The Charlotte News

Wednesday, October 7, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports of FDR’s announced intention of the United States to conduct a post-war tribunal on war crimes, which of course would eventually take place at the site of the Nazi Party’s rallying point, Nuremberg. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson would be chief U.S. prosecutor.

Comes the prediction of economist Melchior Palyi that the Nazis would be depleted within a year by the combination of the tremendous toll being taken on men and equipment at the Russian front and the consistent RAF raid damage being done to its manufacturing capability, only 25% of which was enough, he contended, to defeat Germany’s ability to replenish its scattered fronts. While his temporal assessment was off by two years, he was correct in asserting that the bombing campaign was having its deleterious effects on both the Nazis’ ability to replenish the fronts and the morale of the German people. The first blow struck by the Allies to the house of cards would be to Rommel’s North African campaign over the coming seven months. Then would come, in succession, Sicily, the rest of Italy, and finally France, before the combined pincers of the Soviet forces from the east and the American, British, and Free French forces from the west could strangle the will to spell: Ende von der Welt für das arme kleine, unterdrückte Nazistische Schwein.

The three successive maps highlight the three areas of the Pacific war which were at present the hottest: the Aleutians, where fighting was sporadic; the Solomons, where, after the failed attempt on September 23 to 27, began this date the second raid on the Japanese troop concentration at Matanikau on Guadalcanal, this one to prove successful via a greatly increased attack force; and New Guinea, where MacArthur’s forces, mostly Australian ground troops and American pilots, were making substantial and largely unopposed headway in pushing the Japanese off the Port Moresby peninsula, now through "The Gap" in the Owen Stanley Mountains, heading down the south slope toward Buna.

On the editorial page, "Climax" catches up to the story out of Lumberton making headlines on Saturday regarding the fiery wreck between a gasoline tanker truck, a wagon, and a bus, in which now twelve people had been determined to have died.

Robert Humphreys discusses the President’s secret trip to inspect defense facilities and factories abroad the land, and determines that the trip was not, as suspected originally by Republicans, a political junket to stir up party loyalty for the mid-term elections, there having been only two political speeches during the entire 9,000-mile odyssey, during which the Secret Service estimated that only 150,000 people saw the President, of whom 100,000 were soldiers. The object of the secrecy, he reports, was in fact to avoid the prospect of sabotage and assassination, certainly not an idle concern in this time of peculiar "accidents" in and around defense facilities, as explored by Burke Davis in his review on the page of the book Sabotage! by Michael Sayers and Albert Kahn.

If the reader crosses the Humphreys piece with the Davis piece, and factors in also the Herblock, we suggest that the resulting jambalaya winds up something very much akin to a cross between "Suddenly"and "The Manchurian Candidate" while both rub shoulders simultaneously with Seven Days in May.

Did the big steel monster on the hill in waiting thusly laid forth by happenstance in separate pieces assemble itself and find hot coalescence in the conscious or sub-conscious, or in parts of each, to reach, along with Dutch Elm disease, the stone wall, Bosch, Walter Scott, Gettysburg, and a few other strangely mélanged ingredients, intersection with grim reality proceeding with all deliberate speed in Dallas in the fall of 1963?