Monday, September 24, 1945

The Charlotte News

Monday, September 24, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska had charged that there was a movement afoot to get General MacArthur fired from his post as Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific, charging it to the "liberal press or as some may call it the radical or communistic press", mentioning by name the Daily Worker and PM.

As he also did not like the answers he had received from written questions posed on Friday to State Department Undersecretary-designate Dean Acheson, regarding his view of the role of General MacArthur, he continued to oppose the nomination, but with no visible sign of support from other Senators. Mr. Acheson had sent him a copy of the news report about which Senator Wherry had inquired regarding its accuracy.

The Senator expressed surprise that there was no signature by the Soviet Union on the Potsdam Declaration of July 26.

But that was published information on the front pages of the day, the reason for the absence being that the Soviets had not yet declared war on Japan. Everyone knew it except Senator Wherry.

In Japan, it was believed that Emperor Hirohito would soon go to the Embassy to meet with General MacArthur, an unprecedented step in modern times for the Emperor.

General MacArthur ordered that all Government authority over the Japanese press be released, to pave the way for a free press.

Russell Brines reported that Emperor Hirohito had been advised in late November, 1941 by Marquis Koisco Kido, Lord Keeper of the privy seal, not to respond to President Roosevelt's November 26 message of peace and memorandum stating the points of necessary adherence for resumption of normal relations with Japan. Mr. Kido told Mr. Brines that he provided this advice because he thought it unwise to resist the tide of war given that Japan's assets in the United States had been frozen. He also stated that he had good information that the Emperor had been informed of Japanese atrocities against Allied prisoners in early 1944. He did not know how the Emperor had responded. He also believed that the Emperor had no advance warning of the attack on Pearl Harbor—an untrue assertion, based on subsequent accounts. He contended that he had no advance warning of it either.

In Indo-China, the French had occupied strategic buildings in Saigon and arrested several hundred Annamites, that is Vietnamese, many of whom were campaigning for independence.

A late report disclosed that, three weeks before the end of the war, three British two-man submarines sneaked into Singapore Harbor, sunk what was thought to be a light cruiser, and cut the cable connecting Singapore and Hong Kong, then departed.

A police sergeant released from long-term Japanese internment in Hong Kong, scheduled to return to England on Saturday, but delayed, had gone for a nighttime swim in the ocean Sunday night and was attacked and killed by a shark, rare in those waters.

A report from the war crimes trial of 45 Nazis in Lueneberg, Germany, indicated that on Christmas Day, 1941, at Oswiecim concentration camp, the camp commandant, a man named Hessler, along with two doctors, lined up 3,000 Polish Jewish women, ordered them to strip naked, then made selections of those to go to the gas chambers. A young woman, Sophia Litwinska, testified of the atrocity as she had been pulled out of the chamber at the last moment as the gas began to enter. She believed that her being the wife of a Polish Army officer may have saved her from the fate. Her brief exposure to the gas had lasting effects on her health, causing frequent headaches.

The Arab press in Egypt endorsed the statement by the committee of elder statesmen demanding that the British leave Egypt.

Governor Harry Kelly of Michigan ordered a state investigation into the month-old Kelsey-Hayes Wheel Co. strike of 4,500 workers, which had indirectly resulted in 50,000 Ford workers being off the job for want of wheels to put on the new cars. The Governor asserted that he believed that no more than a quarter of striking workers supported the strike, in defiance of a War Labor Board order to return to work.

The threatened strike of lumber and sawmill workers in the Pacific Northwest materialized, regarding their demand for a $1.10 minimum wage, leaving another 60,000 workers off the job, pushing the number of idle workers to 325,000.

In New York, 1,575 office buildings in Manhattan, including the Empire State Building, were left without elevator service as 11,000 operators went on strike for the first time since 1936.

No sooner than the war was won, the wheels were coming off the country as lumber and the elevators in New York skyscrapers now stood idle as well.

Admiral William Halsey appears in a photograph astride a white horse, presumably on the saddle provided him by the residents of Reno to make good his previously stated desire to ride the Emperor's White Horse through the streets of Tokyo. The horse in question was not that of the Emperor.

On the editorial page, "Hail the Hero!" remarks sarcastically on the new status of Thomas Dewey as the savior of the nation, having withheld during the 1944 presidential campaign the secret of the cracking of the Japanese code, costing himself the election by sparing the honor of President Roosevelt, who, the Republicans plainly implied, was actually to blame for the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mr. Dewey having been loaded with inculpatory information against him, as explained by Herbert Brownell, the Republican National Committee chair.

The piece poses the same question we did as to the other side of the coin, had Mr. Dewey revealed the information: would it not have made him a traitor? Any other American who did so would have been considered a traitor and so, too, it concludes, would have Governor Dewey.

So, it wonders, what the Republican propaganda and gibberish about him being a hero was all about. He did the only thing he could have done.

"New Imperialists" reminds of the words of the Atlantic Charter that no nation would seek territorial aggrandizement or territorial changes not approved by the peoples concerned.

But now, at the Big Five Foreign Ministers Conference in London, the Russians, signatory of the Charter, were seeking trusteeships over the Italian colonies in Africa, though some speculated it to be simply a ploy to forestall French and British colonialism.

Perhaps, resigns the editorial, the Charter was simply an ideal, not to be taken too seriously when things got down to brass tacks, as they now were.

"A Longing Look" suggests that it was the Puck in the editors which caused them to reference the large revenues from ABC stores which went to the counties of New Hanover, Wake, and Durham, as Mecklenburg, a dry county, sought to balance its budget with slated municipal improvements on the drawing board coupled with the desire to maintain low taxes.

Switching to the ABC system, it had been estimated, would provide a half million dollars in revenue annually to Mecklenburg, a sizeable chunk to the community.

"Let 'Em Up?" comments on the criticism offered by George Bernard Shaw of the occupation of Germany and Japan by the Allies, that it would only lead to another war. He thought that leaving the former enemy nations to their own devices after being defeated would better serve the cause of having implemented new and responsible governments  than trying to bully them into it.

The piece, while recognizing Mr. Shaw's sagacity in many things, believed that he might be wrong on this one. For the Japanese had not become empire seekers from oppression internationally. Likewise, no one had been oppressing the Germans in 1914 at the start of World War I or in 1870 at the time of the Franco-Prussian War. Hitler had complained of the harsh treatment under the Versailles Treaty, but the military men blamed the war on the acceptance too soon of an Armistice without first marching onto German soil in 1918.

Mr. Shaw believed that Fascism still existed in both Germany and Japan but that it would disappear of its own accord.

The editorial states that occupation could not continue indefinitely but it ought be more than the enunciated year for Japan and fifteen months for Germany. The record showed that neither nation intended to live in peace.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Clyde R. Hoey of North Carolina discussing the emergency unemployment compensation bill and the proposed re-transfer of the Employment Service back to the states, a move which had already passed.

He quotes from a letter by Governor Gregg Cherry, urging that the employment service be so re-transferred.

Drew Pearson suggests that if Congress were really interested in probing military efficiency and not simply political recrimination, it would investigate the Battle of the Bulge as well as Pearl Harbor.

The Battle of the Bulge had delayed the end of the war by three or four months. Losses, with some 20,000 killed, far exceeded the 2,390 of Pearl Harbor. Moreover, many more American lives were lost in consequence of the battle, though not directly resulting from it. It had also led to vast new orders for supplies which were now war surplus.

Some intelligence officers had warned of the coming of the Ardennes offensive but nothing had been done in preparation to avert it. German officers had testified that the plan was developed in November by Hitler. German officers were brought to Hitler's headquarters in Frankfurt, without being told of its precise location, and placed in chairs four feet apart as a precaution against further sabotage as with the July 20 plot. Most of the generals had opposed the plan, thought it suicidal. But Hitler had insisted.

One of the German commanders who survived the offensive was Lt. General Kurt von Manteuffel, who had cornered Brig. General Anthony McAuliffe's men at Bastogne and demanded their surrender, receiving the well-known response, "Nuts!" General von Manteuffel had stated that he did understand quite well what the message meant, notwithstanding the contrary popular legend. He had opposed the offensive and believed that he would never again see his wife and family at its start.

Field Marshal Kurt von Rundstedt, credited as the mastermind of the plan, had also been opposed to it. He stated that it was the brainchild of Field Marshal General Walther von Model.

In Washington, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy had warned in December of the thinly defended Ardennes forest, but members of the general staff had expressed their full confidence in General Eisenhower. General Marshall made it a point never to give orders to commanders in the field and so left the matter to the sound judgment of General Eisenhower.

Two colonels, Truman Smith and Percy Blair, had also warned General Clayton Bissell of their belief that an offensive was being planned by Germany for the Ardennes. Again, however, General Bissell chose to leave the matter to the commanders in the field. They wrote out their warning and intended it to be passed to General Eisenhower. It remained in Washington.

To complicate matters, on December 15, a day prior to the start of the offensive, a relatively green unit, the 106th Division, was moved into the Ardennes for training purposes. Because of the failure of intelligence, the 106th, which fought valiantly in the face of enormous odds, was almost completely wiped out.

Samuel Grafton points out that farmers, like labor, were beginning to wonder about their post-war incomes. The executive secretary of the American Farm Bureau Federation, Roger Corbett, had warned against a reduction in farm prices with the end of the war. He advocated high production to enable sending of food to Europe and wanted assurance of government supports for farm prices should they become necessary.

Though a conservative farm leader, this plea appeared to Mr. Grafton virtually indistinguishable from that of Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace, seeking full employment, even though Mr. Wallace's plea was, inexplicably, considered radical.

The G.I.'s were being provided benefits without anyone complaining; there was a plan to reduce taxes to aid business, and now the farmers were proposing a kind of full employment. Yet, when labor made demands, it was radical. Indeed, at the farm meeting at which Mr. Corbett spoke, there was a resolution opposing the full employment bill.

A letter writer, a private in the Army writes in favor of providing five discharge points per month to former prisoners of war, given their enormous sacrifice and hardship during their time of internment.

Marquis Childs discusses a plan being considered by a Senate subcommittee to form a TVA-type authority for the Missouri Valley. Another subcommittee had held hearings on the proposed project earlier in the year. Senator John Overton of Louisiana, opposed to an MVA, was the chair of both subcommittees.

The National Farmers Union was the major proponent of the project. Conflicts among agencies wishing to control the project, however, were lending to its defeat. The Department of Interior wanted control, not allowing it independence as with TVA. Who controlled it, Mr. Childs opines, should not determine its fate; rather its benefit to the people of the valley should be the only governing criterion.

Recently, the Department of Interior had proposed a series of regional agencies for each flood control project, with Interior serving as the centralized agency over them. This plan might prove workable.

Life, he says, had recently published a report on the Missouri Valley.

"But the wild Missouri River, carrying away in flood the fertility of the earth, will not wait indefinitely on the maneuverings of politicians in Washington."

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