The Charlotte News
Saturday, January 3, 1942
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page informs that as the Japanese continued to make headway in and around Manila, and were now heavily bombing the deeply fortressed American-Filipino positions on Corregidor with little impact thus far, they were being stopped north of Singapore.
And meanwhile, Hitler's bitterly frozen troops were being continually shelled day and night and pushed back further from Moscow, as Soviet troops recaptured Maloyaroslavets, the town which began the downfall of Napoleon's armies in the deadly winter of 1812-13 in which his Grande Armée was reduced to a fifth of its former strength when it invaded in June, 1812.
And this page tells in pictures of the continuing British success against Rommel in the deserts of Libya, along the Eqyptian-Libyan border. And of Private Marion Hargrove's experience with Fort Bragg blackouts.
British General Archibald Wavell was appointed this date by joint consent of the Allies to be supreme commander of all Allied forces in the Pacific theater of operations while Chiang Kai-Shek was appointed commander of all Allied forces to be deployed in China, and, in the future, of those to go into Indochina and Thailand.
Dorothy Thompson tells today on the editorial page of the weakened internal condition of Germany, the strike of the generals against further slaughter of troops in Russia and the consequent need for Hitler to assume command himself--different from the conventional wisdom that Hitler seized command for his dissatisfaction with the progress of the October offensive and its failure to capture either Moscow or the oilfields of the Caucasus, the wheat fields of the Ukraine. Ms. Thompson counsels a combined military and ideological strike against Germany by the Allies while this disarray and low morale remained pervasive, that, in just six months' time, among the million and a half to two million German men lost in Russia were counted fully a third of the three million best-trained young shock troops, always the front-line putsch speer in the earlier battles which had reduced Poland to a vassal state in September, 1939 and then rolled across Belgium and the Netherlands into France in spring, 1940, rescued the Italians in their futile attempts to conquer Albania and Greece in May, 1941, before now the fatal following of Napoleon's track into Russia.
The generals who had been responsible for Hitler in the first instance, the Prussian militarism which had thrust him to power as a puppet for the industrial barons' resumed profit from war machinery, now were the very instruments of Hitler's destruction from within, one, says Ms. Thompson, which should be immediately exploited further by the Allies.
But for America the war in the Pacific, the need to ratchet up production and change the assembly lines from cars to tanks and airplanes, to coordinate the country from a peacetime economy to such a complete war footing as it had not known since the Civil War would delay implementation of these sorts of dramatic moves counseled by the press. The front page predicted from London an assault on the Continent by the Allies by spring. Besides the continued bombing by the RAF, however, no combined Allied Expeditionary Force onto the Continent would occur until the Sicily campaign in 1943 and the Normandy invasion of June 6, 1944.
Yet, through it all, der Meistersinger, Lord Hitler, would continue to entreat his boys with song: "Tomorrow Belongs to Us" and "Horst Wessel Lied" (whose honored martyr perhaps not coincidentally was resemblant to Oswald).
A few verses beyond the one quoted today says: "As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, and as vinegar upon nitre, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart." And, a little further beyond that: "The north wind driveth away rain: so doth an angry countenance a backbiting tongue."
As Hitler faced the north wind, the angry countenance of the British, Australians, New Zealanders and now, at last, the Americans, were bearing down hard upon his allied back-biting tongues of the Far East as well.
Time held its prophecy, but yet time would be needed, more death in the snow, more death in the jungle, required for the hot breath of the bellipotent, that bearing false witness against his neighbors, to be abated in the little mind of the rat-like man who had leaned on the balustrade above Napoleon's Tomb at Invalides that day at the end of June, 1940, after France had surrendered in the railroad car at Compeigne June 22, as he gained vengeance for the humiliation done him and his comrades fallen in the trenches of 1914-18, as he gained all but the soul he left behind somewhere on that earlier battlefield.
Now, however, a year and a half later, militant discord was apparent in the ranks, even among the military who had aided his final rise to power to be their puppet. Too much blood had been tossed uselessly to cannon as mere cattle. The Fuehrer's exhortations to wage war without pity could not extend to one's own countrymen. Yet, in the Fuehrer's self-loathing little mind, it did. Now, mere boys were to be plucked from their weaning into the ranks of soldiers, to die as little men, just as the Fuehrer wanted, just as the Fuehrer commanded--of all the little German boys and girls, to be eaten and consumed alive by fire, just as he would watch with gruesome delight a film he commissioned of the slow agonizing death by strangulation with piano wire of those in the military who comprised the dastardly cabal against his life in July, 1944.
But it was, in the end, the Prussians who first withdrew their alliance with Napoleon and threw in with the Russians on December 30, 1812. Hitler, during his Christmas season Berchtesgaden nervous breakdown, should have perhaps been more attentive to Tchaikovsky and less to Wagner. Perhaps, even, he should have, instead of the results of his Propaganda Minister's lying tongue, read the editorials of the lady he once had expelled from Nazi Germany.
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