Thursday, May 17, 1945

The Charlotte News

Thursday, May 17, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Tenth Army had entered the heart of Naha and was fighting on the approaches to Shuri and Yonabaru, each a strong point in the four-mile "Little Siegfried Line" across southern Okinawa. The Sixth Marine Division had crossed the Asato River and also entered the heart of the ruined capital at the western end of the defense line.

The 96th Infantry Division moved around the left nose of captured Conical Hill and advanced 800 yards south to within about 200 yards of Yonabaru, the eastern anchor of the line.

Elements of the 77th and 96th Infantry Divisions and the First Marines approached Shuri fortress, the medieval structure at the center of the line, considered the key to its continued viability. Once Shuri was penetrated, according to a Tenth Army spokesman, the end of the campaign would be in sight. The 362nd Regiment of the 96th gained the top of the hill near Shuri and made its way down the southwest slope, to within a few hundred yards of Shuri's moat at the fortress's northeast corner. Tanks of the First Marines entered Wana village, 500 yards west of Shuri's northern end.

Thus far, American casualties on Okinawa through May 14 had mounted to 20,950, of whom 2,771 of the Army and 1,010 Marines had been killed, 11,678 Army and 5,336 Marines wounded, and a total of 165 missing.

Japanese dead had risen to 46,505 since the action began April 1.

Average losses daily were 84 for the Americans and 1,011 for the Japanese, a 12 to 1 kill ratio.

It was estimated that 36,000 enemy troops remained alive on the island.

Based on reports received through May 7, covering fighting through mid-April, the total American casualties since Pearl Harbor had reached 986,000, of whom 878,939 were from the Army. Of those, 294,308 had returned to duty. The number of both Army and Navy casualties had increased 13,560 since the previous week. The Army total included 3,650 more killed, 14,000 more wounded, 6,000 fewer missing, and 2,000 fewer prisoners.

Army casualties in the Philippines were 46,638, including 10,342 killed, 35,699 wounded, and 507 missing. The Japanese had suffered 237,256 killed in the campaign.

The total Japanese counted as killed since Guadalcanal were 360,000, but many more thousands were uncounted from bombing raids and in areas inaccessible to Americans.

Another 500 B-29's raided Nagoya yet again shortly after midnight, matching the same strength of the record-breaking raid on the city on Monday. The planes dropped on a sixteen-square mile area more than a million napalm-based fire bombs, 3,500 tons, utilizing the light of flares and fires still buring from the earlier raid. The raid stressed the inner harbor and estuary docks, the only part of the city not bombed on Monday. Targets included the Mitsubishi aircraft plant and smaller munitions plants. Pilots reported that not much appeared left of Nagoya, the third largest city of Japan. Anti-aircraft fire had been meager and interceptor planes appeared anxious not to fight. No B-29's were reported lost.

Tokyo radio reported that, at noon, 40 American fighter planes from Iwo Jima strafed the Fujizawa district of Tokyo.

On Mindanao, the 31st Division had advanced five miles along the Sayre Highway in the north central part of the island from captured Maramag, to within eight miles of Valencia's airfields and 55 miles of the 40th Infantry Division driving south from Del Monte along the Sayre, in a combined effort to connect and bisect the island.

The 24th Division continued its close quarters battle against the Japanese within Davao, rooting out enemy troops between the Talomo and Davao Rivers.

A Marine dive bomber eliminated a troublesome nest of Japanese Naval guns across Davao Strait as PT-boats crossed the Davao Gulf to destroy six 70-foot torpedo boats and a barge, while firing on four fuel and ammunition dumps and knocking out a pillbox at Piso Point, a secret enemy naval base.

On Luzon, guerillas harassed Japanese garrisons at Tuguegarao and along Highway 4 in the southern Cagayan Valley, but the drive down the road from Balete Pass was halted by torrential rains.

East of Manila, two arms of the 43rd Infantry Division closed to within a thousand yards of one another, isolating an enemy force near Ipo Dam. The First Cavalry Division made its way up the east coast toward a small, unused seaplane facility south of Infanta.

The Dutch effected a new unopposed landing on the southern tip of Tarakan off Borneo, taking ammunition dumps, while, inland, the Australian troops cleared out a strong enemy position.

In Europe, in the area of Berchtesgaden within the Alpine passes of Bavaria and Austria, a search was underway for Heinrich Himmler, former Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop, and Julius Streicher. Lt. Col. Otto Skorzeny, number two man in the Gestapo and leader of the Mussolini rescue party in September, 1943, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Himmler's first assistant who formed an anti-Russian underground resistance movement, and Dr. Robert Ley, the labor front leader, creator of the "Strength Through Joy" program, and leader of the Werewolves, had each been captured.

American generals were taking personal part in the manhunt for Himmler, Streicher, and Von Ribbentrop, the three highest ranking Nazis remaining at large. Anti-Nazi underground Austrians and Bavarians, including a Jewish woman who had been able to survive as a leader of the resistance while residing within a short distance of Hitler's mountain chalet, were providing tips to the searchers. Himmler had been at his summer home at Tegernsee, east of Berchtesgaden, on April 27. The resistance members in this area were said to have been more deadly during the war years than even the Maquis in France.

Captured documents of the Luftwaffe showed that there had been in place a plan to launch a major air offensive against the Eighth Air Force with intent to destroy 750 to 1,000 planes through use of every available German combat fighter. But as the time for the operation to commence approached, the pilots simply lost their nerve. Many of them were court-martialed. Eventually, the plan was dropped.

The combined forces of the American and British bombers, both out of England and Italy, had dropped 1,877,500 tons of bombs on Germany and German-occupied territory in Europe during the war. The RAF had dropped 986,000 tons to the 891,500 of the Americans. Over a million tons had been dropped during the previous two years.

A captured U-boat officer stated in an interview held in Portsmouth, N. H., that he still believed in Nazism. "A Nazi is a good German and a good German is a Nazi," said he. The cook onboard the surrendered U-873 stated that the July 20 plot had been a turning point in the war and that he did not believe the Germans had committed atrocities.

Marshal Ivan Konev visited with General Bradley and attended a U.S.O. show in Bad Wildungen in Germany. Marshal Konev gave more applause to three enlisted men and three WAC's who jitterbugged to an orchestra trained by the late Glenn Miller than he did to stars Mickey Rooney and Jascha Heifetz.

Western Austria was said to have remaining only a 12-day supply of food. The Austrians were so elated by the peace that they were eating plentifully and consuming precious stores. The Allies informed them that they must conserve their food as there would be no provision of supplies from external sources. Smashed bridges and transportations lines accomplished by the Nazis in the latter days of the war had exacerbated the problems.

Supreme Allied Headquarters restored the credentials, effective June 6, of two more American correspondents, Seymour Friedin of the New York Herald Tribune and John Groth of the American Legion magazine and Parade, whose credentials had been lifted because of penetration into Berlin without the authority and escort of Headquarters. Two other correspondents continued under suspension for the same breach.

President Truman drove to Bethesda Naval Hospital to see former Secretary of State Cordell Hull, visiting for 50 minutes. Ambassador to Russia Averill Harriman and Russian expert of the State Department Charles Bohlen had just completed a visit with Mr. Hull as the President stepped onto the elevator to the tower. Mr. Hull had been in the hospital since the previous fall.

In San Francisco, it was believed that the U. N. Conference was about three weeks from adopting a charter, with many proposed amendments being quickly disposed during committee meetings.

There was still no resolution on the proposed bloc plan to allow for regional defense pending action by the Security Council, as no word yet had been received from Andrei Gromyko, awaiting instructions from Moscow. One report stated that Mr. Gromyko had raised a question regarding the proposed rationale for the bloc plan on the basis that Germany had claimed "self defense" when it launched the attack on Russia in June, 1941.

Secretary of State Stettinius announced that the British and American delegations were in complete accord as to the Yalta agreement regarding a coalition government for Poland. A report of the New York Herald Tribune had stated that there had been a difference in positions on the issue.

A light earthquake, epicentered 60 miles from Berkeley, shook the conference attendees at 8:08 a.m., lasting for a full three minutes. Despite its unusual length, as most only last a few seconds, no damage was reported. Welcome to the Bay Area.

A woman in Miami, an ethnologist and war worker, was killed by a pack of nine pit bulls. When police arrived on the scene, the 39-year old woman was still conscious and asked to dictate her will which was then accomplished, leaving all of her property to her son. The owner was charged with manslaughter.

The War Production Board announced that some two million more books of matches would be made available through tobacco and drug stores during the coming quarter.

On the editorial page, "Bloody Justice" remarks of the divided sensibilities in the country regarding the war crimes exposed in Germany and the need for punishment. On the one hand, Americans were eager to see the Nazis responsible taken to the gallows, but on the other there was the counter-balancing notion that there was to be, per the determination of Roosevelt and Churchill, no blood bath in Europe post-war.

The reality was that to punish the guilty meant punishing thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Germans. The death sentence appeared mandatory for whole groups of Germans who participated in the atrocities. But there remained the notion of civilized conduct to prevent wholesale execution.

Some balance had to be struck, however, when confronted with the bestial murderers of the SS, all of whom had earned a date with the executioner. The piece poses questions as to whether leniency could be extended to any one of them and expressed the hope that it would not. So, too, it should be with the quislings of the Nazi-occupied countries, with the Junker generals who planned and waged the war.

This new notion of leniency, it concludes, appeared already to forget the blood bath which had pervaded Europe for twelve years.

"A 'Misunderstanding'" tells of the correction of the policy statement made the previous week by Elmer Davis, head of the Office of War Information, who had stated that all American newspapers and magazines would be banned from receipt by Germans on the basis that they could not yet process free thought, being a "sick man" and having had no exposure to it for twelve years.

President Truman and General Eisenhower had expressed that the policy statement had been the result of a misunderstanding and that there would be no such ban on American newspapers and magazines in Germany.

The piece concludes that Germans, prepared or not, would simply have to begin to accept free expression of ideas and resulting discordant opinion.

"Know Your City" expresses that the new City Council would spend its first two weeks in office becoming oriented. That was a good idea.

The piece suggests that the Council members adopt another idea, travelling to work each day along a less trodden path, through the poorer neighborhoods in which a third to a half of the city's population dwelled, where streets were unpaved, without sidewalks, without lighting, without space, where the residents lived in abject squalor.

"The Rear Guard" again looks at cotton and finds it both a curse and a blessing to the South's economy. Its curse came in the mass of nearly all Southern farmers who sought to raise it and its consequent drag on the market. Thus, there were thousands of farmers raising the crop at a loss, kept afloat only by government subsidies and propped-up prices. So, the farmers continued farming it out of stubborn resistance to change.

Its blessing was the fact that it was a money crop for the region in the aggregate, even if the individual farmers barely eked out a living.

The Bureau of Agricultural Economics in Washington wanted subsidies and price supports removed to let cotton production live or die on its own, a form of Social Darwinism, to allow the survival of only the fittest producers. They believed the result would be increased diversification of crops in the South.

Georgia's Agriculture Commissioner was against that proposal, labeled the bureaucrats conspirators plotting the ruin of the Southern cotton farmer, to render him an economic slave to Northern industry.

The editorial finds the position of the Bureau to be the more sensible, that the sooner diversification would come to the region, the better the entire Southern economy would be.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative George Dondero of Michigan inquiring whether the people had petitioned the Congress for a change in the Constitution to admit of provision of treaty-approving powers by the House.

Congressman John Jennings of Tennessee responded that they had not, that the matter had been conceived by those who thought the Senate might not approve the U. N. Charter. He goes on to speculate of what might transpire under the proposed amendment to the Constitution to allow majority approval of treaties by both houses to supplant the established practice of requiring two-thirds majority approval by the Senate.

He jumps to the conclusion that such an amendment would enable the floodgates to be opened to a tide of immigration to America of war-starved Europeans and British, that servicemen coming home in the hope of finding jobs would then find it that much harder. And beyond that, he believed that it would cause the country to have to nurse the rest of the world back to health.

Drew Pearson discusses the issue of the deteriorating relationship between Russia and the United States, having been brought into bold relief by the San Francisco Conference—a topic on which, as we related Monday, special correspondent John F. Kennedy would also briefly but cogently write the following day.

Russia, Mr. Pearson remarks, was on its way to becoming the most powerful nation in Europe and Asia and there was nothing America could do to prevent it. Half a billion Chinese, he predicts, plus the millions of Indians would likely gravitate toward Russia. As well would Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Balkans.

The United States would likely become the sun around which would orbit Great Britain, Latin America, France, Scandinavia, and Holland.

Thus would leave two powerful blocs of nations, and the question of concern was whether they would drift into war ten or twenty years hence. "If the toboggan once starts, no power on earth can prevent war. The time to stop it is now." And the diplomatic situation between Russia and the U.S. at the conference had reached a nadir, boding ill for the future.

The toboggan toward war could not be arrested, he suggested, once in motion, by any peace machinery constructed at San Francisco.

The basic structure of the organization would be that the large nations could do as they pleased and no machinery had been created to stop a war between the large nations. Only common sense must intervene to prevent it. And already, the large nations had shown themselves at San Francisco unable to settle their disputes.

With those facts in mind, Mr. Pearson proposed to lay out some of the tortured background leading to this tangle of relations with Russia. He prefaced it by saying some of the facts might be considered critical of Russia, some of the United States, and that, until both sides were presented, no conclusions should be drawn.

He asserts that relations with Russia had begun to deteriorate days before the death of President Roosevelt on April 12 when Stalin had sent along his note accusing the United States of having made a deal with the Germans to enable the Americans and British to get to Berlin before the Russians. The only deal which had been worked out was one in Switzerland with the German officers in Italy to arrange for an armistice of those troops. But that meeting plus the wholesale surrender of the Germans in the West versus the bitter fighting still ongoing in the East had led the Russians to become suspicious.

The fact had been simply that the Germans preferred surrender to the West, expecting better treatment than by the Russians whose countrymen they had slaughtered by the millions and left Russia raped and ravaged in their wake. Yet, to allay the Russian suspicions, the Ninth Army had retreated from the Berlin suburbs on April 13 and rested at the Elbe while the Russians took Berlin.

At the same time, the American Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Laurence Steinhardt, was prevented by the Russians from entering the country with the invading Red Army, based on the Russian assertion that there was no secure housing available for him. He still had not been admitted.

Then came the breach of an agreement made at Yalta that both American and Russian troops would enter Vienna and occupy certain Austrian provinces. But the Russians had instead set up government in Vienna under the socialist leader, Dr. Karl Renner, seizing Viennese airfields.

In Bulgaria, more leaders had been executed by the Russians than in any other Allied-occupied country. U. S. officials had not objected for the fact that most were likely bound for execution anyway as war criminals. But Americans were not being permitted to act as free agents in Bulgaria, being confined mainly to Sofia, and this exclusion was ground for strenuous objection. The American military and State Department representatives at one point had been stopped by the Russians four miles outside Sofia when they had merely sought to meet with the Bulgarian Minister of War.

Samuel Grafton writes of the concern of Americans regarding whether they were prepared to make a hard peace for Germany. The episode with General Dahlquist and General Stack being kind to Hermann Goering had shocked Americans, yet had not been unexpected.

That General Eisenhower had to issue written orders that any fraternization with the enemy was forbidden was further proof of this lack of resolve to invoke a tough peace.

The American public did not believe that there would be adequate punishment inflicted for war crimes, that it would be premised on international law and orderly processes which would prove inadequate. And existing law did not make fascism a crime. Thus it had to be proved that the fascists were war criminals, that they had committed a second crime other than just waging war by aggression, for that, too, was no crime under existing law. So, the Allies would be left either to distort the law or the meaning of fascist crime.

But there was a third way, by taking the matter out of the realm of criminal law and moving it to the realm of military necessity and emergent action to preserve the public peace and safety, affording resort to more summary measures. General Eisenhower might, for instance, order all Nazis with numbers under 200,000 to remain in their homes under house arrest to insure the public safety. Beyond that, to assure preservation of order during the reconstruction period, the same number of Nazis might be shipped away into a place of exile.

Dorothy Thompson, now having left Jerusalem and writing from an undisclosed point in the Mediterranean, reports of a conversation with Pastor Martin Niemoeller, recently found in southern Germany within the area abandoned by the Nazis at the end of the fighting, having been taken from his former imprisonment at Dachau. Even the Nazis had never lifted a hand against him during his time in captivity.

From his experiences, he had a spiritual authority, Ms. Thompson suggests, which no other person in Protestant Christendom possessed.

Pastor Niemoeller had been removed from Dachau along with Kurt Schuschnigg, the former Austrian leader, Leon Blum, the former Socialist Premier of France, Hjalmer Schact, Hitler's former Finance Minister, Prince Phillip Hesse, and others.

Pastor Niemoeller ventured no opinions on the future of Germany for the fact that he had been isolated for years and thus did not know enough of conditions. But he did understand the anomie and complete loss of faith in institutions besetting the German people, having placed full stock in Hitler and his minions, then having been betrayed by them. He believed that out of this morass could not come democracy anytime soon. Germany would need be governed by the Allies lest chaos and killing become the order of the day.

He ventured that the collapse morally of Germany had begun with the collapse of the Christian church under Hitler.

The pastor did not believe that Germans would turn to Communism to supplant Nazism because any totalitarian system suppressing conscience on behalf of the state would appear too resemblant to the Nazi regime. He hoped that the West and Russian Communism would reconcile and learn from one another. The way of the future for Germany would depend on how the occupying powers would meet the spiritual and intellectual needs of the Germans.

The reason that the Nazis never sought to harm Pastor Niemoeller, incidentally, is probably explained by a piece by Cash from February, 1938, one of several pieces he would write about Dr. Niemoeller.

Marquis Childs addresses the issue of trusteeships being considered at the San Francisco Conference, finding it apparent that the move was toward re-establishment of the old colonial pattern of exploitation, ignoring the principles set forth in the Atlantic Charter of August, 1941.

Mr. Childs refers to notes he had taken from a conversation with President Roosevelt a year earlier in which the President had envisioned a form of trusteeship which would permit colonial peoples to move toward political and economic independence within a fixed number of years. FDR had talked of the image of the white man in the Far Pacific having come more and more into disfavor among the native peoples, that the quick Japanese successes in 1942 had increased that mood of disfavor. Positive steps would need be undertaken, he ventured, or the West would be pushed completely from the region.

FDR told Mr. Childs that he had proposed a form of trusteeship for French Indo-China. He asserted that the colony had been governed badly and for every French franc put into the country, the French had siphoned off ten. Cambodia and the Cambodian kings had once had their own culture, but had seen it destroyed by the invader from the West.

The President's proposal was that there would be one Chinese, one Philippine, one French, one British, and one American trustee, under whom, for a fixed number of years, the Indo-Chinese would work toward political and economic independence, with complete independence being the final goal.

The President said that his proposal for Indo-China had been approved by both Chiang Kai-shek and by Stalin, the latter at Tehran in late 1943. The naysayer of the plan had been Prime Minister Churchill who refused to consider such a plan for Burma, where the British had before the war been the colonial power in charge.

Query whether, had the plan of President Roosevelt been implemented in Indo-China, rather than the post-war attempt by France to re-establish colonial rule against the independence movement of the Viet Minh, operating under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh as it had under the Japanese occupation during the war, there would have ever been a Vietnam War, either with the French or with the subsequent participation of the United States. Any argument that there would have been, regardless of the plan, must assume that the plan would have been carried out as the President foresaw it, with a view toward independence sooner than later, as he also had anticipated for the Philippines, affirmed to President Sergio Osmena days before President Roosevelt's death.

A letter writer, reading that the South's resources had been ruined by neglect, challenged the editors to do something about the situation "instead of fighting the Civil War", that there was another war on. Apparently the author did not read The News very assiduously.

"Anything Goes" remarks of a "Reincarnation File" maintained by the New York City Police Department so that anyone claiming reincarnation could prove the fact through fingerprints.

On the 29th floor of the Time-Life Building in New York were maintained "bin files" with envelopes containing tidbits about various celebrity figures, the famous and infamous, each tucked into an envelope with the name of the person on it and whether he or she was alive or dead. Under the A's was "Adam—First Man—dead." The piece suggests that it was likely full of dispatches from the Time Garden of Eden correspondent.

A third piece remarks of the ambiguities of the English language. It examples the two phrases "I cannot but die" and "I can but die", both, though appearing logically to mean the opposite result, meaning the same, that the speaker was bound to die. It asks rhetorically what difference there was.

We might add from the front page of Monday the remark from the London News Chronicle anent Hermann Goering and the soft treatment by his American captors: "Because he is fat he is not kind." It is an affirmative statement pregnant with negative implications, thus, in legal terminology, a negative pregnant. Would it have been so with Hermann, the world might have better been.

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