The Charlotte News
Friday, April 20, 1945
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that, as a birthday present personally wrapped by Josef Stalin to Der Fuehrer, the Russians, having fully reinforced and supplied their armies, had reached Hangelsberg, seven miles east of Berlin, literally at the gates to the capital.
German commentator Max Krull further stated that the American forces on the Elbe were being reinforced and prepared for their own last pitched battle for the capital.
It had been earlier reported by the German High Command that the Russians were within 13.5 miles of the outer limits of Berlin on the northeast and within fifteen miles from the east. It indicated a six-mile gain from captured Wriesen to the area of Proetzel and Sternebeck. Southwest of Muenchberg, Russian tanks and infantry had fought to Tempelberg and Buchholz, fifteen miles from Berlin.
To the southeast, the First Ukrainian Army had advanced 16 miles from captured Cottbus on the Spree, breaking into Calau, 43 miles from the capital and 59 miles from First Army lines at Wuertsen.
South of those forces, other units had penetrated to Hoyerswerda, within 55 miles of American lines.
On the Western Front, the Allies were within 45 to 52 miles from Berlin. The Seventh Army moved into the heart of Nuernberg, capturing the stadium in which Hitler had held his first mass rallies after coming to power in 1933, sometimes with half a million people in attendance.
A report suggests that the eighteen major cities of Germany, including Berlin, which were blazing at this juncture, stood as Allied birthday candles and predicts that Siegfried was seeing his last birthday.
Der Fuehrer could not obtain his wish for world domination, being quite unable to blow all of the candles out.
In the Ruhr, the Ninth Army had captured Col. General Josef Harpe, commander of the German Fifth Panzer Army, one of the two armies trapped in the Ruhr, while he attempted to slip through American lines and escape the pocket. As reported the previous day, virtually all, save scattered remnants of the Wehrmacht, had now been captured out of the Ruhr pocket, dooming finally the Third Reich for want of its industrial heart.
Thirty trainloads of Nazi documents were discovered in a cave in the Hartz Mountains, as resistance in the Hartz pocket appeared on the wane. The Potsdam Division fighting in the mountains had systematically murdered American wounded on the battlefield.
The documents no doubt contained the Fuehrer's personal interpretation of Faust, although unclear whether the version was Marlowe's or Goethe's, or the re-write by Herr Doktor Goebbels.
Halle was captured, presumably by the First Army which had, the day before, taken Leipzig.
The British Second Army advanced to within a mile of the suburbs of Hamburg and also a mile from Harburg.
To the south, the French First Army advanced 50 miles southeast of Strasbourg to Rottwell, 14 miles from the Danube and 38 miles from Lake Constance, 26 miles from the Swiss border.
The French, the Seventh and Third Armies, were all converging on Berchtesgaden, where it was believed Hitler was holding his birthday celebration, the Seventh moving to within 122 miles of the mountain redoubt.
The French had gained in this area 22 miles, to within 65 miles of Austria and 120 miles of Italy's Alpine frontier.
Stuttgart was also being approached from three directions.
Some 2,000 American planes attacked rail positions near Berlin and in the vicinity of Prague, as well as other communications centers in southern Germany.
British Mosquitos conducted a double night raid on Berlin.
In Italy, the Eighth Army advanced three miles to capture Portomaggiore and Portoverrara, 12 miles southeast of Ferrara, following their penetration through the Argenta Gap. Other units advanced another two miles toward Ferrara.
The Fifth Army was proceeding at a slow pace along the highway between Florence and Bologna, advancing several thousand yards, approaching Pianora. West of the highway, the Army captured Mount Sanichele, 8.5 miles southwest of Bologna. Mount Mario, a mile to the east of the highway, was also taken. Other advances took place west of the highway and northwest of Mount Baco.
On Okinawa, following thousands of tons of Navy artillery fire, one of the largest such barrages of the war in the Pacific, three Tenth Army divisions, the 7th, 27th, and 98th, were now again seeking to penetrate the Japanese "Little Siegfried Line" before Naha, spanning a four-mile front, breaking the stalemate of the previous thirteen days. The troops made advances of between 500 and 800 yards along both flanks, but were impeded in their advance at the center.
In the Philippines, Balabac, 45 miles north of Borneo, and Carabao, in Manila Bay, became the 44th and 45th islands captured in the group.
On northern Luzon, the Japanese launched a tank-led counter-attack against Baguio but were repulsed.
On newly invaded Mindanao, the Americans advanced 22 miles, to within 52 air miles of Davao.
Legal experts from 44 nations had completed nine days of work in preparation for presenting to the San Francisco Conference, to begin Wednesday, the plans for the new World Court. President Truman had already indicated his desire that the United States belong to it. The World Court had previously existed since 1922 at The Hague in Holland, and the reformulation was hopeful of obtaining approval by the nations not yet members, including the United States.
News Associate editor Burke Davis reports from Washington that Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace might yet wield enormous weight in his new position, despite the Congress having divested control of lending from the Department to confirm his nomination. He had just been given the control of disposal of war surplus property.
Mr. Davis could not land an interview with the Secretary but talked to his secretary, Harold Young, a Texas cigar-smoking lawyer of rotund demeanor. Mr. Young explained that with control of the Surplus Property Board, the Department would see to it that all of the jeeps, for instance, would not wind up with the large automobile companies and that brokers could not buy in large lots the rest of the property and sell it at huge profits. Secretary Wallace wanted the property distributed directly to the people at reasonable prices.
In Winston-Salem, A. G. Shore, produce and fruit broker, announced tentative loans for the construction of a $350,000 cold storage and refrigeration plant in the area of the city. The plant would have a capacity of 150 carloads. York Corporation of Charlotte was the architectural firm and bids for construction of the plant would be open for 30 days—so there is still time.
But, the plans came too late for the deceased D.A.R. member in Washington, unfortunately.
On the editorial page, "A Mild Bang" recaps the County Commissioners' decision on the proposed ban of fireworks, having determined that the heavily-charged variety were the most dangerous and that there was no need to place a ban therefore on the ordinary fireworks.
The piece asserts that the decision had some rationale behind it, based on the lesson of Prohibition, the major mistake during that societal experiment having been to ban all alcohol, including beer and wine. Had there been a lesser ban, then Prohibition might have survived beyond 1933. Bootlegging and the organized crime which went with it spelled the doom of the Noble Experiment.
So, by analogy, the Commissioners, offers the piece, might have made a wise choice.
"RFC's Billions" reports on the first appointment by President Truman, that of John W. Snyder, St. Louis banker close to the new President, to become the new head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, replacing Fred Vinson. Judge Vinson had occupied the job only for a very short period, until just before President Roosevelt's death when James Byrnes had stepped aside as War Mobilizer and FDR had immediately appointed Judge Vinson, quickly confirmed to the position, as he had been to the RFC chair--the controversial position snatched from Commerce to allow Henry Wallace's confirmation as Secretary without the purse strings of lending, feared on Capitol Hill by Southern conservatives who believed Mr. Wallace was going to provide social welfare though the RFC.
The appointment of Mr. Snyder as RFC chair was against the recommendation of Robert Hannegan who wanted Democratic treasurer Ed Pauley to fill the position. Bucking this desire and that of the oil barons, who also favored Mr. Pauley, showed that President Truman was taking firm hold right away on the reins of government. The piece remarks that, in contrast, President Harding, for instance, would have immediately followed the advice of the party chairman.
Mr. Snyder, though serving under Commerce Secretary and RFC chair Jesse Jones, had criticized the delay of Mr. Jones in stimulating synthetic rubber production after Pearl Harbor, a delay which the Truman Committee in the Senate had investigated and heavily criticized. Mr. Snyder had also opposed the Alcoa monopoly on aluminum production for the war effort, which Mr. Jones had awarded.
The political orientation of Mr. Snyder varied from "conservatively liberal" to "a bit to the right", depending on who was describing him.
"The Hungry Peoples" reports that Lord Halifax, British Ambassador to the United States, was showing captured German documents which demonstrated a plan by the Reich to starve Europe into submission to their will within fifteen to twenty years.
And there was something to the notion that Europe was in a dangerous state, with food scarce, as Marquis Childs had reported in February during his trip through Europe. Bitterness among many Europeans had set in toward the Allies, in France, where the Americans controlled the liberation, in the Balkans, where the Russians controlled.
On the day Mr. Childs had departed Paris, he had witnessed 5,600 women standing in protest before the city hall, waving empty baskets, demanding food. General De Gaulle's control of the situation was slipping as impatience rose.
The answer was to supply ample American food, and prior to the winter of 1946. President Hoover, who had made his name in feeding Europe after World War I, had examined the situation and was quite disturbed, recommended also that American food had to be sent at once to Europe to stem the crisis. Plans had to be made and soon, before it was too late.
"Ernie Pyle" laments the death on Ie Jima two days earlier of the diminutive correspondent who was so liked by the G.I.'s and the people as well at home who read his column regularly. The piece indicates that he had a way of simplifying the war or anything else about which he chose to write. His signature style had supplied the personal touch in his columns, as if writing letters home.
He would be remembered, concludes the piece, as one of the most lamented casualties of the war.
"And fighting men, growing older, will remember tiny Ie Jima not as a place won at the cost of men-at-arms, but as the spot where he died, the little man who knew them so well."
The excerpt from the Congressional Record finds Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin providing praise to President Truman as an effective leader and a man of faith, despite the facts that Senator Wiley was a Republican and that during the late election, Senator Truman had gone to Wisconsin and spoken against him. Mr. Truman had expressed the hope personally to Senator Wiley that he did not hold the campaigning out of state against him, saying that his own maxim was never to remember a slight nor forget a kindness.
Senator Wiley believed that America had a common-sense President who represented ordinary folk. He had music in him, and it was true, said Senator Wiley, that, as
Of course, we have to add, although not aiming it at President Truman, that Shakespeare did not say it the other way about, that the musician, as Nero, necessarily doth not play also at times the lyre.
Drew Pearson discusses the pressure from oil magnates and Democratic leaders to have Democratic National treasurer Ed Pauley appointed Secretary of Interior to replace Harold Ickes. We won't belabor it as Mr. Pauley was not so appointed, or to any other Cabinet level post. Mr. Ickes would remain at his job for almost another year.
He next relates of the ongoing Russian study of President Truman, a study which had begun right after Yalta had ended in February, the Russians then apparently believing that FDR had not long to live. Such studies were always undertaken by foreign governments of new Presidents or would-be Presidents.
Diplomats in Washington were speculating that the research had led Russia to change its position on Poland, having in late March been opting out of the accord at Yalta to have a representative government, inclusive of the London government-in-exile, and instead insisting for a time upon seating at San Francisco the Soviet-backed Lublin Government. But, immediately on the heels of President Roosevelt's death, the Soviets, the previous Saturday, suddenly had agreed again to accept four major Polish parties plus the Communists into the Lublin Government. Also, at that point, they decided to send Foreign Commissar Molotov to San Francisco rather than have Ambassador Andrei Gromyko lead the delegation as originally planned.
Mr. Pearson next explains that aboard the funeral train of the President, Ed Pauley and Democratic chair Bob Hannegan had asked recently appointed press secretary Jonathan Daniels who he would recommend as his replacement, a polite way of indicating that they wanted him out. Some names were then tossed about.
Mr. Daniels would not be pushed out, however, into the cold and would go to work for the United Nations Subcommission for the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities, serving for six years in that capacity, while resuming his work as editor of the Raleigh News & Observer. He had been in service of the Roosevelt Administration for two years at this juncture, previously serving as an administrative assistant, until he was chosen in January by President Roosevelt to become press secretary.
Charles Ross, originally from President Truman's hometown of Independence, Missouri, and the Washington correspondent for many years for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, would succeed Mr. Daniels as press secretary following a short transition period. Mr. Ross would serve for five years in the position.
Mr. Pearson next remarks that the Secret Service had been providing a detail for Vice-President Truman for some five or six weeks prior to FDR's death, not the usual in those times. Thus, Mr. Pearson concludes that the Secret Service apparently thought the President's health to be seriously in decline.
The Army and Navy, right after President Truman was sworn, ceased wiretapping journalists, a practice which had flourished, reports Mr. Pearson, under President Roosevelt.
He then lists several men who would be prominent behind the scenes in the Truman Administration: Democratic chair Robert Hannegan, banker John W. Snyder of St. Louis, just appointed as RFC chair, Hugh Fulton, former counsel for the Truman Investigating Committee of the Senate, Matt Connelly, confidential secretary to the President, and J. Leonard Reinsch, the press-radio aide.
Marquis Childs discusses the upcoming San Francisco Conference at which 46 nations would come together to charter the U.N., utilizing the proposals adopted by the Big Four, the U.S., Great Britain, Russia, and China, at Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown the previous latter August through early October.
Mr. Childs suggests that the outcome of the meeting might well mean whether civilization would survive.
After making that seemingly prophetic statement, he quotes from a speech by General Jan Christian Smuts of South Africa, who would head the South African delegation at the conference, saying that the failure of that conference would portend only darkness for mankind.
Though the speech had garnered little notice, it carried great portent for the future:
"Scientific discoveries have been made in this war which have not yet been embodied in war weapons, have not yet materialized in a munitions program—discoveries which, if any war were to take place in future, would make this calamity tenfold, or one hundred-fold, and might mean the end of the human race."
The Germans, Mr. Childs remarks, had threatened to release an atomic weapon. Thus, the informed of the time knew precisely whereof General Smuts spoke.
Even conventional weapons had pulled to rubble the major cities of Germany, and now those of Japan.
San Francisco, as many had predicted, might be the last chance to save the world from future annihilation.
Welcome to the new world, little baby. Better learn to walk fast, and to duck and cover.
A letter writer suggests that the new Freedom Park, to be dedicated to the World War II veterans, should include a pool and park for blacks of the community or the park would be misnamed. The community, she urges, "must stop fighting the Civil War and act with malice toward none and justice for all."
Of course, the best and cheapest way to accomplish that principle would have been via integration, but that was too unthinkable for the Neanderthals even to have it suggested without the person so doing running the risk of having reputation ruined or even, under some circumstances, being murdered. It ran contrary to the laws of nature as the Neanderthals understood them.
A gentleman letter writer provides an eloquent and fitting eulogy to President Roosevelt:
"'He was an admirer of the beautiful, a lover of the good, a defender of the right, a foe to injustice and a helper in distress wherever he found it.'"
Samuel Grafton reports that war correspondent Frederick Graham of The New York Times had discovered on the Western Front a German manufacturer of V-2 rocket bombs who had predicted that unless the world turned to poetry, music, and the arts, there would be a hundred years of bad things to come.
That was one point of view. But other Germans wanted to be Werwulfs and kill, kill, kill, from their Nazi hideaways within the Hartz Mountains of Saxony.
Mr. Grafton stresses that it was the locale of the
It was to be their escape. They would dance on the mountains every night and every night, he states, would be Walpurgis Night, April 30.
As we have informed our readers many times, it is certainly no accident that Hitler and Goebbels committed suicide on the Witches' Sabbath.
Many of those Nazis, however, were left very much alive and free after the war and survived into the 1960's and 1970's.
They were not good old boys.
We posit that they had a heavy hand in the events in Dallas in 1963.
As Mr. Grafton points out, the Werwulfs would come out of the Hartz Mountains, wherein lay their birdseed for their pigeons to coo on,
A third set of Germans buried their heads in the sand and pretended that nothing of consequence was taking place, lunching beside the autobahn as Allied tanks passed by heading for Berlin. They took their escape into liverwurst, says Mr. Grafton.
One woman in Darmstadt rode her bicycle about town cursing Americans. In another town, university officials offered to the Americans their faculty as interpreters so that the AMG could make a better impression on the local Germans. Such was life in the occupied cities.
The Allies had to impress on the Germans that each of these various escape mechanisms were useless, that if they chose to dance as Witches in the mountains, then "we will wait for them to finish, though it take 50 years"—which is nearly what it took.
The only true doorway out of their misty realms of make believe was through democratic reorganization. But, he predicts, they would inevitably try every other
He indicates, with considerable probity in hindsight, that a soft peace would "convince the Germans that the way to the future is to climb to the top of a mountain, and howl like a wolf."
Suffice it to say that if you wish to understand a good deal about the Nazi mentality late in the war and how it continued after the war, even for several decades, even creeping into American society, through the Nazi scientists America decided unwisely to cultivate and use, through our building of our own autobahns to get to and fro and make smog unbearable for decades in our inner cities, and other such Nazi creep-and-cretin, wunderkind-inspired inventions inherited from the Reich, then read carefully this sapient piece by Samuel Grafton.
Beware the Trojan Horse and the bearer of strange gifts. It is not too late to turn it around—yet.
But time on that old iceberg is running lower and lower.
Do you see?
Framed Edition
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.