Wednesday, September 12, 1945

The Charlotte News

Wednesday, September 12, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that former Attorney General Francis Biddle had been named by President Truman to be the American member of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. Federal Appeals Court Judge John J. Parker was named as the alternate. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson had been named earlier to be the lead American prosecutor.

The President also announced the appointment to the D. C. Court of Appeals of former Senator Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri to replace retiring former Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold.

General MacArthur announced the dissolution of the Japanese Black Dragon secret society and named seven of its leaders as being on the wanted list of war criminals.

It was said that the Black Dragon, organized in 1901 with backing of the Army and Navy and leaders of the Government, had been instrumental in setting Japan on the path of aggression in Manchuria and in establishing the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere program which led to Pearl Harbor. The organization was notorious for its gangster-style tactics. Assassination groups acted against any Japanese official who offered even indirect opposition to their motives and the motives of the Empire.

Lt. General Masaharu Homma, one of the most highly sought of the still at large Japanese war criminals, had reportedly fled to an islet off the northwest coast of Honshu. General Homma had directed the Bataan Death March in May, 1942.

German Ambassador to Japan, Heinrich Georg Stahmer, had been caught, accused of being the kingpin in convincing Japan to join the Axis. He had been in Japan since 1940 and had been a special assistant to Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop.

Former Premier Hideki Tojo was rallying after his self-inflicted bullet wound to the area of his heart, following transfusions and injections of penicillin. His condition had been upgraded to "very satisfactory". He thanked his doctors for saving him.

He had received blood from an American sergeant, a veteran of the New Guinea and Philippines campaigns. The sergeant wanted him to live so that that Tojo could pay his dues for the seventeen months of suffering which the sergeant had endured in New Guinea.

A German naval attache, Admiral Paul Wenneker, told Duane Hennessy of the Associated Press that he had thought, when told of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese hours afterward, that it was an "utterly stupid" mistake because they did not then proceed with an invasion of Hawaii, and the attack had merely afforded America a propaganda weapon.

He stated that the Japanese had been suspicious of all white people and that he believed they were always withholding information from him, that it was difficult to achieve cooperation in the war effort.

Admiral Wenneker, in Japan since 1940, had commanded the pocket battleship Deutschland when it had seized the freighter City of Flint in 1939. He stated that he wished he had never seen the freighter.

Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten had accepted the surrender of some 85,000 Japanese troops in Singapore and another 500,000 in Southeast Asia and the East Indies, stating that he would tolerate no impudence or obstinacy from the Japanese, that they would be treated with justice and humanity, but the Allied occupation forces would be their masters.

Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson indicated to the Senate Military Committee that six million men would be discharged from the Army by the ensuing July 1, leaving an Army of 2.5 million men. He stated also that men with 45 discharge points or more were not being sent to the Pacific for participation in the occupation of Japan. It freed for discharge virtually all of those who had seen combat in Europe.

Brig. General Elliott Roosevelt told the House Ways and Means Committee that his father had not at all intervened in his financial dealings, specifically the forgiveness of all but $4,000 of a $200,000 loan by John Hartford, president of A&P. The committee had been told by Mr. Hartford that he had contacted the President in 1940 and that FDR had told him he had no objection to his making the loan to Elliott for the purpose of establishing a radio chain in Texas. Elliott confirmed this phone call. Former Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones had told the committee that the President had asked him to straighten out Elliott's financial affairs.

President Truman was going to fly aboard the "Sacred Cow" on Friday to Kansas City and then to nearby Independence. Along the way, he would drop off in Paducah, Ky., Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley, to become his vice-presidential running mate in 1948.

Press secretary Charles G. Ross clarified that he had no information yet on whether the President's November 2 trip to Statesville, N.C., would include, as announced the previous day by North Carolina Senators Hoey and Bailey, a stopover in King's Mountain to commemorate the 165th anniversary on October 7 of the battle fought there during the Revolution. He would proceed that Saturday to the Duke-Georgia Tech football game in Atlanta and then attend an event on Sunday at the Warm Springs Foundation founded by the late President Roosevelt.

The President remarked in response to a question whether he intended to move to the right or to the left, that the journalists would have to decide that for themselves, that he would decide issues on their merit as they arose. Asked whether he would abide the advice of the Washington Post to appoint a lot of Republicans, the President simply responded with a smile, "I'm a Democrat."

It was not yet clear what the President would be wearing during his travels, the tan suit, the gray suit, the brown suit, or the blue serge.

A ten-year old boy in Urbana, Ill., the center of a lawsuit brought by his mother against the Champagne Board of Education to prohibit teaching of religion in the public schools of Champagne, underwent cross-examination by the lawyer for the Champagne Board as to whether it was fun to be an atheist. He responded, "In a way it is, and in a way it ain't." The boy stated that he enjoyed being different from the other children in his beliefs in God. He had wanted to take religion courses in school but his mother had refused her consent.

He also testified that he had learned the Lord's Prayer at a University of Illinois summer demonstration school and, for awhile, recited it with the other children, but had now forgotten it. He had sung hymns and recited Bible stories also in those classes and had read the story of Adam and Eve.

He believed that members of the Unitarian Church Sunday school class, which he had attended also, when they prayed, were not speaking with God, that prayers were just words. The boy believed that there was no God.

He was a Cub Scout but could not become a Boy Scout because of the required oath.

In Tiro, Ohio, the Washington-to-Detroit "Red Arrow"—alias "Detroit Red"—had struck a stalled automobile, derailing the locomotive and seven cars, injuring fourteen people. The owner of the stalled vehicle had left the car sitting astride the tracks. He blamed a chuckhole in the pavement for the stalled vehicle.

Whether there was any cheese involved, we are still having our crack team of ace reporters investigate for you, on the scene, as always, for your thorough edification and elucidation.

On the editorial page, "New Language" comments on the movement by the International Phonetic Association to establish a new 32-letter alphabet, dispensing with some of the least used or most confusing letters, "q", "c", and "x", all to bring about logic to the English language. Thus "tax" would be spelled "taks".

All words would drop unpronounced letters and would be spelled phonetically.

Such words as "flammable" and "inflammable", being synonymous despite appearing as antonyms, would be eliminated.

Words which sound alike but have different meanings, "cite", "site", and "sight", for instance, would also go by the boards.

It then attempts to set forth the 23rd Psalm as it would appear in the new phoneticized language.

Well, we are glad that these efforts, despite the encouragement to illiterates who never cease in their campaign of witlessness to drag with alacrity the rest of us with some degree of literacy into their radio-tv-speak void, devoid of nuance, irony, and the rest of the essence of poetry and literary enjoyment, have as yet failed to make Illiteracy the official language, though unofficially we find ourselves nearly at the point of the I.P.A.'s attempted rendition.

Just read some of the mindless notes on Youtube, even under literary entries, and one realizes the state of articulation in written language for many, if not most, people, able to speak some variant of English, not to mention their obvious concomitant lack of comprehension of it when written or spoken above a third-grade level. The extant status is not hopeful, though we make room for the probability that many of these mindless entries, emoting as fatuous idiots, are made by young people, perhaps, judging by the quality of both thought and style, young people under the age of six.

"More Bundles" finds the financial dilemma of Britain, about which Lord John Maynard Keynes and Lord Halifax were in Washington to discuss, to be one which had to be dealt with favorably by the United States to prevent a financial problem which would have inevitable rippling effects through the entire world economy otherwise. While most of the leadership in Washington opposed a loan or a handout, a system of credits in trade would probably be worked out to enable Britain to import raw materials sufficient to re-establish its industrial base for producing exports, the basis on which it had thrived economically prior to the war. 

"Help Wanted" discusses the need for traffic turns at Fourth and Fifth Streets in downtown Charlotte and the efforts of the City Manager to bring them about. It suggests that little would likely come from the attempt.

Pedestrians had to cross at the corners and so no turns were allowed.

A qualified expert on traffic, it counsels, needed to be hired by the City.

"Matter of Form" states that Hideki Tojo had not followed traditional Japanese form in not committing harakiri following the defeat in the summer of 1944 on Saipan and his removal from power at that juncture. Thereafter, the Japanese had considered him dead. The Japanese doctor called initially to attend to his self-inflicted bullet wound the previous day had refused to treat him on the basis that he was already considered dead.

It was perhaps questionable, says the piece, why the Americans were reviving Tojo only to place him on trial and execute him. It had to appear curious to the Japanese.

The same was true, it opines, of Vidkun Quisling, sentenced to death in Oslo for treason.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Malcolm Tarver of Georgia debating with John Rankin of Mississippi as to who had changed the record of a previous debate. Mr. Rankin accused Mr. Tarver of adding words to the record. Mr. Rankin then showed a copy of the original transcript with Mr. Tarver's handwritten interlineations.

The issue was whether Mr. Tarver on prior occasions had voted against rural electrification, and his attempts apparently to alter the transcript of that charge by Mr. Rankin.

In any event, the dispute was turned over to the Rules Committee for resolution.

We shall anxiously await the decision and impart it forthwith.

Drew Pearson reports that the admirals and generals were angry at Secretary of State Byrnes having provided to the Russians the Kurile Islands, as they afforded a prime Pacific site for launching rocket bombs against the United States. But the Kuriles had been promised to Russia at Yalta to obtain Stalin's cooperation in entering the Pacific war following the conclusion of the European war. In addition, Stalin was promised the southern half of Sakhalin Island, already occupied by the Russians, control of a puppet regime in Manchuria, a puppet government in Korea, and a puppet government in Inner Mongolia.

At Potsdam, however, President Truman had bargained for a harder position based on the concessions made to Russia in Eastern Europe with respect to Poland and the buffer zone within Germany to the Elbe, enjoying a better position in the Pacific war by that juncture than had President Roosevelt in February at Yalta. Stalin agreed with President Truman's demand and only asked that Port Arthur and the South Manchurian Railroad plus the Chinese Eastern Railroad, all of which had been constructed by the Russians, be returned to them. President Truman agreed.

But when China demanded bases also at Port Arthur and Dairen, Stalin asked for occupation of the Kuriles. Secretary of State Byrnes acquiesced. The reason was to avoid giving the appearance of attempting to surround Siberia with American bases. But the military pointed out that strong trade winds blew from the Kuriles toward Washington and Oregon, a fact which had permitted the Japanese balloons to reach the West Coast after being launched from the Kuriles. It was thought that winds would aid rocket launches in the future.

Observers reported that President Truman had used a deft technique in handling Stalin at Potsdam. He ingratiated himself to the Premier at night, singing and drinking with him, then became highly formal during the day, polite but cold.

Mr. Pearson next reports that at least two of the members of the Pearl Harbor Board of the Army and Navy had been disgruntled Army generals who had an axe to grind against General Marshall. Some had suggested it as the reason for the Board having found General Marshall negligent in not apprising General Short early enough of the information regarding broken negotiations in Washington with Japan.

Politics, more often than not, and its handmaiden, petty jealousy and vendetta, explain the apparent logical inconsistencies one often encounters in any study of historical events, and must always be maintained as a guidepost to reconcile the otherwise inexplicable.

Finally, he imparts the story of Congressman Mel Price of Illinois who had gone to Rome to study Rome's civil government. As he was not able to speak or understand Italian, he employed the services of a Red Cross interpreter, a young woman. She then accompanied him to question municipal officials.

As she spoke in Italian to a clerk, he asked her and the Congressman to sign his register. She then complied and Congressman Price noticed that a priest had entered the room. The Congressman then was able to determine via sign language that the clerk had thought the woman wanted a marriage certificate issued and that was what they were about to sign. The priest was there to officiate. Congressman Price quickly took his leave.

Marquis Childs discusses reconversion. The general expectation among businessmen was for a boom. He had discussed prospects with two businessmen, Robert Young of Otis and Co., with intentions to buy out Pullman, and Frank Pierce of Standard Oil.

Mr. Young believed that the railroads could develop new unexplored fields of travel which would offset the competition from the airplane and automobile.

Mr. Pierce had worked out a modern pension and security plan for his company's employees, which included a stock-equity sharing program, and had been invited to Washington to discuss it with the Civil Service Commission.

Mr. Childs believes that such men of vision in business would establish the American system on a sound footing.

Samuel Grafton finds that the chief flaw in American policy vis-a-vis Japan could be represented by the fact that were there a revolution in Japan, it would have to be suppressed in the name of the Emperor. The Government policy had made the Emperor not only a servant but also a charge for whom the occupation forces had to be responsible. For it was necessary to prevent any uprisings against him lest might he then not be able to prevent uprisings against the occupation forces. To insure the continued Japanese perception of him as omnipotent, it was necessary to give full backing to his power. The occupation forces could not take over his press or eliminate his secret police without foiling that notion of infallibility and omnipotence.

While it was true that the Emperor was subject to orders by the Americans forces, it was also true that they could not humiliate him without him losing face before the Japanese people. In consequence, the Japanese press was stating that the Emperor was still in charge, while the American Government was contending that the reins of power were solidly in the hands of General MacArthur.

The Japanese press meanwhile raged against American arrogance and the American press raged against Japanese arrogance.

While General Headquarters of the Japanese military had just been abolished, that was a formality foreordained by the result of the war. The real issue immediately was not Japan's ability to make war but its reformation as a society. For the present, the Emperor and his clique remained untouched in this regard and, indeed, America appeared as a supporter of the regime.

The Emperor's usefulness was increasingly in question and the policy of retaining him in power could always be changed. The alternative was to discard the purposes of occupation in order to make it smoother, thus rendering it also meaningless.

Harry Golden writes again of the secret of the atomic bomb and the likelihood that it would not for long remain secret. He cites the example from history of the electric light, known to have been developed by Thomas Edison, but not known to have been also developed at the same time independently by American Navy Midshipman F. J. Sprague. The British scientist Dr. John Hopkins revealed at the time of Edison's claim his own research going back several years regarding the electric light.

Charles Darwin's theories of evolution and natural selection had been explored independently by Alfred Russell Wallace living in the East Indies.

There were many examples in science of such coincident discovery in a given time period, obviously the result of the general flow of scientific information in the scientific community, leading minds to deduce similar conclusions based on extrapolation from known principles, though some had speculated that it was either the result of telepathy or the will of God at a given point in development of the human race.

There had also been the concentrated ages of ancient Greek philosophy, of discovery out of Spain and England, of the Elizabethan era in English drama.

It was the decided trend therefore of history that human development took place in particular periods under particular stresses and conditions inherent to the times, and that therefore it stood to reason that the atomic secret would not long reside solely with America.

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