Monday, May 28, 1945

The Charlotte News

Monday, May 28, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that, following 38 days of intensive fighting, the Japanese appeared to be withdrawing from Shuri, the fortress town at the center of the Japanese "Little Siegfried Line" on southern Okinawa. The key was the Seventh Infantry Division flanking maneuver from the east coast, having penetrated through heavy rain to Chan, two miles south of Shuri, threatening to cut off Shuri from the rear. More than a mile southwest of Chan, a Japanese contingent was caught moving south from Gisushi and was wiped out by coordinated naval and air action.

To the north of Shuri, the First Marine Division observed the enemy blowing up fifteen to twenty caves.

On the east flank to the south of Yonabaru, the Seventh Infantry Division discovered large stores of food, ammunition, and equipment abandoned by the enemy in caves in the Ozato Mura Hills.

Japanese artillery bombardment had decreased from an average of 15,000 rounds of ammunition daily to about 500 rounds, the likely result of elimination of 363 enemy field pieces.

Although these indicators strongly suggested Japanese retreat from Shuri, Navy sources refused to speculate on their meaning.

Rain slowed action on the island for the sixth straight day as the First Division Marines expanded their bridgehead across the Asato River into Naha, the Fourth Regiment advancing 400 yards through the ruined capital, and the 22nd Regiment advancing 800 yards southwest of the river. To the east of the line, the Seventh Division expanded patrols far south of captured Yonabaru.

Tokyo radio reported that about a dozen B-29's struck the Shikoku area in southern Japan, while 30 Mustangs led by three B-29's attacked Tokyo airfields for about forty minutes shortly after noon.

Chinese troops had reached the Japanese corridor to Indo-China in the vicinity of Pingyiang, 60 miles northeast of Nanning, re-captured during the weekend by the Chinese forces under the command of General Chang Fah-Kwei. Nanning had been the site of an important American airbase until its capture the previous year by the Japanese. Its position was 78 miles from the Indo-China border on the Si River, 430 miles above Canton and about 70 miles from the Gulf of Tonkin.

The acting Premier of Syria, Jamil Mardam Bey, stated that French troops had on Sunday fired upon citizens of Hama, north of Damascus, on the road to Aleppo. The citizens who had been the targets then attacked the French garrison. The acting Premier was fearful of a general clash between the French and Syrians.

Fighting in the streets was reported in Hama and scattered gunfire in heavily armed Damascus. British Ninth Army troops in Syria for training were possibly going to be utilized to maintain order. French forces in Syria were weak, numbering about 2,000, 1,200 of whom were Syrian conscripts who, it was believed, would desert in the face of a fight.

Since April 1, more than a half million Allied prisoners had been taken from Germany by the American Air Transport Command and Army Transport Corps. The majority of American troops had already been evacuated to England and France and 30,000 were headed back to the United States.

In Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, 25 eight-week old babies, sick and undernourished, were left at the 134th Medical Group clinic. There was no information as to where they had originated, but it was believed that nurses had brought them from Prague. One had died and the others were in serious condition. It was one of many problems faced by the 134th in its attempt to administer 26 hospitals serving 26,630 patients. Sometimes they had to establish thousand-bed hospitals overnight. Many of the patients had been Russian prisoners who had suffered terrifically in German custody. The patients also included wounded Germans.

President Truman conferred for nearly an hour with former President Hoover at the White House, regarding the food crisis in Europe. President Hoover refused comment on his discussions. The new President extended invitations likewise to former Kansas Governor Alf Landon, failed 1936 Republican candidate for the presidency, and failed 1944 Republican nominee Governor Thomas Dewey to drop in whenever they wished for consultation on international and domestic issues.

The President recommended to Congress that unemployment insurance be maximized to not less than $25 per week payments for up to 26 weeks to enable reconversion to peacetime.

Secretary of State Stettinius would deliver a major foreign policy address by radio this night from San Francisco, his most extensive statement since becoming Secretary in November.

During the weekend, the Big Four worked out a statement to deliver to the small nations in explanation of how the veto on the Security Council would operate and to assure that it would not be abused or prevent appeal by an aggrieved nation to the Council.

On the editorial page, "Curtain on a Farce" comments on the looting by the Nazis, represented by Admiral Doenitz going into custody clad in six suits of costly silk underwear. Heinrich Himmler had stowed away a million dollars in currency of 26 countries beneath a barn near Berchtesgaden. Hitler had sold his stamps at a 24 pfennig profit for his own support. And Hermann Goering had collected stolen art—even if some of it turned out to be forged and worthless.

The piece concludes, "As well as being tyrants of the grand order, they were simple shoplifters and grafters."

Of course, they were not always very shrewd at the practice.

"Relief at Home" finds that Washington observers were speculating that the request by the President for authority to reorganize the Government for peace was signal of the end of his honeymoon. But the effort to streamline government and make it more efficient would be widely supported throughout the country. The Congress and the country had more faith, it posits, in Mr. Truman as an administrator than in President Roosevelt. The Congress had refused the former President broad powers of reorganization in 1938 and when they granted some limited powers in 1939, the general perception had been that he was so hamstrung by strictures that he could not use them to very much effect.

At the end of the war, some three million government workers would need to be demobilized among 1,200 departments and bureaus. Many of those agencies overlapped and could be curtailed or eliminated.

The editorial hopes that the Congress would grant unfettered authority to the President to effect the needed streamlining.

"For the Record" comments on the notes of Hitler found at Berchtesgaden stating plainly his original war aims, that he intended to devour Czechoslovakia and Poland. These notes only corroborated that which the Allies already knew even before Munich.

It then quotes from an editorial by W. J. Cash of September 17, 1938, just after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had reported that Hitler would refrain from hostilities provided the Sudetenland was allowed "self-determination". Cash was not buying the cheeriness of "Mr. Bumble" in his attempt to make a sales job to Europe and the world. Following the pact, Cash's refusal to be sold would grow even stronger.

"The New Frontier" discusses United States Chamber of Commerce president Eric Johnston and his belief that American industry would thrive in an era of free world trade and competition. Many businessmen were opposed, especially to development in primitive countries, that seeking to bring industry in the midst of widespread poverty would lead the United States to economic ruin.

Mr. Johnston, however, believed that, based on the pattern of large trade with Great Britain, a heavily industrialized country, versus a much smaller amount of trade with China, the more industrialization which could be developed, the greater the market would be for American exports. Mr. Johnston believed that almost every country wanted to become industrialized, citing the case of India building its first aircraft plant, employing 14,000 native workers, its rate of production rivaling that of American plants.

Extending industrialization would raise world wages as already occurring in South America and curtail American fear of imports. This "new frontier" which he foresaw should be opened by private enterprise, not by government action. The latter would lead to wars.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record finds Representative Emanuel Celler of New York informing his colleagues that a year earlier he had been assured that Britain would not cut off emigration from Europe by Jews into Palestine. But recently, Lord Devonshire, Undersecretary for Colonial Affairs, had announced in the House of Lords that the colonial office had rejected a demand by the Jewish agency for additional immigration certificates beyond those made available pursuant to the Palestine white paper. Lord Devonshire had explained that the rationale had been that many of the Jewish refugees did not wish to go to Palestine.

"That statement," said Mr. Celler, "is as ghastly as a laugh in hell."

He went on to explain that the Swiss Government had recently received several thousand children and adults from various concentration camps on condition that they would subsequently be removed to make way for others. When they had sought to leave to go to a United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Administration camp for refugees in Algiers, the requested certificates were refused by the British on the premise that there were not enough ships. But now that there were enough ships, the British still refused the certificates.

Though Lord Devonshire had accompanied his refusals with great helpings of expressed sympathy for the plight of the Jews, Mr. Celler found those words hollow in the face of the millions of deaths discovered as a result of the Nazi horrors and the victims of the sinkings of the refugee ships Patria and Struma off the shores of Palestine. Compassion, he urges, would not bring back these lost lives.

Drew Pearson reports that Senator William Langer of North Dakota had sent an angry letter to Secretary of War Henry Stimson protesting the delay of public revelation of the Japanese balloon attacks on the Western United States. The Senator had become aware of them in January and sought permission to reveal them, but was asked by the War Department not to do so. He now believed that he should have been so permitted without revealing precise locations of the drops.

The balloons were believed to be primarily intended as incendiary devices to start forest fires, and with the West now dry, the prospect for their doing so had significantly increased. It was thought that they originated in Japan and were carried by regular West to East trade winds, resultant of the turn of the earth on its axis.

He next indicates that Attorney General Francis Biddle had suggested to the Truman Committee that it examine the relationship between I. G. Farben in Germany and Standard Oil of New Jersey in withholding patents from America on synthetic rubber. The Attorney General had already conducted his own probe and released the findings to the Truman Committee, expediting the committee's work. The resulting headlines had assured the Truman Committee continued appropriation for its investigative work, and it was Attorney General Biddle, just asked to resign by President Truman and replaced by Tom Clark, who had provided the jumpstart which had led to Senator Truman being placed on the Democratic ticket the previous summer.

Mr. Pearson suggests that the President had forgotten this political favor. At Chicago the previous summer, however, Mr. Biddle had fought for the re-nomination of Henry Wallace and for the reappointment of Maurice Milligan as U.S. Attorney for Kansas City. It had been Mr. Milligan who had sent to jail Tom Pendergast, Kansas City Boss who had been responsible for Mr. Truman's run for the Senate in 1934. Two weeks after becoming President, Truman had appointed a successor to Mr. Milligan.

The column next reports of Texas Senator Tom Connally, in San Francisco, holding a meeting with various advisers to the American delegation regarding the veto of the Security Council and the world court. The only supporters of retention of the old world court were the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Bar Association. These two organizations also were the primary opponents of the unilateral veto as too much favoring Russia. The NAM representative stated that he did not wish to be perceived as anti-Russian, that many American businesses were actively engaged with Russia, to which Senator Connally added, "And profitably."

Finally, the column reports that Joseph Grew, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, had been sent to London to convince Prime Minister Churchill to cease needling Russia, that Churchill played the century-old British diplomatic game of seeking to keep Russia and the United States mutually suspicious, to avoid an alliance which would pinch Great Britain in between. Mr. Davies, because of his health, had been sent on this mission instead of going to Moscow to talk to Stalin. He was the only American diplomatic representative whom Stalin thoroughly trusted, based on his 1941 book and the 1943 movie based on it, Mission to Moscow. But, Harry Hopkins had been sent instead by President Roosevelt.

Samuel Grafton discusses the likelihood that Russia, with its abrupt methods, would have Eastern Europe set up and functioning while the West still debated policy for Western Europe. For all intents and purposes, the debate with respect to the structure of Eastern Europe had been determined by Russian action. Russia had moved swiftly to set up rations in Berlin at levels higher than under the Nazis. Russia was paying more attention to organization than punishment of the former enemy. Berlin already had 500 food stores functioning, 22 movie houses, and ten music halls.

The prospect of Western Europe seeing Eastern Europe so well-organized by the Russians would prompt inevitable domestic debate as to whether to accept the new Russian position in Europe. That debate had already begun in Britain, precipitating the general election set for July. The results of the election likely would not affect Russia but rather only the amount of social security payments for Britons.

Relief of the mounting tension between East and West would be one of President Truman's major objects at an upcoming Big Three conference, not yet scheduled.

"The game is definitely worth the candle, for we are deciding much more about our futures than we can at the moment appreciate."

Marquis Childs instructs that the continuing problem of composition of the Polish government had to be seen through the prism of the long and bitter past of mutual hatred between Russia and Poland. It had surfaced in Stalin's attack the previous week on Polish General Leopold Okulicki, one of the 16 arrested Polish officers in Moscow. It had been suspected, and Mr. Childs had echoed the suspicion, that General Okulicki had collaborated with the Nazis. But, he informs, his previous information was erroneous and there was no such collaboration.

The general had given himself up to the Russians at Lwow in the fall of 1939, at which time the Russians wanted him to direct Polish troops in the Red Army, which he had refused to do, leaving him in a GPU prison until the summer of 1941 at the beginning of the German offensive in Russia. He then went to work on organizing the Polish Army in Russia, eventually being deployed to Italy to assist the Eighth Army in the Adriatic campaign.

At 50 years old, he had been dropped by parachute the previous summer into German-occupied Poland and assisted General Bor in the Warsaw uprising. After General Bor had been arrested by the Nazis, General Okulicki became the leader of the Polish Underground Army, that which was left to the Nazis as the Russians encamped on the other side of the Vistula River, the perception of the Poles having been that the Russians had abandoned them. The feeling was bolstered by the Russians preventing American transports from dropping supplies to the Warsaw Underground on the premise that the supplies would wind up in the hands of the Germans.

The Russians, via propaganda, had fanned the flames of these prejudices in Poland and throughout Europe. General Okulicki's story could repeated many times over and the blood feud between Poland and Russia was not simply one-sided but represented a history of revenge and counter-revenge.

Americans, for their part, could not undo or fully understand this complex history but could work as a mediator and friend to try patiently to effect understanding between the two sides.

"Anything Goes" first recounts some statements attributed to the wives of various great men. Mary Lincoln had thought her not so handsome husband was nevertheless bound to become President.

Mme. Tolstoy expressed that Leo had little warmth, that his kindness came from his principles, not his heart. He had never given his child a glass of water or his wife comfort, but would be remembered for his buckets of water carried to the laborers.

Mrs. James G. Blaine, wife of the 1884 Republican presidential nominee against Grover Cleveland, commented that she missed his erratic table manners.

Mrs. Arnold Bennett, wife of the British novelist, had rebelled against her husband's dictatorial ways, had never foreseen that a husband who loved her could be so sharp.

A piece from Reader's Digest suggests that colorful, suggestive sales techniques, chocked full of plentiful description of the object of the sale, was the way to attract customers. It offers examples.

Also from the Digest comes the aphorism: "The children always know when there is company downstairs. They can hear mother laughing at father's jokes."

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