The Charlotte News
Friday, July 27, 1945
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that B-29's dropped, instead of bombs, 60,000 pamphlets over each of eleven cities of Japan, stating, in the words of General Curtis LeMay, that unless Japan surrendered, they would be fire-bombed to the ground, with the first four cities to be destroyed within the ensuing few days. The pamphlets were not carrying idle words.
The first five of the cities over which the pamphlets were dropped are listed: Ichinomiya, fire-bombed July 13 when 80 percent of its built-up area had been destroyed; Tsu, struck July 24 with demolition bombs; Ujiyamada; Nagaoka; and Nishinomiya.
Domei, the Japanese news agency, reported that the Government, after meeting at Premier Suzuki's home, intended to ignore the ultimatum from Potsdam of the previous day and would prosecute the war to the "bitter end".
Domei speculated that the absence of Premier Stalin's signature from the ultimatum signed by President Truman, Prime Minister Churchill and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, was significant, indicative of the failure of President Truman to obtain Russia's commitment to join the Pacific war. It also found the British election to be instructive of the desire by the people of the Allied countries to begin the work of construction of peace rather than continuing war. It warned that an American invasion of Japan would result in the loss of possibly millions of American lives.
Unwittingly, the broadcast had made the case forcefully and finally for dropping the atomic bomb.
Maj. General John M. Franklin had told the Senate War Investigating Committee that the timetable for defeat of Japan had been considerably shortened. More shipping would, in consequence, be needed for the Pacific, and the rate of return of soldiers from Europe would be reduced. The furlough policy in place would, however, not be altered.
The previous day, General Joseph Devers had informed a press conference that there was a plan to deliver a "single crushing blow" to Japan.
The Third Fleet had entered Tokyo Bay and sent 18 torpedoes slamming into a Japanese merchant convoy on Sunday night. No American casualties were suffered. The ships had sunk two and possibly three of the merchantmen before the moon had lit up a clear sky, causing the force to break off the action. Deeper penetration had been planned, but the fringe of a typhoon had interfered with the operation.
Chinese troops had entered the suburbs of Kweilin and, three days earlier, taken back the eighth former American airbase, at Yangso.
In Washington, Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley urged his colleagues that the United Nations Charter should be brought to a floor vote the following day. The Senate was to remain in session this Friday evening until 7:00 p.m. and would convene at 10:00 on Saturday morning.
From Frankfurt, Secretary of War Henry Stimson stated that the Big Three were having difficulty reaching agreement on a unified policy for administration of Germany.
In London, new Prime Minister Clement Atlee spent his first day as the head of the new Government, anticipating return to Potsdam during the weekend. It was believed that he would make his Cabinet appointments prior to departure.
Neither Mr. Churchill nor Anthony Eden would return to the conference.
The overwhelming victory of Labor had suggested that the party would be in power for awhile, possibly the full statutory five years.
New members of the House of Commons were to be sworn in August 1, with a new Speaker elected, probably Col. Clifton Brown, a Conservative, as the office was non-partisan.
The War Labor Board ordered 20,000 employees of the Chrysler Corporation Dodge plant in Chicago to return to work immediately to avoid a serious deficiency in B-29 production. The CIO announced that the United Auto Workers had agreed to end the strike on Monday. The warning of imminent takeover of the plant and Wright Aeronautical in New Jersey, where an additional 30,000 B-29 workers were striking, came from Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson. The two plants together manufactured 80 percent of the B-29 engines. The production stoppage had so hurt the war effort that within days, the striking forces against Japan would need to be reduced, prolonging the war. The workers in Chicago were not after a wage increase but rather company negotiation of grievances.
In Paris, former French Premier Leon Blum testified at the treason trial of Marshal Henri Petain that, at a time when France needed reassurance, in May, 1940, Petain had told them that the armistice was not dishonorable. That, asserted Mr. Blum, was treason. Petain, he said further, had given himself powers of a "jungle sovereign" and abused the confidence placed in him by the people. The Vichy Government, he continued, was headed only by Pierre Laval, but he did not know whether Petain gave the orders from behind the scenes. Once Paris was surrendered to the Germans and the Government had fled to Bordeaux, he said, the military leaders lost confidence in the Government and gave up any notion of further resistance to the Nazis.
In Brooklyn, the FBI was probing the poisoning of 90 percent of the work force of a war plant, Super Electric Products Corp. None had died, but many had become violently ill. A water cooler was discovered to contain potassium chloride, a compound used at the plant for electroplating. The poison had been diluted by the water and prevented anyone from suffering death.
On the editorial page, "Sharp Left" comments on the British election, finding that it marked a change which substituted an unknown for a known, with the result of uncertainty. It would likely lead to an experiment in socialism which would be viewed with a keen eye in the United States.
The previous Labor Government of Ramsey MacDonald in 1931 had differed little from the New Deal, except that Roosevelt had been accused of being a traitor to his class, whereas Mr. MacDonald had been accused of allowing himself to be wooed by the aristocracy. The new Labor Government appeared quite advanced from the previous one.
Regardless of the outcome of the election, it had become clear that Britain was in for a period of sweeping change with a much greater role for the Government in social welfare programs. The Conservatives had also called for protection of the individual from cradle to grave. Labor wanted socialization of the banks, land, transportation, fuel, power, etc. The foreign policy would likely be unchanged, except that relations with the Soviets would likely become cozier. Communists in countries, such as Greece, within the British sphere of influence would likely be able to thrive. India had been promised dominion status by Labor.
The piece concludes that the change likely had come from the endless desire of man for change and appeared to be a second choice.
"The Man Churchill" remarks that Americans were in stunned disbelief that Britons had rejected the Conservative Party of Churchill. Churchill, it asserted, had been undoubtedly one of the great men of modern times, was the steady hand at the tiller on the Ship of State in 1940 when Britain was in peril of being vanquished.
After Dunkerque, he had stirred the hearts and spirits of Britons by urging them to look to the future when historians would say,
"But whatever the history books record of the British electorate which turned him out, they must say of Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill that he stood in the great line of men who fought against evil, facing perhaps the greatest odds of all time, and won. Perhaps history will scarcely note that, within a month after victory, his people turned away from him."
It would, however, not be Mr. Churchill's last turn as Prime Minister, as he would, however improbably at age 76, return to power in 1951 for three and a half years.
"In the Bull Pen" finds warm-ups at the ready to take the mound even though Dog Days were yet a week away.
One was a minister from St. Charles, Va., who handled copperhead snakes, relying on the Biblical assurance that one could tread on deadly serpents and be spared by faith. The minister had been bitten and his face swollen as a result. He blamed the accident on a female parishioner who had stepped on the snake's tail and made it mad.
The piece rejoinders with Ecclesiastes 10:11: Surely the serpent will bite without enchantment; and a babbler is no better.
Like as not, that minister had been bit by a bit of the juice squeezed through the
A second relief pitcher was Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi who had received an irate letter from Josephine Piccolo of Brooklyn for his opposition to the bill to make permanent the Fair Employment Practices Committee. Senator Bilbo replied with a letter which began, "My Dear Dago".
Besides being silly to reply in the first instance, the manner of the reply was, said the piece, "downright stupid".
"All the Bilbo had to do was to say, 'My dear Miss Piccolo: Are you any kin to that piccolo player they tell the joke about? Cordially yours.' "
The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana fighting a straw man with regard to the notion that the United States was responsible for the rise of Hitler and the war in Europe. He first suggests that the statement by Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, that the nation had, after the last war, shut itself off from the world and would not wish to follow the same path again, should not have applicability to the Bretton Woods proposal. Senator Wheeler advises that he had voted against the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act on the basis that countries would circumvent it by depreciating their currencies, as many nations did.
He then says that he could not let the statement pass regarding the United States having been responsible for Hitler and the war.
Senator Fulbright tersely says that he did not so state.
Senator Wheeler agrees, but says that the statement was ludicrous.
Senator Fulbright indicates that had the country approved of membership in the League of Nations, then it might have prevented the war, but that was not to say that the country was responsible for it.
Senator Wheeler agrees that the United States might have prevented the war by joining with France to dissuade the Germans from entering the Ruhr, as France, without the aid of Britain, sought to do on its own.
Drew Pearson informs that Spruille Braden, Ambassador to Argentina, would be the likely choice of new Secretary of State James Byrnes to replace Joseph Grew as Undersecretary. Ambassador to Spain Norman Armour would likely replace Nelson Rockefeller as Assistant Secretary for Latin America.
Mr. Braden was disliked by the Argentines and his appointment would be a slap in their faces. He was being booed wherever he went because of an accident which had occurred at the Braden copper mines in Chile, where he had been previously the Ambassador in 1933. He had also served as Ambassador to Colombia and Cuba. When he left his post in Argentina, there would be no new appointee as Ambassador, a further slap at the Fascist regime in the country.
Mr. Armour had been Ambassador to Argentina and Chile, and Minister to Canada and Haiti.
He next relates of a luncheon thrown for the Duke of Windsor at the Statler Hotel in Washington, which several Senators attended. Senator O'Mahoney of Wyoming presented the Duke a letter from an Episcopal priest in his home state, who had written that an Englishman had married an American woman and settled in Wyoming, but, when he wished to be naturalized, he ran into a roadblock because his wife wanted to press charges against him for assault. The priest had written that if he had not beaten his wife, he should have.
The Duke responded that he found the letter ironic, coming from a man of the Church, that he had been forced by the Church of England to abdicate his throne when he announced his intention to marry a woman who had been divorced. He found it especially amusing that the Church of England had been founded by Henry VIII, who had six wives.
Per our usual course, we did not look at this page before completing yesterday's note for you.
General Eisenhower had reprimanded Brigadier General Julius Slack for "intemperate and reprehensible actions and language" toward 22 enlisted men in an alleged rape case in which three men had been accused by the General of assaulting by force two German women in a German house. But, according to a private, General Slack had acted on the word of two fanatical German women, as bad as the German Army. General Slack had called the men "dirty bastards" two or three times. He told the three accused that he would see that they were hanged within 30 days.
When Senator Theodore Green of Rhode Island heard of the incident, he had asked Undersecretary of War Patterson to investigate, and General Eisenhower then obtained a full report. General Slack, with an efficient record in combat, was an artillery commander in General Patton's Third Army.
All 22 of the men were acquitted at a court martial.
Finally, Mr. Pearson informs that the Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Andrei Gromyko, was going to be transferred from Washington following the Potsdam Conference, for reasons unknown. He had been the Ambassador for two years since Maxim Litvinov, former Soviet Foreign Commissar, had been ordered to return to Moscow. It was speculated that Mr. Gromyko might become Assistant Commissar of Foreign Affairs. His successor was likely to be Alexander Kapustin of the Soviet Embassy in Washington.
Eventually, in 1957, Mr. Gromyko would become Foreign Commissar, a position he would retain until 1985 when he became Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, a position he held until 1988, less than a year before his death. He would also become, in April, 1946, the Soviet Union's representative to the United Nations, a post he would hold for two years.
Marquis Childs examines the preparations of CIO's Political Action Committee for the 1946 Congressional elections. PAC had been active in the 1944 election and intended to have an even greater impact on the 1946 elections, taking a survey of every Congressional district in the country, seeking to elect only those candidates approved by labor.
The job in 1946, however, would be tougher for PAC, as there was no central fulcrum, as with President Roosevelt, about which to rally support among labor. Moreover, traditional leadership in the Democratic Party had been hostile to PAC during the election cycle and that division was likely to be intensified in 1946.
Thus far, says Mr. Childs, Congress had undertaken little action toward implementing the full employment program recommended by President Truman or toward passage of the proposed increases in unemployment compensation to relieve out of work war workers. It had, however, passed a bill to provide business with five billion dollars in tax relief.
The programs proposed by the President were not just for labor but for the benefit of the entire economy as substantial unemployment could send the economy into a recession.
A letter to the editor provides wholehearted support for the view of the woman who had written earlier in the week suggesting that for any race to be regarded as deserving of a lower standard of living because of skin color was un-American.
Another letter writer presents a mini-play inspired by Senator Bilbo's "Dear Dago" salutation to Ms. Piccolo, as explained in the column.
As the letter writer sets it out, Amerigo Vespucci and Christophoro Columbo debate at some length whether Bilbo was an Italian surname. Eventually, they both decide to try to find the discoverers of Mississippi, De Soto and Verrazzano, to aid in the determination.
Well, as to The Bilbo
Framed Edition
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