The Charlotte News

Friday, January 9, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page this date contains more good news from the Russian front as it is reported that the sieges of the port cities of Leningrad on the Baltic and Sevastopol on the Black Sea were now dissipated by Russian troops, now laying siege to the siege defenders of those cities, previously evacuated in the summer as Russians laid their scorched earth policy and moved inland, leaving behind only the skeletal remains on which the Nazis could feed.

In Libya, the Nazis' attempts from sea to supply Rommel's retreating forces had been beaten back by RAF bombing raids on the shipping.

In the Philippines, bombing had ceased for the nonce, as defensive positions continued to prepare for an all-out assault by amassing Japanese ground forces.

In Malaya, the Japanese continued their movement from the north toward Singapore, as British troops exacted large losses in the process, themselves, however, accumulating heavy losses in the defense of the Slim River area.

But on the positive side of the Pacific action, American submarines had attacked and dispatched four Japanese transports and supply ships and damaged one maru, within 100 miles of Tokyo and Yokohama. The Japanese government-controlled press, however, boldly predicted to their public a land invasion of the United States, which they predicated on the fact that the British had successfully out-maneuvered the United States Navy in 1812--obviously a press a bit behind the times. American General Homer Lea, it is also reported, had written a book sometime around 1910 positing that a land invasion of some 170,000 Japanese troops could effectively occur in Washington state, moving south to take San Francisco within five months against forces then extant in the American Army. Government officials, however, dismissed the prospect of Japanese land invasion of the continent as an absurdity in present times, as the prospect of supplying such an invasion would be impracticable if not impossible, as it would first have completely to eliminate the Fleet in Hawaii and also take Alaska and its line of defenses, before any land invasion could possibly begin--all against the odds of eventually being neutralized by the Air Corps forces along the West Coast. The Japanese had not apparently updated their military strategic libraries in some time.

Hawaii, reported the new Army commander, Lt-General Delos Emmons, replacing Lt.-General Walter Short, was now ready for any recurring attempt at surprise invasion and was being made self-sufficient on fuel supplies by sugar fuel--that is a carbon-derived substitute for gasoline. (We don't recommend, incidentally, trying to put sugar in your tank. Your engine, we promise, won't appreciate it.)

And in Luzon, three of five Salinas, California soldiers, played dead amid Japanese attackers, sometimes just feet away from their luncheon engagements, for some 28 hours, to escape otherwise certain death in fact. These hail-hardy swift-thinking survivalist soldiers, no doubt, had read their Steinbeck in preparation for combat.

The editorial column counsels the stressing of bad news to Americans to continue to remind them that the war against Japan may be after all lost, as the Japanese fighting forces in the Pacific continued to defy the odds pronounced against them before the war began, continued air and land maneuvers, utilizing in the latter jungle infiltration into the rear of British lines in Malaya in their movement to surround and capture Singapore.

"Desecration" bemoans the Tin Pan Alley approach to commemoration of Pearl Harbor through popular song, replete with its cheapening tinsel lyrics. Maybe so. But, youth being youth, and youth being the ultimate market from which most of the front-line fighters would come, perhaps lightening the burden already heaped upon them with the gravity of the situation, such escape in song was no doubt needful to encounter the death-defying task of going off somewhere half way around the world to die, either in a Philippine jungle or in a Flying Fortress headed for Japan or onboard a patrol boat somewhere in the Solomon Islands. One would not be apt, in truth, to respond in those times or any other, to Mozart's Requiem, for instance, or even to "The Ride of the Valyries". More likely, some swinged-up, or swinged-down low fancy, full of sentimental lyrics, would be the goad to victory, even if, to older, more seasoned stateside ears, it might come out as sentimental hogwash drivel which they had heard a thousand times from barroom jukes, cheapening the memory of the dead at Pearl Harbor. We ourselves recall, at a young age, in 1965, being moved by Sgt. Barry Sadler's "Ballad of the Green Beret", which today might put most of us into a state of somnolence with its fading drum rolls and sternly militaristic sounds backing. (The flipside, while at the time moving, would prove likely even worse to contemporary ears, something, we recall, about a letter from home.)

Paul Mallon reports that the Japanese have a million men in China, 400,000 on the eastern Siberian frontier. He foresees, therefore, especially with things now going much better on the eastern front in Russia, a Russo-Japanese war, ending their mutual neutrality pact, instead, by spring, giving into their historic enmity, and that such an eventuality would relieve pressure on the British in Malaya. As Japanese air reconnaissance had been removed from China to the south, he also predicts more Chinese success as at Changsha, reported in the editorial column yesterday.

Raymond Clapper speaks again prophetically of the hard fight ahead, as honestly imparted by FDR to Congress earlier in the week. He speaks of the "United Nations"--a most prophetic phrase indeed--, rather than the more typical "Allies", as needing to coordinate effort to carry the fight to the Axis and then to continue to coordinate to insure in the postwar world a peaceful co-existence among nations. No one today, astute to the history since the war, could readily find room to argue against the point. Indeed, like it or not, like all of its business or not, like all of its constituent relatives or not, were it not for that key phrase, we might not be here by now.

The Baltimore Sun reports from Ozark country the change of opinion in the middle of the land, first from the newspaper editor in Missouri who, a year earlier, had voiced support for the old saw "no entangling alliances", putting faith in the protection of the two oceans, Robert Rice Reynolds's and his fellow isolationists' line, and advocating staying out of the war, not providing aid to Perfidious Albion, the Imperialist state, their war. Now, in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the piece reports, he was befuddled, no longer the voice of restraint and isolation.

Second, came the bootlegger from Hope, Arkansas. The Hope bootlegger summed it all up, both in the previous year and now a year later, with no change in the interim, least-wise none you could put your finger on in the rhythm and rhyme of his determined poetry, with some pretty danged gud commun sense in the bargain--figerin' we owed it to 'em to go ova theya and beat the stuffin's outta that jackleg Hitla boy. And he had a son, now, a real son of a gun, he says, doin' just that. What's mo', the still business was betta since last yeya, as all his danged wife's relatives had moved up Nawth to Missoura to aid in the woa industries effot, leaving him not to havin' to fend off thems whens they's a mind to seek to shaya in his cawn squeezin's of a Sunday aftanoon git-togetha. Like him or not, like his business or not, like his relatives or not, it's thems, and folks like 'em, that pretty danged well kept this here country from bein' the easy pickin's faw ol' Hitla and Mussalenni and Toojo. And you know that's the danged truth.

Keep Left down at the Riva, and just keep on Left, and you'll find youwa truth when you come back around every eight yeyas or so. Just folla the signs. What's that? Naw, don't worry. We don't know the way, either.

Lana Turner.

And, reports a member of Senator Harry Flood Byrd's committee on economy, according to the little piece from Nation's Business, in reference to the need to conserve expenditures in time of war on domestic programs: "We also know that we could reach the moon in a rocket, if we had the rocket." Eventually, long after the war, or so it seemed, though not so really, its name would be Saturn, with a costly payload.

Speaking of space, we ran across this other version of the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram today under the entry for "stellar evolution", in The Columbia Encyclopedia, 1993 5th ed. We were looking for some other entry and it just popped open to that page. We therefore reproduce it for your edification, as we reproduced the other one some time ago:

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