The Charlotte News
Thursday, August 16, 1945
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that General MacArthur had stated that the Japanese had indicated through the Emperor that because of "scarcity of time", they could not send an emissary to Manila to meet with the General on Saturday as he had demanded. The order to cease hostilities had been issued by the Japanese to their troops but the Emperor stated that it would take two to twelve days to reach all points of the extended lines. He stated that six days would be required to make the order effective in China, eight days in Bougainville, and twelve in New Guinea and the Philippines—28 years, seven months in at least one part of Luzon.
The ceasefire order, effective at 3:00 a.m. EWT, was issued only following General MacArthur's criticism of the Japanese delay in same.
Observers believed that the delay was the result of internal turmoil in Japan and the desire to save as much face as possible.
The message from the Emperor also claimed that the Japanese did not understand the type of plane the General insisted be used for transport of the emissary to Ie Jima and requested that the message be repeated. It had been specified the previous day as a Zero, Model 22, L2, D3, painted white with green crosses on the fuselage and wings, visible for 500 yards.
Members of the royal family were to be sent to the fronts, according to the Emperor, to insure that the order of ceasefire was obeyed.
A deadline had been set for receiving details on the envoy's flight, by 5:00 p.m. this date EWT, and that it must contain notification six hours in advance of the planned flight to Ie Jima, from whence the Americans would fly the envoy to Manila.
The Emperor expressed embarrassment at the delay.
General MacArthur had sent a reply to the Emperor but its contents were not known.
He may have taken a leaf from General Patton's handbook on international etiquette. We shall have to wait and find out what was said. It is probably a good thing that General Patton had been assigned to duties in Versailles rather than his requested duty in the Pacific. Otherwise, a couple of more atom bombs might have found new targets.
Meanwhile, carrier planes of Admiral Halsey's Third Fleet were returning from their canceled bombing runs on the Tokyo area on Wednesday morning when, between Atsugi field and Tokyo, after just having received word of the acceptance by Tokyo of the surrender, they encountered the largest group of enemy interceptors in weeks, and had to shoot down 26, bringing the number to 1,175 enemy planes destroyed or damaged in the previous four days of action since Japan had first proposed surrender on Friday. Nine other enemy planes had been shot down during the day. This action had occurred Tuesday night, Washington time, just after the 7:00 p.m. announcement by the President.
The pilots did not express happiness over having fired what appeared to be the last shots of the war as several of the pilots failed to return from this last air battle with some 50 enemy planes.
Parenthetically, we note that Lee Oswald, as a young Marine private, 17 years old, was transferred from the El Toro, California, Marine Air Corps Station to the Atsugi Naval Air Base in September, 1957. Atsugi at the time, having been taken over as the largest American air base in the Pacific after the war, was then being established as the central Far Eastern base for U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union by the joint CIA and Air Force operations, codenamed Aquatone for the CIA flights and Oilstone for the Air Force flights. In late July, 1957, the U-2 project was recommended for continuance, with a view to overflights in 1958 from Atsugi, by CIA Director Allen Dulles to the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Thomas White. The first overflight of the Soviet Union had occurred on July 4, 1956 from Wiesbaden in Germany. The U-2 had been rejected by the Air Force when first proposed, but was recommended to Mr. Dulles and the CIA by Edwin Land of the Polaroid-Land Camera Co., who served on the Air Force review panel for the U-2 and was a photographic reconnaissance advisor to the military and President Eisenhower during the 1950's. Eventually, the U-2 received the support of the Administration, was funded by Congress, and developed for test flights at Groom Lake in Nevada in 1955.
Coincidences? You tell us, Ms. Moorman.
Admiral Nimitz disclosed that, on Monday, a naval auxiliary vessel had been damaged at Okinawa, claiming 15 lives, one missing, and 14 wounded.
Japanese resistance in Eastern Burma continued as leaflets were dropped over Moulmein by the Allies informing of the surrender. One C-47 dropping leaflets was fired upon by the Japanese.
In Nanking, the puppet Government dominated by the Japanese dissolved.
Emperor Hirohito appointed Royal General Prince Naruhiko Higashi-Kuni as the new Premier replacing Kantaro Suzuki. The Prince became the first member of the royal family in charge of the Government.
In London, Winston Churchill addressed Commons, telling the members that the atomic bomb had been the reason for Japan's quick surrender. He further stated that it had likely saved a million American and 250,000 British lives in obviating the necessity to invade Japan by land. He further indicated, confirming Drew Pearson's point a couple of days earlier, that Premier Stalin had given his word earlier that, three months following the German surrender, Russia would enter the war, occurring therefore right on time on August 8.
Mr. Pearson had stated that general assurances of Russia's entry to the Pacific war at conclusion of the European war had been provided in late November, 1943 at Tehran, and a more specific agreement at Yalta in February.
Mr. Churchill disclosed that he and President Truman had made elaborate plans for "great battles and landings" in Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and in the homeland of Japan. He stated that he and the President had agreed to deploy the atomic bomb. To those who had asserted that the bomb should never have been used, he stated that six years of total war had convinced most people that the Germans and Japanese would have used such a weapon had they first discovered it, and done so "with the utmost alacrity". He expressed surprise that "worthy people" had adopted such a contrarian view freighted as it was with tacit assent to sacrifice of potentially huge numbers of American and British lives to avoid use of this weapon.
Indeed, the use by Hitler of his aimless rocket-bombs on primarily civilian populations confirmed the former Prime Minister's estimate of the Nazi mentality. The attack at Pearl Harbor in stealth by the Japanese established their willingness to use any weapon at their disposal, including violation of all previously accepted rules of war.
It was disclosed by Colonel Franklin Mathias, director of the nuclear facility at Richland, Wash., that more atomic bombs were in the arsenal of the United States and could have been used had Japan delayed much longer its acceptance of the surrender. He stated that production of bombs continued and would not cease until the facility was so ordered.
President Truman issued a statement urging the 79th Congress to get busy on reconversion plans and stated his intention to call a conference between capital and labor. He assured that the War Labor Board would continue in existence as long as it was needed.
The President also issued a proclamation declaring Sunday to be a national day of prayer.
The President's declared two-day holiday for Federal employees on Tuesday night had been extended pervasively in some states to all stores, while in others, most businesses remained open, including banks. In Tennessee, stores were closed in two major cities and open in two others.
In a press conference, the President had stated that he did not believe the Japanese would ever have the opportunity for revenge for use of the atomic bomb, as atomic energy, he predicted, would be quickly put to use for peaceful purposes. The question had arisen in the context of repeated Japanese radio broadcasts which appeared to assume some future plan to wage further war. Mr. Truman dismissed this talk as that of any defeated people. He stated that the future of the three plants which had developed the atomic bomb, at Hanford, Wash., Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Los Alamos, N.M., would be up to the Congress. He stated that he had urged Congress to develop a commission for control and production of atomic energy, that which would become the Atomic Energy Commission the following year.
The President wore a tan summer suit and a
It was expected that Congress would slash taxes before Christmas, causing millions likely not to owe any tax at all on 1946 income.
In New York, an unidentified man jumped from the 86th floor observatory of the Empire State Building and fell all the way to the ground, 1,000 feet, the furthest anyone had ever fallen in New York—even those on the Bowery. Others had leaped from higher floors in the building, but had landed on setbacks.
The crash into the building of the B-25 on July 30 had hit just seven floors below, on the 79th floor.
On the editorial page, "Just Like That" comments on the quick release of gas rationing and manpower controls at the news of the peace. Price and wage controls had to remain in place to prevent runaway inflation. But, it hopes, they, too, would be gone in a flash when their time would come.
"Advance Priming" wonders whether the country was willing to pay out the proposed unemployment compensation recommended by the President, $25 per week for up to 26 weeks, for perhaps ten million unemployed war workers in the ensuing six months. Several Southern states, such as North Carolina, provided average weekly wages below this proposed stipend, thus serving as a disincentive to work if passed. Moreover, many of the workers who would be laid off had chosen temporary work at higher wages.
Nevertheless, with high unemployment looming, steps had to be taken to prevent an economic downturn. Sidney Hillman of the CIO proposed a 65-cent minimum wage, a proposed increase from 40 cents. But as that would cut into profits under price controls, it was not a good solution to encourage full employment.
"Redder & Redder" states that Hollington Tong, China's Minister of Information, was not wary of potential civil strife in the country. But Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was not so certain. He was maintaining a cautious eye on the Communists in the North, who had already disarmed Japanese troops and were threatening to take possession of large stores of enemy munitions in the coastal cities.
The Red Chinese had obtained new prestige when the Soviets had entered the war in Manchuria and now they looked toward Peiping, Tientsin, and Shanghai as possible acquisitions. They were also demanding to be represented at the peace table and participate in the occupation of Japan.
It could take an American landing force to effectuate the surrender of the Japanese to Chiang's Government, actually now headed by his brother-in-law T. V. Soong, rather than to the Communists. The Government contended that the Japanese were seeking to produce disunity in the country by surrendering to the Communists. But the Communists contended that Chiang was seeking to cause civil strife by ordering the Red Chinese not to take further independent action.
A book published in the spring by Harrison Forman, Report from Red China, had informed that the Red Chinese, the fiercest fighting forces in China, considered themselves wholly independent of the Central Government and the dominant force in the North.
So, it appeared that Chiang might have to request American assistance to keep the territory which had been occupied by the Japanese from falling into the hands of the Northern Communists, especially now given the presence in Manchuria of the Russian Army.
The Cold War was now starting in the Far East as well as in Eastern Europe.
Did Stalin outwit President Truman with his assurance of participation in the Pacific war at the last minute after the bomb had dropped on Hiroshima? If one believes the assertion of Hirohito, himself, it was the pair of bombs and not the presence of the Russians which had led directly to the surrender.
Nevertheless, President Truman, while at Potsdam, could not be absolutely certain, despite the positive results at Trinity on July 16, that the bomb would work, or that it would lead to Tokyo's surrender. Thus, continuing this commitment of Stalin, first made at Tehran in late 1943 and then finally assured at Yalta with FDR the previous February, was not only prudent but virtually inescapable, lest the President appear reckless with American lives. Had the bombs not worked or not led to surrender, the Japanese might have sought exit from the home islands, as was thought by many military observers, into Manchuria, replete with its raw materials and substantial industry. The Russian presence there would eliminate that as an alternative, thus speeding surrender.
So, the President made the only practical decision he could at that time, even if it unwittingly helped create the situation which ultimately led to the Korean War and Vietnam. But that is likely applying the principle of post hoc, ergo propter hoc to the situation, leaving out in the process too many intervening events which in fact led to those wars, prime among which was the old suspicions and prejudices of too many Americans of the day to anything which smacked of Communism, the word itself having become as anathema on the lips of many, if not most people, in middle America by 1950.
In any event, it would be only another nine days, on August 25, when an unknown American Baptist missionary and intelligence officer, John Birch, would be killed in Northern China by the Communists, setting him in place as a martyr to the extreme rightwing in the United States.
They were not sure what he had done, but he was their hero just as, to the Japanese, was the Sun.
"Accountability" finds the taxicab ordinance of the city in need of tightening here and loosening there. A probationary period of 90 days had been proposed for any applicant for a license previously convicted of a felony, but maintaining a clean record for two years. The proposal, it finds, was questionable, but former convicts deserved a chance if they had maintained a clean record for a given period of time. Indeed, such a person, it suggests, might be more trustworthy than an unreformed misdemeanant convicted of serious driving offenses.
Otherwise, the taxicab companies should be subject to strict enforcement of the laws to insure the safety of passengers.
The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Clyde Doyle of California urging his colleagues during the summer recess to speak in their districts only on things of which they knew to be fact and not base statements, as too often he heard on the floor of the House, on mere hearsay and rumor. Such caused the people to believe things which were not necessarily true.
Drew Pearson warns that, with the State Department having made the decision to work with and through the Emperor, it should be mindful not to be fooled by him and the so-called moderates of Japan, as had been Ambassador Joseph Grew prior to Pearl Harbor. Mr. Grew had assured right up to the time of the attack that Japan did not wish war.
Taking away Japan's colonies and raw materials with which to build war industries was only part of the problem. The rest was in changing the entire outlook of Japan to one of democracy and to encourage its people to give up Shintoism and their ingrained belief from it that Japan was destined to rule the world. Shintoism revolved around the person of the Emperor as the divine earthly being.
While Hirohito might be as Mr. Grew maintained, a moderate, the problem lay in the underlying system which he represented. That system taught that war and conquest were essential parts of life.
Mr. Pearson states that Lt. Andrew Roth had provided him with a wealth of material on Japan and how the moderates had fooled Mr. Grew. His book on the subject, Dilemma in Japan, had not seen print because he was arrested for allegedly pilfering Government documents to compile this book. Mr. Pearson urges its reading should it finally see the light of day.
It was imperative, he says, that American leaders bear in mind that Hirohito was captive to the will of the five big business families in Japan, which, in turn, had promoted the war with China, and was the principal of a State which preached war. Mr. Grew had not realized these crucial points in 1941, and still had not come to grips with the ideas.
Mr. Grew had urged the continuation of the policy of sending oil and scrap iron to Japan and had urged that General Tojo would resign as Premier should the ongoing diplomatic talks with Secretary of State Hull not be productive of an amicable resolution of the basic problem, the insistence by the United States that Japan pull out of Manchuria and French Indo-China, the latter having been occupied in late July, 1941, then causing the Government finally to cut off oil and scrap iron to Japan.
Six weeks after Mr. Grew had reported these opinions to the President in October, 1941, the Japanese attacked, an attack which had been planned since the previous December and which had been actively engaged, as part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, since the fateful July 2, 1941 meeting of the Japanese High Command with the Emperor, at which the decision was made to put the plan of aggression in the South Pacific into action.
Mr. Pearson suggests that Mr. Grew's optimism at that critical juncture may have led the United States to be less alert to possible attack. Despite that fact, former Secretary of State Stettinius had, in December, 1944, selected Mr. Grew to be his Undersecretary.
Some diplomats, Mr. Pearson reports, had observed that Mr. Grew's statements in support of retention of Hirohito had led to the Japanese making the demand, given Mr. Grew's important role in the State Department.
To woo Japan from a warring mentality would be difficult, opines Mr. Pearson, with the Emperor still on the throne. Yet, he was not so sacrosanct to Japan as believed by Mr. Grew. There had been an assassination attempt at one point on Hirohito and violent rebellion against his grandfather, Emperor Meiji. The Mayor of Tokyo, Yujio Ozakai, had made a speech against the Emperor during the war and was sentenced in consequence to two years in jail; but the sentence had never been imposed for the fact that the people supported the position of Mayor Ozakai. He had been elected to the Diet in 1942.
Mr. Pearson posits that the proper strategy of U.S. officials would be to reduce the standing of the Emperor with the Japanese people.
Mr. Pearson, on this occasion, had received apparently some bad information, completely inconsistent with the 1943 White Book, released by the State Department and publicly disseminated, about which, if memory serves, Mr. Pearson made comment in one of his columns, specifically with regard to the Grew memorandum to the State Department of January 27, 1941, reporting that several sources, including at least one Japanese source, who turned out to be a maid, had informed a member of the Embassy that an attack was being planned against Pearl Harbor, the memorandum then having been ignored by the State Department as unreliable information, or likely impracticably "fantastic", as Mr. Grew, himself, appeared to find the accounts. Nevertheless, he dutifully saw fit to report the rumors.
Mr. Grew, also, on November 3, 1941, reported to the State Department that war appeared "inevitable" with Japan, completely opposite to the opinion ascribed to him in this piece by Mr. Pearson.
The real issue which motivated some carelessly erroneous statements against former advice by Mr. Grew apparently was the great feeling among many columnists and journalists who had covered the war, including Mr. Pearson, that, regardless of Hirohito's use to the Allies as a kind of mediator with the Japanese people, it would be a great mistake to enable him to continue on the throne of Japan and not treat him as a war criminal, just as guilty as Hitler and Mussolini. Assistant Secretary Dean Acheson, about to succeed as Undersecretary, was the leading proponent of the State Department group which believed that Hirohito should not be allowed to remain on the throne.
This view probably, on balance, with 20-20 hindsight in store, was the wiser approach. But, since the contrary was untested with Japan, and the treatment of Germany as a divided and occupied land with the consequent problems being sui generis to Germany and its proximity to Russia, the premise necessarily can reside only in the realm of the hypothetical. We posit that not all went quite as rosy as we might think with Hirohito on the throne of Japan, along with his Empress, until they both died not so long ago. We suggest that he was not the humble, innocently duped gent on the White Horse, the image of which his stealthy handlers went to great lengths to promote and preserve.
So, perhaps there was some method in the slightly askew facts presented by Mr. Pearson, appearing slanted somewhat against Mr. Grew.
The editors provide a report on the proposal by the CIO to the Congress to increase basic wage rates by 20 percent, raise the statutory minimum wage from 40 cents to 65 cents per hour, and provide for emergency unemployment compensation. Senator Alben Barkley, Majority Leader, had already indicated that an emergency bill to provide unemployment compensation would be introduced shortly after the Congress reconvened September 5. The President had requested the measure eleven weeks earlier, on May 28. President Roosevelt had also requested such legislation.
Three million workers employed in Federally-operated war plants and arsenals were not covered by unemployment compensation.
Both a House bill and Senate bill had already been introduced on unemployment compensation, but, while the Senate bill provided the requested liberal terms, the House bill had provided the compensation only on a time-delayed basis. Typically, such measures originated in the House.
Harry Golden writes his first piece on each of eight famous trials. The first he examines is that of
In the wake of this triumph, the Dauphin of France was escorted by Joan to Versailles, where he was crowned King Charles VII, enabling France to take its position again as a power.
Joan then took part in the battles to recapture Leon, Soissons, Compeigne, and was in the process of storming Paris when, on May 24, 1430, she was wounded and taken prisoner by some Burgundian soldiers who, in return for money, then surrendered her to the British.
She was taken to Rouen and, by order of Henry VI, turned over to the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Beauvais who placed her before the Inquisition which charged her with heresy.
At her subsequent trial, she asserted that the voices from which she had claimed to receive guidance during the battles, as she had previously asserted, were those of St. Michael and St. Catherine.
That she received a trial at all, points out Mr. Golden, was remarkable for the time, and stood as testimony to Joan's reputation among the people. Her judges were twelve of the most influential leaders of the Church and State in the country.
The judges demanded that Joan recant her claims of hearing voices and seeing visions, but she refused, even in the face of threats of being burned at the stake. When asked whether she considered herself to be in a state of grace, she had replied that if she was not, she beseeched God to put her there, and if she was, then she hoped that he would maintain her in that state.
On May 24, 1431, she was convicted of heresy and burned at the stake in the marketplace of Rouen. She died with a prayer on her lips as a martyr, still refusing to recant, even in the face of continued pleas by the Bishop of Beauvais.
A letter writer unabashedly votes to hang the Emperor. Had Hitler been caught alive, had Mussolini been caught alive, inevitably, he asserts, and correctly, they would have been tried as war criminals and hanged. Thus, he wonders, why Hirohito should receive a pass when he had led the forces which had attacked Pearl Harbor.
It was indeed a good question which Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew, who had been the chief proponent of saving Hirohito as a puppet through whom the Allies could control the Japanese people and prevent what he thought would otherwise be chaos, could best answer.
Another letter writer compliments Reed Surratt for a piece appearing in the previous Saturday's News, in which he had urged resolution of differences at home peacefully, to honor the international peace achieved at such a high price in blood.
Unfortunately, the ensuing 25 years or so would not be so peaceful domestically. Indeed, it would be a period characterized by domestic strife with little competition since the Civil War. The country kicked, yelled, and chafed at one another in its growing pains regarding social change, both between black and white and between youth and their elders, between Hawks and Doves, between labor and management, labor and Congress, and between some outspoken politically avaricious members of Congress and those labeled by them as inimical to the American way of life, as they defined it, antithetical to the Constitution or not.
The Fifties and Sixties, contrary to many popular assumptions, was not a period of Happy Days in the first of those two decades and orgiastic drug-induced haze in the latter. It was instead a period of continuing and profound social change in the country and throughout the world and the obstructionist-obscurantist resistance to that change by entrenched, politically powerful forces seeking to maintain the status quo. The popular conceptions are merely masks of escapism, popularized in the culture by media, which largely avert the inattentive or inexperienced eyes from the reality that was lived in those years by most people, much of which was largely mundane, vicariously viewing through the gauze of television news the tumult of the outside world, only occasionally actually reaching out of the television into the midst of a given community and an individual's experience to afford firsthand observation of the strife and crisis. Yet, such strife and crisis did occur at one or more times during those 25 years following the war in most communities with large populations. And, occasionally, it reached also into the smaller towns and hamlets of the country.
A third letter writer, who regularly wrote from Shelby predicting economic doom, sends another caveat, saying that a severe national post-war depression would occur and last three years, that its harbinger would come from the Federal Reserve Board, for which the reader should remain attentive.
He may have been right, but about 60 years ahead of schedule.
Incidentally, as the newspaper informed yesterday, the Federal Reserve system was established in 1914.
Also, while we did not realize it, we actually did manage to obtain for you a portion of the solution of yesterday's crossword puzzle, which appears in the right lower corner of the page, adjacent to the editorial page, partially visible this date. So, if you are still working on it, try not to
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