Saturday, June 2, 1945

The Charlotte News

Saturday, June 2, 1945

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Tenth Army, having completely captured Shuri, had virtually wiped out the Japanese southern defense line on Okinawa. The backbone therefore of the enemy resistance was declared to be broken.

The enemy forces were now concentrated in two pockets, one on the east coast, on the south shore of Nakagusuku Harbor, and the other on the west coast at Naha Airfield, west of captured Naha. The Japanese would need to make a decision as to whether to try to join these two forces, having to battle then across the island in one direction or another, in the face of heavy ground, air, and naval bombardment.

The day before, the Japanese had made advances of between 400 to 1,000 yards into the southern Ozato Mura Hills. Stiff resistance was being offered still in Kokuba village, southeast of Naha, as the Sixth Marines set up a thousand-yard line along the Kokuba River after crossing it the day before, placing the Marines in a position to take Naha Airfield. General American advances were up to 2,000 yards.

There remained an estimated 25,000 Japanese defenders of the original 85,000 on the island.

The Seventh Division moved southward to cut off Chinen Peninsula on the east coast.

Admiral Nimitz, however, referred to "mopping up operations" in progress and "diminished resistance".

The Admiral announced that Admiral William Halsey would be returning to action with the Third Fleet, relieving Admiral Raymond Spruance and the Fifth Fleet, which had fought in the actions for both Iwo Jima and Okinawa during the previous four months.

Tokyo radio stated that carrier raids had been renewed by 200 planes and flying boats out of bases in the Kerama Islands, hitting Kyushu for two hours during the morning.

In Tokyo, the raging fires from the earlier raids during the week had prompted the announcement that martial law might have to be imposed.

Reconnaissance from the raid on Osaka the day before showed it to have been one of the more successful raids to date, with the entire city burning. There was so much smoke that the last waves of bombers had difficulty locating their targets.

Ten of the B-29's out of the 450 in the Osaka raid had failed to return, and about 36 had utilized Iwo Jima, halfway to the home base at Tinian in the Marshalls, the latter 1,500 miles from Tokyo, because they were low on fuel after circling within the dense smoke to locate targets.

One plane encountered a Japanese fighter dropping two devices about the size of paint buckets attached together by a nine-foot length of chain, seeking to hit one of the B-29's from above. Whatever the device was, it missed.

Under a new relaxed policy of reporting on Navy submarine activity in the Pacific, relaxed because of the decimation of the Japanese Fleet, the Navy reported that the U.S.S. Salmon had distinguished itself, taking out an enemy tanker and then, forced to surface by depth charges, having sunk the four escort vessels. The submarine Wahoo had likewise distinguished itself by taking out an entire enemy convoy, including four troop ships, headed to New Britain.

In China, the troops heading southward to the highway leading to Indo-China were approaching Scelo, 70 miles southwest of recently liberated Nanning, known also as Yungning. Heavy fighting was occurring at the highway junction town of Tsinkiang, also known as Chienkiang, 85 miles northeast of Nanning.

On Luzon, the 38th Division encountered new enemy resistance out of the old Shimbu Line east of Manila. The Americans were able to make headway in the north into the Cagayan Valley. The 32nd Division cleared the last of the enemy from the Villa Verde Trail, stretching between the Luzon plains and the Cagayan Valley.

The 32nd, having recently joined with the 25th, had to backtrack to clear remaining bypassed positions of the enemy to enable the trail to be traveled safely. The trail had been widened to road width by Army engineers. In the building of the road, the 32nd had killed 9,000 enemy troops. The trail would afford easy access to the valley, where the remaining Japanese in the north were concentrated.

Resistance likewise stiffened on Mindanao in the area of Managok, as the 31st Division pushed the enemy back about a half mile east of Malaybalay.

General Charles De Gaulle stated from Paris that France would not submit to the proposed tripartite commission in London, to be composed of U.S., British, and French representatives, to iron out problems with Syria. Instead, he blamed the uprisings in Syria and Lebanon on British agents. He stated that France had withdrawn all except 5,000 to 6,000 troops from the Levant States while Britain had maintained a force of 600,000 men, including the Ninth Army.

He also indicated that the ceasefire order had been executed by French commanders on May 31, prior to receipt of the note of Prime Minister Churchill requesting the return to the barracks of the French troops.

After consultation with President Truman at the White House, Robert Murphy, political adviser to General Eisenhower, assured that the Allied Control Council would soon be established in Berlin, whereby the representatives of the Big Three plus France would each be occupying established regions. Some details still needed to be worked out, however, before the Council could be established.

Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew, in response to questions regarding the statements of the previous day by Senator Owen Brewster that the Russians in Berlin were liquidating various professionals among the Germans, indicated that such questions could not be considered at present for the fact that there were no American representatives within Berlin. Senator Brewster had based his statement on rumors received from reliable sources during his visit to Germany recently with the Mead Committee.

It was announced that General Omar Bradley was returning to the United States from Europe and would speak at graduation exercises at West Point on Tuesday.

In San Francisco, Ambassador Andrei Gromyko handed a note to each of the other Big Five delegations regarding the Russian stand on the veto power within the Security Council. The contents of the note remained secret but those present when it had been read reported that it stated that the Russians continued to favor a strict interpretation of the veto rule, as being applicable even to hearing a complaint from a member nation, that unless all of the Big Five agreed, there would be no presentation at all to the Security Council. Britain and the United States had favored a less strict interpretation, permitting at least discussion without the veto rule being available to prevent it.

On the editorial page, "Memorial, C.O.D." informs that the proposed War Memorial to the veterans in Charlotte would ultimately be paid for by the veterans, themselves, as the bonds being issued for the project would not mature until 1972.

The piece proposes instead that some way be found to make the memorial a true gift to the community rather than one paid for by the taxpayers a generation hence. It proposes placing a heavy tax on the current year and the ensuing two or three years to foot the bill immediately.

"Rear Guard Action" remarks that, while the poll tax was in its death throes, having been removed recently in Georgia under the leadership of Governor Ellis Arnall, there were still seven states keeping it on the books.

It finds the editor of the Pee Dee Advocate in Bennettsville, S.C., exercised at a report prepared by the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax. That report had indicated that in the most populous district in the United States, the seventh district of Illinois, 52% of eligible voters turned out at the polls in 1944, while, in South Carolina's third district, 4% had turned out to vote. The difference was attributed to South Carolina's poll tax, but the editor in Bennettsville begged to differ. He viewed the disparity as a function of general lack of interest in the general election after the primary had occurred in a one-party state.

He pointed for support of his theory to the fact that there was no poll tax on men over 60 or on women, accounting for 70,000 voters in the third district, and that 30,000 who had paid the dollar tax in the district had not bothered to exercise their franchise, only 13,500 having voted in the election. Moreover, the poll taxes were used to pay for schools, not to prohibit voting, he argued.

The editorial finds the Bennettsville editor's points generally sound but also reminds that North Carolina, following its abandonment of the poll tax in 1920, had a significantly higher turnout at the polls than in 1916, suggesting strongly a correlation between the presence of a poll tax and low voter turnout.

"The Wrong Jail" points out that Morganton State Hospital remained severely overcrowded with 2,700 patients under the care of only four staff doctors, in a facility ideally meant to house 1,500 and no more than 2,000. The result was that, not only were the patients at Morganton receiving inadequate care, but that other persons who ought be in mental facilities were consigned instead either to burdensome home care or to jails, poorly equipped to deal with the maladies with which the individuals in question suffered.

A filler below the editorial commits the sin of racism, even if in a jesting sense. These squibs were provided by a subscription service. This one certainly runs in considerable contrast to the stands taken by the column itself, appalled as it had properly been at the recent reports out of the Western states, especially in California, of the acts of violence and bigotry aimed at Japanese Americans returning from the relocation centers to which they had been transferred in early 1942 after Pearl Harbor, or, in some cases, against returning veterans.

Why the editors let this silly filler enter the column, when it was not aimed at "the Japs" as the enemy, but rather against Japanese in general, is not known. But there it is. It was not the first such inappropriate statement to find its way into those interstitial spaces. It may have been that the column was under someone else's control on Saturday than Burke Davis or J. E. Dowd, or, simply that the editors assumed that not too many people read the fillers, or, if they did, treated them with the grain of salt to which they were most usually entitled.

Much of the super-sensitivity to racially loaded comments, standing alone, is overblown, we think. Often, it is simply misunderstood irony or overstatement for ironic purposes. It is rather discriminatory ideas and action which are important, segregationist policies, deprivation of rights and liberties based on race or other identifiable characteristics, not mere words. Words cannot hurt us unless we allow them to do so. Often, the use of the racially-loaded word is not only completely inoffensive but even cathartic as discharging racial tension in a controlled setting, whereas the neutral phraseology expressed in conjunction with racist ideology becomes the real scavenger which seeps into the unconscious mind and preys therein on the unsuspecting.

But in this instance, we draw attention to it because it is particularly an odious comment to have been printed knowingly in an atmosphere still charged with potential violence against completely loyal Japanese American citizens of the time. That was not, by the simple fact of numbers, an issue around Charlotte, but there also was no need to spread the flames with such comments in such loaded times.

The comment had come from an actual report of a school district in Schenectady, New York, removing from the curriculum The Old World and It's Gilts, (as printed), for the book containing the quote in question. Another school district, in Albany, had opted only to staple the offensive pages together.

It may be that the little story was circulating enough in common parlance that the filler was considered harmless, that the average reader who bothered to read it would see through the statement and adjudge it to mean something innocent rather than racist, which it could be interpreted to mean. But that is a bit tricky, assumes complete understanding of the context in which the statement originally appeared and its ban and the reason for it, requiring more thinking than one ought to have to provide to a filler, without immediate reference also to its context. Perhaps, it was just something quick to place in the column on a spring Saturday, without much thought to it, rather than fill in the space with another brief editorial, on, say, the United Nations Conference.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Congressman Lawrence Smith of Wisconsin discussing with Congressman Jesse Wolcott of Michigan the meat shortage in the country. Mr. Smith wanted to know if the subsidies for meat and butter were consumer subsidies, to which Mr. Wolcott affirmed that they were, having nothing to do with production, that they were only designed to maintain maximum prices, something the Congress had never intended.

But for all that, he continued, the Administration had not been able to avert shortages. The Congress had done all it could, he contends, to permit the Administration leeway to try to control prices and production, but to no avail.

Drew Pearson states that the first job for new War Food Administrator and Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson would be to weed out the personnel from the agency who had worked to avoid surpluses to such a degree that there were major shortages in the country in such things as fats and eggs. The black market had been so thriving that poultry trucks in the Midwest were being hijacked as in the days of Prohibition.

He next reports of Congressman Clarence Cannon of Missouri, Democratic chair of the House Appropriations Committee, socking in the eye Congressman John Taber of New York, a Republican. Mr. Taber had, in the eyes of Mr. Cannon, sought to politicize the proposed $2,500 expense allowance to members of Congress by first indicating his intention to vote for the bill, provided the stipend was doled out in a monthly allowance, and then voting no when it came to committee vote. That had prompted Mr. Cannon to change his vote to no, at which point, upon inquiry from other members, he stated the reason as being the change by Congressman Taber. Mr. Cannon was not going to allow the matter to be politicized. Mr. Taber denied that he had initially indicated his intention to vote in the affirmative, and a row began, culminating a few days later in the sock in the eye when Mr. Taber came to Mr. Cannon's office at the invitation of Mr. Cannon.

Such incidents were getting to be a fairly routine occurrence in Congress.

Marquis Childs asserts that the concept of the Founders that the Senate was to be the more deliberative body of Congress to offset the tendency toward rash action of the more localized Representatives of the House, had been stood on its ear. He cites the reciprocal trade agreements bill as example. The Republicans of the House had fought it while the Democrats supported it.

Congressman Jesse Wolcott of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the House Banking and Currency Committee, had sought successfully to tailor the Bretton Woods proposal to establish the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to maximize Republican support. Only three of eleven Republicans on the committee had opposed it in the end, predictive of the final result in the House as a whole when the matter would come up for a vote the following week.

But in the Senate, there was stiffer opposition to the reciprocal trade agreements bill. Senators, led by Elmer Thomas and Robert Taft, were also planning to try to eviscerate the Price Administration Act, the enabling legislation for OPA and price controls during the war as a hedge against runaway wartime inflation. The general argument was that OPA had not set prices high enough to afford adequate profits. With record profits during the war being earned by corporations, Mr. Childs wonders what the fighting men on Okinawa thought of this argument.

He points out that Herbert Hoover had urged President Wilson at the end of World War I in 1918 to continue price controls. The advice was not heeded, and runaway inflation of 1919-20 resulted, followed by the bust of 1921-22.

In the South and in New England, he reports, land prices were skyrocketing in anticipation of war's end.

The fact that there had been so much surplus income unspent during the war for scarcity of goods only indicated that more income should have been taken in taxes, not that the OPA was to blame for keeping prices stable and some goods, in consequence, scarce. Wages should have been frozen along with prices, he observes.

Samuel Grafton discusses the proposal by President Truman that the Federal Government pick up the difference in state unemployment benefits such that the war worker let go during demobilization and reconversion would receive at least $25 per week for up to 26 weeks. Most of the states supplied only $15 to $18.

Senators such as Senator Walter George of Georgia who were raising the specter of states' rights over the issue were disserving, says Mr. Grafton, the common sense rationale for the President's proposal. For it was a Federal responsibility to demobilize and thus to take care of the demobilized workers in the war factories. The states should not become responsible for this burden when the war workers had been lured to higher wages in war factory jobs during the war and so concentrated in large urban areas outside their native states.

Dorothy Thompson, writing from Rome, tells of the logistical problems in getting basic supplies from one place to another in battered Europe. The devastation had to be seen, she says, to be believed. Not only the cities, but every village and town had been leveled. Farmers in the fields had been killed while plowing during battle; others were still being killed by plowing into land mines. In Italy, some whole villages were living in caves because they simply had no shelter left.

Even amid this devastation, however, the Italians had maintained their vines, terraced their hillsides, pruned their fruit trees, pursued their basic industries. The same, she had observed, was true in Austria.

The real test would come in winter, as bread and coal would be scarce. Considerable marauding was ongoing in Slovakia by the Russian, Hungarian, and Rumanian soldiers. The four occupied zones of Europe thus far had no integrated economic policy. The grain fields of Hungary, Rumania, and Yugoslavia had previously fed Europe, except for Germany, which had received its grain from the eastern provinces. But the land reforms carried forth by the Nazis in the occupied lands had, along with the civil war in Yugoslavia and food shortages from the war in Russia, depleted so the basic resource that the future of feeding Europe was a major problem. Wheat from overseas would not become available until the end of the war in the Pacific.

Framed Edition
[Return to Links
Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i><i><i>--</i></i></i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.