Tuesday, May 8, 1945

The Charlotte News

Tuesday, May 8, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page and inside page report the joint Allied official announcement of the end of hostilities in Europe as of 6:01 p.m. EWT this day, 12:01 a.m., May 9 in Britain, 11:01 p.m. in Germany. Of course, it was just ceremonial, as the end actually had come Sunday night at 8:41 EWT, announced prematurely by the Associated Press on Monday morning.

The Third Army, the last in the fight among the Western Allies, had been ordered by General Eisenhower to cease fire at 2:00 a.m. EWT, Monday.

The full thousand-word dispatch of Edward Kennedy via the Associated Press was published, the dispatch on Monday having been truncated to 700 words because of communications having been broken during his transmission by phone from Paris to London, a detailed account of which is contained on the inside page. The story the previous day had been passed by London censors since it had originated outside their jurisdiction.

Edward R. Murrow reported for CBS that the Allied leaders had planned to make the announcement at noon on Monday, but Premier Stalin had not yet been ready.

As we said, V-E Day was yesterday, like it or not, Pinko. If it was good enough for Kennedy and Murrow, it's good enough for us.

The ceasefire, the important thing, as everyone agrees, began on May 7.

Both President Truman and Prime Minister Churchill gave speeches, the full texts of which are reprinted on the pages.

President Truman, speaking from the Oval Room of the White House on his 61st birthday, stressed that the job was only half done and that, until Japan had surrendered, the war would not be over.

"The Western world has been freed from the evil forces which for five years and longer have imprisoned the bodies and broken the lives of millions upon millions of freeborn men. They have violated their churches, destroyed their homes, corrupted their children, and murdered their loved ones. Our armies of liberation have restored freedom to these suffering peoples, whose spirit and will the oppressors could never enslave."

He declared the ensuing Sunday, Mother's Day, as a day of national prayer and thanks.

It was raining in Washington and there continued to be little sign of celebration of the victory. Spotlights were to shine for the first time during the war, for one night only, on the Washington Monument, the Capitol Dome, and other major Government landmarks normally lit in peacetime.

Mr. Churchill announced that Marshal Gregory Zhukov and other Allied representatives were ratifying the peace at Berlin this date.

Premier Stalin had not yet proclaimed full victory, but did state that victory of the Red Army had been achieved within the Dresden sector, and that Omuetz in Czechoslovakia had also been captured, as a ceasefire order, on agreement between the German and Czech commanders, was issued in Prague, where fighting had been ongoing since Saturday, only a small number of Germans being reported still fighting in the capital by noon. Dresden was the last German city to hold out against the Allies.

A delegation of Germans was said to have departed Prague to seek out General Patton's forces of the Third Army to effect surrender.

You might wish to rethink that one, Sparky.

Fighting continued in eastern Moravia and adjacent areas of Czech territory.

Some 300,000 Germans, Latvians, and quisling Russians were in a pocket on the Vistula Estuary near Danzig, where the war started.

Marshal Tito's Partisans in Yugoslavia had captured Zagreb, last major city held by the Germans in the country.

The Germans still holding French ports, La Rochelle, Nazaire, Bordeaux, and Lorient, were expected to surrender arms without further fighting. The Germans defending the Channel Islands, likewise, were said to be ready to surrender.

A half million German troops in Denmark began the march back into Germany, preparing to surrender arms at the border.

Admiral Karl Doenitz, the replacement Fuehrer, addressed the German people, officially announcing the surrender and stating that the Nazi Party had "left the scene of its activities" and was no longer a part of the German State. He told them that he now served at the pleasure of the Allied occupation authorities who were in control. Germans had now to walk the line, even if it was a "thorny path".

Moscow radio sought death for Admiral Doenitz as a war criminal who, along with all others of the Nazi hierarchy, had aided and abetted the construction and maintenance of the death camps

General Eisenhower stated, "The victory bells of Europe are sounding Japan's doom." As imparted on a second inside page, he thanked all of his subordinates and the nearly five million troops under the command in Europe for the victory, achieving the goal set by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill at Casablanca in January, 1943, the obtention of Unconditional Surrender.

The peace had been signed Sunday in the L-shaped War Room of the Ecole Professionale in Reims, the so-called little red schoolhouse, Supreme Allied Headquarters. The room was about 30 x 30, decorated in Nile green beaverboard which was covered with the giant battle maps of the war, now no longer in need of extension for the first time since the summer.

Initially, the Germans had been authorized only to surrender the soldiers on the Western Front to the Western Allies, but when these terms were rejected, they sought and obtained permission from Admiral Doenitz for full surrender to all of the Allies.

The signatures were obtained with two fountain pens maintained by General Eisenhower since the end of the North African campaign in May of 1943. All of the signatories used them except the Russian representative, General Susloparoff, who had his own large green fountain pen which he used and retained.

The Navy was likewise ordered to surrender and all German U-boats to surface.

As he had the previous day, Don Whitehead again reports that the First Army soldiers were taking the peace in stride, wanted no part of any victory celebration, no drunken revelry, as they had imagined they would a year earlier, not now. They just continued to do their chores, to await further orders.

The U. S. Army death toll for the war in Europe and the Mediterranean, as of April 1, had been 139,408 of the total 732,270 American casualties, of whom 467,408 had been wounded and 72,274 missing. Of the dead, 96,390 had fallen in Europe, 35,167 in the Mediterranean. The figures did not include the captured. The Navy did not list casualties by theaters. (Why the number of dead in the two theaters was about 8,000 short of the total for the two theaters was likely the result of incomplete data by theaters, perhaps airmen, but is not explained.)

American casualties in all theaters amounted to 950,000 at this stage. Total Army casualties in all theaters by April 21 were 170,407 killed, 520,200 wounded, 80,264 missing, and 77,110 captured, a total of 848,089. The Navy had suffered a total of 40,271 killed, 47,739 wounded, 10,123 missing, and 4,250 captured, a total of 102,383.

Demobilization of the 70 American divisions in Europe would take up to twelve months to accomplish, even for the soldiers not sent to the Pacific theater. The Fifteenth Army, which had been deployed only in the last couple of months of the war and saw little action, was to become ultimately the Army of occupation of Germany for the United States. But for the ensuing few months, additional forces would be required for policing purposes and establishing order.

A paragraph of the story, having stated that relations between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union were yet to be worked out and tested, said a mouthful, quite unwittingly: "Germany, divided between control of the two, likely will be one of the foremost proving grounds of that correlation."

The Russians reported having found the Fuehrerbunker beneath the Reichs-Chancellery; but there was no sign of Hitler's body or that of Goebbels—the latter reported in one Moscow dispatch, filed the previous day, to have been found. They also discovered garages leading to a long tunnel which fed onto a street far from the Chancellery.

A full page advertisement reminded that the war had ended in Europe, but not in Japan, urges thus the continued purchase of war bonds and S & P peanut products.

Alice Hughes, syndicated columnist, on a third inside page, provides her impressions of the fashions and the many Hollywood stars abounding at the San Francisco Conference.

And a map on that page presents ten major events during the European and North African war.

In New York Harbor, a U-boat was thought to have surfaced flying a white flag. Turned out it was just a Navy ship with the sailors' wash hung out to dry.

On the editorial page, "Guns for Nazis?" addresses the requests of German field commanders to retain their weapons to resist vengeful Partisans, stating that it would not be a request received well by the American people. It reminds of the wiping out of Lidice, in retaliation for the killing in Prague in May, 1942 of Reinhard Heydrich, the SS leader who formulated the plans for the Final Solution; of the horrors just discovered at Dachau; of the murdering of American prisoners during the Battle of the Bulge at Malmedy in Belgium—these and other atrocities having been committed with those same guns which the Germans now wished to keep.

The piece favors letting the Germans fend for themselves against the Partisans they had stimulated to anger. It served them well to be hunted night and day as they had hunted their prey, and, if it came to it, to face death in a foreign land, in Italy, Yugoslavia, Holland, Denmark, or Norway.

"And if, despite all our precautions, the vengeful peoples mete out justice to some of these brutes in uniform, let us shrug and forget it."

We'll drink to that.

"Scoop and Muzzle" ventures opinion on the controversy surrounding Edward Kennedy arising from his breaking the news of the surrender some 30 hours in advance of the time set by the pledge to Supreme Allied Headquarters, made along with the other 16 reporters of the pool permitted to report the signing of the articles. As reported on the inside page, while the Associated Press, after complaining of the suspension of its reporting privileges in Europe, was reinstated after seven hours, Mr. Kennedy remained suspended.

The editorial tells of the strange wait in front of the wire for confirmation of the Kennedy account from Supreme Allied Headquarters, confirmation which never came the day before. Yet, there was no denial of the story, so was tacitly admitted.

Finally, a dispatch came through stating that King George had congratulated General Eisenhower on the victory, a story authorized for release at 6:30 p.m., nine hours after the Kennedy story had been received in New York and quickly transmitted over the wires to A. P. affiliated outlets. It was then announced that official proclamation of the peace would be made on this date.

The editorial finds the punishment of suspension unwarranted. It was punishment of Mr. Kennedy for telling the truth, even if premature, even if in violation of a pledge to withhold the news. The censorship was not, and he knew it at the time, invoked for military reasons, was not to save lives, but just to enable convenience to the Russians, a purely symbolic gesture.

It concludes that if he scooped everyone, including the Allied leaders, then so be it. He was "scarcely to blame".

We agree wholeheartedly and agree with the long belated apology and reversal by the Associated Press just made last Friday for its November, 1945 decision to fire Mr. Kennedy over this breach of journalistic etiquette. Unfortunately, of course, it is a pyrrhic victory for his memory at this stage, as he has been deceased for over 48 years, since November 29, 1963.

What he did was in the best spirit and tradition of American freedom of press. We do not hold to the ideas of the former Soviet Union in this regard, and undoubtedly he thought precisely so at the time. Indeed, contrary to risking lives, his early dissemination of the story may have served to circulate the news the better throughout Europe and thus saved lives who might otherwise have died in fatal sniping incidents or like scattered activity for want of enemy soldiers being present at the radio when the German announcement was delivered at 8:30 a.m., Monday, the trigger for Mr. Kennedy breaking his pledge of silence. Regardless, it certainly did not cause any loss or compromise anyone's safety.

What ticked off the other reporters was that they dutifully maintained their pledge to withhold the story and got scooped. That is no shame to them. But neither was it any shame or cause for concern or disgrace to Mr. Kennedy, who placed the public's right to know above his own hide. He may have had in mind a scoop, but he was not an unknown reporter at the time. Indeed, his by-line appeared in A. P. newspapers, such as The News, regularly throughout the war.

So, it simply misunderstands history to say that he did it only for the scoop. He did it knowing he might get the boot, but he did it anyway, because the people of the world who had fought this bloody war, who had sent their sons and brothers, and husbands, and even daughters off to the battle zones, deserved not to have to wait in suspense 36 hours while Joe Stalin made up his mind whether he wanted to join in collective Allied recognition of the surrender.

V-E Day, in honor of Edward Kennedy, was May 7, not May 8. Never forget it.

It represents freedom of the press over stupid, silly military censorship without purpose and finally run amuck with power.

The argument that this incident led to crackdowns on the press during the Korean War is faulty, applying the always suspect rule, post hoc, ergo propter hoc, wanting of proof save perhaps a self-serving statement by the military. The fact was that General MacArthur was notorious throughout this war for withholding stories from the press, sometimes for weeks, typically for at least 48 hours. At the beginning of the war, he had enraged many reporters and there were several columns written about his censorship, the toughest of the war, continuing long after the other theaters had ceased to engage in it wholesale.

And it was, of course, General MacArthur who charted the course in Korea, at least until April, 1951.

Thus, one must first isolate out that common thread running through both wars before trying to place blame on this episode for the censorship in the subsequent war. More likely, it was simply the fact of the continuing practice of General MacArthur, and some disgruntled reporters with long memories who wanted to place the blame on Mr. Kennedy to get even for being scooped.

Candidly, the average reader doesn't pay attention to or give a hoot in hell about the by-line, save for columnists and sports writers. We hate to tell you, journalists. We hope it doesn't spoil your day.

Candidly again, the way some of you write, you would be better off without one.

"Ah, That Pierre!" comments on "Msieu Le Rat", Pierre Laval, having provoked, undoubtedly, spontaneous derisive laughter from Frenchmen, when he said, from his cell in Barcelona, that he was confident that he would be acquitted if tried as a war criminal and that France would ultimately thank him for his efforts.

The piece finds it remarkable in light of the chanting crowds in Paris who wanted the death of World War I hero to France, Marshal Henri Petain, and given that M. Laval was already under a death sentence handed down in absentia.

For now, however, he denied his association with Petain, denounced Marcel Deat, his accomplice in selling out France.

The motivation for his remarks could not be fathomed. Perhaps it was the vague hope that an Allied commission might try him and save him from his fate awaiting in France.

The Allies, it concludes, should not interfere with the judgment already entered against him. Upon its execution, he would receive the thanks of France he deserved.

"Prospectus" suggests that the Japanese Imperial High Command must have shuddered during the weekend to hear of the plans outlined by General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz for winning the war in the Pacific, the trimming down of the Army to seven million men, the release of two million troops, and a 30-day furlough for those being transferred from Europe to the Pacific. It suggested raw confidence in the ability of the fighting forces already deployed, supplemented by some experienced combat troops from Europe, to finish the job of defeating Japan.

Even though the Japanese had a force of four million men and the prospect of many more within Japan, their forces were flung far and wide, in Malaysia and the Dutch East Indies, on Okinawa, in Indo-China, China, Manchuria, and throughout the Japanese islands.

Thus spread thin, the American forces could effect victory with a relatively compact Army.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative John Rankin of Mississippi rising to oppose the bill to make permanent the Fair Employment Practices Committee, established by President Roosevelt for the duration of the war to insure equal pay and opportunity for employment among the races in businesses with war contracts with the Government.

Mr. Rankin, one of the most outspoken segregationists of his time, and an overt racist, believed the legislation "dangerous", "totalitarian", and "communistic", the most so of any such legislation in the whole history of the Congress of the U-nited States.

"Already the peaceful, hardworking Negroes of the country are disturbed, because they know it would stir up race trouble such as this country has never known before."

The "communistic representatives" of "another race" were demanding the legislation's passage.

The businessmen, he went on, were also disturbed. The legislation meant dictatorship.

He warned his colleagues that they would be stirring up more trouble in their own districts than in the South.

Representative Vito Marcantonio of New York took the floor to say that it was time to call a spade a spade and address the substance of the bill pending, that it was so subversive that the Republican Party had adopted a plank the previous summer at its convention calling for the FEPC to be made permanent.

He further stated, in response to supposed objections of soldiers, as claimed by Mr. Rankin, that those who had fought beside black men in battle would not have hesitation to work beside them when they returned home.

The purpose of the war, he continued, was to defeat Nazism and fascism, and the soldiers expected to return to a country in which the principle of equality was paramount.

The only subversive notion was that implicitly advanced by Mr. Rankin, to deny employment to someone because of his skin color. "It is," he concluded, "about time we meet this false cry of subversiveness and nail it right on the head."

Rumor has it that he then mailed to Mr. Rankin a fish.

Drew Pearson reports that Sir Anthony Eden had been the most skillful diplomat thus far at the San Francisco Conference, occupying well the role of friend to all sides and a valuable mediator between the U. S. and the Soviet Union, a role which FDR had deftly played between Churchill and Stalin.

Stalin personally disliked Winston Churchill for the fact that the latter had, in 1939, briefly flirted with England's Cliveden Set, who had advocated Nazi Germany as a bulwark to Communism and supported an attack by Hitler against the Russians. (Mr. Churchill denounced the attack, however, quite strongly before the House of Commons when it occurred in June, 1941.) He had also supported sending Allied troops to assist the White Russians in resistance against the early Communist state.

In carrying forth these policies, however, Churchill was only continuing the century-old tradition of Great Britain with respect to Russia, keeping it isolated from warm-water routes, to preserve Britannia's rule of the waves. The British had formed an alliance with Japan to prevent Russia from obtaining a warm-water port on the Pacific in Manchuria. It was a policy which had underlain the British sphere of influence in Iran, to prevent use by the Russians of the Gulf of Persia. It also had served the basis for the Crimean War of the middle 1850's, to prevent Russian use of the Dardanelles into the Mediterranean. And, it was the reason likewise for Britain taking the Baltic States and Finland from Russia following World War I, to block access to the Baltic.

At Tehran, in November-December, 1943, Stalin wanted to have the Western Allies invade France from the West to relieve stress on the Eastern Front; Churchill wanted the Western Allies to proceed through the Balkans, to keep Russian influence minimalized in the area and avoid wreaking ruin on Western Europe, Britain's sphere of influence. Roosevelt tipped the scale in favor of the Stalin plan.

Mr. Churchill had stated at Tehran to Stalin, "Marshal, I have noticed that whenever anyone comes into contact with you, they become slightly pink," to which Stalin replied, "And, Mr. Prime Minister, any good doctor will tell you that pink is the healthiest of all colors."

FDR then reportedly interjected, "Gentlemen, let me remind you that there is nothing more beautiful than all the colors of the rainbow."

Mr. Pearson reiterates his previously related exchange between the two on their departure from Tehran, Churchill saying that he would see Stalin in Berlin, Stalin replying that he would be in a tank and Churchill in a Pullman car.

Even with his powers slipping, President Roosevelt had maintained the role of intermediary at Yalta. Now, at San Francisco, Secretary Stettinius was not adept at the role and so it had been taken over by Mr. Eden. The result was important: the United States was now in a secondary position with respect to Russia and had become its potential opponent post-war, while Eden had been able to maneuver Britain into a middle position, able to shift to one side or the other.

Marquis Childs comments on President Truman at the end of his first nearly four weeks in office, maintaining a deliberate low profile to focus attention of the public instead on the San Francisco Conference. The President believed it of paramount importance that the conference succeed, but that he could personally do little other than await its outcome. Success depended greatly on the attitude of the Russians. He believed that they must live up to their commitment made at Yalta with respect to a representative government in Poland. When an agreement was made, it had to be kept, not betrayed.

It should be noted that on one of the inside pages appeared a story this date that many of the Poles were not impressed with V-E day, believed that their liberation was yet to occur, until the Russians so agreed to a representative government and the ability of the London government-in-exile to return to its homeland.

President Truman, remarks Mr. Childs, was proving to be a good listener, did more listening than talking with visitors, a trait not shared by President Roosevelt. The new Chief Executive received between fifteen and twenty callers per day, each allotted a certain block of time which was rigidly maintained, also a practice not followed by FDR. President Roosevelt would talk aplenty and often charm his visitors so that they would forget the original reason for having sought the visit. President Truman, by contrast, mainly heard from experts and let them do the talking.

Mr. Childs comments that the President was most at ease with his old Senate crony, Lewis Schwellenbach, for the previous five years a Federal judge. Judge Schwellenbach was likely to become, according to rumor, the new Secretary of Labor to replace Frances Perkins, who had wanted to resign since 1941.

And the rumor would prove true.

As to other Cabinet appointees, no apparent decisions had been made as to who would stay and who would be replaced.

Gradually, the new President was adjusting to the duties and burdens of the office.

Sgt. Robert E. Taylor, stationed now in the "Isles of the Singing Lizards" in the South Pacific, again, as in March, writes a letter anent liquor, having previously objected to the sale by Mecklenburg County of $3,000 worth of confiscated liquor to the State ABC Board. Now, he found a story on March 16 which had stated that Mecklenburg was petitioning the Legislature for authority to ban the sale of wine. He finds the two actions quite inconsistent of mind, apparently establishing the county as viewing the converse as the foolish Hobgoblin of littles.

He invokes Biblical verse, I Timothy 5:23, recommending turning the water to wine.

He then offers as pertinent some lines of Richard Le Gallienne regarding England in Cromwell's day:

When mince pie and the Christmas tree
Were nothing but idolatry
So, in despair, the English beckoned
Across the strait to Charles the Second.

But still the same sour race survives,
Hating the joy in human lives,
Making, by law, all merriment
A grudging three point two per cent.

"Anything Goes" again presents some snippets, first an excerpt from China To Me by Emily Hahn, better read on your own.

Next, "Fightin' Baseball", by John J. McGraw, in Liberty, better read on your own.

Then, "The Cooler Sex", appearing in Popular Science, recounts a German experiment which had shown that a female's temperature next to the skin was as much as ten degrees cooler than a male's, and that humidity was a third to half lower. The male, it concluded, spends most of his life in the tropics while the female resides in the cool, dry air of the Alps.

Now, we understand, don't we, boys and girls?

"Grounds For It" presents, as culled from Time and Newsweek, five quick bases for divorce.

Sample: A stripper divorced her husband because he did not object to her stripping.

Maybe he thought it kept her cooler than even the Alps.

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