Wednesday, March 14, 1945

The Charlotte News

Wednesday, March 14, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the First Army had pushed into the hills above the Remagen bridgehead, advancing three-quarters of a mile to within 1.25 miles of the autobahn linking Frankfurt and the Ruhr. At the northern end of the bridgehead, the troops had captured Honnef, five miles north of the Ludendorff Bridge, the largest town yet taken on the bridgehead and the place where the Germans had made the strongest stand yet in the fighting for the bridgehead. Two miles inland from Honnef, Hill 370 had been taken. To the southeast, infantry fought through Kretzzhausen into Kalenborn, five miles northeast of Erpel, the town immediately east of the Remagen Bridge.

Despite a German report that two direct hits had been made on the Ludendorff Bridge and a nearby pontoon bridge, the bridge was still functioning as of 9:30 a.m. this date. The bridge, however, would collapse two days later, from a combination of factors, the strikes against it, the heavy added weight of wood planking for the transport of vehicles upon it, and the heavy loads of men, trucks, tanks, and supplies which had been pushed across it during the period since the bridge had been taken March 7-8.

American engineers reported that the bridge had not been detonated before the American crossing for the fact of a faulty fuse cap, preventing hundreds of pounds of TNT from exploding.

Don Whitehead proceeds to relate of the dramatic events which had transpired during the previous 19 days since February 23 when the First and Ninth Armies, having been held up at the Roer River for three months, having to take one by one several dams held by the Nazis which threatened flooding of the Cologne plain otherwise and prevented crossing, were able finally to effect the crossing, having captured the large Schwammanauel Dam and the others. That push had been the first step in enabling the taking finally of the Remagen Bridge, the crossing of which was effected in the amount of time it took to traverse the 1200-foot span across the Rhine, a dramatic contrast from the previous delays, complicated by the Ardennes offensive, taking up fighting strength of the Allied Armies from December 16 through January 25.

To the south, the 70th Infantry Division of the Seventh Army advanced nearly four miles into Germany, reaching the Saar River at Furstenhausen and Wehrden, just west of Saarbruecken, a mile into the Saar industrial region, establishing a five-mile front. Petite Rouselle and Krughutt were taken in the drive. The Germans put up only light resistance until the Saar was reached, at which point the 70th started receiving artillery fire from across the river.

The Seventh Army had been positioned 1.5 miles from Saarbruecken since February 23, but then confronted a double Siegfried Line, one running along the Saar in front of Saarbruecken and other cities on the river, and another extending ten or fifteen miles into the hills. The troops also occupied Stiring-Wendel, east of Forbach, the scene for several days of intense fighting.

The Third Army had captured thirteen towns in the drive to clear the east bank of the Moselle River and had begun a new drive across the top of the Saar.

The Eighth Air Force struck again in concentration for the 30th straight day, hitting targets along the Western Front, including Limburg, destroying 45 German planes and damaging twenty others, with a loss of only two fighters, the result of a collision during the attack.

Against light German resistance, RAF heavy bombers the night before struck Gelsenkirchen and Herne, as Mosquitos hit Berlin, Bremen, and Frankfurt am Main.

On the Eastern Front, the First White Russian Army had penetrated one of the main German lines of defense west of the Oder along an 18-mile front between Kuestrin and Frankfurt. The Germans stated that heavy battle was also engaged with the First Ukrainian Army along a 115-mile front from Stettin south to Guben and Forst on the Neisse River, southeast of Berlin. The Russians were devoting attention to the fight for Gdynia from three sides.

German Lt. General Bruno Von Hauenschild, head of Berlin's defense, stated that the city would be defended to the last and that "all stratagems" would be employed. The citizenry was being trained within the public squares in the use of anti-tank guns and machineguns, with the exhortation to fight the Russians with "enthusiasm and imagination".

In Italy, the Fifth Army had moved to a point north of German-held Vergato, fourteen miles southwest of Bologna, and were approaching the town from three sides.

Yet another 300-plane raid of B-29's on Japan struck Osaka again this date for the second day in a row, taking out five square miles of the industrial heart of the city. Fires in Osaka were still burning from the Tuesday raid, eventually merging after two hours with the new fires from this date's raid. In all, during the five days since Saturday's raid on Tokyo and Monday's raid on Nagoya, the Superfortresses had, with 6,000 tons of incendiary bombs, destroyed an area of 24 square miles, larger than Manhattan. Two planes had been lost over Tokyo, one over Nagoya, and one over Osaka. Seventeen square miles had been destroyed in Tokyo, two in Nagoya, and five in Osaka.

Tokyo radio reported that Japanese children in the fifth and sixth grades were being trained in how to use bayonets and were enthusiastic about the program. The prospect was that the training would be extended to the lower grades.

By August, bayonets or even sharp swords in the hands of young children would be a moot issue, rendered rather useless.

On Iwo Jima, the Marines continued to struggle against tenacious Japanese resistance from caves and pillboxes to hold Kitano Point utilizing small arms, mortars, and machineguns. Two rocks, Kama and Kangoku, respectively a thousand yards off the west central side of the island and 2,700 yards off the northwest end, were occupied by the Marines after they were evacuated by the Japanese.

The 41st Infantry Division had encountered stiffening resistance on Mindanao as they pursued the Japanese defenders into the mountains north of captured Zamboanga.

On Luzon, the 11th Airborne Division took the town of Santo Tomas, in addition to the previously announced captures of Los Banos and Batangas, the latter seized by the 158th Regimental Combat Team. The First Cavalry Division had captured Antipolo on Monday, also announced the previous day. Antipolo was the southern anchor of the Shimbu Line on the Marikina watershed east of Manila.

Two North Carolina Supreme Court Justices had petitioned the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals for review of a U.S. Tax Court decision denying them deductions for travel expenses from their hometowns to Raleigh, on the basis that the travel was not business related as claimed. The Court had ruled that, because the Justices were elected to eight-year terms in Raleigh, their principal place of business was there and thus their home also was to be considered at that location.

The Senate was investigating the meat shortage in the country, after Senator James Eastland of Mississippi had reported that the entire salt meat supply of the country was being shipped to Russia. Testimony indicated that hog prices and beef prices were much higher than OPA price ceilings, causing the industry to operate for a prolonged period with heavy losses.

—Dang, look here, sugar. They got all our red meat going to them Reds. Ain't that awful? We thought it was going to our boys. What more indignities do we have to endure as a country? Them Rooskies get everything.

On the editorial page, "A Good Start" looks forward to the proposed $400,000 Charlotte Memorial Park, originally proposed by the Lions Club and now taken up as a municipal project. It was a good beginning, says the piece, toward establishing a much needed municipal park system, but only that. Other areas of the city were in worse need of recreational facilities.

"The South's Ills" comments on the re-publication of a tract titled "Divided We Stand", by Dr. Walter Prescott Webb, laying out in detailed factual analysis the great discrepancy in wealth between the South and West versus the Northeast. The South and West had 80 to 90 percent of the natural resources of the country, except for iron and steel, but, nevertheless, because of manipulation of freight rates and tariffs and because of absentee ownership of the resources, only held 21 percent of the manufacturing wealth and 20 percent of the general wealth.

While nothing new, the re-publication would focus attention on the need for redistribution of the nation's wealth following the war to decrease these large disparities.

"Some Progress" comments on a study by Dean T. E. McKinney of Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, showing more than 35,000 African-Americans within the city, more than a third of the population, having "excellent" educational opportunities, 300 black-owned businesses, and 77 black churches.

The greater part of the businesses, informs the piece, were restaurants and lunch counters, barber shops, beauty parlors, dress shops, and grocery stores. But there were only eleven black doctors and surgeons and the only black hospital, Good Samaritan, was overcrowded and understaffed.

Educational facilities, on the other hand, were above the Southern average, if not ideal.

"Eve's Fruits" warns of the love-apple, the ripe red tomato, easy of digestion but given, according to The Journal of Living, to heavy contributions to the body's supply of Vitamins A, B, and C, nourishing of the hormones necessary for reproduction and fertility. Proof of the matter had been adduced in a study conducted on St. Croix in the Virgin Islands some years previous, when the population was fed tomatoes after years of an unbalanced diet. The result was a spike in population.

The editorial suggests that the unadulterated tomato therefore should be viewed with the caution that it deserved, with its propensity toward animating ultimately the patter of little feet, that the dilution of its impact in soups or goulash or slumgullion would likely reduce the fertility otherwise stimulated. Thus, better adulterated than unadulterated, unless one were of a mind to produce offspring.

So, perhaps, the apple is not really the blameworthy Garden produce, proscribed to the human race originally.

We think it was more likely the poison berries, but that is just surmise.

In any event, now you know that those songs which sing of "ABC", of which there are several, three of which immediately come to mind, are not by accident combining the letters with love. But where is the song which combines "ABC" with tomatoes? Maybe that one has yet to be written, or, at least, has remained obscure enough to pass our notice.

Get busy, songwriters. There is an area left for potential originality.

We shall start the lyric train: "ABC, tomatoes, you and me, candlelight, more tomatoes, ABC, babies you gave to me 1-2-3, of which I had no desire, but the tomatoes and hot peppers together lit an unquenchable fire, put us both in a stew, and now of children we have more than a few." Well, you can take it from there, free of royalties, as always.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record finds Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland in debate over the work-or-fight legislation being considered by the Congress, stating that he blamed neither business nor labor for not wanting the bill. Both had performed admirably in war production, but doing a good job, he suggested, was not enough. It had to be a total commitment, regardless of whether the action smacked of a temporarily totalitarian program.

He further suggests that Congress would be cowardly not to impose such a law when a million American casualties had thus far been suffered in the war, while strikes continued to take place.

Senator Robert Taft of Ohio interrupted to state that there was no proof that the manpower situation in war industry had anything to do with the failure to have adequate munitions at the front a year earlier, rendering Senator Tydings's argument fallacious.

Senator Tydings responded curtly, saying that General Marshall knew more of the needs of the military than did "General" Taft, and the War Production Board had also asserted the need for increased war industry manpower.

Senator Burnet Maybank of South Carolina added that Undersecretary of War Patterson had commented that there was a 400 million-dollar flower industry in the country during 1944, when Americans were invading France and the Philippines.

Senator Tydings agreed, and suggested that the country had to have its various cosmetics, lipsticks and lotions, regardless of the adverse impact on war production.

Post-war production, including the Jergens, would be a different issue.

Drew Pearson relates of the observation by analysts of the German political situation, that if it had not been for the July 20 plot against Hitler's life, the war might have been shortened by six months, for the aftermath provided Hitler with the excuse to rid the ranks of the military of all officers who might have brought an early end to the war. Moreover, the purge inhibited any tendency of other officers to challenge Hitler's policies or suggest an armistice.

The British had been responsible for arranging the July 20 plot, based on weeks of minute planning. The fortuity of the briefcase containing the bomb being moved against a wooden leg of the table at which Der Fuehrer sat in the Wolf's Lair had foiled the plot. In consequence, an estimated 100,000 German officers and other suspected officials had been killed. Anyone who had become cool to Hitler was included in the purge. Thus, the military was now stripped of any prospect of repeating the demand made of the Kaiser on September 29, 1918 to sue for peace.

He next recounts the bitter feeling between former President Herbert Hoover and Governor Thomas Dewey following the 1944 election. President Hoover apparently believed that Governor Dewey had not been sufficiently appreciative of the former President's aid in turning Governor John Bricker of Ohio away from any challenge to Governor Dewey at the convention and instead convincing him to run as the vice-presidential candidate. President Hoover had remarked that all former losing Republican presidential candidates had, nevertheless, enjoyed a personal following after their campaigns. The one exception, he suggested, was Thomas Dewey.

Regardless, Mr. Dewey would achieve the 1948 nomination as well.

Mr. Pearson next points out that the Germans had salted away a cache of weapons and supplies in mountain hideaways in Southern Germany and Austria from which it was believed that underground elements of the Wehrmacht and hardcore Nazis would stage a further fight, either continuously after the armistice, or waiting until an opportune time to resume the warfare.

Query whether they waited until November, 1963 to try to achieve one grandly de-stabilizing, fatal coup de grace to the West.

Finally, he contrasts the quick confirmation of Judge Fred Vinson to be Federal Loan Administrator with the troubled six weeks during which the nomination of former Vice-President Wallace to be Secretary of Commerce had been delayed to strip the FLA duties from Commerce. Judge Vinson, he posits, had the same liberal credentials of Henry Wallace, the former having proposed New Deal type programs in the House before FDR and having been a consistent supporter of the Administration's policies. In his role as Economic Stabilizer, Judge Vinson had stepped on many powerful toes, including those of the oil industry and organized labor.

The difference was that Judge Vinson had maintained his Capitol Hill cronies while Mr. Wallace had never engaged in the business of cultivating personal relationships in Washington.

Judge Vinson would be appointed by President Truman in 1946 to succeed Harlan Stone as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in which position he would serve until his sudden death in 1953. Those closely involved with the landmark 1954-55 case of Brown v. Board of Education, ordering desegregation "by all deliberate speed" of the public schools in the country, opine that Chief Justice Vinson was considered unlikely to steer the Court in the direction of such a decision, and regard it as a stroke of timely fate that his death allowed President Eisenhower to appoint as Chief Justice Governor Earl Warren of California, credited historically for having effected a unanimous decision in the case.

Of course, whether that story deserves quite the credit it has is subject to plentiful speculation. The outcome might not have been unanimous but would likely have been the same in result, we suggest, had the Court continued under the leadership of Chief Justice Vinson. While the Chief Justice generally has a great impact on the types of cases to be heard by the Court, historically, it is not the case that the position sways necessarily great impact on the rest of the Court in terms of its decision-making in individual cases, especially those cases with broad-reaching social consequences.

Whatever the case, except for the proviso of "all deliberate speed", predictably seized upon by Southern segregationists to thwart integration for the ensuing ten to twenty years, the decision was an entirely correct one which should have been undertaken in 1896 instead of the concept of apartheid instructed by the Plessy v. Ferguson dogma of "separate but equal", allowing that such facilities were sufficient to accord equality under the Fourteenth Amendment, that which, in practice, was never achieved pervasively in the country.

Samuel Grafton explains the necessity of adopting the Bretton Woods proposal for a World Bank and International Monetary Fund as complement to the Security Council of the United Nations organization proposed at Dumbarton Oaks. The Fund allowed nations to borrow to bolster their economic standing, eliminating the need for economic chicanery, unloading goods on the world market to achieve favorable foreign exchange, deliberate devaluation of currency, and the like, which tended to destabilize world markets and unsettle currencies, practices which had occurred previously on the world stage, especially following World War I.

Without the Fund, he posits, the Security Council would only be a police force seeking to impose law and order against nations with economic insecurity, an unstable environment which inevitably would explode in revolt. He suggests the situation would be analogous to a police department seeking to enforce the laws of a town while there were no banks available to loan money.

Marquis Childs, writing from Rome, observes that, from this vantage point, the differences were sharpened between the manner in which the Russians fought the war and that of the Allies. Many American and British officers expressed envy at the Russian methods, recognizing the while that the West maintained its respect for life too much to throw troops headlong into battle in the manner of the Russians.

Russian officers were required to perform almost no paperwork on individual soldiers, not even informing next of kin when a soldier was killed. If he did not return home, he was dead.

The Russians did not want the Americans mingling with their armies in the Balkans because, given the American standard of living, they would demand a separate cook. Russian troops lived simply, off the land, eating plain food, with vodka being their only luxury.

The Russian soldiers utilized mutual foot massage to ward off frostbite, with the result that there were fewer cases of it on the Eastern Front than on the Western front during the winter months. Failure to provide the proper massage such that the partner became frostbitten meant severe penalties for the massager.

Perhaps, no message home.

The Russians took little heed of what they could provide the civilian populations of countries they occupied and liberated, rather expecting care from the civilians. Each treaty required that the country make provision for Russian troops. The soldiers treated the women of each conquered city, however, with respect and there was no drunken revelry to be observed.

The primary cities in the Balkans which the Russians had taken were Sofia, Bucharest, and Budapest. American officers participated in the control of Sofia and Bucharest, but real authority was retained by the Russians. Only one Allied officer, an American colonel, had thus far been allowed by the Russians to visit recently taken Budapest.

In Yugoslavia, Mr. Childs had observed firsthand the good will and energy of Russian officers, but the strain of war was also apparent on their tired faces.

A private stationed in New Guinea writes a letter to the editor to inform of his views on the organization of the post-war world. He advocates a world Army, Navy, and Air Force, with each nation giving up its individual armed forces and only retaining sufficient police forces to maintain domestic law and order. The world military power would immediately render ineffectual any attempt by any nation to undertake aggression.

He ends prophetically, saying, "We must not fail this time [in building our brave, new world] for the next war may very well prove the end of man on earth."

The only problem with his idealism was that he failed to reckon with the notion that some among our number think it best that way, but do not wish to die alone and prefer the thought of everyone going out together, such that they won't be missing out on any of the fun.

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