Friday, May 18, 1945

The Charlotte News

Friday, May 18, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Sixth Division Marines on Okinawa were broadening their bridgehead across the Asato River into Naha.

Three divisions were closing in on the fortress at Shuri in the center of the Japanese line, the key to the enemy defense.

Some 34,000 enemy troops still waged a tough battle after 48 days of fighting on the island.

Two dozen American vessels had been sunk and numerous others damaged since the beginning of the campaign.

On Luzon, a large enemy force was trapped by the 43rd Division near Ipo Dam.

On Mindanao, the 40th Division and the 31st Division, now 45 to 65 miles apart, had trapped a substantial enemy contingent between their positions and the Sayre Highway. The 40th Division was driving south from Del Monte airfield and the 31st was driving north to the edge of Valencia airfield. Maramag, already captured, had been placed into operation.

The 24th Division had trapped another enemy group near captured Davao, between the Davao and Talomo Rivers.

A raid of about 100 B-29's against Japan's largest oil storage area on Honshu, including that for the Army and Navy, had virtually destroyed the facility, with 65 to 80 percent destruction evidenced by reconnaissance photographs.

In the faded print on the page is the story of the return to Brooklyn Navy Yard of the heavily damaged but afloat U.S.S. Franklin, an Essex-class carrier, which had returned from the Pacific on its own steam after having suffered two 500-lb. bomb hits from a lone Japanese plane on March 19, about 80 miles off Honshu. The main damage was caused by the resulting fire which destroyed virtually all of the flight deck and nearly caused the ship to capsize. Nevertheless, after a tow, the ship was able to regain its own power and put into port at Pearl Harbor under its own steam.

Of the crew, 724 had been killed and another 265 wounded.

The Franklin had begun service during the summer of 1944 and had seen battle action in the Marianas and Leyte Gulf before joining Task Force 58 off Japan after a repair to previous dive-bomber damage suffered in action off Leyte on October 30, when a kamikaze raider struck the ship.

It made the longest voyage on its own steam of any warship during the war after sustaining such crippling damage. The ship was repaired and then mothballed and never saw service again, was sold for scrap in 1964.

In the series of photographs on the page is pictured Chaplain Joseph O'Callahan of Boston, kneeling on the deck of the carrier in provision of last rites to a critically wounded sailor of the vessel. For his valor under fire during the ordeal, Chaplain O'Callahan was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

President Truman conferred with French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault and issued a statement saying that there had been an agreement reached for the United States to relinquish to the French part of the designated American zone of occupation of Germany. The four zones had not yet been announced. The President expressed his desire to meet with General De Gaulle and deferred the question of whether France would join in the future Big Three meeting, not yet scheduled, but to occur at Potsdam beginning July 16. The President also indicated that priorities for shipping of food to France to relieve the want had been established.

German-American Bund leader Fritz Kuhn had been ordered deported to Germany by the Justice Department. A native of Germany, he had been interned in 1943 in the United States as an enemy agent and his citizenship had been revoked.

On the editorial page, "Race Progress" writes of racial progress having developed during the war with a million more blacks being employed than before the war, with a million young black men serving within the armed forces, many in more than menial roles. Some of the progress in the job market had been through the Fair Employment Practices Committee, but much of it had come from simple cooperation.

While many people of the South expected there to be racial clashes after the war as returning servicemen competed for scarce jobs and new racial frictions pent up during the war would likely surface, this prospect, says the editorial, was not inevitable and could be avoided with continued good will and mutual cooperation in effecting racial progress.

"King John Speaks" finds ludicrous the attempt of Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi, ardent racist and segregationist, to define in law "un-American" by proposing a statute whereby it would be a finable offense punishable by a jail term for anyone to engage in activity intended to accomplish, except by Constitutional amendment, the overthrow or any change in the form of Government, or to effect any impairment of the rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution.

At once, the unbeliever in the Constitution was seeking to punish those who would in any manner offend it or seek to effect change apart from amending it. The concept differed markedly from that of Jefferson, who, informs the piece, believed that the country and its institutions belonged to the people, who enjoyed the authority to change it, dismember it, or even overthrow it.

But Mr. Rankin, an enemy of anti-poll tax legislation and anti-lynching legislation, saw no incongruity between his stands and his proposed bill.

Speaking of which, we note today that the Secretary of State of Arizona has stated publicly that it is possible he might exclude President Obama from Arizona's presidential ballot unless he receives confirmation from Hawaii that a valid birth certificate exists for the President, proving that he was born in the United States.

Tell you what, Mr. Bennett, we would like you to prove to us, with indisputable evidence, not just documentary evidence, as, in your case, more is required, that you were not born on Mars and thus entitled to serve office in the State of Arizona, even if a few Venusetians, or whatever you would call them, have served your State in the past.

"It's a Habit" finds it unfair to have at military installations a cut in rationing for cigarettes, to six packs per week, and other forms of tobacco. It was the first time tobacco had been so rationed and the piece wonders why the Government could not have waited until the end of the war. Surely the public, despite its cigarette mandate, would not want the Army and Navy to go without its daily fix part of the week just to satisfy civilian demand.

"War Memorials" ventures that the sculptures erected to the fallen heroes of warfare conveniently prettified the harsh and horrid spectacle of war, the death and putrefying flesh on the field of battle, the flame, the misery of foxholes in winter and mosquitoes and malaria in the tropical conditions of the Pacific, that, in the process, the true picture of war was sterilized and left behind in memory as only a bronze or white stone image of that true picture.

One sculptor who had been called upon by municipalities to erect memorials, Hornsby Ferril, was ashamed of the job he was asked to perform. For in making such memorials, the true fighting man was betrayed by them, corrosive of both individual and collective memory of what war was.

"And there is much to be said for his theory. Why, if we wanted to assault war at its source, in the everyday life of men, should not war memorials be made as ugly as possible, recalling all the vile, foul and stupid things that war is, the stench of rotting flesh, the agonies of death, terror, and hunger? Mr. Ferril's answer is that we love ourselves too much. It is this thing, translated into nationalism, and patriotism, that moves us to beautify and glorify war in our memorials."

The excerpt from the Congressional Record finds Representative Robert Jones of Ohio objecting to allowing the State Department, as part of its appropriations, to run a commissary without any restrictions on the methods by which it was to be run and how its accounting was to be made.

Drew Pearson discusses the formidable job being faced by U. S. Ambassador to China, General Patrick Hurley, seeking to effect rapprochement between the southern Chinese, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, and the northern Chinese Communists, under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung. The State Department was concerned that the Russians would recognize the Red Chinese and create another divided situation such as in Poland, leaving America stuck supporting the increasingly unpopular government of Chiang.

Ambassador Hurley was trying to unite the forces in China to fight Japan instead of each other. He had met with Stalin the previous month to try to prevent the Russians from siding with the Communists of the north against Chiang, which would further divide the two fighting forces of the country. Stalin agreed that China should remain united.

Ambassador to Russia Averill Harriman, however, found the meeting unsatisfactory and informed the State Department that Ambassador Hurley had only skimmed the surface with Stalin, had achieved agreement only on the most superficial level regarding policy toward the Chinese.

Ambassador Hurley had cabled the State Department that Stalin agreed with his Chinese policy. The cable wound up at the Chinese Embassy in Washington and was interpreted to mean Stalin's support for Chiang, who wanted minimum cooperation with the northern Communists. The erroneous belief had caused Chiang to be less pliant with regard to combining with the north in the fight against Japan, leaving matters where they had been the previous summer when General Stilwell had been forced out as military commander because of his inability to get along with Chiang on this fundamental issue.

It was believed that Stalin would soon announce Russian intent to support the northern Communists.

Mr. Pearson next reports of the offer by President Truman of the job of Secretary of Labor to Judge Lewis Schwellenbach, and his mulling over whether to accept it. The judge had been recommended by West Coast Teamsters boss Dave Beck. Judge Schwellenbach would accept the position.

Dave Beck would, in 1953, become Teamsters Union president, until 1957 when he fell under investigation by the Senate Rackets Committee. He eventually, in 1959, was convicted for embezzlement and racketeering with respect to the union, as well as tax evasion, and served three years in prison. He was subsequently pardoned in 1975 by President Ford.

Mr. Pearson next reports that Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, designated as lead prosecutor for the United States in the war crimes tribunal, would be taking a six-month leave of absence from the Supreme Court to prepare himself, whether his colleagues liked it or not.

The Hays Office had refused to approve the documentary film on Nazi atrocities for its showing too many gruesome scenes. Radio City Music Hall had refused to screen the presentation for the same reason. Will Hays, who would soon be replaced as chief censor by Eric Johnston, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, preferred, according to Mr. Pearson, jazz to death camp scenes.

Marquis Childs, in Norris, Tennessee, discusses the TVA and its great success in providing electrical power and flood control for the Tennessee Valley. About 60 percent of electrical production had been diverted during the war to the production of aluminum for airplanes. The project also had contributed substantially to reforestation and soil conservation.

The project had attracted attention from the Chinese and the British, as well as from representatives of Latin America, all of whom had come to the area to study TVA, making the project an essential part of American foreign policy, showing what American government and ingenuity could do.

Mr. Childs had visited a black community near the lake at Chickamauga Dam and had been impressed by the changes brought about to thee residents' lifestyle by the project. Although still poor, their quality of life had dramatically improved with the use of soil-enriching crops and crop rotation methods, as well as the presence of livestock on the land. The improvements had come from the good advice of county agents sponsored by TVA.

Mr. Childs stressed that the project represented not government by handout but government by partnership.

Samuel Grafton looks at the totality of relations between the West and Russia and their gradual disintegration with the end of the war in Europe, which had been the cement holding traditionally suspicious relationships together for the previous four years. The British were training 250,000 Polish troops in London, were strangely not antipathetic to the Flensburg government under Admiral Doenitz, and Prime Minister Churchill had spoken against the formation of "totalitarian and police" governments in Europe. All of the rhetoric suggested a move away from unity and a move toward a divisive policy with respect to Russia.

The United States had allowed lend-lease with Russia to expire while continuing it with Britain, and appeared more interested in befriending Argentina than Czechoslovakia. Thus, the U.S., too, appeared drawing lines on the map which portended ill for the post-war world.

The Russians wanted Doenitz and the rest of the Nazi coterie of prisoners held by the West to be exceuted, yet did not uniformly follow their own advice with respect to Nazi prisoners held by them.

It all suggested a series of actions and reactions, incapable of being sorted as to what was precisely causing what, but the end result, the important part, was inevitably suggestive of a coalitional world rather than a unified one. The dream had quickly evaporated.

The question now being posed was not so much what would become of Europe but what would become of the United States.

A piece by Hank Lewis from the San Juan World Journal in Puerto Rico, tells of a real-life Robinson Crusoe living on Peter Island, near St. Thomas, in the Caribbean. "Lord" Charles Bruce was owner of 300 acres, had forsaken, 15 years earlier, the British diplomatic service to live on a desert island. He had been private secretary to Lord Gray, former British Foreign Minister during World War I, but decided to follow his individualist streak.

He did not miss any of the luxuries of civilization. He had his family on the island in two small houses and one large. There was electrical power and 80,000 gallons of potable water, plus refrigeration and radio. He raised his own meat, caught his own fish, grew his own vegetables. His recreation was reading; his wife painted. Total expenditures annually were less than a thousand dollars, and the land had cost less than a thousand dollars.

Their children were content and were being well educated, would be sent out into the world for their extended education at the appropriate time.

Mr. Bruce was being hounded by a publishing house in the States to write up his story, but had no parts for his Corona typewriter and remained too busy to compose it anyway.

The only pests on the island were four-foot amphibious lizards as good winds kept other forms away.

He told Mr. Lewis that he regarded himself as the happiest man alive, imparted of no catch to the lifestyle.

"Anything Goes" prints a snippet from the Charleston News and Courier of November 25, 1944, apparently not at all in jest, saying that the newspaper was against democracy, considered voting a privilege, not a right.

The New York World-Telegram stated that the last gesture given by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as he was on his deathbed, surrounded by nurses and doctors and Professor Felix Frankfurter, before the latter was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1939, was to place his thumb to his nose and wag four fingers.

A letter from Napoleon to Josephine, dated November 13, 1796, protested, much too much, of Josephine's not writing her husband, stating that he did not love her, found her "a naughty, gawky, foolish Cinderella", complained that the affair with her new lover unduly preoccupied her. He concluded by saying that he would soon upon her be, to crush her in his arms and cover her with a million kisses "burning as though beneath the equator"—obviously to show how much he detested her.

Last we heard, on May 2, the happy couple were bathing in perfumed strawberries and milk. Wha' happened, Nappy? You and Jo were always so happy.

Arm you against your other enemies,
I'll make a peace between your soul and you.
Young Arthur is alive: this hand of mine
Is yet a maiden and an innocent hand,
Not painted with the crimson spots of blood.
Within this bosom never enter'd yet
The dreadful motion of a murderous thought;
And you have slander'd nature in my form,
Which, howsoever rude exteriorly,
Is yet the cover of a fairer mind
Than to be butcher of an innocent child.

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