Friday, August 10, 1945

The Charlotte News

Friday, August 10, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that, through Sweden and Switzerland, Japan had offered to surrender based on the terms of the Potsdam ultimatum of July 26, that is, unconditional surrender with the eight defining conditions attached, provided that Emperor Hirohito could retain his rights as a sovereign, a condition not mentioned by Potsdam one way or the other.

Among the conditions of Potsdam were complete disarmament, return of conquered territory, including Manchuria and Formosa to the Chinese, and Korea to Koreans, evacuation of Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and French Indo-China.

The report was relayed to Washington by the Swiss and Swedish officials between 1:00 and 2:00 p.m. EWT, a little over five hours after Tokyo had announced the peace tender in a broadcast by Domei at 7:30 a.m. EWT.

"[B]ut," the report adds, "the war went on."

Although celebrations had begun in London, Chungking, and on Okinawa, both the British and American Governments were still awaiting official confirmation of the peace tender and pondering whether to accept the counter-term re Hirohito remaining on his White Horse.

At the White House, President Truman held his first Cabinet meeting since returning from Potsdam, discussing whether to accept the Japanese offer. There was no indication from White House press secretary Charles G. Ross that the President was in communication with the Allied leaders.

At 10 Downing, Prime Minister Atlee simply stated that he was awaiting official word on the offer by Japan and that the British were in communication with each of the Allies.

The Russians still continued the fight in Manchuria, having advanced from the northwest a hundred miles deep into the Japanese-occupied territory. From the area of Lake Bor, the Russians drove into the foothills of the Khingan range, reaching the primary natural defenses of the Manchurian plains on the west. Hulan had been captured, an important junction on the Chinese Eastern Railway in northwestern Manchuria. The Soviets penetrated the northern border at two new points. The Russians had also invaded the Japanese southern half of Sakhalin Island along an 80-mile frontier, with bombardments at Rutka and Hunda.

The Office of War Information the previous month had assured the Japanese that, once the Potsdam terms were accepted, they could form their own government pursuant to the Atlantic Charter, but said nothing of the Emperor.

John Hightower reported that capitulation to the terms of surrender would take several days, just as it had at the end of the war in Europe.

On the inside page, Mr. Hightower reports on the President's speech the night before, addressed to the American people and to the Japanese, warning yet again that failure to surrender would result in a rain of atomic bombs which would wipe out every industrial center within Japan.

Whether the words were bluff or would have become reality, no one knows or would want to know. The President, recall, had played a game of poker with old friends in Independence, according to Drew Pearson on July 14, before departure for Potsdam.

He now had in his hand a Full House and a Royal Flush.

Meanwhile, airmen who had witnessed the Nagasaki blast of Fat Man from distances varying between 70 and 250 miles described it as too tremendous to believe. One pilot, from a distance of 250 miles, saw the bomb's "fiery yellow-orange ball" shoot into the sky 2,000 feet, followed by the column of smoke rising at least 20,000 feet.

Japan would not have wished to see the explosion of Fat Girl.

General Carl Spaatz stated that three and a half hours after the blast at 11:01 a.m. Nagasaki time, the devastation was still obscured by the mushroom cloud.

Tokyo had still made no direct comment on the blast or its effects on Nagasaki's population of 253,000.

The Strategic Air Forces of General Spaatz had hit Japan for the fifth consecutive day, this raid consisting of 70 B-29's striking the outer-Tokyo arsenal area.

On the editorial page, "Peace & Hirohito" observes that, while the initial news of the peace tender that morning by Japan had buoyed hopes of the end of the war, it had come with an unexpected and potentially fatal catch, the retention of the Emperor.

On the streets of Charlotte, there had been no air of excitement as had accompanied the initial news of V-E Day when it broke May 7 out of the premature story published by Edward Kennedy, one of the pool reporters at the signing by the Germans of the armistice. It supposes that the tepid reaction had been because the news was an anti-climax following news of the dropping of the two atomic bombs and the drive of the Russians into Manchuria.

The offered terms of surrender had divided the nation from the top down. Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew, former Ambassador to Japan, had led a movement to allow retention of Hirohito to act as an agent of mediation between the Allies and the Japanese people to avoid chaos. But on the other side of this pragmatic argument was the notion that Hirohito had stamped his imprimatur on Japanese war policy at each juncture in the manifestation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and that it was an absurdity therefore to hold him harmless for war crimes. He had not been a mere puppet to the military masters, and, even if he had, he therefore lacked the power to achieve order among the people after surrender.

So now the decision had to be made in Washington, Moscow, and London, as to whether to continue the war with these new developments in Allied strength, both from the air and on the ground in Manchuria, or accept the terms offered by the Japanese.

The editorial demurs to provide an answer, that if the experts could not agree, then neither could the column sort it out.

The Potsdam ultimatum of July 26 had not mentioned Hirohito, only that all authority and influence of those who had led Japan into its "career of conquest" had to go and that there would be "stern justice" for war criminals and removal of all obstacles to revival of democracy and its necessary incidents, freedom of speech, religion, and thought.

"Jake Newell" provides an obituary on the local Dry Republican churchman who was also an anti-tax crusader and advocate of removal of unfair competition on freight rates.

The state had liked him but could not follow his political course.

"Fresh Outa Words" suggests that the atomic bomb had caught the world off guard, including newspapermen responsible for setting headlines, who had, during the lead-up to V-E Day, expended their cache of verbs and adjectives of power and strength out of the printer's box.

The Fayetteville Observer ran the headline, "Hirohito Evaporates". The Orangeburg Times & Democrat, stated, on successive days, "Winged Furies Smash Japan" and "Monarch of Doom Crackles". A local headline had stated the bomb as "Enemic Charge".

The piece offers unused words as means to descry the new terror weapon and its ominous effects: dissilience, displosion, triturate, levigate, abrade, scranch, muller, attenuate, and cassation.

At least no one had come up with something like: "Enola Homo Turns Hiro to Dust While Boxcar Awaits Hitch".

But I know none, and therefore am no beast.

"The Navy's Knot" suggests that talk of a new Department of Armed Services to replace War and Navy would be fine for the Navy, criticism of the silly garb sailors wore would be acceptable, but not any attempt to change the Navy knot, its substitute for the mile and, specifically, nautical miles per hour.

It explains that, not only was the reference shorter than miles per hour, but more accurate than the mile in dealing with navigation of the globe where a minute is a constant on the latitudinal scale, equal to 6,080 feet, a nautical mile, compared to the statute mile of 5,280 feet. Longitudinal minutes are not a constant.

Without maps which could show accurately statute miles on the sea, the Navy, and air forces which flew over it, would stick by their knots.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin discussing a new committee in the Senate designed as the counterpart to the House Un-American Activities Committee, appearing, in the dim print, to wish instead that there would be a Senate committee to stress patriotic activity rather than duplicating the House effort to hunt down anti-patriots.

Drew Pearson examines some of the things to which agreement had been reached at Potsdam but which were omitted from the Declaration. One was the retention of Allied troops in occupied Europe through the coming winter; another was the setting up of democracy in the Balkans and Southern Europe. These issues had been highly contested among the Big Three and resulted in deadlock.

President Truman had wanted to withdraw troops from Europe, except Germany, before winter, but Churchill had been opposed and so had Stalin, the latter giving a chillier reception to the notion than the former. But President Truman had expressed the belief that removing troops from the Balkans, prime among which were the Russians in Rumania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, and the British in Greece and to a degree in Yugoslavia, would ease tensions between East and West.

Mr. Churchill, did, however, after considerable prodding by the President, agree to withdraw British troops from Italy during the winter.

Most of the Potsdam agreement was resolved while Churchill remained at the conference, prior to July 26 when the conference adjourned so that he and Clement Atlee could return to London to obtain the results of the July 5 vote. The new Prime Minister, Mr. Atlee, had simply lent his imprimatur to all of the previous work, at which he had been present in its formulation, at the invitation of Prime Minister Churchill. Mr. Atlee did, however, insist that the declaration re Spain and Franco be strengthened.

In the end, the Balkans were left unresolved. Mr. Pearson remarks that he had, in his column of July 20, reported that Premier Stalin in May had proposed Big Three recognition of Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Finland, but President Truman had brooked exception to all save Finland, as an acceptable government had been established there, but not in the other three.

In the end, Italy was the only occupied country which emerged from Potsdam in a better position. But Italy and the other countries of the Balkans and Southern Europe would await final resolution, if possible, at the foreign ministers' conference in London, set to begin September 1.

Mr. Pearson next turns to miscellany, including the report that Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson would shortly become Solicitor General in the Justice Department, a job he had desired when FDR had appointed him in 1933 as Undersecretary of the Treasury. Mr. Pearson thinks he would perform well as Solicitor General. "Sometimes it takes a long time for a man to find his groove."

Instead, in fact, he became Undersecretary of State, replacing Joseph Grew.

The column next points out that Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan had obtained his idea for a San Francisco-type peace conference between labor and management from Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut, who had told Senator Vandenberg that he believed such a conference would be more effective than the Ball-Burton-Hatch bill, B2H1, as more legislation would not bring about more integration.

He also points out that Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo's proposal to send all blacks back to Africa, consistent with the Marcus Garvey doctrine, had not been formulated as a bill presently pending before Congress, though once Senator Bilbo had proposed it in the form of an amendment, allowing also whites to go to Africa, which he subsequently withdrew. Mr. Pearson wonders parenthetically whether going to Africa should be deemed a privilege for whites.

Marquis Childs discusses a meeting between Judge Lewis Schwellenbach, the new Secretary of Labor, and Senator Vandenberg regarding the hostility between labor and ownership, union and management and Senator Vandenberg's proposal had for a conference of top men of labor and capital and management, which Secretary Schwellenbach approved.

The new Secretary had recently been looking at the compulsory arbitration law in Australia and it ineffectiveness, resulting in more strikes having occurred in proportion to the labor force than the United States had suffered.

He also informed Senator Vandenberg of an attempt he had made, at the request of a labor leader, to call a conference of the heads of just two or three large companies, who had not responded to the attempt by the labor leader, himself, to call the conference. But he found that there were rival unions with majorities in some of the plants of the companies. And when he imparted that determination to the labor leader, he was told that, in that event, the union would attend. Secretary Schwellenbach then called off the conference.

Recently, William Green, AFL leader, had accused CIO of being rife with Communists.

But Senator Vandenberg's concerns were not merely the trouble between labor and management and the intra-labor disputes, but rather extended to other areas of tension in the labor movement. In Detroit, issues of racial tension had developed since the summer of 1943 when there had been riots. There were also issues of regional tension, and inter-boss rivalries. Both such sets of chafing had come from the movement of vast numbers of people seeking war work from the South into the Motor City.

All of these problems had been irritated by the war, shortages, rising costs of living, relatives in battle, and the labor grievances pent up by war restrictions on collective bargaining. These tensions had overflowed in violence and riots.

Mr. Childs concludes that Senator Vandenberg's proposal for such a conference to ameliorate those tensions was a sound one.

The editors compile a piece on Potsdam and the Big Three leaders, plus Secretary of State James Byrnes, focusing on the latter. Mr. Byrnes might have been President at this point, as his chances for obtaining the vice-presidential nomination the previous summer in Chicago had been better than those of Harry Truman. But Sidney Hillman of the CIO PAC had nixed Mr. Byrnes as the nominee based on his alleged anti-labor stands. But his real problem had been that he was from South Carolina and could not deliver any votes from the Solid South which were not safely already secured for the Democrats and FDR.

S. H. Hobbs, Jr., writing in The UNC News Letter, tells that income and profits for farmers in 1944 had been the highest in history for North Carolina, cash income from crops, livestock, and subsidies coming to 628 million dollars. In 1943, the figure, by contrast, had been 497 million, and about 428 million in 1942.

Crops represented the bulk of the money, 504 million, an increase of 122 million over the previous year, while livestock was at 107 million, and subsides, 16 million. Most of the increase in crop income had come from tobacco which had fetched 316 million dollars during the year.

North Carolina, despite a banner year in livestock income, the highest in the history of the state, ranked forty-fifth in the category, only ahead of Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi.

Per-farm income placed the state 38th in the nation, a statistic significant as it determined standard of living on farms. North Carolina, however, was third among the states in number of farms and second in farm population. About 20 percent of the state was under cultivation in crops, indicating that North Carolina's average farm was among the smallest in the nation, as the state ranked 28th in area. Such explained the rank of the state as 38th in per-farm income. The rank would have been lower, he informs, had it not been for the high tobacco yield.

Well, these farm statistics are so effervescingly exciting, quite so as the evanescences of the augments, that we shall let you finish it on your own. But don't do what Bogie did.

As to the "Side Glances": Pirandello played his white cello, lonely in the meadow, along with fellos turning mildly, splaying the praise braying from grayed mare flames, strayed to the frames of Pleistocene courtiers fraying the hems of the grim shambling shorters in their pain.

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