Friday, May 4, 1945

The Charlotte News

Friday, May 4, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Germans in Holland, Denmark, and Northwestern Germany had all surrendered this date to Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, agreeing to lay down arms on May 5 at 2:00 a.m., EWT, 8:00 a.m., DBST. The surrender, announced as likely the previous day, left only the Germans occupying Norway and small pockets in Southeastern Germany, Northeastern Austria, France, and Czechoslovakia, still active.

The only substantial contingent remaining was that in Norway where an estimated 150,000 Germans were still present. Negotiations were said to be ongoing to effect their surrender.

The Nazi Gauleiter in the protectorates of Bohemia and Moravia in Czechoslovakia was ordered by the new German Foreign Minister to surrender his position as the protectorates were no longer within the German Reich or its defense zone.

Production Minister Albert Speer, the architect of the Reich, had told the nation the previous evening in a radio broadcast that Germany was defeated.

New Fuehrer Karl Doenitz and Heinrich Himmler were reported to have approached the Allies again offering unconditional surrender of the remaining active German forces.

The Seventh Army joined the Fifth Army in the Brenner Pass, 20 miles south of Innsbruck, as Salzburg, to the northwest, also surrendered.

The Third Army besieged Linz in Austria.

Some 21,000 Allied prisoners, including 4,100 American airmen, had been found by the Third Army in the woods five miles south of Braunau, Hitler's birthplace, to which they had been marched and then abandoned by the Germans. The Americans appeared in fair condition but all suffered for want of food. The Russians were said to be starved and diseased, had been in other camps.

Field Marshal Paul Ludwig Von Kleist, who had engineered the 1940 breakthrough of the German Army into France, had surrendered to the 26th Infantry Division of the Third Army on April 25 at Mitterfels.

Queen Wilhelmina of Holland had returned for the first time in five years to the liberated portion of the Netherlands from her place of exile in London.

In Denmark, King Christian X was reported ready to resume his throne, with the Parliament already on hand to take over its duties.

Correspondent Romney Wheeler reported that Germans were surrendering so fast to American and British forces to avoid capture by the Russians that they were presenting a problem for the Western Allies in terms of feeding and enclosing the prisoners.

Wes Gallagher had reported that at the Elbe, the Germans were swarming across the stream in makeshift rafts or swimming to try to surrender to the Ninth Army.

The number of prisoners taken since D-Day had reportedly now swollen to three million. The new surrenders were not yet approved by the Americans as they had hoped to be able to relieve their surplus troops and send them home.

Thus far, according to Red Star in Moscow, the Russians had not been able to locate the body of Hitler within the burning ruins of the Reichs-Chancellery building on the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, despite having thoroughly searched the building. The floor in the Chancellery was reported to be literally getting hot, with the flames of the burning fire encroaching, and would at any moment cave in. The dispatch stated that it might be difficult ever to prove that Hitler and Goebbels had committed suicide. All of the questioned German prisoners, however, insisted uniformly that the two had so performed.

Two Russian commanders described Berlin as "[r]uin, craters, smashed streets, street cars on their sides, fresh graves, German bodies still not buried, white flags, throngs of gloomy, starving inhabitants".

In the Tiergarten, Berlin's central park, fires continued to rage among the trees.

In Burma, the British had captured abandoned but intact Rangoon, making a parachute landing on Elephant Point without resistance, and the Japanese were declared defeated within the country. Prome on the Irrawaddy, 150 miles northwest of Rangoon, was also captured. A contingent of about 5,000 Japanese in western Burma were cut off from supply lines and remained the only enemy forces still fighting.

Some 97,000 Japanese had died in the Burma campaign during the previous fifteen months.

The victory climaxed a three-year campaign to retake Burma since the Allies had been forced into India in 1942, after the Japanese had arrived on elephants. The overland Burma Road was now wholly restored into China—the northwestern bypass, the Ledo-Burma Road, dubbed the Stilwell Road, having been re-opened since December, affording the supply route by land from India.

Some twenty B-29's and Liberators struck Marcus Island, southeast of Japan in the Guanos.

In San Francisco, the Big Four nations were close to agreement on revisions of the Dumbarton Oaks proposal of the previous October. The unstated revisions were said to be giant leaps forward for mankind toward avoiding deadlocks among the nations even after Foreign Commissar V. M. Molotov would depart, as expected the following week. The amendments apparently did not relate, however, to the structure of the Security Council or its voting. But there were signs following that it would be permitted to take into account regional bloc defense pacts which would provide interim defense measures against aggression while the Security Council considered its actions. Most of the revisions were believed proposed by the United States and Great Britain, and Secretary Stettinius indicated his pleasure at the results thus far achieved—while he preened for the cameras.

A flash of light appearing in the skies over Philadelphia and the Middle Atlantic States at 3:45 a.m. this date was described by the Franklin Institute Planetarium director as likely having been a bolide meteor. Tremors were felt coincident with the flash. The large meteor was said to have been as great as ten feet in diameter and weighing a thousand tons, traveling at a speed of five to twenty miles per second, up to 1/9250th the speed of light.

Because the inside of the meteor was cold and the outside rushing air highly heated by the meteor's passage through it, the meteor produced shock waves and explosive vibrations, eventually causing it to break into fragments.

Early reports were that there had been an explosion in Maryland.

No reports indicated the whereabouts of either Mr. Welles or the Martians of Halloween, 1938.

Perhaps, however, it was Hitler's spaceship landing instead, somewhere near Langley, Virginia, soon to be taken to a remote location in the Nevada desert for further study.

On the editorial page, "Witch-Wetting" again tackles the issue of the City Council, following the lead of the recommendation by the Optimists Club, seeking to ban assembly by Jehovah's Witnesses or any similar organization on city property, finding the ban plainly unconstitutional as an infringement of the First Amendment prohibition on government interference with the right of assembly, association, free exercise of religion, and freedom of speech.

The piece wisely substitutes in the proposed ordinance the references to Jehovah's Witnesses with the First Presbyterian Church, to demonstrate the problems with the action. The Council could not discriminate between those whom the people of Charlotte liked and those whom they disliked and wished to run out of town on a rail.

Americans had become especially disenamored of Jehovah's Witnesses during the war for their pacifist stands and refusal even to salute the American flag or serve in the armed forces.

But the freedom at issue was that to be enjoyed by "quacks and crackpots" as much as by recognized patriots. Only by preserving the freedom of the Witnesses could the freedom of the Presbyterians, instructs the editorial, be assured of protection. Moreover, the Council merely massaged in the Witnesses the belief in their own martyrdom as Christians before the Lions—or, in this case, the Optimists.

"The Rat Runs" discusses Pierre Laval and the fact that he was no turncoat, that he had been a rat for years. He was no more contemptible turning up in Barcelona to seek asylum from his death sentence imposed in absentia in France than he had been previously.

"The swarthy face, the pig-like eyes, the uneasy rodent's grin are yet the same."

He had, as head of Vichy, invoked Hitler's anti-Semitic laws without a whimper of dissent and sent thousands in consequence to their deaths in forced labor camps.

He now whimpered that he wished to surrender to an Allied Commission, to seek less terminal results than that afforded his victims.

M. Laval had once stated, prior to 1942: "I want Germany to win. A German victory will prevent our civilization from foundering in chaos. An American victory would bring in its train the triumph of Jews and Communists."

It concludes that if he were not already on the Allies' war crimes list, then he should immediately be handed to the French for deliverance to justice.

"A Turnabout" comments on the order by the Federal Court in Charlotte that a local service station operator suspend his business for the duration of the war for violating gas rationing strictures, and the announcement by OPA officials in its wake that it was proof that the regulations worked, had "teeth".

But, the service station owner had announced the previous day that he had leased his operation to another party and would continue at the same location providing other services than dispensing fuel.

The piece questions thus the teeth ascribed to the regulations by the OPA representatives—in need of the Optimists.

"Civilian Defense" observes, on the passing of the Office of Civilian Defense from the scene, as ordered during the week by President Truman, that the already largely moribund Office had passed mostly unnoticed, though it once, in 1942, had occupied a central place in the fears and expectations of Americans regarding the prospect of enemy attack by air or sea via both coasts. The drills, the coastal observers, the practiced blackouts and air raids, were all a thing of the past now, but should not be forgotten.

For, it warns, a new form of civilian defense must now come upon the scene for the fact that in the future war, blackouts and badges would avail the public little assistance against the mighty weapons to come.

The best defense lay in San Francisco at the peace tables.

"If that defense fails again, it's curtains."

Duck and cover, little baby.

Welcome to the new world and the Office of Civil Defense, and its shelters to protect you from the atomic bomb that you may then feel secure in the prospect of living in an underground bunker for decades to come, until the radiation is sufficiently dissipated, that is should you avoid a semi-direct hit, within about fifty miles or so of your secure sanctum and succor.

Yeah, San Francisco is better.

And, also, meantime, please, learn to spell "potatoes".

It's very like Mosquitos.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin referring to the doctrine of Grover Cleveland, that the people should support the Government and not the Government the people. Since that time in the 1880's, the country and world had changed so that the conception thus iterated was now altered to accommodate such conditions as had been brought on by the Depression, to ameliorate its emergent consequences. While it had been a palliative remedy, its inevitable outgrowth had been a wieldy bureaucracy, grown excessive during the war.

And times had again changed as the war had brought prosperity to the bulk of the nation, and with a newly trained labor force at work in war industries ready to be freed into the private marketplace, Senator Wiley believed it was time to say to the bureaucrats who would seek still to shape the post-war economic environment, "Get thee behind us."

He thus favored that the Congress and President Truman engage in paring down the Federal bureaucracy to save the taxpayers a billion dollars and send forth the message of efficiency and economy.

He should have probably contacted instead the Charlotte Optimists.

Drew Pearson reports of a behind-the-scenes debate brewing in the War Surplus Property Board which affected commerce throughout the country, especially on the West Coast, that being the manner in which billions of dollars worth of machine tools would be distributed by the Government. The issue was whether they would be sold in great lots to large manufacturers or distributed evenly throughout the land.

Henry Kaiser had made noises about getting into the automobile manufacturing business and wanted to convert the war shipbuilding and plane manufacturing facilities on the West Coast into auto plants, requiring machine tools. So, how the tools were sold would determine whether this plan could have a chance to become a reality.

The Board chairman, former Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa, was in favor of distribution to such smaller manufacturers. But the two other Board members, Col. Edward Heller, from the West Coast, and former Governor of Connecticut, Robert Hurley, opposed, favoring instead that the companies presently controlling the equipment should have first opportunity at purchase. The latter policy would favor the major automakers.

Senator Gillette, however, had the support of the Justice Department. He had pointed out that after World War I, the war plant machine tools were given to the larger manufacturers, providing them an unfair head start after the war.

Mr. Pearson next reports that former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen, thought to be a leading contender for the 1948 Republican presidential nomination, had made some valuable allies among black leaders at the San Francisco Conference who were sitting in as consultants and observers. He had been assigned the job of consulting with the consultants, had effectively explained the Soviet position desiring a rotating chairmanship of the conference, the issue of the weighted vote sought by the Soviet Union to counter-balance the cohesive uniformity they perceived to be extant within the Americas and the British Empire, and the issue of island trusteeships in the Pacific sought by the United States as means of providing protection against future aggression—from Japan and Russia.

Samuel Grafton, continuing his notes on the San Francisco Conference, discusses the hysterical quality pervading the affair at the start having now left it, an atmosphere which had included the rumor that the Soviets maintained a ship in the Bay so that they could depart on a moment's notice should anything transpire which they did not appreciate—such as an invasion by the Charlotte Optimists Club.

Now, even the Dumbarton Oaks agreement was not considered the Holy Grail incapable of amendment. At the start, it had seemed necessary to have the conference as a kind of rite of passage to make Dumbarton final. But now, just ten days subsequent, all of that concern had disappeared.

The invitation to White Russia and the Ukraine to join the conference had not wrecked it; neither had the determination to invite Argentina; nor had the expected confrontation between the large and small nations materialized to vaporize the gathering.

Instead of the latter, the small nations had become the leaders for social and economic progress as, for instance, Australia's having raised the question of full employment, representative of the general movement afoot among the smaller nations to enlarge the Social and Economic Council as a trade-off to allowing the planned structure of the Security Council to remain intact.

Another development in the process of the conference was that the press had begun to consider itself through a glass darkly, in a different, more objective light, with some organs, the New York Herald-Tribune and the Christian Science Monitor, questioning openly the wisdom of having so many reporters at once covering it, hungry for sensational stories.

The better news from the conference would be that it was moving along steadily but in a pedestrian manner.

Once, we had occasion, on a February late afternoon, to ride in an elevator with Shana Alexander and Mike Wallace, from an upper floor of the Federal Building in San Francisco to the lobby. Remind us sometime to tell you of it.

Marquis Childs examines the contentions of Herbert Pell, father of former Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, that the State Department should have acted more decisively, along with the other foreign ministries of the Allies, to state a definite code and policy with regard to war crimes. Mr. Pell had served as the American representative to the War Crimes Commission in London until January—Drew Pearson having pointed out two days earlier that he had been called home by the State Department in deference to the British Foreign Office, which wanted him excluded for his favoring the position of summary execution for the top 100,000 Nazis.

The commission made recommendations to the foreign offices of the Allies that they inform the world that war criminals would be prosecuted and severely punished on terms of an established code to be agreed upon among the Allies. But the recommendations had not been thus far acted upon, no code promulgated. Mr. Pell had sought action by the State Department, stressing the urgency for immediate statement, as the tottering Reich would inevitably become more dangerous, the closer to its end it perceived itself to be.

President Roosevelt had assured his full support of the efforts of Mr. Pell. But the Congress refused to appropriate $30,000 for his continued efforts and so he was informed by the State Department that he would be dropped from the commission.

At about the same time, the British representative, Cecil Hurst, resigned from the commission and was likewise unsuccessful in convincing the British Foreign Office to take action on the commission's recommendations.

While notice was served on the enemy that war crimes would be severely punished, nothing was done pursuant to the notice insofar as establishing a code of conduct.

While nothing could have prevented the holocaust which ensued, some of it might have been deterred, according to Mr. Pell, had a clear set of rules been stated.

The result was that American commanders were left with some doubt as to whether war crimes should be actively prosecuted as no clear rules were ever implemented on what type of conduct crossed the line of ordinary warfare to constitute war crimes.

By contrast, the Russians, finding war criminals on Russian soil, had acted decisively and according to an established code, causing many Nazis already to have been tried and executed. They had also established the Free German Committee, drawing a bright line between war criminals and non-criminals among Germans.

To allow the Soviets to have the decisive hand in the European charnel house was to invite among the depressed Europeans a lack of respect for the Western Allies and respect instead for Russia's realism.

Mr. Childs expresses that it had been no wonder that the Germans had flocked to American lines to surrender, given the relative policies of vacillation and determination as between the West and the Soviets.

The Administrator for the Wage & Hour Division of the Department of Labor in Washington writes a letter in response to a News editorial appearing April 10, titled "Take 'Em All", re the complaint therein that the administrator of the Fair Labor Standards Act tended to seek to legislate through regulations the interpretation of the Act, to the confusion of employers.

The Administrator responds that he tried only to keep employers apprised of developments in the courts so that they might adjust their conduct accordingly in relation to likely decisions altering their presently followed policies, ostensibly abiding existing law.

We mention it primarily for the fact that, though only 24 short days had passed since April 10, 1945, the entire world had undergone immense and glacial changes in the brief interim, from the death of President Roosevelt on April 12, to the beginning of the United Nations Conference on April 25, to the final Berlin offensive by the Russians, beginning April 21, to the deaths of Hitler and Goebbels, April 30 and May 1, respectively, to the surrender now of virtually all of the remaining active German forces in Europe in the aftermath of those events.

Following this tumult in real time, even 67 years later, somehow the beginning of those 24 short days seems as months ago, as, no doubt, it did, even more so, to those who lived through the whirlwind of the events—not unlike the experience of those alive in 1963 in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy, even without the climactic events of a world war intruding on that latter time of collective shock, grief, and quick adjustment.

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