The Charlotte News

Tuesday, November 10, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page continues the story of the Allied offensive in North Africa, now in the mopping-up phase, after most of the points of invasion had surrendered. Token resistance remained at Casablanca. The Allies were reported to be preparing for operations into Tunisia to trap Rommel's forces as they fled west across Libya.

Prime Minister Churchill attributed the plan of attack to FDR and stated that he remained the President's faithful lieutenant in prosecution of the operation.

Without citation, we note, Wicked-pedia has it down that the exact opposite was the case, that the United States desired an invasion of Europe, but the British believed that such an opening would be premature and disastrous, and so FDR eventually acquiesced to the North Africa invasion plan. Once again, Q.E.D.; and we caution thus against relying too heavily on Wicked-pedia for strictly accurate information on much beyond the most basic of facts, names, dates, casualty rates, etc. (Sometimes, even that basic information is wrong.) The rest is often politically motivated or motivated by arrogance and ignorance on the part of Wicked-pedia's hired "editors"--for the most part elementary school drop-outs, obviously--who appear all too often, for their lacking basic scholarship skills, to be at war with both history and the world, or anyone who has the ability to think on a slightly elevated level, above that of fifth-grade equivalency.

That latter view of the matter is quite illogical, given the history of the time, that is, should one peek out from amid the morass of excruciating detail offered too often by the articles in Wicked-pedia, to view the matter with something less than constrained myopia resulting from too close scrutiny of those excruciating details and not enough of the larger picture preceding and following a given event, that which tends to characterize the attempt to construct such an encyclopedia by erratic piecemeal from thousands of authors of varying levels of scholarship and care, all filtered through a mindless array of "editors" bound in a box of "rules" which demonstrate little recognition of the way human knowledge comes to be and is normally purveyed by traditional encyclopedias.

American troops stood ill-prepared still for a concentrated coastal invasion of France or Norway, inevitably destined to meet heavy resistance, especially in France. The Dieppe Raid of August 19, while reported at the time as a tremendous success, was actually anything but a success, with the cadre of Canadians involved in it sliced to pieces by the Germans safely encased in their concrete pillboxes along the coast. The bulk of the American forces had only been in training for between six months and a year, were anything but seasoned in battle, and were therefore far too green for such a concerted action out of the chute. The North Africa campaign thus presented a better theater for obtaining battle experience before facing the heavy German coastal batteries--the Maginot Line artillery literally transplanted to the coast of France. Patton's tank forces had been training in the California desert specifically for the purpose since the spring, as reported March 27.

Obviously, as reflected persistently in the press, there was an impatience after Pearl Harbor on the part of the American people to open a second front in Europe; obviously there was an impatience on the part of Russia for it to be done. But the American military command was not on record as favoring such a move but for the intervention of British military wisdom, contingency plans developed for an invasion of the Continent in the case of dramatic changes in the Russian situation in 1942, notwithstanding.

We therefore accept Mr. Churchill's contemporaneous explanation and reject Wicked-pedia's revisionist speculation.

While the British experience at Dunkerque had taught the lesson to all that inadequate preparation and inadequate forces would wind up on the losing end on the Continent--and thus the British, too, needed no great prodding from the Americans to go along with the more indirect and longer route to Berlin--, the plan was largely the brainchild of General Dwight Eisenhower, commander of the entire operation, with headquarters now at Gibraltar. And, of course, it proved an entirely correct plan to follow.

Returning from Guadalcanal, Lt.-General Thomas Holcomb reports that the Marines had fought without reinforcement since the beginning of the campaign on August 7, now fully three months. He champions it as a record for frontline tenacity on the part of American forces, citing the forty days on the frontlines in France during World War I as having been then thought the extreme limit of troop endurance. They didn't call them Leathernecks for nothing. The stand they were making was a fitting tribute to the 167th anniversary of the founding of the Marine Corps then being celebrated. But, inevitably, the General offered, they were tired and battle-weary by this juncture, badly in need of relief, being daily either under fire or under threat of it.

On the editorial page, Paul Mallon forecasts that the end in Europe could be only months away, as the weakness in Rommel's positions had been exposed by the push westward by the British in such short order, combined with the failure of the Nazis to take the Caucasus or Stalingrad, faced now with another long winter in which the Russians might mount yet another counter-offensive as in the previous winter.

Raymond Clapper picks up the theme, explaining why North Africa was so strategically important to the Allies, not for its own resources but rather because of its geographical significance in affording a springboard to launch an offensive into southern Europe while protecting the sea lanes of the Mediterranean as a supply route to the Middle East and through the Black Sea to Russia. Conversely, it took away this same crucial protective armor of the Axis which Rommel had afforded since 1940. Clapper also points out that Casablanca provided both a naval and rail post to guard against Axis provisioning of the crucial port of Dakar on the West African coast, long feared as a potential launching pad of Axis operations into South America and the Caribbean, specifically so referenced, along with the Cape Verdes, the Azores, and the Canaries, in President Roosevelt's "National Emergency" speech of May 27, 1941.

Dorothy Thompson reviews Stalin's recent annual speech to the Russian people, finds it one unifying of the Allies, bearing therefore good portent for the immediate, as well as long-term, future. She gleans that the failed aim of the 1942 German offensive was to take Moscow by a flanking maneuver from the south, with the Caucasus and Stalingrad only as ancillary goals. That apparently was Stalin's view, or at least the view he wished to convey to his people.

The actual facts, however, viewed from the persepctive of those known then and in hindsight, suggest that the Caucasus oil was the goal Hitler had in mind, in order to enable his drives in the desert to the south in North Africa and ultimately to enable, in all probability, an invasion of England, his thorn, though one now shored up by the American troops arriving there and in Northern Ireland on a regular basis across the still treacherous Atlantic, even if rendered less so to shipping since the early summer height of losses.

Mallon, echoed by Clapper, had pointed out that one of Rommel's primary problems in mounting an offensive to take Alexandria and the Suez Canal was an inadequate supply of gasoline, its sparseness brought about primarily from RAF bombing raids on gasoline dumps during the previous months since the stand at El Alamein began--but also because there was simply little gasoline to be had, the primary supply coming to Hitler from Rumania being used to fuel the now increasingly desperate operations in Russia.

"Plagiarism" gives praise to the Allied coup in launching an airborne invasion of the crucial Japanese base at Buna on the north coast of New Guinea, news of which had been drowned out the day before in the wake of the Allied invasion of North Africa. The editorial, relying on reports of the Japanese having been taken by surprise, appears to assume that the base had been captured and was secure. It wasn't. Entrenched fighting would ensue for nearly two more months at Buna, as well as at the nearby Japanese stronghold in the village of Gona, before both locations were under Allied control.

"Wrong Number" takes issue with the President's explanation for the invasion of North Africa, the protection of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia from Axis invasion and possession. The editorial suggests it as the wrong message, conveying a position of defense rather than the actual offensive purpose, to serve as a launching pad for invasion of southern Europe.

But, was the President not playing his hand close to his vest, to delude, to the extent still possible, the German-Japanese propaganda machine? Enable them to circulate enough the notion that America was engaged in an imperialist-nationalist-protectionist campaign, something the spoon-fed Germans and Japanese had been told of the Allies for years by their propaganda agents, and perhaps the reinforcement by the President of such propaganda, disseminated within the Axis gleefully as proof positive of the American aims, would have the desirable impact on their people and soldiers of relaxing their vigil sufficiently from the prospect of offensive action to enable an element of surprise when the push into southern Europe eventually came.

And, characteristic of a democracy, "Wrong Number", by suggesting Roosevelt's statement as disingenuous, could be equally set forth as an exhibit arguably confusing to any enemy agent who might read the piece. That is one of the many advantages in wartime enjoyed by democracies with a free press, which countries with a government-run lackey propaganda arm, masquerading as a press, lack. The very concept of free speech serves thus to throw into disarray the controlled speech and mindset of the enemy without ever consciously trying to do so.

Point-counterpoint, argument, even for the sake of it, always has its role to enlighten. We recommend the notion to the fascists who control Wicked-pedia, as well as other fascists who think freedom of expression is a threat and anathema to their existence. Well, maybe it is. But that is only because they are fascist in their mindset.

"Spirited State" explains the temperament which gave rise to the Civil War, and perhaps why the shooting irons which precipitated that war first arose in South Carolina--a leaf out of Cash's thesis on "force bills" and the South's reactive "hair-trigger temper" often on display in response to them, that permeating usually from the threat perceived to some symbolic font, held sacred against intrusive influence from without, out of which, the predominating belief system holds, springs the traditionally prevailing social constructs, whether formed as institution, law, or mere custom, held as so commonplace in the memory of the living to be regarded as permanent and sacred--hallmark of the sort of mental stagnation which, if followed persistently by mankind, would have resulted in humans still living in caves.

Of course, no actual force bill preceded the Civil War, even if its perception as imminent, the prospect of legal abolition of slavery with the election of Lincoln, cast the mold for the cannonfire which was hurled against Sumter. Even so, a century later, the thesis was borne out visibly, first in reaction to school desegregation orders from the Federal courts, and then from the promulgation in 1963 of the civil rights legislation to prohibit by law racial discrimination in access to privately-owned facilities open to the public and engaged in interstate commerce, coupled with the voting rights legislation forecasted by the Kennedy Administration.

Perhaps, the concept also explains historically why a modern Congressman from that state lacked the self-control not to blurt "You lie!" during the course of the President's recent speech to the Congress regarding the proposed health care reform legislation. But, then, maybe there was some other explanation. Regardless, as an anodyne to the malady, whatever causes it, we recommend realization that it is the 21st century, not the 19th. Deterrent canings on the floor of the Congress, physically and verbally, resulting from disagreement with the espoused viewpoint of the speaker of the moment, seem to have gone out of fashion.

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