The Charlotte News
Tuesday, July 24, 1945
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that 2,000 planes had struck the Kure Naval base, Osaka, and Nagoya. Between 1,000 and 1,500 of the planes emanated from the Third Fleet carriers, involved in the raid on Kure, 56 percent of which had been destroyed by a B-29 raid of June 22. Between 600 and 700 B-29's were included in the complement, the largest raid yet of the war conducted by Superfortresses, dropping 4,000 tons of bombs on Osaka and Nagoya.
A report out of London stated that a Tokyo broadcast claimed that the B-29's were dropping toy airplanes made of metal over Hiroshima Prefecture, designed to explode when the propeller was stopped. It was not clear whether this report was simply more Japanese propaganda or true.
The men of the PT-boats would no doubt recommend, as a remedial measure, toilet paper.
In China, the Chinese were bombarding a village three miles northwest of Lingschwan, 15 miles north of Kweilin.
From Pilsen in Germany, Bill Cunningham reports that thousands of Germans were fleeing Thuringia, to which they had fled during the fighting on the Western Front. Now, with the Russians extending their occupation zone into the sector, the Germans wanted to rejoin the West. Mr. Cunningham described it as one of the great hegiras of all time and that the people were fleeing before the Russians as "partridge before a prairie fire".
Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska proposed that the Senate determine from the State Department whether there had been any genuine peace tenders from Japan. He stated that if the President would express terms of surrender, then Japan might accept.
A high military source had stated that a communication had been made to President Truman by Japan offering to surrender, provided the Emperor would be retained and that Japan would not be militarily occupied, although allowing for a control council to monitor cessation of military capacity. It also purportedly acquiesced to the Cairo Declaration of November, 1943, signed by FDR, Chiang Kai-shek, and Churchill, stating that Japan would have to surrender all territory acquired since the beginning of the war, including Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores. The statement also pledged independence for Korea in due course and withdrawal from China, Burma, and Indo-China. It was not clear, said Senator Wherry, from what source the alleged statement had come.
The Big Three in Potsdam scheduled a recess for Thursday to enable Prime Minister Churchill to return to London to receive the British election results, after the count had been transpiring for three weeks, delayed by the ballots of soldiers. Labor Party leader Clement Atlee, also in Potsdam at the invitation of Mr. Churchill, would likewise return to London for a day. The announcement made it clear that the conference would not end at that time.
It would in fact last another six days after the election results became known on Thursday. Mr. Churchill would not return to the conference.
Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana, leading isolationist, indicated that he would vote for ratification of the United Nations Charter, but would seek to limit use of American troops in aggressive actions under its auspices. He believed that the peoples of Eastern Europe would be denied the guarantees of the Atlantic Charter and that the U. N. Charter would have little impact on the situation.
In the trial in Paris of Marshal Petain, former Premier Paul Reynaud, leader of France at the time of the fall in June, 1940, testified that both Petain and King Leopold of Belgium had surrendered to the Germans in acts of treachery. Reynaud claimed that he did not oppose an order of ceasefire but did not want an armistice.
Reynaud wanted to transfer the French Government to West Africa and continue the war from there, but was opposed by both Petain, then Vice Premier, and General Maxime Weygand, successor to General Maurice-Gustave Gamelin as supreme commander of the French Army. He had received a British proposal to join Britain in a union, but rejected the plan on the advice of former Premier Camille Chautemps, a member of his Cabinet, not wanting France to become a dominion of Britain.
A survey of readers, deprived of their newspapers in the New York market for five weeks during the strike of deliverers, found that at the beginning of the strike, 76 percent of readers, forced to obtain their news primarily from radio, stated the source to be inadequate. After an additional week had lapsed, the figure of dissatisfied listeners had risen to 89 percent.
On the editorial page, "First Obligation" points out that the country had a responsibility to insure that returning disabled veterans received proper treatment for the rest of their lives and their proper monthly disability stipend. Beyond that, however, it was also to be recognized that veterans should not be provided preferential treatment above ordinary citizens.
It points to the logic of President Roosevelt's address to the American Legion in 1933, stating both of these principles, to care for the injured and disabled of war, but to avoid creating special classes of beneficiaries above other citizens simply because an individual had served in uniform.
With a history of overthrown monarchs behind it, Spain, hopes the piece, would muster out of its woeful state the energy to overthrow the Generalissimo.
"No, Just No" offers that the fact that Senator Hiram Johnson of California had spoken against the United Nations Charter was no reason to be disheartened, that he had spoken from conviction, unchanged since World War I. It would not matter that the Charter would not be ratified with unanimity in the Senate. Nor did it matter, likewise, that Bretton Woods would not receive unanimous approval.
But the method of attack on the latter by Senators Burton Wheeler and Robert Taft was important. They had assailed the plan by way of inquiring of supposed secret deals with Russia and Britain regarding high finance and the method by which America would provide its share of the nine billion dollar International Monetary Fund to stabilize world currencies, and whether the Fund would actually be able to accomplish that result.
They were inconsistently attacking the foundations of the means of maintaining world peace, through stable economies, while providing nominal support to the U. N. Charter.
The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Ernest McFarland of Arizona, appearing to continue a colloquy begun in the excerpt printed the previous day, urging Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky to correct the misimpression that Senators only worked during the six hours each day that they appeared on the Senate floor, that they worked, in addition, at least another six hours outside the chamber.
Senator Barkley quickly agreed.
Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska assured that he spent as much as 24 hours a day on the job.
Senator Wallace White of Maine took responsibility for starting the six-hour issue, and apologized for placing Senator Barkley in a pitfall regarding the matter.
Senator Barkley then recalled the story of the dog who came to town in Paducah regularly with a farmer when the farmer sought to sell his crops. The men in town started tying tin cans to the tail of the dog, and the dog finally got so used to it that every time he saw a tin can, he simply backed up to it. Senator Barkley said that he had become so inured to Senate pitfalls that every time he saw one, he backed up to it.
Drew Pearson posits that it could take many years to ascertain whether Hitler and Eva Braun had, as a recent report had stated, escaped into Patagonia in southern Argentina. The area was comprised of a series of large German-owned ranches which would be impossible to penetrate as a non-German to try to establish the truth or falsity of the story. Hitler could easily, he says, be hidden in the region. It was entirely conceivable that a German U-boat could have landed in the coastal area of Patagonia. U-boats often sailed as far as Argentina and Uruguay during the war. There was no reason why Hitler and his bride could not have been on one of them.
He then notes that he had pointed out in a column of December 15, 1943 that Hitler and his understrappers of the Reich were preparing a refuge in Argentina in case of defeat, that the loss of Stalingrad and Tunisia had placed the handwriting on the wall.
He reminds that it was Assistant Secretaries of State Nelson Rockefeller and James Dunn who had insisted that Argentina be admitted to the United Nations at San Francisco.
He also points out that Dr. Robert Kempner, former German police official who had investigated the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and lived in Pennsylvania, had identified Hitler as having an abnormally elongated right thumb, a pointed right ear on top, and a receding mouth.
The remainder of the column discusses the closed-session meeting of the Senate Military Affairs Committee regarding the reasons for the resignation of Maj. General Claire Chennault from his command of the air forces in China and his replacement by Lt. General George Stratemeyer. Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson had testified that the primary reason was General Stratemeyer's seniority. The Senators were reluctant to accept that explanation and instead believed the change to have been the result of Army politics.
General Ira Eaker had explained that the war in China had entered a new stage in which overland operations were no longer so important as the stoppage of supply lines for food and raw materials from the mainland of China to Japan, a job of logistics at which General Stratemeyer excelled. But the Senators were neither accepting of this reason.
Senator Joseph O'Mahoney of Wyoming had inquired of Undersecretary Patterson whether or not the real reason for the change was that General Chennault was a primary backer of Chiang and, with Chiang being unpopular with the Communists in the north, that the alliance therefore had rubbed off onto General Chennault in the eyes of the Communists. General Chennault also was opposed to the Communists. Mr. Patterson denied that Chinese politics was an issue.
It had not been discussed at the hearing, but insiders had observed that the end for General Chennault was written when General Joseph Stilwell returned to command in the Pacific, replacing General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., killed on June 18 in the closing days of the battle for Okinawa, as commander of the Tenth Army. General Stilwell and General Chennault had been constantly at loggerheads regarding whether air or land fighting should take precedence in the war in China. General Stilwell had wanted to finish the Ledo Road from northeast India through Burma into China to supply a land army. General Chennault wanted to use the supplies for an air war. There were only enough troops available to defend either the Ledo Road or the airbases. General Stilwell had been able to win the argument. The Ledo Road was built and the airbases, without protection, were lost to the Japanese. The result had caused Chiang to protest and obtain Roosevelt's intervention to have General Stilwell sent home.
Another reason for the change in command was that the traditional brass hats in the military did not like General Chennault and, in the end, they always got their way.
Dorothy Thompson discusses an article by former Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles in which he had stated that a return to balance of power politics in Europe was on the horizon, the status in 1920-28 which had led to the rise of Nazi Germany.
Ms. Thompson states that she found the concept incomprehensible, as the period in question was one of economic instability and rampant inflation in Germany, causing the French to send troops into the Ruhr for the purpose of collecting reparations, not to halt re-militarization.
Just as then, money reparations would be uncollectible from Germany. The British had sought in the period to stabilize the German economy, not to stimulate German militarism as a bulwark to Russia. At the time, no one considered Russia a military threat. The issue rather was to prevent widespread poverty which would lead to collectivism.
She posits that Britain's worst mistake was to abandon balance of power politics in Europe at the point when Hitler came to power. In 1938, Britain permitted the expansion of Germany into Austria and Czechoslovakia because France was too weak to be counted as much of an ally and the United States was overwhelmingly isolationist, leaving Britain alone to resist Germany. The expansion upset the balance of power, leading to the war.
Mr. Welles, she argues, feared a return to balance of power as though it still resided in Western Europe. The balance was instead with the Big Three, not on the central Continent. It was now a global concept. Germany could only provide the pivot by virtue of annexation to Russia or the West. The major goal at Potsdam was to prevent either side from being able to dominate the other on the Continent.
Balance of power was one way to maintain peace; a dominant nation was another. There would be no dominant nation after the war, however, as the United States could not occupy that role and did not wish to do so in any event.
Marquis Childs discusses the crowded trains for the veterans and the resulting determination of the Office of Defense Transportation to turn over all passenger coaches to the Army.
He predicts that historians a half century hence would find the fourth summer of the war of great interest for its many contradictions and for what had survived during the war in terms of normal or semi-normal patterns of civilian life. It was possible to conserve ration points and take a short vacation, for example. In the East, a motorist could travel a hundred miles to the coast, causing resorts along the seaboard to be crowded to capacity. From Miami to Maine, coastal accommodations were renting for two or three times that of earlier years. Atlantic City was booked solid for the summer.
Yet, despite the atmosphere of relaxation and the need for it among the citizenry after the great push in the war effort, there remained a fight ahead in the Pacific—which the military commanders were predicting would not be over before the end of 1946.
Ah, heck. They've got it covered. Go back to your surfing.
Another letter writer responds to the racist letter of the previous Thursday, which had condemned the Charlotte laundry workers for striking for a higher wage than the 15 to 30 cents per hour being paid, on the premise that the workers were black and that blacks had a lower standard of living, therefore needed no higher wages.
This woman had formerly been of the opinion that striking union members generally were unpatriotic. But the previous letter had changed her opinion, though she initially was sympathetic to his point of view. It was, however, when she reached the sentence where he laid the bomb, regarding the lower standard of living not requiring higher wages, that he lost her. She takes him to task on the absurd logic, asking why any race should have a lower standard of living than another, that such a view was un-American.
So, she had discovered a reason why strikes made sense, to improve the standard of living of a group of workers who were not engaged in war work and who were only earning meager wages relative to the rest of the labor force. She hoped that the veterans, black and white, would be able to return to a nation with a better opportunity to make an honest living.
Another letter writer, in the service as a mess cook and stationed on Guam, tells of a member of the outfit, Shorty, who, each evening, crowed like a rooster. He could also imitate other animals, a hound treeing a possum, for instance.
The men stood at attention before Shorty crowed. The soldier ends by saying that it was bed time and Shorty was getting ready to sound off.
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