The Charlotte News
Monday, August 27, 1945
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the battleship Missouri, on which the signing of the formal surrender by Japan would take place on the following Sunday, entered Sagami Bay with the Third Fleet ships and ships of the British Navy, from which the first troops, from the Eighth Army, would land Saturday. The ships anchored at 1:30 p.m. local time, midnight EWT. Additional landings would occur at Yokohama and Tateyamahojo, also on Tokyo Bay. The airborne landings at Atsugi airfield and Yokosuka would begin Thursday.
The following day, technicians and equipment would be sent from Okinawa to Atsugi to prepare the way for the airborne landings. It would take ten hours for the transports of the Air Transport Command to make the 2,000-mile roundtrip to Tokyo, longer for the C-47's of the 317th Troop Carrier Command.
Two Japanese emissaries came aboard the Missouri and were turned over to Admiral Robert B. Carney, who had been, since early in the Solomons campaign, head of the "dirty tricks" campaign strategy against the Japanese Navy and Air Force.
Parenthetically, whether Lt. (j.g.) Mitchell served under Admiral Carney's command in his PT-boat will require further research. In any event, he commanded the PT-boat unit of which Lt. (j.g.) John F. Kennedy was a member.
The two emissaries informed Admiral Carney of the continuing efforts to clear mines from Tokyo and Sagami Bays. They were informed that any violence or resistance by the Japanese would be considered mutinous and put down by force, that coastal guns had to be marked by white flags, and all guns demilitarized with ordnance locked in armories, as well as all ships de-camouflaged. All naval and other Japanese military personnel, other than required forces to maintain facilities, would have to be withdrawn by 4:00 a.m. Wednesday.
A schedule of the surrender and entry of occupation forces is presented on the page.
On northern Luzon, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the "Tiger of Malaya", holed up in his hideout, began negotiations with the American forces for surrender of his troops. He had received orders on August 20 from Tokyo to cease fighting and had ordered his troops to do so. He was apologetic that he had not been made aware earlier of the surrender and had continued to have his forces resist.
A captured American flier, Captain Dan Shaw, held for eleven days without divulging information, was released by Yamashita with the advice that he intended to surrender.
The late show of humility, however, would do General Yamashita little good, as the sometime poet would be tried as a war criminal, convicted, and executed in February.
W. H. Lawrence of The New York Times descried, from his firsthand observations after flying over Nagasaki, the vast devastation of the city. One could see no living thing on either side of the Urakami River, the area in which the bomb damage was concentrated. No longer did Nagasaki appear as a sea of roofs, as it had prior to the bombing. They were all gone. Only foundations remained. About 50 percent of the city had been wiped out. Mr. Lawrence stated that he had seen the aftermath of the sieges of Warsaw and Stalingrad but had seen nothing to equal the eradication of Nagasaki.
A report recounts the many battles of the carrier U.S.S. Enterprise since the early days of the Pacific war, the only U.S. carrier which had survived the early action during 1942. It had been damaged fifteen times, primarily in the fighting in the Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz Islands, and reported by the Japanese as sunk six times. It had been struck by a kamikaze plane on May 14, killing 13 and injuring another 67 men, buckling the flight deck. Onboard at the time, as it acted to protect the troops on Okinawa, was Vice-Admiral Marc Mitscher, commander of Task Force 58. The ship had also been repeatedly attacked off Okinawa in March.
The ship or its planes had been responsible for shooting down 911 Japanese planes and sinking 71 enemy ships while damaging another 192. Admiral Halsey had dubbed it the "Galloping Ghost of the Oahu Coast", having been the flagship of the Admiral's task force at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, fortuitously at sea on December 7, returning from a mission to Wake Island.
The President urged Congress to allow the continued induction of men between 18 and 25 into the armed forces to supply the occupation forces of the Far East and warned against declaring prematurely the emergency past.
In Greenwich, Conn., a soldier whose car struck and killed a woman pedestrian on July 15 was fined $30 and released by the coroner after being charged with vehicular manslaughter. He had been kissing his girlfriend at the time of the accident. In issuing a light sentence, the coroner took into account the fact that the soldier had voluntarily returned for the trial from his military camp in Texas.
The large hurricane, which had been reported on Saturday as heading for Texas and Louisiana, had hit San Antonio Bay at Sea Drift near Port O'Connor packing winds between 100 and 135 mph. Heavy winds had also hit in the area of Aransas and Corpus Christi, 60 miles to the southwest. The hurricane's track continued to point toward the Houston-Galveston area.
In addition to toasters, waffle irons, washing machines, ranges, and refrigerators to begin production again during the fall, the OPA added that vacuum cleaners would be "fairly plentiful" by Christmas, while the other appliances would remain fairly scarce until spring.
No doubt, in millions of homes across America at Christmas, 1945, would appear, therefore, with bright bows adorning them under the trees, millions and millions of shiny new vacuum cleaners, along, perhaps, with a toaster here and there for the wheat toast which the wife, no doubt, upon seeing the vacuum, would serve the beneficent husband as a thank you message.
There would be plenty of women's and children's dresses, slips, blouses, nightgowns, panties, and pajamas by November. Men's suits would be less plentiful, however, as returning soldiers would cause supplies to dwindle quickly.
Be wary of the well-dressed men in new suits and black hats who appear to be watching too intently while sitting in the parks
On the editorial page, "Victorious Death" suggests that Americans should not greet the news of masses of Japanese committing suicide before the Imperial Palace as a good thing as it would only set up new national martyrs and make Japan harder of orientation toward a new, anti-militaristic way of life.
It had always been difficult for the West to understand Japanese mentality and its dependence on saving face, even to the point of suicide. The practice was wedded to the notion of worship of the Emperor as a deity, with the Japanese posited in that mindset as a race of superior beings.
Bearing that in mind, it concludes that the latest round of hara-kiri in the wake of defeat would do the American occupation forces no good in the long run.
"Going Home" suggests that musicians were people about whom one could not tell, living in a world wherein communication with their higher plane of being was difficult. Fabien Sevitsky, the conductor, for instance, had proposed at one point a ban on
Arturo Toscanini
He had adamantly asserted that he would never return to Italy as long as the monarchy continued. With the House of Savoy now on the way out, his wish to return to a new republic could soon be fulfilled. And, with that in mind, he had even agreed to appear in Milan at La Scala to open the opera season with a selection by Verdi
If the Maestro was satisfied with the direction of Italy nearly two years after its surrender to the Allies, then it was likely a safe bet that things were going well.
"Faith Restored" discusses the longest criminal trial ever held in North Carolina to that point, that resulting in the conviction of East Carolina Teachers College former president Dr. Leon Meadows, charged with embezzlement and misappropriation of college funds for his own personal use. The State had spent $75,000 to try the case. The expenditure was necessary to restore public confidence in public officials.
Initially, the trustees of the college had cleared Dr. Meadows of wrongdoing, indicating that the problem had been the result of sloppy methods of accounting.
With his conviction, the people of the state likely felt relief and satisfaction that the matter had finally received justice.
"A Nomination" suggests that it was no military secret that the State Hospitals were all but without doctors during the war because of the depletion of medical personnel to serve in the armed forces. Most of the staff during the war had been elderly men, with physicians and psychiatrists in short supply. The veterans would begin to re-supply these hospitals with personnel who had received plentiful experience during the war.
In the meantime, the piece recommends to the Board a physician who had been once on the staff of the Goldsboro Hospital and was now the Union County Health Officer.
"Man of Dignity" says that the editors liked "old Jim Hendrix, and if we never hear of him again we'll keep on liking him." Jim Hendrix was a tenant farmer from down about Lepanto, Arkansas, who had gone to Washington to see his son awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by the President.
He and his family had been housed at the Willard Hotel. But, when he had gone to the dining room for dinner, he was refused service for the lack of a coat and tie.
This guy
Anyway, without protest, Mr. Hendrix took his family to a cafeteria.
When the Willard management discovered what had taken place and who Mr. Hendrix was, it profusely apologized.
So, he and his family returned to the dining room, and Mr. Hendrix still wore no coat or tie, dressed in his shirt sleeves, just as back home when he went out to dinner.
Says the piece, "We're hisn. And we'd just as soon more young heroes would turn up fathers like that."
The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire telling Senator Robert Taft of Ohio that there had been highly paid lobbyists at Bretton Woods who had been sent to sabotage the proposed agreement during the summer of 1944.
Senator Taft challenged, asked for a record of who had informed Senator Tobey of that information.
Senator Tobey stated that it had come from prominent publicists who admitted having been charged with the task to kill the proposal. He had asserted the charge at his opening address to the Democratic convention in July 1944.
Senator Taft responded that Americans had the right to combine, as the CIO or PAC or any other special interest group, and lobby for a position. He objected, however, to the Government using taxpayer money to print and disseminate materials to the public which favored a particular position, such as Bretton Woods, that the Government was spending some 300 million dollars on its own publicity agents, out of the seeds which had been used to grow the war propaganda machine.
Sgt. Max Novack, a column writer for Yank, the Army weekly, substitutes for Drew Pearson, commenting on the many suggestions by pundits as to what the returning veteran would want, some hitting the mark, some missing it altogether. Most of it, however, had appeared to the veteran as so much hogwash.
The belief that the returning young veteran who had seen the world and seen battle would be still a naive boy at heart, that all he would want was a slice of homemade blueberry pie a la mode, was one of the major peeves. In fact, what he desired was to be able to return to civilian life, able to make his own decisions, not placed in a special category. He wanted a job, but realized that others would need jobs also. He was not desirous of special economic privileges.
Some G.I.'s favored the prospect of a bonus, but others did not, eschewing it as a cash handout. The latter preferred job security with organized job planning and the assurance that future war would be averted through the United Nations.
The revisions to veterans' benefits via the G. I. Bill had generally met with approval, though some improvements of the bill were in order.
The veterans were in support of the end to racial and religious intolerance, as they had learned to live in harmony with men of other races and religions during the war.
They also believed that better education was in order to help prevent a future war, and, to that end, that standard curricula should henceforth include international affairs, history, and political government studies. Many G.I.'s wanted compulsory education through high school, slum clearance, low-cost housing projects, and universal or group hospital and medical care.
The veterans looked to the White House and Capitol Hill for leadership in these various areas before looking homeward to their local communities.
More than anything, the veteran did not wish to be treated as a "strange or curious being who is slightly 'teched' in the head". Many veterans had heard so much talk about rehabilitation that they wondered whether they would be greeted with straitjackets when they returned. The veteran wanted neither that nor a brass band to greet him; he simply wanted to be reintegrated to the community and be treated as anyone else, a return to "being the ordinary
Marquis Childs comments on the official good will visit by General Charles De Gaulle with President Truman and other officials in Washington. It was good timing, says Mr. Childs, for many misunderstandings had developed between the two countries since the liberation of France the previous summer. He believed the French contribution to the war had been greatly underestimated. The French had returned about half of the billion dollars in Lend-Lease aid to equip its armies, via reverse Lend-Lease. The measure of its contribution had to be taken with the reality in mind of its occupation through most of the war by the Germans and the shattered state which had been left behind when the Nazis had been booted out by the Allied armies and air forces.
Nevertheless, French industry had supplied critically needed equipment for the Allies during the last months of the war. Some 700 plywood storm boats, used by the Americans to cross the Rhine
But likewise, he adds, the French had not appreciated adequately the aid provided them by America. They had a tendency to try to shift blame for their hard existence onto the Allies. But enough coal and food were now being shipped to the Continent to supply France during the winter.
The United States had urged admission of France to the Big Three conferences at Yalta and Potsdam but Russia had objected. Yet, the French blamed America for their exclusion.
The French would hold elections in the fall for the first time since before the fall in spring, 1940, and would likely move to the left, with Britain, albeit retaining General De Gaulle as Premier to present a unifying figure.
A letter writer, a criminal court judge from Anson County, informs that Judge Hoyle Sink was particularly well-qualified to render an opinion on retention of Emperor Hirohito, as a a piece the previous Friday had indicated his strongly negative reaction to the Government's position. Judge Sink, he informs, had been a teacher of English and of American law and ethics to aristocrats in Japan, accredited by the U. S. Government.
A former prisoner of war in Japan, a sergeant, writes a letter expressing his relief at the dropping of the atomic bombs ending the war, and that he was certain the prisoners felt likewise. He believed that Japan would cause no problem into the future.
Another letter writer, a private who had seen action in Normandy and three other battles in Europe, likewise expressed relief at the bombs having been dropped, and congratulated The News for its editorial of August 21, "A Protest", suggesting that ministers and educators who had lodged a protest against the use of the bomb, along with their protest of its future use, were off point, at least insofar as the limited use August 6 and 9.
The editors provide a piece on the end of War Time and return to Standard Time, requiring that clocks be turned back an hour, War Time having been continuously maintained since February 9, 1942. The law was scheduled to lapse six months after cessation of hostilities or as Congress otherwise directed for an earlier time.
Following World War I, War Time had been maintained as Daylight Savings Time between the last Sunday in March and the last Sunday in October during 1919. Farm groups began to seek its termination at the end of the war but it was not ended until a year after the Armistice, with Congress overriding President Wilson's veto to accomplish it. Afterward, many industrial states, however, individually maintained Daylight Savings Time during the summer.
Britain, France and other countries in Europe had maintained Daylight Savings Time, or "
The War Production Board had estimated in July that War Time had conserved during its duration five billion kilowatt-hours—high
It does not mention the fact, but Washington had been on War Time at the time of Pearl Harbor, albeit only moved ahead by a half hour from Standard Time, a move undertaken in latter May, 1941 when President Roosevelt declared a national emergency.
Should War Time end the last Sunday of October, it points out, it would have been in effect for three years, eight months, and nineteen days, that is, by our count, 1,357 days.
As to the "Side Glances", whether the boys were discussing sub rosa
Framed Edition
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.