The Charlotte News
Tuesday, May 1, 1945
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: As indicated yesterday, an Extra edition of The News would appear in the evening, announcing the death of Adolf Hitler. Unfortunately, it is not included on the microfilm. A brief story, however, would appear on an inside page the following day, explaining how the edition sold out as soon as it hit the streets, some people snatching up multiple copies, one woman paying a quarter for three, not waiting around for change—and, for the life of us, we still don't quite get the joke. The price was a nickel a throw, but...
Anyway, that was a hell of an idea.
The front page reports that Soviet troops were closing in on the Tiergarten in Berlin as the Germans were running out of ammunition. The battle had shifted to the center of the capital as desperate German defenders continued to resist, especially in the subways where bloody fighting was taking place. Dozens of German suicides were occurring as the Russians closed in on their positions, reported to have captured the Reichstag and Interior Ministry. The forces of the First White Russian Army and those of the First Ukrainian Army were about to join in the area of the Tiergarten.
The Third Army had advanced to within 58 miles of Berchtesgaden, entering Griesbach, 16 miles from Hitler's birthplace at Braunau. The 11th Armored Division moved on Passau from three sides, while the 26th Division moved 12 miles northeastward to Kellerzberg. The Army pulled up to the Czech border along nearly its entire western length.
The Seventh Army captured Munich as the Germans began shelling the city. The Army crossed the Austrian frontier and captured Scharnitz, ten miles from Innsbruck and 15 miles from the Brenner Pass.
The French First Army captured Freidrichshafen, moving inside Austria and the Bavarian redoubt.
In the north, the British Second Army linked with American airborne troops at a point beyond the Elbe, forming a bridgehead twenty miles wide and twelve miles deep, threatening to cut off Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark.
In Moscow, the Russians celebrated May Day with a greater enthusiasm than at any other time in the 27-year history of the USSR.
In Paris, the May Day cry was "hang Petain" and "throw Petain under the Metro".
In Italy, a day before the final surrender in that campaign, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani and Lt. General Pemsei, commander of the Fascist Ligurian Army, announced its surrender, urging all troops to lay down their arms. (Graziani had been reported dead in Milan on Saturday with Mussolini & Company, but there were conflicting reports that he was instead in custody at Allied headquarters.)
New Zealanders of the Eighth Army linked with the Yugoslav Partisans at the bend of the Adriatic Sea in northeastern Italy.
Prime Minister Churchill told Commons in his May Day address that it appeared the war in Europe might end by Friday evening, but refrained from making any special statement with regard to it. It was, however, the first time that the Prime Minister had ventured such a prediction.
The piece remarks that, even after the official proclamation of surrender, it would take days for the word to trickle through the German ranks to reach every garrison of defenders, and the possibility existed that some might choose to continue the fight despite surrender by the High Command.
In the Pacific, Australian and American forces had invaded Borneo, landing at Tarakan, the oil shipping port of the oil rich region on the northeast coast.
Talikud Island, nine miles off the coast from Davao on Mindanao had been captured by guerrilla forces.
On Okinawa, the 27th Infantry Division completed the capture of Machinato Airfield on the southern coast.
In San Francisco, Foreign Commissar Molotov was said to be preparing soon to leave the conference because of war developments. Foreign Secretary Eden, it was reported, might also have to depart for the same reason by mid-May.
And, true to his word, though having been told it simply wasn't done, President Truman had driven over to the Capitol to have lunch with his friend, Speaker Sam Rayburn.
Whether the menu consisted of something more than hot dogs was not provided.
On the editorial page, "Hi There, Tom!" chastises Senator Tom Connally, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for issuing an anonymous statement from a "high official source" at San Francisco that peace was at hand in Europe on Saturday. He had persisted even after President Truman had denied the rumor.
The editorial did not expect the outspoken Texan to be humbled in the face of having spread a false rumor across the world. But it hoped that it would serve in the future to keep him quiet.
"A School Subsidy" comments on the approval, despite a sparse turnout at the polls, of the 20-cent tax increase for teachers' and school janitors' salaries. But, it cautions, the public should have no illusions that the approval would cure the problems of education.
Since Pearl Harbor, 200,000 teachers nationwide, mostly from rural areas, had gone to higher paying wartime jobs. A fifth of the 25,000 North Carolina teachers had done so. Where replacements had been made, the teachers generally were of less training and lower ability.
The national average teacher salary was $1,550 per year, $967 in rural areas, against average war work salary of $2,400. More than 285,000 teachers nationally earned less than $1,200 per year. The average in North Carolina was $947, down to $517 in Mississippi. By contrast, in New York, the salary was $2,618 and in California, $2,300.
A 300-million dollar annual education appropriation bill pending in Congress was being eyed with caution for fear that it might be freighted with Federal controls over education. The other practical concern was that the states, such as North Carolina, which placed a high premium on education and funding for it, might then be tempted to let the Federal Government do the job.
"Freedom and Justice" comments on the drive in the city to fund the proposed Freedom Park, with a goal of $400,000, the campaign set to end the following day. Not all of the goal had yet been met, but enough had been donated to assure that the park would become a reality.
"Gall Is All" comments on the French Army in Stuttgart refusing orders from Supreme Allied Headquarters to move forward to the south so that other armies in the north could approach the Bavarian redoubt. The French had refused because of the failure of the Big Three to recognize the French demand for control of the Rhineland and the right to police the Rhine from the Ruhr to the Swiss border.
The French still clung to the fallacious scheme of the Maginot Line, blown to bits by the easy panzer penetration in the spring of 1940, as a defense to Germany in an age of airplanes and powerful tanks, and now rockets and jets. It was an anachronistic belief system and, while the French could not be forced at the point of bayonets to vacate Stuttgart, surely there had to be someone who could explain to them the new order of things in the new world.
The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Harlan Bushfield of South Dakota debating with Senator Clyde Reed of Kansas the group medical plan proposed as part of the Farm Security Agency, Senator Bushfield contending that it would ampunt to socialized medicine. Senator Reed disagreed, said that group medicine was working swell in Oklahoma.
Senator Richard Russell of Georgia then joined the debate to say that the conservative AMA had appointed a committee to look at the group healthcare system and had approved it.
Senator Reed then explained that in group plans, the patient simply surrendered to what the majority of the group determined would constitute policy.
In any event, he had written in response to a constituent who was a doctor that he would vote to allow doctors to continue their closed shop, even though he would not do so for the CIO.
Drew Pearson reports that the people of Los Angeles had taken some offense at his columns the previous week praising San Francisco for its having risen from the ashes of the 1906 earthquake to become a modern, bustling city. Los Angeles
The only thing Mr. Pearson says that he could say for certain was that it
He then corrects a statement he had made previously that the Army was issuing to combat troops the quick-release parachute, in preference to the deadly triple-release version, even if not yet able to issue the safer chute to those in training stateside. A B-29 pilot charged with bombing Japan had written that he still flew with the triple-release version, wanted to know how he could obtain the single-release.
Mr. Pearson next warns that two departments for the public to keep their eyes on for potential political graft in the new Truman Administration were Justice and Interior. Interior controlled the hydroelectric projects and the big oil lands, the latter being the area which got the Harding Administration into trouble; Justice had put in jail some of the big city bosses, including Boss Tom Pendergast of Kansas City, who had given Mr. Truman his start in elective politics, and the bosses, such as Ed Kelly in Chicago and Ed Flynn in New York, instrumental in putting Senator Truman on the ticket the previous summer, therefore wanted someone new and friendly at Justice.
Mr. Pearson next presents several odds and ends, and then explains that the Russian suspicion of a deal with the West by the Germans to allow the Western Allies to breach at will their Western defenses to reach Berlin first was unfounded. What had merely taken place was that the fanatical Nazi military leaders had been transferred to the East to resist the Russians, leaving the path open in the West, with the more reasonable ordinary German commanders all too ready to surrender their battered forces.
Marquis Childs suggests that the announcement of V-E Day had been indefinitely postponed by the Allies and that it appeared a wise decision. The announcement was to accompany either the joinder of the Russian troops with those of the Western Allies or at the fall of Berlin, a plan agreed upon by the commanders before the drive across the Rhine was commenced March 7. But General Eisenhower had expected then resistance of the Germans to be greater than it was.
While on the one hand, with relatively light resistance encountered, the dream of rapid conquest had been realized, the Germans had also created as much confusion as they could and had succeeded at it. Germany could not surrender in whole for there was no longer any coherent state. There remained only fanatical bands bent on rebirth of Fascism in Europe. To eliminate these last pockets of resistance would not be an easy task. The prospect of months of hard fighting lay ahead. To proclaim V-E Day would thus only create confusion.
For instance, one Nazi garrison was still holding out on the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel, to which they had retreated at the time of D-Day. A few weeks earlier they had conducted a raid on the French coast, taking prisoners and booty.
Germans in between held several French ports, were fighting hard still in Southern France, receiving apparent aid from Franco in Spain.
Thus, to have a proclamation that the war was over in Europe would imply that the responsibility of the Allies was likewise at an end.
Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy--who would become, between 1949 and 1952, High Commissioner of West Germany--had just returned from the battlefronts to report that the task of rebuilding Europe would be huge and could take years. But that rebuilding was a phase in the war itself and required dedication by the Allies just as strictly as had the fighting.
And, the military planners had counseled that the war in Japan would yet be long and hard, that the Americans had still to face the bulk of the Japanese army.
The Nazis, like the Japanese, were fanatics, and so the simple formulae normally used to calculate the end of wars were not applicable in these settings. The exhaustion of the enemy militarily did not necessarily imply the end of the wars.
There were more than 10,000 Germans still on Crete in the Aegean. They were, at last report, still ready to do battle, with the supplies to accomplish it.
Dorothy Thompson discusses the unilateral veto power of the permanent members of the proposed Security Council as placed in the Dumbarton Oaks plan. She believes it to be one which might act as a deterrent to war. For if two of the large powers decided with smaller nations to band together to vote to use force against a third major power to enforce the peace, the converse would very likely occur, and war erupt. Likewise, if any two major powers banded together to prevent aggression by a smaller power under the protection of a larger power, the result would likely be war. The veto power had tendency to act therefore as a stalemating device.
She warns that the next war would be utilizing far more sophisticated equipment than in World War II. It would be fought by remote control with push-button rockets launched from an underground facility. So a war to enforce the peace would be just as calamitous as a war of aggression. The veto power negated this sort of war unless all of the major powers agreed on suppression of aggression by a smaller nation, an unlikely prospect.
Samuel Grafton remarks that the San Francisco Conference had stirred to new life any vestiges of anti-Soviet feeling within the United States. Should any Russian delegate disagree at the conference, then it was reported as a major rift; should any Russian delegate be agreeable, it was reported as major healing of rifts. No other delegation was being subjected to such intense scrutiny.
The effect was to make the conference into a type of sporting contest, Molotov vs. the Conference. Commissar Molotov's suggestion that there be four rotating chairmen of the conference rather than a single chairman, while violating tradition, carried with it the idea of a coalition proposal to distribute power rather than concentrate it. Nevertheless, the observers of the conference tended to see only the disagreement, not the substance of it.
The other effect was to make the conference appear ill, with observers constantly taking its temperature. There were "roadblocks" and "deadlocks", to describe variously a proposal accepted by all delegates save Russia or a debate over an issue lasting more than an instant.
The sum effect was to render the conference frivolous and ignore the more serious substantive matters. The primary issue at hand was to set up a new League which recognized the difference in world relations adhering since the previous League in which Russia had stood alone with a single vote, outnumbered by the remainder of Europe. Now, Russia was a world partner who had been indispensable in winning the war. The correct recognition of this fact with respect to Russia's position vis à vis the West had to be included within the framework of the new League for there to be a successful outcome of the conference.
To do what the observers were doing to the conference was to recapture the spirit of failure which had pervaded the old League and resulted in world war.
Anyhow, so much for
Framed Edition
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