The Charlotte News
Monday, July 16, 1945
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that between 450 and 500 B-29's had struck, pre-dawn, four Japanese cities along a 460-mile radius between Oita on the northeast coast of Kyushu and Hiratsuka, 34 miles southwest of Tokyo on Honshu, hitting also Kuwana, 12 miles southwest of Nagoya, and Numaru, 25 miles southeast of Fujiyama, dropping more than 2,500 tons of incendiary bombs, the 53rd incendiary raid initiated from the Marianas. It was the first raid since General Carl Spaatz had assumed command of the Army Strategic Air Forces.
In weekend attacks, American carrier planes from the Third Fleet virtually erased three Japanese cities in northern Japan and heavily bombarded thirteen others, sinking or destroying 152 surface craft.
According to General Curtis LeMay, reconnaissance photographs showed that a July 10 incendiary raid of B-29's on Gifu had destroyed 1.93 square miles of the city, three-quarters of its 2.6 square-mile area.
On Borneo, Japanese resistance before the oil refinery center at Sambodia was collapsing, as the enemy was fleeing into the jungles. The Australians progressed five miles in two days.
In China, the Chinese were mopping up the Japanese remnants at Kanhsien, following the capture of the airfield south of the city, the sixth former American base re-captured by the Chinese in the current campaign. The major Japanese forces at Kahnsien were reported to be retreating toward Wanan to the north.
To the southwest, other contingents were closing in on the former American base at Kweilin. Hwangminkai on the Hunan-Kwangsi railway had also been taken, 50 miles southwest of Kweilin, as the force moved toward Yungfu, 32 miles from Kweilin. Still another column captured Lieukianghsien, 35 miles northeast of Liuchow, advancing toward Hsiujenhsien.
On the East China Coast, the Chinese recaptured Chenghsien in Chekiang Province, 117 miles south of Shanghai. To the south, Limkong was retaken in the neck of Liuchow Peninsula.
The 45th Infantry Division began moving into the area of Reims in France, preparatory to re-deployment to the United States. The 45th had fought in Sicily, Salerno and Anzio in Italy, before landing in France. More than 26,000 members of the Ninth Air Force were among the 165,000 men being redeployed out of Reims. The status of several units are provided.
The first in the series of reports from former French Army head, General Maurice-Gustave Gamelin appears on the page. He explains, in what he describes as the first newspaper article he had ever written, that in France the Army had been traditionally the "silent service." He had remained silent at the trial before the Vichy Government in Riom in 1941, despite Vichy pressure for him to finger leaders of the Republic as being at fault for the weakness of the Army.
He states that the problem lay in the fact that France had not begun to rearm until the end of 1935 following World War I. Germany had begun the process in 1933. The Riom tribunal had sought to lay blame on the very men who had tried to make up for lost time, former Premiers Edouard Daladier and Leon Blum.
He begins by assessing the events of May 19, 1940, when, suddenly, he was relieved of his command. He had given the order, in the face of the retreat of the French forces from Belgium, to launch a counter-offensive that morning. The order was never executed and he did not know why. After the evening of May 19, he was no longer kept informed of events. He was arrested on September 6, 1940 and brought before the tribunal in Riom. On March 4, 1941, he was taken to Germany.
He later found out that General Maxine Weygand, who had succeeded him in command, had executed his order for a counter-offensive on May 22. But by that time, the situation had "profoundly changed", as German panzer and infantry divisions had reached the Somme, attacking in the direction of Arras and Boulogne. By May 25, the Allied armies were being pinned against the coast and the Belgian Army had been forced to surrender.
Somewhere over the north country of Minnesota, a crew of a B-29 had been forced to bail. A search was on for the plane, which, at last report, was left pilotless, cruising on automatic pilot at an altitude of 9,500 feet. The plane had enough gas to reach Montana, albeit with a leaking fuel line. It was speculated that it may have exploded over the Minnesota north woods.
Its mission was from Pyote, Tex., to Duluth and then Wolf Point, Mont. One of the bailing crew had fallen into Napoleon Lake and swum to shore. None of the men had serious injuries.
The plane may still be up there. Beware.
About 21,250 workers returned to the job, most being the 16,500 of Firestone in Akron, ending a two-week old strike, leaving still 29,750 workers on strike across the nation, as 874 AFL metal trades workers struck in San Francisco—possibly over the delay in hammering out the U. N. Charter in the Senate. At Spicer Manufacturing Co. in Toledo, 6,500 CIO auto workers went back to work after ten days. Most of the remaining strikers were at newspapers in five major cities.
House Minority Leader Joe Martin of Massachusetts proposed a resolution to end compulsory military training in peacetime worldwide to preserve peace into the future.
President Truman, becoming the first sitting American President ever to visit Germany, arrived in Berlin on Sunday for the Potsdam Conference, talked with Prime Minister Churchill, and toured the ruins of Berlin, viewing what remained of the Reichstag and the Tiergarten. Outside the Chancellery, the President, looking at the ruins, declared, "It is a terrible thing, but they brought it on themselves." He also reviewed the troops of the Second Armored "Hell on Wheels" Division, stationed along the autobahns.
No word had come of the arrival of Premier Stalin and Foreign Commissar Molotov, but both were believed to be in Potsdam.
The Big Three meeting would begin this date.
Perhaps unwittingly propitious irony, given the day's events, a dispatch from Tokyo by Domei stated that unless the Japanese leaders were to give up the "political superstition" that the Allies could be split, it was bound to result in Japan's surrender.
The true headliner of the day, of course, was not then known abroad the land. But an event which would change the world and send it into the nuclear age had occurred in the New Mexico desert at the Trinity Test Site below Los Alamos, as the world's first atomic bomb was successfully detonated at dawn this date.
The target date had originally been July 4, set earlier in the year, but delays had resulted in the date being set, not coincidentally, on the same day the Big Three meeting in Potsdam would convene.
Critical mass experiments had taken place since May 31, after the arrival of sufficient quantities of plutonium from the Hanford nuclear facility in Washington State. The arrival of the lenses to concentrate the implosion did not begin until late June.
The core of the bomb was about the size of a small orange and weighed eleven pounds.
On July 4, the British had given their approval for use of the bomb on Japan. At the beginning of Potsdam, it was not yet decided whether Premier Stalin and the Russians would be informed of the weapon. A successful test would mean less need for Russian help in Manchuria and thus obviate the necessity of trading away more territorial concessions in Eastern Europe to the Russians.
One of the key factors in delaying the test to July 16 was simply the weather, to avoid prevailing winds spreading fallout over populated areas of New Mexico.
Robert Oppenheimer had wired Arthur Compton and Ernest Lawrence, all three being key scientists on the Manhattan Project
Drenching thunder showers from a tropical air mass began at 2:00 a.m. on this date over Ground Zero at Trinity. Winds gusted to thirty miles per hour.
The scheduled 4:00 a.m. blast time would thus have to be delayed until between 5:00 and 6:00, depending on conditions. General Leslie Groves, director of the project for the Army, had threatened to hang the meteorologist if his prediction of clearing weather at dawn proved erroneous. The weatherman signed his forecast and gave approval for the shot at 5:30 a.m. General Groves warned the Governor of New Mexico that he might have to declare martial law—in the wake of the blast.
The viewing party of scientists and military gathered at Compania Hill, twenty miles northwest of Trinity, to watch the blast. Some of the observers used standard issue Lincoln welding glass, shade number 10, to shield their eyes from the searing brightness.
At precisely 5:30 a.m., MWT, just as the first rays of sunlight appeared over the horizon, the first atomic bomb in the history of the record of mankind was
Says Richard Rhodes in his 1986 Pulitzer Prize winning work, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, "Before the radiation leaked away, conditions within the eyeball [of the bomb] briefly resembled the state of the universe moments after its first primordial explosion."
It was the singular event in Modern Times which changed man and his world forever, at least until Pandora may be returned to the Box and man can forget this terrible, deadly secret unleashed on the world only by the threat of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi scientists working feverishly to develop first their own atomic bomb, as revealed to President Roosevelt by Albert Einstein in his letter to the President of August 2, 1939.
That it would be used on Japan for its first and only, thus far, use in war, was incidental. That it took, in the end, approximately 200,000 Japanese lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is certainly not incidental. But had it not been for this device, given the stubborn temerity of the Emperor and the coterie of Imperialist-bent military leaders under him, many more hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers, both Japanese and Allied, American and Chinese, would have perished in World War II, in further B-29 incendiary raids and in ground action in both Japan and Manchuria.
So, for all of its evil, within the context of the overall perversity of active warfare, it served an ameliorative purpose in this limited circumstance. Its threat, perhaps, has saved the world, in the intervening 67 years, from another conventional world war, until the machinery of the United Nations could get up and running with smooth meshing of all the gears to tamp down the aggressive trait in mankind before it could arm itself so to the teeth as to enable aggressive action on neighbors not so well-equipped. It cannot, however, prevent internal civil war and strife within countries, the primary source of active conflict during the last 67 years.
Thus, we pose the poser again: Evil or
On the editorial page, "Not Illiberal" reports of Governor Gregg Cherry's statement the previous week that North Carolina's full development depended on the guarantee of equal educational, economic, and political opportunities to African-Americans.
The statement had gone further into liberal territory than even the recently recognized Southern leader of liberal trends, Governor Ellis Arnall of Georgia, who, while leading the Georgia Legislature to abandon the longstanding tradition in the state of the poll tax, had stopped short of advocating social, educational, and economic equality.
Governor Cherry was not advocating the Fair Employment Practices Committee but was in favor of equalizing educational opportunities in the length of school terms and teacher salaries. He also stated that the time was coming in the post-war period when a person would be able to obtain a job based on skill and efficiency, not on race.
The editorial urges that the words be noted, especially coming from a Governor who had been thought to be only mildly progressive and bowing to the Democratic captains. The policy stand placed North Carolina in the vanguard of Southern states seeking progress in race relations, a means of avoiding Federal Government regulation, inexorably to come otherwise.
"A Day Dawns" suggests that the new Secretary of Labor, Lewis Schwellenbach, having appointed an AFL man to become his first assistant secretary, hailed a new era which probably set the CIO men to fretting, even though it was indicated that a CIO man would also soon be appointed to a top level Labor Department position.
The new Secretary was urging that the mostly academic work of the Bureau of Labor Statistics had to be revised into more practical applications or that it would need be abolished. It suggested that Judge Schwellenbach would call the shots as he saw them and that the days of CIO's control of the Labor Department had come to an end.
"P. S." reports that the City Council had been greatly relieved at the news that Police Chief Walter Anderson, who had three weeks earlier announced his resignation to accept appointment by Governor Cherry as the head of the newly combined State Highway Patrol and Division of Public Safety, had decided instead to stay on as Chief.
It was a good thing because the City Council, in its endeavor to find a replacement, had looked through the existing Department and found no one in whom it could reposit sufficient confidence to be the new chief. The piece wonders at the end, however, why it was so.
"Gravy Train" remarks on a handy device for dispensing political patronage from North Carolina's Governor continuing to be the North Carolina Railroad, established prior to the Civil War, running from Goldsboro west through Greensboro to Charlotte. It was now operated primarily by Southern Railways, but North Carolina still held a majority stock interest and so the Governor each year could appoint ten board members whose duties were primarily perfunctory but who received a stipend of $1,500 and free passes on other railroads. So, the little state-operated railroad still remained as a small bit of Democratic pork-barreling despite its anachronistic role within the railroad system as a whole.
The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Frank Havenner of California remarking on a report that the House Un-American Activities Committee had voted to send investigators to Southern California to determine the validity of reports of Communist activities in the area.
He had previously revealed in January that a secret meeting of the Dies Committee held in Beaumont, Texas, in July, 1940, had, through a witness who was a former member of the State committee of the Communist Party of California, resulted in a claim that Mr. Havenner was a member of the party.
Mr. Havenner says that he had been a member of the House for three and a half years in mid-1940 and never received notice of this special secret hearing in Beaumont. He first found out of it in November, 1944 in an advertisement of a political opponent in the 1944 campaign. He had never been given opportunity to respond to the accusation and neither had Mr. Dies reported it to the other members of HUAC.
He reiterated that which he had stated to the House in January, that the contentions of the Beaumont witness were false. Said Mr. Havenner, "I do not subscribe, and never have subscribed, to the platform or program of the Communist Party."
—Yeah, Bob. Did you get a load of that?
—Yeah, I know. These tricky Democrats will say just about anything to hide their Commie ties. We'll fix that. We'll fix that. We'll have double secret-secret hearings and bug the opposition.
Drew Pearson discusses the Big Three Conference getting underway at Potsdam. Stalin, of Georgian peasant background, controlled a country with the largest land mass of any in the world, struggling for a hundred years or more to obtain a warm-water seaport.
Mr. Churchill, the aristocrat whose ancestor was the Duke of Marlborough, had once helped send troops into Archangel and Siberia, following World War I, to encourage the White Russian generals to overthrow the new Bolshevik regime. His friends in the British Cabinet had formed the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia to keep Russia from having access to the Baltic. They had also helped to form the Japanese-Anglo alliance to keep Russia from the Pacific, and had made it British policy to control the Mediterranean from strategic bases in the middle.
Stalin wanted Russia to have a voice in the control of Tangier, just opposite Gibraltar. That control would neutralize Gibraltar's strategic significance as the aperture from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic. He also wanted to have a Russian representative on the board which controlled the Suez Canal, central to the oil interests of the British Empire. Moreover, he wanted the Russians to have the dominant control over the Dardanelles, from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean.
President Truman, neither a revolutionary as Stalin nor an aristocrat as Churchill, was cast in the middle between these competing interests. It was likely that the Missouri farm boy of common sense background, who had believed the British had taken advantage of America at times during the war and that the Russians had not lived up to their Yalta commitments since V-E Day, would stand up to both men on the one hand while endeavoring to get along with them on the other.
The major question as he sat down to play poker, was whether he would have the finesse and skill of an international negotiator, a game at which he had not been tested, to work out the differences effectively. He would need, suggests Mr. Pearson, to maintain a grip on his temper. Both he and Secretary of State Byrnes had a tendency to be curt and plain-spoken. The trait could, in international play, break up the poker game.
But, remember, the President had three queens. Whether the missing one was, say, the queen of diamonds, was not told by Mr. Pearson on Saturday.
The complicated agenda of the conference, he further indicates, would be: agreement on an early peace conference for Europe; the war with Japan; the disposition of control of the Dardanelles; the establishment of a permanent site for the U. N.; determination of recognition by the U.S. and Britain of the leftist governments of Bulgaria, Finland, Rumania, and Hungary; whether Italy would be invited to join the U. N. and settling the Italian peace terms; guaranteeing free elections in various parts of Europe, including Poland and Greece; feeding Europe during the coming winter; the establishment of regional treaties, the Anglo-French treaty, the Soviet-Czech-Polish treaty, and how they would fit in with the U.N., (those treaties which eventually became NATO and the Warsaw Pact, respectively); world aviation bases and routes remaining after the only partially successful Chicago air conference; and organization of a world police force for the U. N.
Marquis Childs relates of a story from Clare Boothe Luce anent a farmer and his hired man. At first, the hand worked hard, cutting the hay in the south forty the first day, mending more fences than any previous hired man the second. But on the third day, the farmer set him to peeling potatoes in the basement, and by late afternoon, the farmer discovered that the man had peeled only half a bushel. The man had explained, "Yeah, I know. But it's these decisions that kill you."
Mr. Childs finds the anecdote illustrative of the dilemma of Congress of late, finding the nation at the end of one era and the beginning of another, with decisions to make on such important matters as the structure of air transportation, communications, and whether to have peacetime compulsory military service. Questions of competition and monopoly, both at home and with respect to companies abroad, pervaded the debate.
The Navy wanted merger of all companies in the field of communications to achieve national security. Recently, the Senate subcommittee, chaired by Burton Wheeler of Montana, had been led on a tour of Europe and the Middle East by the Navy's chief proponent of this plan, Admiral Joseph R. Redman. The Senate subcommittee now appeared convinced that merger was requisite for security. In the event of war, the Navy could not use the communications system were several companies to prove at odds in access to it. But, at present, most of the military communications apparatus was in foreign countries which would never allow such use in peacetime and so the argument did not appear applicable.
Also accompanying the subcommittee on its tour was Paul Porter of the Federal Communications Commission. Mr. Porter also favored merger, but with the added condition that no company involved in domestic communications could also be involved in international communications. Senator Wheeler and others, however, found that position to suggest such Government regulation of communications as to favor ownership outright by the Government, no less regulatory or intrusive to the free market.
Assistant Secretary of State Will Clayton, and the Justice Department, had made the case for free competition, to breed invention and creativity in communications development.
To weigh these arguments properly, concludes Mr. Childs, one had to be an expert in the field.
Horace Horse, offering a piece from the Stanly (N.C.) News & Press, tells of Miss Beatrice Cobb, writing in the Morganton News-Herald in March, having said that the word "sass" was not to be found in the dictionary, but had insisted it to be a good American word nonetheless.
Mr. Horse, not content, had endeavored to search for the word in Webster's. He found it, a dialectical variation of "sauce", as in "saucy" language.
He points out that Tom Jimison often used the word to connote "any garden vegetables eaten with meat". "Long sass" were such vegetables as beets and carrots, while "short sass" were onions, potatoes, and pumpkins.
Parenthetically, we make room for the possibility that the barely discernible phrase within the barely discernible sentence we quoted Saturday from Mr. Jimison's last piece for The News, replete with three completely indiscernible words, may have been, "_______ and valley sarsaparilla", but time will tell.
We have to wonder though into which classification, short or long sass, fell, in Mr. Jimison's phraseology, squash.
In any event, we might redefine, with the passage of time, "short sass" as a good expression to communicate the essence of a Republican, while "long sass" fits the average Democrat.
As to the context of the word in the sense Ms. Cobb had in mind, "Today, most children are 'sassy,' though some are more than others," Mr. Horse insists sassily.
She had recognized the expression from the writings of Charles B. Driscoll when he warned, "Let the incompetent sass-boxes look out when the boys come home." "Sass-box", Mr. Driscoll in turn explained, was a popular expression in his Kansas community when he was growing up.
Mr. Horse assures that, since the war had begun, he had not run into very many sassy people. Some clerks in certain stores had proved the exception and not the rule. But those sass-box exceptions, he felt confident in assuming, would soon be looking for jobs once competent people returned from the war to replace them.
Samuel Grafton suggests that no Senator should be provided great plaudits for being for the U. N. Charter, following two world wars before finally the lesson had been driven home that the U. N. was necessary to preserve world order. It would, he says, have taken genius to be for it in 1912, sagacity in 1920, and courage in 1935. To be for it in 1945, however, only meant that one was an exemplar of homo sapiens, in no way remarkable.
Bretton Woods, to establish the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to maintain stable currencies and avoid the conditions which provoke fascism and active militarism, was slated for passage in the Senate during the week. Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, among others in the Senate who supported actively the Charter, planned to vote against Bretton Woods. Mr. Grafton asks whether anyone could be deemed a friend of internationalism if he voted for the Charter, but against Bretton Woods.
To be against the Charter was simply an eccentricity; to be against Bretton Woods, less visible and less controversial, was easier politically, but meant that the Senator was not supportive of the sine qua non for success, practically, of the U. N.
"What we have are a lot of people who are proud of being Galileos in the age of Einstein; they are busy putting a high polish on yesterday's wisdom, and trying to answer today's questions with it."
As to such a man, he further suggests, "We cannot be sure he is a real, a faithful Elk: he may just have joined for the contacts, and to have some place to go at night."
One of the quotes of the day, from Hall L. Hubbard, aircraft engineer: "The jet-driven family
Framed Edition
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