The Charlotte News

Saturday, October 24, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports of the opening salvos of the Second Battle of El Alamein, explained in immediate significance by the map. As tanks and infantry piled through the narrow opening in the minefields to Rommel’s lines during this day, the Allied navy sent planes and ships to strike at Matruh.

The operation’s overall significance was to form a pincer pushing from the east against Rommel’s forces, ultimately designed to pin him in between the British Eighth Army under Montgomery and the forces under Patton set to invade the western portion of North Africa in less than three weeks as part of Operation Torch, with landings in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.

So, it was Operation Lightfoot meeting Operation Torch, to extinguish in the middle Rommel’s Afrika Korps of panzers.

"Der schwere Panzer wird zum Fluegelkleide
Kurz ist der Schmerz, unendlich ist die Freude."

Indeed, from many panzer commanders, German and Italian, the heavy pants of life would be relieved by the lightfooted wings of the angels, with little pain and enduring joy—strength through joy, achieved by triumph of the will to create one great, supreme Germania, its inhabitants, however, unfortunately, all dead. The Fallen Rebel Angels had first tempted them to embrace their cause, as they did to the Confederates of the Old South eighty years before, spiriting these easily swayed non-readers of the bunk purveyed by their Leader not to Heaven but rather to the depths of darkest Hell.

How sweet would be the victory, finally, for the Allies, come springtime.

The report tells of the interim since the first Battle of El Alamein in late June, early July, after the loss of Tobruk to Rommel. The first battle had ended in a siege line drawn across the narrow strip between the sea and the Qattara Depression. The sandstorms and intense heat of the summer had made desert fighting impossible, even at night. The lull provided the Allied forces time to replenish the 50,000 men lost during the first battle and retreat from Tobruk.

For the second night in a row, RAF pilots bombed Italy, this time adding Savona to the previous night’s targets, Turin and Genoa, bombed yet again.

According to the front page preview, editorial writer Burke Davis reviewed a book on James B. Duke, founder of the American Tobacco Co. and the Duke Endowment, which built Methodist churches across North Carolina, Duke University, and established the primary electric utility in the state, Duke Power Company. Unfortunately, we don’t have that page for you. So, you will have to obtain it yourself or imagine what he said, or, for another impression, read Cash’s "Buck Duke’s University" from The American Mercury, appearing September, 1933.

Mr. Davis had originally entered college in 1931 at Duke, incidentally, but had to drop out after a year for financial reasons brought on by the depths of the Depression. He then, in turn, attended Greensboro Woman’s College, (now UNC-G), for a year when it accepted males, then Guilford College, also in his native Greensboro, before finishing his collegiate career with graduation from the University in Chapel Hill. Thus, but for Mr. Hoover’s Depression, Mr. Davis would likely have been a Duke graduate. Such, sometimes, are the vicissitudes of life, having nothing to do with potential or intellectual capacity, but only the size of the pocketbook from which derives the daily provender.

Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I flying ace, had disappeared over the Pacific with a crew headed from Hawaii to a stopover point on Canton Island on a civilian mission to allow Rickenbacker to assess air operations in the Pacific while personally delivering a secret to General MacArthur in Australia.

The press would presume the crew dead within two weeks, but the search continued nevertheless, and eventually, on November 13, they were spotted near Samoa floating on a raft, just as the report of this date speculates might have spared them the fate of the Locker.

Only one of the crew died during the ordeal. As a scene out of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", Rickenbacker caught and killed a seagull which provided food for the crew, without the curse of the albatross attached. And they drank rain water.

Senator Lister Hill of Alabama debated against an amendment to the draft age reduction bill proposed by Senator Pappy Lee "Pass the Biscuits" O’Daniel of Texas, seeking to restrict the hand of General Marshall in determining the appropriate time of deployment of new young draftees, once the minimum age was lowered from 20 to 18.

Senator Pappy wanted to pamper the youngsters with assurance by law of a minimum of one year of training before being ordered into combat. That sounds well and good in the abstract. But, with the war being lost, and manpower on the fronts being short, the abstract had little place in this world of 1942. Action was needed and plenty of it, immediately. Former flour salesmen probably should not have strayed far from topics with which they were more familiar than not and left the decision on how long to train a green draftee to the commanders in the field. Instead, he sought memorable favor from the electorate back home by defending the skins of their young sons about to be drafted.

Senator Pappy, and his hillbilly band, incidentally, was up for re-election in 1942, just ten days away, having won the right, through the narrow defeat of Lyndon Johnson in the special election primary of June 28, 1941, only to complete the term of the deceased Morris Sheppard. He ran unopposed, but nevertheless, impressing the voters as a populist never hurt a politician who would say and do anything to get elected and stay elected. (If you look him up in the Wicked-pedia, incidentally, you will see that someone decided to dub him "Wilbert", thinking apparently that his first name was the one he preferred. But, no one called him Wilbert. Such is emblematic of the problem with relying too closely on anything contained within Wicked-pedia. Hence, we just call him Pappy. But you can call him Lee or Biscuits if you want.)

On the editorial page, "War and What?" once again addresses the recent calls of Wendell Willkie and Chinese Foreign Minister T.V. Soong for postwar planning in the form of a United Nations organization, Mr. Soong favoring an executive council formed by the principal Allies. The editorial agrees and suggests that such planning ought include lifting of trade barriers, renouncing extra-territoriality in China, freeing India, the Middle East, South America, Africa, and the Indies from British, French and Dutch colonial rule while insuring the populations of the former colonies a fair return on their product.

It would take until after the end of the Cold War for all of the vestiges of empire to recede and for the vision of the United Nations to begin to be realized. The economic impact of centuries of colonialism, however, still remains, even if in the guise of capitalism, in too many parts of the world where cheap labor and low standards of living maintain cheap goods for the markets of the West.

"Long Swells" tells of the Japanese admonitions to their own people that the war would be long. The piece warns that destruction of the nation would ultimately be the end to be meted for waging such battle against the might of the United States. It was not just hubris, even if, in the end, Germany suffered a far worse fate than any of the other Axis nations. But it was, after all, Germany which had started not only this war but the previous world war as well.

"Miracle of Milk" praises the State’s purchase of thirty milk cows for the mental health facility at Morganton to insure the patients at last good whole milk. The State’s conscience had, the piece exults, finally been awakened. "Cows is coming."

They were ruminating, no doubt, on the singular question of whether, if there came a drought to the foothills of North Carolina, their carcasses from dehydration and starvation having become denuded of flesh in time, leaving their skulls to bake in the sun, finally becoming the object of photographers come from Washington with the good offices of the Government behind them to raise public awareness of the issue, such a photographer might move the skull of one of their number by ten feet, causing such asportation to defeat the entire purpose and truth of the photographic record of the drought, and to the point that all of honor and integrity would dismiss the putative condition as myth merely drummed up in chicane for political fodder at election time.

And, today, we read that Democrats are criticizing President Obama for having an all-male basketball game at the White House, leaving out representatives of one of his most avid demographic bases, females.

Things change, and always somehow remain the same.

When the forest is denuded, one cannot see it for the trees which were cut down.

Next time, Mr. President, we recommend cheerleaders.

We enjoyed the Errol Morris series on photography as art and documentary and journalism, and again recommend it to your attention. One could say of the various points of view: all in the wrong. Or, one could say: all in the right. Or bits and pieces of each. And that, we think, is characteristic of art: if documentary ceases to be art, it will scarcely move anyone to remedy the problem which the documentarian set out initially to record. Show us any documentary which is purported to be devoid of art and we shall show its lie, or its completely vapid exposé of nothing save mediocrity, its own. Take your average "reality program"...

For the hard of hearing, we do a quick review of the week's news: Wheat was being substituted for scarce corn in production of local moonshine in and around Charlotte in 1942. Alf Landon had suffered the worst defeat in the history of presidential elections to that point in 1936, after the moved steer skull became a hot topic in the pro-Landon camp during the weeks immediately preceding the election.

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