, of devastation in factory and trade districts, in the heaviest destruction yet wrought on the Japanese capital. No Superfortress was lost in the mission. Few enemy fighters were observed, as the carrier-based fighters accompanying the raid had chased them away.

Premier Koiso was said to have called on Emperor Hirohito to apologize for permitting the destruction of some imperial property in the raid.

East of Manila, the Japanese launched a banzai raid near Montalban, 12 miles northeast of the capital, against Sixth Army positions seeking to take the Marikina watershed. The Japanese warriors suffered heavy losses.

Cordoba, with its rich Corinthian leather factory, had not yet been approached.

The Sixth and First Cavalry Divisions found the Japanese entrenched in a series of interconnected pillboxes and caves in the Sierra Madre Mountains, from Mount Oro to Antipolo.

They did not need no stinking badges. They had an American watch for sale in exchange for guns.

In Manila, flamethrowers, thermite grenades, and drums of gasoline were employed by the Americans to clear out the remaining Japanese from the legislative building during the morning, following a nighttime artillery barrage which had broken up a machinegun nest on the second floor. In other buildings still held by the enemy, some of the Japanese committed suicide while others were killed by officers as they sought to surrender.

The Army Air Forces announced the fastest new airplane to enter the war on the Allied side, the Lockheed jet-powered Shooting Star, the first plane in military service to have a pressurized cabin.

The United States delegation to the Mexico City Pan-American Conference had reached tentative agreement on the Chapultepec declaration, which would provide for multilateral commitment with Latin American nations to suppress with force any aggression within the Western Hemisphere.

The House of Commons in London defeated overwhelmingly the motion of protest to the Big Three agreement at Yalta, regarding the territorial cession from Poland. Preliminary to the vote, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had stated that the agreement would make Poland as strong or stronger than it had been in 1939 before the war. He also denied that Britain had ever guaranteed Poland's pre-war frontiers.

The general motion of confidence on the Yalta accord was to be brought to a vote the following day.

Upon the President's return to Washington from the conferences in Malta, Yalta, and Alexandria, acting press secretary Jonathan Daniels told the White House correspondents that the President was in "grand shape" and never looked better, denying rumors of the President's failing health. Vice-Admiral Ross McIntire, the President's physician, echoed the sentiment.

The President was scheduled to deliver a report to Congress the following day at 12:30 p.m., E.W.T., anent the trip. It was also expected that he would address the delegates at the opening of the United Nations charter conference in San Francisco on April 25.

Of course, the President would die in just 43 days, April 12.

Reporters were told by members of the President's party on the trip that the Soviets had presented a mixed picture, on the one hand showing the depredations of war, a country rendered a skeleton of itself; on the other, the President and his entourage being feted day and night with the most lavish of food and accommodations, staying at the former summer palace of the Czars, with vodka and caviar available even for breakfast to those desirous of the cuisine.

The President signed the George bill, which severed the lending powers of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation from the Commerce Department, effectively clearing the way for the confirmation of Henry Wallace as Secretary of Commerce.

On the editorial page, "A Good Move" favors the action of the Legislature in amending the charter of the City of Charlotte to have the City Council members elected at large and limited to seven, to replace the ward by ward election system which had provided for eleven members on the council. The former system had been too wieldy and resulted in factions by sections of the city, with determination of membership only by dint of residence within a specific section of the city.

"School Bell" comments on the shortage of scientists in the country, brought on by the war and the consequent need to encourage young students to the sciences, as further stated in the article on the page from Science Service.

"And .... Or" finds the speech to Commons the day before by Prime Minister Churchill to have been masterfully delivered, especially when he addressed the issue of the participants to be permitted at the San Francisco United Nations charter conference, that they would be those countries which by March 1 would declare war on Germany and Japan.

The British Press Association had changed the words to "Germany or Japan", but later reverted to the original Churchill statement. The implication, albeit speculative, was that Russia was intending to declare war on Japan, breaking its commitment made in 1937 to the mutual non-aggression pact.

On April 25, the date the conference in San Francisco would begin, the non-aggression pact was to be extended automatically for another five years, unless one of the parties to it expressly renounced it. Once the pact was ended, by its terms, a year had to pass before war could be declared.

So, the question arose as to what the status of Russia would be should it not declare war on Japan. Plainly, Russia had to have a place at the peace table. But what of this language uttered by the Prime Minister?

"Delaying Action" found that Governor Gregg Cherry's statement to the General Assembly, that the hospital and medical care expansion program, while in the abstract to be supported, had to await the end of the war to receive funding, to be fiscally responsible while not providing much impetus to the ultimate passage of this worthy program.

The piece expresses the hope that among the provisions of partial enactment which the Governor recommended would be the fund for training of doctors, providing for dollar per day indigent patient services, and stirring to action local communities without hospital service to lay plans to insure the construction of new facilities when money from the State would be made available.

As commented in the column, a piece from Science Service reports that the war had drained off the candidates for PhD.'s in physics, and had drawn science professors from colleges and universities into war research with the result that there had been a dramatic decline in physicists in the country during the war, with only 55 PhD.'s awarded in 1944 compared to 191 in 1941. The drain would continue for twelve years following the war, says the piece, with the result that by 1953, there would occur a shortage of 1,800 physicists in the country.

By comparison, Great Britain and the Soviet Union had been able to increase their stock of physicists during the course of the war.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Congressman Adolph Sabath of Illinois, after being interrupted on a point of order, failure of a quorum, during his presentation on the rivers and harbors bill, addressing the source of the interruption, Minority Leader Joe Martin of Massachusetts, indicating that he was aware that the Minority Leader only wanted to assure that sufficient numbers of his own party and those as well of the Democratic Party would hear his speech on this important bill.

Mr. Martin corrected that it was instead his desire to have a quorum present to hear "the charm" of Mr. Sabath's voice.

Drew Pearson reports that the War Mobilization Board was not acting as a rubber stamp for the Army and Navy, having among its membership the voice of considerable protest of the work-or-fight or work-or-jail legislation favored by the President, War Mobilizer James Byrnes, and presently pending in the Congress.

Eric Johnston, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a member of the Board, expressed to Mr. Byrnes his objections to the legislation on the basis that the Army was placing its contracts in concentrated labor areas such as San Diego, where no longer were available war workers. Thus, to remedy this labor shortage, the Army should more widely disperse geographically the award of war contracts.

Furthermore, he complained, the Army had not made any real effort to get rid of the cost-plus contract which resulted in labor hoarding. The contract allowed a certain percentage of profit to the manufacturer over cost, regardless of what the actual cost was. Such contracts, complained Mr. Johnston, allowed for management inefficiency in hiring more labor than necessary to do a particular job. The result had been often idle workmen in factories.

He also stated that the Government had not conducted campaigns to recruit labor except in major markets where employment in war plants had already absorbed the available labor force.

Mr. Pearson next tells of John Rankin having previously had a near fisticuffian encounter with another member of Congress, preceding the Washington's Birthday spectacle of the previous week when he charged and sought to strangle Representative Hook for having called Mr. Rankin a liar when Mr. Rankin suggested Mr. Hook to be involved with Communists in the labor movement.

Congressman Emmanuel Celler of New York had remonstrated Mr. Rankin regarding the latter's comments in protest of Mr. Celler's statement that the American Dental Association was seeking quotas for Jewish dental students. Mr. Rankin had asserted that Mr. Celler was a primary reason for anti-Semitism in the country and that he was tired of the Jewish question being incessantly raised by the Congressman. He then defended the actions of the ADA, while Mr. Celler interrupted three times to call Mr. Rankin's charges "false", "unfair", and "outrageous".

Mr. Rankin then began penciling out some of the remarks from the Record, including those of Mr. Celler, to which Mr. Celler protested. Mr. Rankin then arose in a threatening manner and ordered Mr. Celler to leave him alone. Mr. Celler stated he would re-insert anything Mr. Rankin cut from the Record and then left.

Marquis Childs, at the headquarters of the 29th Tactical Air Command in Holland, describes the efforts of the tactical air command to take out a bridge near Neuss, two days in operations. Their primary task was to clear the way for the Ninth Army, an endless process.

The missions were dangerous, even if the P-47 pilots rarely saw any enemy planes. Anti-aircraft fire nevertheless remained plentiful within the Roer and Rhine Valleys, and the positions of the guns were constantly being shifted.

A colonel to whom Mr. Childs talked believed that the public at home was unappreciative of what the tactical air forces had to accomplish. The public rated the pilots on the number of enemy planes shot down, without understanding that to dive-bomb a target in the face of enemy flak was the most dangerous of circumstances and also the most strategically important, for the fact that the ground targets were of far greater import than enemy fighter planes in the air.

Mr. Childs relates of the boredom experienced by the pilots during days of bad weather, followed by round-the-clock schedules during periods of good weather. On the day he visited, there was good weather and the group which he observed flew three missions, with the entire command flying 553 sorties, likely a record for the Ninth Air Force. The missions destroyed 50 locomotives, 187 rail cars, two rail bridges, and made 53 cuts in rail lines.

Samuel Grafton again writes in contradiction of the American Bankers Association position opposing the establishment of an International Monetary Fund to which the United States, by the Bretton Woods agreement of the previous July, would contribute 2.75 billion dollars, with the purpose of maintaining stabilization of world currencies after the war, to prevent the economic depression worldwide which had been the primary precipitant cause of the Fascist and Nazi movements in Europe leading to militarization as a means of full employment and plunder of other nations' resources to support the military regime and the party in power in grand style, resulting in World War II.

Mr. Grafton views the matter in light of the converse, doing nothing, as had been the case in the aftermath of World War I, with the result at hand.

A letter writer, the Executive Secretary of the North Carolina Council of Churches, writes in protest of the Government action in curtailing conventions, impacting adversely the holding of religious conferences, while not applying the standard to sporting events. He notes that the Southern Conference Basketball Tournament had been held in Raleigh on February 22 to 24, attended by fully 3,000 people.

The churches had, he remarks, "cut to the very bone" their religious program, and he saw it as incongruous that the Government had not included athletic events in the proscription, as tending to keep the public at home.

What the Government obviously meant was that short travel to athletic events acted as mini-vacations tending to alleviate the crying need for longer travel.

The churchman, also blinking the fact that the Government had obtained cooperation from the horse racing industry to cancel its winter season, apparently never had attended a basketball game, as he seemed unable to understand this complex psychological phenomenon.

In any event, the University of North Carolina won the tournament and, thus, we feel certain that God forgave the fans for attendance to worldly duties. Had the regular season Southern Conference champion, the South Carolina Gamecocks, won, however, it would have been a quite different story, and the war, indeed, might have been lost or the world even exploded in the Apocalypse inexorably ensuing such a damnable result.

The following year, incidentally, led by Hook Dillon, Bones McKinney, and Bob Paxton, the North Carolina team would advance to the finals of the NCAA tournament, the institution's first appearance in the Final Four, before falling, by a mere three points, to the 1945 national champion, Oklahoma A & M, coached by the legendary Hank Iba.

Ha, ha, ha. We catch up to you, 2012, after a year of being a day behind. As we warned you a year ago, we are now going to check to see that everything is fixed in this year of discordant leap. It had better be. That December date, at which the Mayan Calendar ends, looms large in your future otherwise.

That underlying "certain inalienable rights" from last year is now here. Do not try to hide the Truth, Mongoose. You will regret it. Riki-Tiki.

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