Thursday, September 20, 1945

The Charlotte News

Thursday, September 20, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that General George C. Marshall had informed Congress that the Army would, by late winter, abandon its point system for discharge of men from service. The 80 points necessary for discharge would be lowered to 70 on October 1, 75 for officers, and to 60 on November 1. Discharge points for WACS, set at 41, would be lowered to 36 on October 1 and 34 on November 1.

The Army chief of staff also stated that a huge invasion of Japan had been set for November 1, consistent incidentally with Japanese reports of late July.

In Lueneburg, Germany, a British officer testified at the murder trial of Joseph Kramer and 44 SS guards of the Belsen concentration camp that a well-supplied food store had been discovered on April 15 less than two miles from the camp, whose prisoners had been routinely dying of starvation.

Correspondent Larry Allen reports that Warsaw was likely the world's most expensive city, costing an American $250 per day to live, the Polish currency inflated five times the rate of exchange just prior to the war in 1939. A single meal now cost 60 American dollars. Instead of a black market, there was a white market, that is prices being fixed by the Government at high levels.

The debris-strewn streets of the capital were filled with food vendors. A loaf of bread went for $16, fruit at $3 per pound. A steak cost $26, ice cream, $13. Even coffee sold for $5; soup was $8, the same cost as beer.

A cheaply made dress ran to $2,600.

And then there was 20 percent sales tax on top of it, for rebuilding the city.

Foreigners in the city had to live by signing chits, with the hope that exchange rates would be reduced by the time of payment.

No doubt, therefore, the question in Warsaw among foreigners was what the chit was really worth.

In Japan, speculation ran as to the fate of the battleship Nagato, as Admiral Raymond Spruance took over as head of the American Fleet in Japanese waters. The Nagato was crippled in Tokyo Bay.

One rumor was that it would be used in subsequent tests of the atomic bomb at sea. Bingo. That rumor gets the booby prize. Be careful in boarding the ship though.

The Senate moved to pay the transportation costs, up to $200, of displaced war workers back to their homes.

Senator John McClellan of Arkansas had opposed the measure on the grounds that it did not provide retroactive payment to those workers who had already paid their own way back home and did not make provision for payment based solely on need. He believed it encouraged unemployment.

The State Department contemplated sending a special emissary to consult with General MacArthur regarding divergent policy between that favored by the Government and that implemented by the military with respect to the occupation of Japan. One such policy was the ban on Japanese-operated air travel, relaxed by General MacArthur to allow air travel between Japan's major cities to expedite administration of the islands.

Meanwhile, the Navy sent home from Tokyo several thousand occupation personnel aboard seventeen ships.

General Robert Eichelberger stated that, had the Japanese Government been dissolved, the occupation would have been more difficult and was proceeding instead easily.

Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, Ambassador to Washington at the time of Pearl Harbor, stated to correspondent Morrie Landsberg that Japan had to rid itself of soldier statesmen and militarists to prevent another war. He denied advance knowledge of the December 7 attack plan.

At the Foreign Ministers Conference in London, a pro forma peace treaty with Finland was discussed, the essential provisions of which having already been previously defined.

Secretary of State Byrnes requested that advisor to the American delegation, John Foster Dulles, former foreign policy advisor to the Dewey campaign in 1944, go on a fact-finding tour of Europe to provide a basis for State Department policy. Mr. Dulles stated that he had not yet consented to the trip, but that if he were to go, he would visit Germany, Italy, Poland, Austria, and France, but not the Balkans or Moscow.

Maj. General Curtis LeMay stated to correspondent James Strebig that the atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war with Japan and that the war would have been over within two weeks without either the bomb or entry to the war by the Russians on August 8. The General stated that he could not disclose how he had come by this information imparted so confidently. He, along with Lt. General Barney Giles and Brig. General Emmett O'Donnell, stated that the war was won through air power alone.

General Giles thought that Japan should be occupied for a hundred years, stating that he was serious in making the statement.

The generals were in Washington to greet the three B-29's flying from Sapporo on what had been set as a record-breaking mission for distance for multi-engine aircraft. All three planes had been forced to land in Chicago because of fuel shortage created by resistant headwinds.

The weatherman always knows.

On the editorial page, "Leap? Or Look?" discusses the relationship between the City Council, Mayor Baxter, and the Planning Board with respect to the plans for a new municipal auditorium, library, and an expanded parks and recreation system, as proposed and heavily promoted by the Mayor.

"Surprise Package" indicates that not only had Washington journalists and members of the Government been taken by surprise at the appointment to the Supreme Court of Senator Harold Burton of Ohio, but Who's Who was also caught off guard.

The Senator, part of the March, 1943 "B2H2" resolution, Ball-Burton-Hatch-Hill, to have the United States join an international peacekeeping organization, had been active in his first term to create a new direction for Republicans in Congress, free of the old isolationist tendencies and embarking on a non-partisan path.

Previously, he had served as Mayor of Cleveland for four years and had served one term in the Ohio Legislature, but had no other qualifications which appeared to recommend him to the Supreme Court.

As a progressive Republican, however, he fit the bill needed for filling the seat of Justice Roberts, also a Republican, having been appointed by President Hoover in 1930.

The piece, realizing that, politically, Ohio was more important to both parties than North Carolina, nevertheless points out that Judge John J. Parker, also a Republican, was far more qualified by judicial experience than Senator Burton, without any.

Justice Burton would serve on the Court until 1958, succeeded by Potter Stewart. He assisted Chief Justice Earl Warren in his efforts to effect unanimity on Brown v. Board of Education in 1954-55, to send a solid signal to the country that the determination to desegregate public schools "with all deliberate speed" was not just a majority view of the Court.

"Urgent Call" indicates that Chief of Police Walter Anderson was asking for the additional hiring of thirteen police officers, two of whom would be black. He stated that otherwise law enforcement was going to be difficult in the city. Many of the existing force were of an advanced age. The estimated cost of the additional hirings was $20,000 per year.

"3.2 Caliber" comments that 3.2 beer was being fought by the Women's Christian Temperance Union, charging that brewers had sought to convince legislators that beer was non-intoxicating but that, in fact, 3.2 beer was as intoxicating as hard liquor.

The piece declares it a lost cause to try to convince the WCTU otherwise, as they would not believe the experienced or accept the challenge to appoint a special experimental board from its membership to try out the premise.

And it concludes that volume of alcoholic content was not the point anyway, that the WCTU challenge, deriving from its refusal to accept the failure of Prohibition, would continue even if the amount of alcohol were but a tenth of a percent.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Congressman Robert Rich of Pennsylvania asking who had spent all the money, getting the reply from Representative George Bender of Ohio that it was the people who had voted for the Administration four times. He disagreed with the President's statement that all of the people of the United States were ultimately to blame for the lack of preparedness which led to the debacle at Pearl Harbor.

Congressman Clare Hoffman of Michigan chimes in that the people had gotten the Government that they wanted, that it would be the returning veterans and their descendants who would have to pay for it.

Mr. Bender overplays his hand, hits under the belt, suggests that a "radio voice", that of FDR, had the country hypnotized for many years.

Mr. Rich suggests that perhaps Congressman Bob Doughton of North Carolina, chair of the Ways and Means Committee, could enlighten the membership on how the debt was to be paid off.

Of course, it must be borne in mind that, by far and away, the principal part of the debt which they were bemoaning had come from the war effort, not the New Deal. And it was the Federal spending on preparedness for war which the Republican and Democratic isolationists in Congress had resisted for so long, tying President Roosevelt's hands on the war until 1941, which had finally led to the attack at Pearl Harbor and the sudden plunge into war without adequate military strength, in a world which had been increasingly at war since mid-1937. Since it was the perception by the Japanese of this weakness which led to the attack at Pearl Harbor, it is certainly conceivable that a larger Navy and air forces, especially deployed in the Philippines where forces were weak, might have prevented the attack and the consequent spending on the Pacific war.

Drew Pearson relates of an interview provided by retiring Admiral Randall Jacobs of the Navy to a reporter regarding the Navy discharge system, in which he frankly admitted that the Navy was interested in retaining young men on which to build the future Navy. Admiral Jacobs, after giving the interview, had been relieved as chief of personnel because he had finished his tour of duty.

The Navy discharge policy had come under heavy criticism by the men, who believed that they were being retained for a large peacetime service.

Among his "Capital Chaff" items is that Senate restaurant waiters wore badges stating "USSR", U.S. Senate Restaurant.

Samuel Grafton examines the notion that labor disputes would interfere with reconversion. He reminds, however, that labor disputes were a part of the readjustment process to peacetime. The differences between management and labor should not be regarded as aberrant but rather as the expected norm. With prices going up and taxes going up during the war, there was no reason to expect that labor would remain complacent at a return to pre-war lower wages.

Both Britain and France were engaged in national debates on economic issues. There was no reason to expect that the United States would enjoy immunity from the matter.

Mr. Grafton recommends that the President establish a board to study reconversion wage issues and make recommendations.

Marquis Childs finds that the Battle of Detroit had been joined as between the UAW and Ford. The outcome would impact the entire economy as the price of cars would impact what consumers paid for other desired goods as well.

OPA had set prices based on the initial production run of 1942 models, about 15 percent above the 1941 models. OPA had given the option, however, of setting prices based on a 1914 formula of increased labor and materials costs—perhaps using the Essex as the chassis, had there been one in 1914. Regardless of the formula applied, OPA had estimated, before the current labor squabble, that the price would not be more than 5 percent above 1942 prices.

Now, OPA admitted, with the demand of a 30 percent wage hike by auto workers, that those estimates were no longer valid. The wage hike would leave wages of auto workers at the same level paid to them during the war, albeit based on a 40-hour week, whereas the war work had been undertaken on a 48-hour week with overtime, making it equivalent, at time and a half over 40 hours, to 52 hours.

The plan promulgated by UAW was to raise wages without raising prices. To do so would enable workers to buy the products being produced, increasing volume of sales, lowering the need therefore for higher profit margins.

The UAW strategy was to strike against one manufacturer, in this case G.M., and then obtain capitulation to enable it to resume production in competition with the other automakers not having to stop work.

But into this plan had been thrown the wrench of Ford, with its layoffs because of the Kelsey-Hayes Wheel Co. strike of 4,000 workers and the consequent absence of wheels to put on the new cars. The Ford strike had nothing to do with the 30 percent wage demand.

The resulting morass, he concludes, could have a detrimental impact on reconversion.

Dorothy Thompson finds the Foreign Ministers Conference to be headed into retrograde territory from that established at Versailles 25 years earlier, with regard to relocation of populations. Versailles had followed an ethnographic principle whereby changes in frontiers should follow centuries-old settlement patterns by particular ethnic groups, modified only by the exigencies of the aftermath of the war. The same principles were applied to both sides of the war.

But the news from London suggested to Ms. Thompson that the foreign ministers of the Allies were engaged in realpolitik, that is a determination of frontiers based solely on the subjective desires of the victors, established through compromise among them.

In Poland, for instance, the ethnographic principle had been applied to parts of the eastern section but had been wholly abandoned in the western frontier.

After World War I, Italy's frontiers were established naturally in the watershed of the Alps. Now, Russia wanted to provide the Alto Adige, the southern Tyrol, to Austria, invoking the ethnographic principle which it discarded elsewhere.

To Austria, the area was useless economically, save for potential tourist trade; but to Italy, it was a vital source of hydroelectric power.

All of Italy's colonies were being discussed for possible conversion to trustee status, as sought by the Soviets. The United States surprisingly had consented to such an arrangement which would place the Soviets for the first time in North Africa and in the Mediterranean.

Italy could avert falling to substandard living conditions only through integration within a larger complex of European nations.

The only peace which had a chance to last through time, she posits, was one which could be supported by reason and conscience. Anything else would require long occupation by armies.

Incidentally, we must apologize to Shigenori Togo and his memory. Yesterday, we reversed the syllabication, at least sonorously, if not somnolently, of the first name of the former War Minister who died in prison in 1950, sentenced to twenty years for war crimes, winding up with "Shinegori", which, if we do say so, posed better allegory. Nevertheless, we make humble supplication to the Empire for forgiveness. Blessed are the peacemakers.

Sometimes, we suffer from the malady of Demosthenes, must chew stones to afford correction.

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