The Charlotte News

Thursday, January 15, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Last Sunday in the wee-wee hours of morning, having mentioned the night before "The Ballad of the Green Berets" by Sgt. Barry Sadler, we decided to go a-searching through our thousands and thousands of old 45 r.p.m. records for the real McCoy. In fairly short order, we found it sitting there on the shelf, right in between "I Can't Let Go" by the Hollies and "Bang, Bang" by Cher. Well, we played all three records on the old Victrola with the old doggie listening by, its ear cocked attentively to the megaphone, there--a bit tinny, you know, but sufficing for the purpose, as we don't play those so often anymore, like that anyway. We also sampled the flipside of "The Ballad of the Green Berets", titled "A Letter from Vietnam". Suffice to say that time plays tricks on the memory sometimes, and on the ears, especially when the amplification equipment is a bit tinny and the old Victrola a little wobbly in its spin to begin. But we did find it interesting as to how, when we were twelve years old, we had filed these records, their order being meticulously maintained since. And so we thought we'd pass that on.

Elsewhere on the page, amid the many reports of mostly bleak war news, Turkey Gehrke of Watertown, Wisconsin, the winter hibernating tavern keeper there, died at the age of 59. We rather admire his style, a gent who knew how to live--through 30 winters of hibernation in the Great North. Should we have been born in Wisconsin, having visited there once in the early winter, we would have done likewise.

Likewise, we like the style of 27-year old Joseph Cotton, editor of The Herald, a weekly or not, out of Turners Falls, Mass. We adopt much the same philosophy here.

And as cheer to the otherwise beset Allies, there is the headline report of five Japanese ships sunk by the Navy in the Pacific, harbinger of things to come for the Japanese, presently drunk with victory upon victory upon victory. But numbers of battles won, as Sun Tzu says, do not the war decide.

Meanwhile, Wendell Willkie filed an amicus curiae brief with the Supreme Court arguing that Communist Party affiliation is no bar to American citizenship. How quickly attitudes had changed since June. How quickly they would revert to fomer status quo after the war.

"Hitler Moves" describes the new Nazi air offensive on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean 60 miles off Sicily, an effort to relieve Rommel's embattled tank divisions in Libya by diverting the RAF to its defense from chasing Rommel's columns. King George VI would eventually, in the wake of this heavy bombing, provide to the entire population of the island the George Cross in recognition of their brave stand against the onslaught. Malta's primary importance to the British lay not in any resources on the island, but as a launching pad for naval and air raids on Sicily, and as a means for protecting vital supply lanes against Nazi control to Rommel's armies in North Africa. Thus for Hitler to have taken it away would have been one more stepping stone eliminated, after Crete and Greece in May-June, 1941, to obtaining control of the eastern Mediterranean through Italy and Greece. The worst by far, however, for Malta was yet to come. As the piece suggests, the pattern for Crete was to send next parachutists and then ships; Hitler planned such tactics, but then, being reliant on the weak and vacillating Italian Navy, he decided to abandon the plan out of fear that the Italians would run in the face of British naval support. Instead, he bombarded the island almost continuously for two years. In April, 1942, there would be 5,715 bombing sorties delivering 6,728 tons of wallop, all of which would eventually destroy three-fourths of the island's infrastructure. Through it all, however, the British Navy base there and air fields continued to function. The tiny, brave island never fell into enemy hands. The British had only three biplanes on Malta at the beginning of the war. The bombing raids eventually took down 568 British planes while the Axis lost nearly twice as many, 1,129. It was not only for morale that the little island of 122 square miles--controlled by the British since they ousted Napoleon's forces in 1800, they having held it for two years--was defended so heavily; it was not only for morale that it stood the test. The spirits of the Knights of Malta, who held the island from 1530 to 1798, obviously fought alongside the defenders.

Author Pearl Buck, of Pulitzer Prize winning The Good Earth fame, has her letter reprinted on the page from Time, urging, with sound advice, that Time not succumb to the now popular temptation--including reportage and editorials appearing in The News--of using "yellow" as a colour to refer to the Japanese, and thereby insult the Chinese, the allies of the United States. Sail the ship.

Paul Mallon writes of the nitroglycerine which the retreating Dutch threw into the oil wells on Tarakan before abandoning that island finally to the Japanese, of the orders issued to locals in Malaya to cut down rubber trees as they were retreating in the face of the enemy. Yet, he cautions pessimism at these reports, that still it was likely the Japanese would acquire sufficient booty from their various conquests in the region to replenish their ailing island and supply their lines into China indefinitely, and to continue to defend the areas acquired, all for the purpose of achieving "peace"--at least as the Emperor and the little Empress and Tojo understood that term.

He also writes of the contradictory instructions issued by the Office of Civil Defense, between those of its local and national offices, with regard to whether or not one should, in the event of an air raid, fill the bathtub with water--the national office thinking it a storage facility in the event of severed mains, the local thinking it costing undue reduction of the water supply for more vital purposes, no doubt such as fighting fires caused by the air raid. Which of the two entities won out, we don't know, but we'll bet that people were more assiduous about keeping their tubs nice and hospital spic 'n' span.

"Oh, listen, little puggy, there's an air raid. Off with ye now and fill the tub high to the brim. What? No, don't get in it; we may be drinkin' that in a few hours, you silly little bugger. There's an air raid on. Bombers are comin'. Can't you hear? What in all Hades do you think you'd be doin' takin' a bath? So that your little mug might appear snappy clean and shiny for the Nazis? Oh, for goodness sakes, don't start cryin', you blubberin' loony. What's the harm a little bomb's gonna do ye? We've all got to draw our last bath sometime. Chin up, now. Cheerio. We're just goin' for a little ride."

Perhaps, this preparatory instruction was that which prompted the Japanese language schools in Southern California to instruct from a book which counseled it the duty of all, when the enemy was in view, to go underwater. Perhaps, too, sales of H.L. Mencken's the "Great Baltimore Bathtub Hoax" went suddenly wild through the roof.

Whatever the case, it reminds us of that winter's day long ago in 2003 when we heard the instruction over the tv to seal all the windows and doors with duct tape, because of the impending gas attack. Ourselves, after dutifully spending four days rushing back-forth from the Home Depot doing so, we have never heard the countermand to remove it, and so we are still quite tightly ducted in here and refuse to budge until we hear the all-clear signal from the Orange Alert. Those dirty little yellow-bellies are not about to get in here.

For fear of reprisal and potential removal of our duct tape, we offer no comment on the Herblock today.

And the other letter presents an interesting vignette from World War I, a veteran writing that when a machine gun battalion, home from the front, nursing its wounds, then being sent back to the trenches to fill the void left by their dead fellows as the Germans rushed the lines in February, 1918, was marching through London by a munitions plant, the workers, mostly women, but including some of the scruffy dodgers who avoided conscription by working there, subito, started cheering loudly for the heroic, but nameless men passing by them. Yet, despite this apparent exclamation of camaraderie, feelings ran so high at the laggards back home by now, after four years of fighting in the bloody trenches, that the Sergeant-Major, an American, directed the Irish Lance-Corporal, "Chinnu" Dunn, to break open his expansive lungs and simply to let them have it with all his ammunition. And so he did. In quick succession, so, too, did the others follow suit in the assault on this munitions factory. Well, you can read for yourself how it all came out. Sometimes, the vocal chords are an instrument more powerful than merely the machine-gun and bullets being manufactured there in the munitions factory.