The Charlotte News

Thursday, January 29, 1942

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page identifies as the Lady Hawkins, a Canadian liner, the passenger ship which a U-boat sunk on January 19 off Puerto Rico, not Bermuda as the previous day's report indicated. With 250 missing, and, after 10 days, presumed dead, (revised down from the 371 reported the previous day), the sinking constituted by far the largest loss of life in North American waters to date in the war, two and a half times the loss of life on the Reuben James off Iceland October 31 prior to the U.S. entry to the war. The sinking further confirms the idea that Hitler was following, in reverse, the track of the September 1938 Long Island Express, perhaps thinking it somehow good luck in his Book of Charms, having preceded by only a few days the Munich Pact. The charm was firm and good. At least until Dunsinane was approached by Birnam Wood.

The first Congressional Medal of Honor to be awarded in the war (though fifteen would be awarded, ten posthumously, for bravery at Pearl Harbor) was announced this day, to Second Lieutenant Alexander R. Nininger, Jr. of Florida, for bravery under enemy fire in the Philippines. The award was given posthumously.

In Africa, the Nazis and Italians under Rommel re-captured Bengasi.

In Malaya, the Japanese advanced through the theretofore thought impenetrable jungles to within 30 miles of Singapore's Johore Strait, the mile-wide barrier to the island city from the north, another 18 miles since Tuesday's reports. Even the Aussies' determined bayonets in the dense jungle terrain could not stop them, only slowing their advance to the inevitable target. It was not yet known whether the British had erected defensive positions of big guns aimed at the northern strait or had concentrated all of its defensive guns on the seaward approach from the southwest through the Malacca Strait and to the southeast guarding the harbor. In addition to its strategic significance, proximal to Sumatra and thus enabling the Japanese to perform from its positions already taken in northern Borneo in Sarawak and then from Singapore and Sumatra a pincer movement against Java, the largest Allied naval base in the Far East was at stake with the impending fall of Singapore. With every gain by the Japanese of such strategic positions came crucial losses to the Allies of footholds, staging areas for operations in the Pacific.

The hands were quickly folding; the cards held by the Allies at present were no good. The betting to the contrary notwithstanding, one Ed Bradley, as the editorial column indicates, well-known "plunger" of the day, placing 2 to 1 odds in Miami that the war would be over by fall, the war was not thus far going well for the Allies in the Pacific, the capability for tough fighting by the Japanese, especially their piloting skills, having been sorely underestimated. The war would not be over by fall. The war, for all intents and purposes on every Pacific front indeed appeared lost inside of two months.

Yet, despite the odds being stacked them, the Americans, British, Dutch, and Australians continued to fight fiercely, inflicting regular enemy losses on the Japanese, and would in the three years to come fight inch for inch and yard for yard to recover the territory being lost in these opening salvos of the war--and would ultimately succeed in so doing, right to the outskirts of Japan proper at Iwo Jima, before the atomic bomb a few months later trumped the age of conventional warfare.

In the meantime, the Japanese poured more ships, more planes, more men into the wine-red seas and the bloody jungles, the fight to realize the dream of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, co-prosperity contemplated being one to be enjoyed only by the Japanese and the Nazis, more to the point for the Japanese and Nazi imperialists and military commanders, little or nothing of the co-prosperity planned for the people fighting and dying on the warfronts, little save congratulations for demonstrating courage for the Fuehrer and Emperor, those in whom they had invested demigod status to relieve themselves of the responsibility of thinking, of individual conscience, giving way to the primitive instincts in order to rid themselves of feelings of loss and insignificance, to engorge themselves with perceptions of godlike qualities of endurance and fierceness, providing withal to their petty peasant lives meaning, purpose: the killing of another not unlike themselves. They had become one with the jungle in which they fought. They were, indeed, now little better than stock animals. They had progressed to the state of beasts to insure the wealth of the Fuehrer and the Emperor, to insure that the little Empress could continue to impress them with her divinely inspired quatrains giving praise for their supreme sacrifice.

In Burma, the American and British fly-boys scored successes, without loss, on 13 Japanese planes out of cloud-cuckoo land. The last of them, sputtering to the ground, attempted a suicide mission but failed to hit a target. Recounted also on the front page is the bailout of an American pilot over Burma on an earlier day's Tomahawk mission gone awry. The pilot lived to tell the harrowing tale, that falling at 140 miles per hour gave one the feeling of falling at 140 miles per hour.

In the Philippines, General MacArthur's American-Filipino forces continued to hold out on Bataan against the onslaught by the Japanese, after a lull in the action for a couple of days. The good news, however, would prefigure only the bad to come.

With the sinking of tankers along the East coast and Nazi U-boats now reported in the Gulf of Mexico off Texas, coupled with the diversion of tankers to the war zones, Secretary of Interior Ickes reported that gasoline was again becoming scarce as it had been in mid-summer, 1941, prompting then limited hours for service stations, prompting in turn motorists to fill up more regularly during the hours of operation. Rectification of the situation, however, was anticipated. After all, soon the tires would be giving out anyway. In those days they didn't have 40,000-60,000-mile steel-belted jobs comprised of polyester and nylon warp and woof, just a range of 10,000, maybe 15,000 miles on smoother roads, for their rubber lubbers plying mostly bad rural stretches, often badly banked, often still unpaved. Probably 5,000 miles was more typical. Maybe not even that in the far backwoods, along the Texas plains and through the Rockies of Colorado, the dense back-country of Wyoming. (We know. Even with some of those nice 50,000 steel-belted jobs afoot, we found them not lasting more than half that under our pedals back there in the wild, wild seventies.)

The Raleigh Times has an excerpted piece on the editorial page regarding Tom Jimison's "inmate's eyeview"--being sort of akin to that which might be had by one who flew over the nest, we suppose--of the insane asylum at Morganton. The piece finds the reports worthy of further investigation but also questions Mr. Jimison's bona fides, based on his revelation not only that he voluntarily committed himself originally to the institution, but also, when given a green light to exit two months into his stay, chose instead to remain for another ten months. The question which the Raleigh newspaper, not to be confused with the News & Observer, finds begged is whether a man could be trusted who chose voluntarily to stay in a place which he described as a hell-hole.

But, that is to condemn any first-hand messenger for doing or not and thereby to enable a blink of the issue. For, if he had been there involuntarily and made to stay the year, would it not be said by the skeptical that he was simply foisting his sour grapes about the involuntary institutionalization on a gullible world? that all was quite okay there in Morganton? that Jimison and his sour grapes were the only problem?

Given Mr. Jimison's past and his tendency to view his world with realistic disdain for anything hypocritical--the claim of a state to be so unearthly 'sblood as to be one and the same, a view regularly heard and maintained by the same sorts of idiots to this day, while permitting such a 'sfiendish institution as its lunatic asylum to exist in its 'Sfoot mountain hollows, for instance--we suspect that Mr. Jimison entered the institution not for any rest or relaxation from mental illness, but rather to glean from the participant-observer status confirmation subjectively of the very anecdotal reports which likely he had received as a minister, lawyer, and reporter through the years, the sound, as so much wind howling through the crags for want of ability or forum in which to articulate them, for want of corroboration by anyone who had, effectively silenced.

Ridiculous times full of the ridiculously unrealistic, whose messengers sedulously sought to impose on others their wishes of enunciated precepts, by which the messengers themselves failed to live, but persisted for reasons of obtaining and maintaining economic and political power, require ridiculous measures to thwart, to open the eyes of both the ridiculous themselves and those on whom such ideas prate and prey.

Look around this world of 1941-1942 and see if it had not gone completely insane. Who was to blame? They were blaming each other, just as Hitler had done, just as his whole insane country had done. What Mr. Jimison saw around him was the very same concatenation of circumstance which Cash had observed and analyzed so effectively--the very society at base being denominated by the same sort of peasantry and their captains, the same concatenation which gave rise to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis--the genuine folk movement of the South historically, by the 1930's Howard Odum's and the President's Economic Problem No. 1, so, at base, for want of education, for its tendency to loaf in its thinking into a dream world of sentiment composed of cardboard characters out of romance novels, turned into talking movies in vivid colors, rather than to face hard realities; to shove under the carpet the unpleasant, out of sight, out of mind, to insist that anyone daring to expose these realities was some sort of misbegotten devil, a charlatan, a conjurer, a thief, a drunkard, a moonshiner, or finally just some poor fool, gone at last insane. Don't listen, rationalize, for otherwise he might remind what a Pharisee really is and of the average Herrenvolk's daily cooperation with the lot of them for the sake of extermination of the rational.

At least the Raleigh newspaper and the Kinston newspaper both supported a full investigation of the charges brought by Mr. Jimison. But, a full investigation jaundiced by political prejudice in a one-party state whose party had sought political contributions of 10% from the $20/month staffers, impliedly to maintain their jobs, was unlikely to uncover many, if any, abuses--save, that is, underpayment of the bribes to the payees, the political handlers of those little men in the legislature who not only tolerated but finally and quite deliberately created the Morgantons, deemed a fit habitation for those who were not kowtowing to their Ku Klux Klan Klubs.

And any fool who thinks that it is not sometimes to be found still to be the case in some places, both among Republicans and Democrats, is a fool indeed. It still goes on. And most usually, nobody cares, nobody investigates, especially in the South. The word is mum, cooperation with the way things have always been--'Slaw.

The newspapers sometimes delve into history and provide history lessons. But let the subject dare turn to the present, even among one's own family, and they hide their heads in the sand, insistent that the world has changed completely from the bad old days, just as the bad old days blinded themselves and resisted progress for decades to come by insisting it had changed remarkably since the antebellum days and post-Reconstruction when it hadn't, allowing the bad old days to continue and shout "Resurgam!", that they are not as their parents' and grandparents' generations.

Change in some, certainly. Change by small degrees, certainly again. But systemic change at the base of the society, impacting virtually everyone? Ah, best look again, with Mr. Jimison's hard, insistent rules of activist journalism in mind.

Both Raymond Clapper and Dorothy Thompson write on the editorial page re the Roberts Commission report on the attack at Pearl Harbor, Ms. Thompson urging the lesson that poor communication and cooperation among people in the society was chiefly to blame for the atmosphere which led to the same lack of coordination between the Army and Navy in Hawaii, evident in the days preceding the attack. Paul Mallon points out that, according to Senator Brewster of Maine, such lack of communication had reached downright hostility between the services in some places.

Ms. Thompson also counsels less adherence to what she deems nineteenth century thinking in respect of civil liberties of foreign attachés operating around key military facilities. But, while understandable in the context of such a war operating on every front and on every part of the society, it was precisely the latter sort of thinking run amok which stimulated the paranoid atmosphere of the Cold War in the society of the 1950's and into the 1960's, leading to McCarthyism and revival of the pre-war sentiment characterized by distrust of anything with the slightest connotation "Red", right down to words themselves: "collective", "commune", "socialism", "sociology" (as everyone knows, the study on how to be a Communist and how to indoctrinate others likewise), "sociability". Only "church socials" might be exempted from full suspicion.

We do not blame Ms. Thompson for this atmosphere; it was expected to think that way during wartime. The problem was that the population, urged on by power-hungry pols of the worst stripe after the hot war's end, urged the Cold War, built largely on paranoia with respect to a former ally, without whose brave fighting and sacrifice, more than any of the other allies, the war would have undoubtedly required at very least substantially greater loss of American and British life, probably brought Britain directly within the Nazi sphere of occupation, leaving the United States, obviously poorly equipped in 1942 to fight even in the Pacific against the Japanese, to fight desperately on two fronts, alone. Instead of building positively from that relationship, setting aside foolish suspicions of the "godless Communists" and trying to build a better world from the one which lay in ruins after the war, some insisted on provocation and deliberate cause for mistrust to try to provoke a third war, one finally to end all wars indeed, the chief incidents of Armageddon not enough having been realized in the first two.

Take, for instance, the open declarations in early 1963, as reported in the February 28, 1963 News, those by some Senators from the South, John Stennis of Mississippi for one, Richard Russell of Georgia for another, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for yet another, in combination with some Republicans out to make political hay, to deprive the Administration of an unduly long glory garland wreathed it for the triumph of peace in the Cuban missile crisis, purporting to quote publicly Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that the United States was actively pursuing a policy to eliminate Castro and Communism from Cuba, interpreted then by the Soviets to mean a plan for invasion, prompting a threat of nuclear retaliation in such event, with rejoinder of the Senators that such threats were merely so much "blast and bluster"--all despite the Administration's pledge at the end of October not to invade, the deal necessary to be rid of the missiles, likely placed in Cuba in the first instance resultant of loose cannons on Capitol Hill making similar public statements during the year and a half after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs, suggesting that a Communist dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere was not acceptable, implying that another attempted invasion was both plausible and desirable, this time with a stronger force supported actively by the Air Force of General LeMay.

Did not such foolish prating create the atmosphere which led to the assassination, which led to America's military involvement in Vietnam, resulting in the deaths of 58,000 Americans, all over a strip of land the military significance of which was built on a World War II model largely, if not completely, outmoded by the nuclear age? a strip of land whose occupation by either or both the Soviets and the Communist Chinese was to be as actively and tenaciously resisted by the Vietminh and Viet Cong operating under Ho Chiu Minh as the occupation perceived in the North to be sought by the Americans since Eisenhower worked the U.N. to cancel the 1956 elections to reunify the country after the fall of Dien Bien Phu in April, 1954? (Wherein, incidentally, the Eisenhower Administration had refused the desperate pleas of the French for additional air support against the insurgent Communists who had encircled them and reduced their last stand in Indochina to two square miles, prompting the question whether we ever once hear, then or now, in the popular media, which writes the contemporary history in the minds of most Americans, of the failure and weakness of the Eisenhower Administration to provide such air support to the brave French garrisons at Dien Bien Phu, providing a perfect precedent for the Kennedy Administration refusing air support to the insurgent brigades of anti-Castro Cubans at the Bay of Pigs in April, 1961.)

In other words, does this view that civil liberties may be suspended as against the non-citizen in times of social stress not lend itself to self-fulfilling prophecy?

Is that notion not extended further in Mr. Clapper's analogy? Mr. Clapper analogizes between military preparedness for the unexpected and that of an average newspaper, and finds the military far less prepared in the days approaching the Pearl Harbor attack. Were they? First, we note the obvious flaw in that analogy, that the newspapers were not prepared for the attack at Pearl Harbor. Take The News, the largest afternoon daily in the Carolinas. Its offices were closed, its print cold, its employees scattered on the afternoon of December 7--despite war warnings afoot and known to everyone generally in the preceding days. So, too, it was with all the major news organs, whether generally operating on Sunday or not. No one scooped this story. No one predicted an air attack on Pearl Harbor in the days or weeks preceding it or even speculated that there could be a missing fleet somewhere plying the Pacific without detection, maintaining radio silence. There was no superiority therefore in fact in the "well-run" newspaper versus a haphazard military chain of command.

Second, we note missing facts in the premises of Mr. Clapper's comparison, facts unknown fully to anyone on the Allied side at that time in early 1942, that the reasons ultimately for the surprise element of the attack at Pearl Harbor--though, as Ms. Thompson appropriately indicates, "surprise" being then, and still, an overused modifier for description of the attack, as war was in fact expected from Japan during the ten days preceding the attack, indeed was considered a foregone conclusion, albeit expected on another front, the Philippines, Malaya, Thailand, Burma, N.E.I.--were the complete radio silence of the Japanese First Air Fleet under the immediate command of Vice-Admiral Nagumo, and its sailing through the "vacant sea" far to the north of any reconnaissance lanes normally kept by the American Navy and air corps, or easily capable of being carried out on any regular basis with the limited number of carriers then in the United States Navy, only three being available in the weeks preceding Pearl Harbor and those being subject to alternating missions to keep at least one close to island defenses at all times, being a sound order of the day when submarine attack was thought the chief likely culprit to be faced. Moreover, with the spying capability available in Hawaii to the Japanese, had air defenses been sound and had patrols concentrated instead to the north rather than the south, then different approaches would have been used. And, as pointed out subsequently by military experts and the brass, had the entire Fleet been at sea on December 7 and encountered the Japanese in an open sea battle against superior numbers of fighter and bomber planes, permanent loss of the Fleet stood as a real possibility, sinkings accomplished in deep water, not the shallow 40-foot depths of Pearl Harbor permitting salvage of most damaged ships.

To continue the figure of Mr. Clapper's comparison, it would be necessary to assume that the "well-run" newspaper office he posits for his paradigmatic efficient operation, had suddenly lost all wire service capability, all access to civilian radio and telegraph communications, and had to rely strictly on messages coming from Washington telling it that Sherman's men were in fact in Virginia, not marching toward Atlanta from Chattanooga. Atlanta need prepare primarily for acts of sabotage by the Union sympathizers in the area and the expected collective insubordination of plantation slaves in an uprising in support of such sabotage. Watch closely the railroads to insure that the tracks were not upset, interrupting supply routes. Then, you have, more or less, a better analogy than the one offered by Mr. Clapper. The newspaper office would likely not have had a headline ready in that case to the effect, "Atlanta Burning, Yankee Devil Sherman to Blame". More likely, they would be caught looking--and looking for a scapegoat among themselves.

The Pacific was simply too vast a place for complete reconnaissance in a time when radar was primitive and land-based only. Moreover, the equipment and men available to the Army and Navy in Hawaii in 1941 simply did not enable full 360º local air reconnaissance of Oahu, as presumed erroneously by the Roberts report.

Perhaps for morale during a time of national emergency and war, the Roberts Commission laid the thing off on the two scapegoats, Kimmel and Short, preserving public confidence in the Administration and the chain of command in Washington. (Comparison may surely be drawn to the Warren Commission Report of 1964, and for precisely the same reasons, a report drawn by men who had not forgotten the lessons of Pearl Harbor.)

That is not to say that some of the post-war reports were any the less scapegoating, but more information was available by that time, after the end of the war with Japan in August, 1945, even if much of that information was verbally anecdotal from surrendered Japanese officers and communications soldiers, rather than documents, most of which were destroyed as the war approached its end.

The third problem with Mr. Clapper's analogy is that self-fulfilling prophecy notion, that being too ready, too expectant of catastrophe, might well bring about the catastrophe which one is assiduously trying too cautiously to prevent. Indeed, one might ask whether the very process Mr. Clapper describes as inherent to well-run newspapers, anticipatory tragedy, might serve to bring about the tragedy as a necessary relief from boredom to reporters forced to prepare for such eventualities without a payoff of actuality. Do we sometimes bring about that for which we are overzealous in preparing against? If we assume someone is an enemy, that they have bad designs on our welfare, will such assumptions about reality not ultimately lead to inimical relations?

Whatever the case, we prefer to remember Pearl Harbor for the bravery of those there in the face of enormous unexpected adversity than for any dereliction of duty. There were no laggards or slackers on which to place blame. The blame was strictly that of the sneak thief invaders in their aeroplanes.

"Mickey Morale" finds issue with the USO sending to Fort Bragg the likes of Mickey Rooney, a rich actor with a good looking wife, and short, to boot, not, the piece suggests, the likely personage to inspire morale. Why not get Lana Turner? suggests the writer--right, maybe in her night clothes. But then, of course, the young men would have been so captivated by the Midwinter's midsummer night dream thus instilled to their enthralled rapture that they would have balked the prospect of going abroad to shoot Germans and Japanese. The sight instead of Mr. Rooney in a fur coat or what you might should well have made them want to fight the harder, to get back home to insure that the Mickeys didn't cop their chickies while away from the roost fighting the Jerrys alongside the Tommys, supplementing the work of the Rooskies.

And the Ulster girls, it is said on the front page, didn't care for the Yanks' dancing; too much jitterbugging, not enough jigs. Why do you think they call it Belfast?

Or, maybe their corsets were too tight. Mr. Mallon reports of the girdle controversy whereby the rubber shortage had first threatened their existence, only to be overridden, by citation to the British example, thus added to the protected list of essentials--together with hot water bottles, fire hoses, nipples, and macks for the policemen and firemen, and in the pouring rain, very strange.

The whole of them seemed to be eating carcake on some stupid Bloody Tuesday. Well, let them eat carcake. For as Sir Walter Scott said in The Antiquary, "...[T]he dame was still busy broiling car-cakes on the girdle..." Car-car-cajou.

Anyway, better to keep the rubberized girdles than to waste the scrap iron at home on some reversion to a medieval variety of the apparatus, as welded up for the ladies by Rosey the Riveter.

Girdles and Goebbels, both of the propaganda ministry. We eschew both.

Antipholus of Ephesus:

Good Signior Angelo, you must excuse us all;
My wife is shrewish when I keep not hours:
Say that I linger'd with you at your shop
To see the making of her carcanet,
And that to-morrow you will bring it home.

But here's a villain that would face me down
He met me on the mart, and that I beat him,
And charged him with a thousand marks in gold,
And that I did deny my wife and house.
Thou drunkard, thou, what didst thou mean by this?

Dromio of Ephesus:

Say what you will, sir, but I know what I know;
That you beat me at the mart, I have your hand to show:
If the skin were parchment, and the blows you gave were ink,
Your own handwriting would tell you what I think.

--The Comedy of Errors, Act III, Scene 1

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