Friday, April 27, 1945

The Charlotte News

Friday, April 27, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page and inside page report that on Wednesday afternoon, the First Army had linked at Torgau with the First Ukrainian Army, veterans of the siege of Stalingrad, 58 miles southwest of Berlin and 28 miles northeast of Leipzig. The troops celebrated with dancing, music, and singing, drank champagne, patted each other on the back, and generally enjoyed a good time, if having to communicate through a language barrier aided by sign language. The action had the effect of cutting Germany in two.

The initial contact took place at 4:40 p.m. local time, 1:30 Moscow time, on the Elbe between the girders of a blown bridge, as Second Lt. William D. Robertson of Los Angeles, a member of the 69th Division, said, "Put it there," extending his hand to the unnamed Russian soldier across from him, Alexander Silvashko of the 58th Guards Infantry Division.

Hal Boyle, however, reported that the first contact was made by Lt. Albert L. Kotzebue of Houston at another point on the Elbe.

Thousands of Germans stood on the east bank of the Mulde River with their belongings packed in carts, hoping that the Americans would allow them to surrender before the Russians arrived. Included were still armed German soldiers who made no pretense of resistance, were marching willingly into captivity without guards. Also present were liberated British prisoners walking alongside the Germans. There was no room in the American lines for more German prisoners and so they were forced to remain until the Russians came.

President Truman issued a statement praising the efforts of the two forces and suggesting the junction as hearkening the end of Nazi Germany, though, he cautioned, hard fighting still lay ahead to final victory. Likewise, Prime Minister Churchill issued a statement congratulating the two armies, as did Premier Stalin.

The Third Army invaded Austria, moving on Linz, 31 miles distant, and established radio contact with the Russians of the Third Ukrainian Army west of conquered Vienna, 35 miles from the Third Army lines. The action shut off the "front door" to the Bavarian redoubt at Berchtesgaden. A joinder of those forces also appeared imminent. The Third Army was moving without resistance, the Austrians welcoming their entry with garlands and barmaids offering up steins of beer. No shots were fired.

During the last two miles before the Austrian frontier, the Americans entered a no-fire zone for artillery, to avoid inadvertent firing on Russians. The tanks were permitted to fire on Germans but saw none.

The Third Army also took previously bypassed Regensburg.

The French First Army moved to within 31 miles of Munich and 78 miles of the Brenner Pass.

The Seventh Army approached to within 35 miles northwest of Munich.

The British in the north pushed beyond Bremen to seal off Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein.

The Canadians broke through the Kusten canal line and moved closer to Emden, Bremenhaven, and Wilhelmshaven.

In Berlin, the Russians reported that the city center was unrecognizable, its buildings virtually gone, as they had gained control of two-thirds of the capital.

Fighting within the subways had erupted afresh, and was ongoing building by building in the heart of the city. The infantry had taken Square 281, but the Germans continued to resist in the upper floors of the buildings still standing. The Russians had the explosives to blow up the buildings but had been informed that the Germans were holding hostages, including Ukrainians and White Russians. Many of the German occupants were simply civilians or civil servants who did not know how to fight and would often put out flags of surrender. But even from those windows would come gunfire. Molotov cocktails were being thrown into cellars from which emanated gunfire, and the Russians fired point blank into snipers' nests.

The whole city was a mass of burning wreckage with civilians everywhere lining up before shops for bread.

Between Squares 306 and 274 in a subway tunnel, the Russians had gained about a third of a mile.

There were streams of liberated Berliners leaving the city and another stream of frightened Germans entering.

West of the city, the First White Russian Army captured Spandau, Potsdam, and Rathenow. Potsdam had been the home of the German Army since the time of Frederick the Great.

To the northwest, Marshal Zimkov's forces advanced three miles into the workers' district and into the fringes of the Tiergarten in the center of the city. Battles were reported raging within the Tiergarten itself.

To the south, the First Ukrainian Army was believed to have completed the occupation of Tempelhof airport.

In Italy, the Fifth Army drove into Genoa and to within 35 miles of Milan, following the capture of Verona, breaking the German Adige River Line. The advances placed the Americans about a hundred miles from the Brenner Pass, thus about 178 miles from the French. In the center of the line, the Americans overran Pacenza.

The Tenth Mountain Division had captured the airport at Villafranca.

French forces moved from the Riviera into northern Italy, six miles from San Remo, about a hundred miles from Genoa along the Ligurian coast.

Mussolini, who had now only hours to live, was again reported to have fled to Como, near Milan, in which bitter fighting was ongoing between the Fascists and the Partisans. A Swiss report indicated that Mussolini was already in custody of the Partisans.

Perhaps, the squib beneath this report re Portland cement and its hardening characteristics, causing it to resemble the stone of England, carried with it some intuitive sense of the impending doom overhanging Il Duce. All that was missing was an ad for Esso.

The Nazis appeared to have abandoned the fight to support the Fascists in all of the northern cities.

In San Francisco, a dispute had arisen between the Big Four foreign secretaries as to who would chair the conference, traditionally chaired by a representative of the host nation. Foreign Minister Anthony Eden had proposed that Secretary of State Stettinius be made chairman, but Foreign Commissar Molotov objected. He approved the idea of Mr. Stettinius that the chairmanship rotate among the Big Four, but again nixed the companion motion that Mr. Stettinius would chair the important Steering and Executive Committees. Mr. Molotov favored rotation of all three positions. The Americans and British, however, found this compromise unworkable. The meetings were characterized by hot tempers and hurt feelings.

The awaiting assemblage of representatives of the other 42 nations took a dim view of these initial proceedings, believing they portended problems arising with respect to the more serious substantive issues to be considered at the conference. There was even concern that some of the nations might depart before the conference was half over. That included Foreign Commissar Molotov, according to one of his associates. Some of the Latin American delegates talked of going home within two weeks.

Foreign Minister Eden had suggested that the conference should last no more than a month, to permit the foreign ministers to return to their critical duties at home.

An agreement had been worked out on the form in which trusteeships would be held over former enemy territory. Some of them, those deemed essential to preservation of the future peace, would be handled by the Security Council, with the power to use force to preserve the peace, while the remainder would be overseen by the General Assembly, with a view toward raising the living standard within those territories.

In any event, at the start, the diplomats were a-splittin' hairs—while the scientists at Los Alamos were busy trying still to split Old Man Atom.

Those who believe in ill omens might take note of the plane crash at National Airport in Washington involving a Lockheed Lodestar which failed to get off the ground, killing several passengers.

On the editorial page, "Two Veterans" reports of two G.I.'s, one a wounded veteran of the Pacific war on Guam and the other of the European war, who were serving on the staff of former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen, a member of the U.S. delegation to the San Francisco Conference, who believed that the conference would at best achieve a working alliance and that the United States would wind up having to provide the force necessary to prevent aggression. They disfavored the veto agreement at Yalta whereby any of the permanent members of the Security Council could unilaterally veto any proposed action, and that the U.S. was engaging in double-dealing by asking for international cooperation while also insisting on individual security.

The piece speculates that these two G.I.'s must have wondered at the stories surfacing anent the State Department's hard stand against Russia at the outset of the conference, and, as Drew Pearson had revealed, the State Department's havong, on April 16, reversed the Roosevelt policy of a "hard peace" for Germany, stripping it of the ability in the future to have sufficient industrialization to wage war. They must have wondered who the Americans were fighting, Germany and Japan or Russia.

Such men were going to insist that the conference get down to business and work out an accord which would prevent any future world war, prevent any resurrection of a war machine within the Axis nations. Otherwise, they would depart cynically and critical of any half-measures.

"The Cleavage" comments on the acceptance by the aging Dr. Louis Beal of the role of Acting Superintendent at Morganton State Hospital to replace Dr. J. R. Saunders who had resigned because of the delegation of new power to the business side of the institution. The conflict between the business side and the medical side continued, resulting in severe shortages of medical and staff personnel.

Before accepting the position, Dr. Beal had insisted on certain personnel matters being settled and the piece applauds his determination in this regard.

"The Crest" reports of the Navy having sliced its draft quota in half in May, from the April call-up of 32,000 men, based on fewer than expected casualties in the Pacific and heavy enlistments of seventeen-year olds.

That enlistment advantage of the Navy, in accepting seventeen-year olds, had drained off required younger recruits from the Army, causing the Army to have to draft older men. Nevertheless, the Army also was contemplating reducing its draft quota. Enlisted men over 42, some 50,000 in number, would be discharged at their request. The Army was likely, by July, to allow requests for discharge of those men who had been in service for four or five years.

For the first time since spring, 1941, the draft was beginning to be reduced and reconversion of manpower to civilian life therefore beginning as well.

"A Subdivision" comments on the proposal of Democratic House Majority Whip Robert Ramspeck of Georgia, wanting to see the membership of the House cut in half, from 435 to 268, with every two districts merged and each district then allowed to elect a working Congressman who would attend to the Government's business in Congress, and a political Congressman who would look after constituents at home, answer mail, attend to appointments, and the myriad of other tasks which Mr. Ramspeck contended took up the bulk of the time of Congressmen, leaving little for their actual attendance to the duties of governance.

The piece doubts that the proposal would ever gain traction, but it was fun to speculate about it. Imagine, it concludes, "real Congressmen!"

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Clare Hoffman of Michigan referring his colleagues to the stories that there was a meat shortage within the nation's capital, that the House restaurant had the day before not had any butter.

Cigarettes, liquor, and clothing also populated the list of scarcities across the nation. But, he felt, it might be a good thing to bring home the fact to the people that war meant suffering and death, not a good time and higher wages.

Drew Pearson, for the third day in a row addressing complicating factors between Russia and the Anglo-American Allies, comments on the capture by the American Army in Germany of the former German alien property custodian, Dr. H. J. Caesar. After lengthy interrogation and revelation of documents in his possession, it had come to light that both Chase Manhattan Bank and J. P. Morgan & Co. had engaged in continued banking association with Nazi Germany through 1941, their Paris offices receiving favored treatment by the Nazis following the occupation of France and establishment of Vichy. The British banks had been even more cooperative with the Germans.

J. P. Morgan correspondence showed that the firm bent over backwards to present an anti-Semitic face to the Nazis, bragging that it had relentlessly maintained a policy since its founding in 1668 to keep Jews out of its employment and had successfully done so.

He quotes at length from a German banker's summary of a conversation had in May, 1941 with a Morgan representative in Paris in which the German alleged the Morgan man had repeatedly made anti-Semitic statements and pledged support for the Reich and its goals. According to the German banker, the Morgan man blamed Roosevelt and his "criminal clique" for starting the war and, through coercion, obtaining the cooperation of Britain and France in waging it.

Mr. Pearson finds these financial dealings troubling to the Russians, and why they were so insistent about having a friendly Poland and friendly Czechoslovakia. Stalin had reminded Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta that twice in 25 years Russia had been attacked through Poland by Germany. He asked Mr. Churchill whether Britain would come to Russia's aid should it happen again.

Feeding the suspicion were the elements in both the U.S. and Britain who wanted to re-build Germany as a bulwark to Russia. The greater the tendency exhibited toward making Germany strong after the war, the greater the suspicion of Russia and the more they demanded, in consequence, a friendly Poland.

Such issues therefore colored the San Francisco Conference and threatened to undermine the peace before the present war had even ended.

Marquis Childs discusses again the food problem with respect to Europe, that 16 million tons of food was on hand when Herbert Hoover began his food distribution program in 1919 at the end of World War I. That amount was not on hand at this stage of 1945, with a far greater task ahead of feeding starving masses in Norway, Holland, Belgium, France, Greece, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Baltics than was present in Europe at the conclusion of the earlier war. Former President Hoover had estimated that a half billion people would be in need of feeding.

One of the principal steps undertaken in the earlier time to insure that food was shipped to the Continent was to remove merchant ships from standard trade routes and devote them to food shipments to Europe. That was not being done thus far at this time. Non-essential trade was taking place between the United States and South America.

Moreover, statistics bore out the fact that food consumption during the period 1917 to 1919 in the United States had been less, despite the absence of rationing, than during the period 1942-44. What had worked at the earlier time were appeals to the sense of patriotism and humanitarianism to eat less, to enable feeding the starving of Europe for the purpose of insuring the peace. He urges similar appeals at this point.

Samuel Grafton discusses the troubled Republican Party, part of it wanting to go forward, adopting the position of international cooperation, part of it wanting to remain entrenched in the past politics of isolation. The former included the Willkie elements, now represented by former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen and the New York Herald-Tribune. This wing, however, had very few members in Congress.

In the House, all ten Republicans on the Ways & Means Committee were working to defeat the bill which would permit the President to cut tariffs by up to fifty percent to encourage international trade.

Governor Dewey was in a position to unite the two party wings but had left it unclear during the campaign which wing he favored. He was, says Mr. Grafton, more of a secret tunnel than a bridge, therefore, between the two factions. In the absence of unity, the party seemed to be gravitating toward a position of favoring the Dumbarton Oaks proposal but nothing else, the tariffs bill or the Bretton Woods proposal. But this glue was fraught with the difficulty that it presented a platform to the people of speaking out for world peace while not providing the machinery to maintain it economically.

Nationally, the problem was not unity within the Republican Party but unity between the Republicans and President Truman.

Under the banner "Anything Goes", the editors provide a sampling of editorials from other publications.

The first is from Dave Clark of The Textile Bulletin, registering his complaint regarding the tenor of the editorials and commentary which proceeded for three days following the President's death, lionizing him and the New Deal. Mr. Clark did not appreciate the fact that the editorialists appeared, in his view, to be attempting to set up the New Deal as the living memorial to President Roosevelt.

Of course, Mr. Clark had thought FDR a Communist and had not, at earlier times, hesitated to say so in print. He also thought that the editors of The News, including W. J. Cash, were Reds, and likewise had said so in print.

Henry Ford II addresses the subject of future wages and how high they would be, stating that industrialists regarded wages as being too high only when they were not earned, never when they were, regardless of amounts. American management had improved working conditions and shortened hours, while making the product worth more. So, he concludes that management had been the primary force in increasing wages in the country.

Finally, The Woman comments that 65 million dollars had been spent on perfume the previous year while only a million had been spent to try to determine the cause and cure of tuberculosis, a half million on cancer, and five million on overall medical research. Similar larger amounts were spent on hand lotions, shampoo, saccharine, and dentifrices.

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