The Charlotte News

Friday, November 13, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the British Eighth Army had re-taken Tobruk, 300 miles west of El Alamein, key supply depot for Rommel's Afrika Korps which he had captured in late June from the British. Rommel continued his fleet flight westward, apparently hoping that the beat of his corps' hoofs in retreat would create enough dust in its tracks to hide his position from the RAF and General Montgomery.

The Allies at the border between Algeria and Tunisia were now less than a thousand miles from the retreating Axis forces. The showdown appeared nigh. Yet, the last four hundred miles between Tripoli, Tunis, and the Algerian border would prove the most difficult to requisition from Axis possession. It would yet be another six months before Rommel would finally be vanquished in Tunisia.

Apparently emulating Rommel or at least upset by the news of his fast approaching glory terminus, an elephant named Modoc was reported on the rampage in Wabash County, Indiana. She had run down and injured Mr. Kindley, kindly trying to catch her. Just how the two-ton Wabash Cannonball got loose and from whose care and where it was trying to go, the piece does not bother to inform us. Guess you had to be there.

Rommel appeared headed to the shores of Tripoli for re-supply. Modok was headed west of Mt. Etna, into Huntington County. The sheriff in Wabash washed his hands of her. "She's no longer my baby," he sighed, apparently not broken-hearted from the loss. Fortunately, Montgomery continued to pursue Rommel through Libya after the Battle of Egypt was won.

Hope Modok didn't wind up like Mary.

On the editorial page, "Prodigy, 69" welcomes the re-emergence in Algiers of what the editorial's title appears to assume was a 69-year old Henri Giraud. As the body of the piece recognizes, he was actually 63. (So, why "69" and not 63? We don't know. Maybe it was a misprint in '69.) It sets forth some of the exploits of the World War I Allied hero who, while leading the defense of the Ardennes in May, 1940, was captured by the Nazis and delivered to a castle in Dresden atop a 750-foot mountain, from which he arranged for himself a daring escape in April, 1942 by means of a rope he wound together from gradually collected threads. The prospect of joinder of his leadership once again with the Free French was viewed by the editorial as a boon to Allied spirits and renewal of World War I and early World War II alliances, so strained in the previous two and a half years since the fall and the establishment of Vichy. Giraud was made commander of all Free French armies in North Africa by Dwight Eisenhower, even as some of the Resistance suspected the virility of his loyalty for his perceived former sympathy with Vichy. In fact, the apparent affinity was more likely the result of military camaraderie with his old commanders who happened to be part of the Vichy regime, primarily Marshal Petain.

Raymond Clapper cautions wisely against too much optimism from the victory in North Africa, that it only supplied a base of operations for approach to southern Europe, but that a long road to Berlin still lay ahead.

Indeed, not even North Africa was as secure as the headlines and front page stories were making it appear. Yet, with eleven months of almost unrelentingly dreary news behind them, interspersed only intermittently by the sputtering glories of the Doolittle Raid in April, the supposed victory in the Coral Sea in May, the victory at Midway in June, the successful taking of Henderson Field at Guadalcanal and the Dieppe commando raid on the French Coast in August, bombing raids aplenty on various points in France and Germany and, more recently, in northern Italy, by the RAF, the mainly jaundiced eyes of readers up until this week could greet with unrestrained hope this singular event as the first major inroad into Axis territory, the first major Allied Expeditionary Force of the war. The front page was guessing, if overly estimating from provided tonnage of supplies, that the force was 285,000 to 350,000 strong. Even if the number was closer to about 75,000 troops in the initial landings the previous Sunday, it was nevertheless something which the good-news starved war audiences of Britain, the United States, and especially Russia could take as a sparkling oasis in the desert.

Paul Mallon finds fault with Henry Wallace's speech on the prospect of a unified post-war peace among the United Nations, Mallon taking issue with the fact that it was delivered on the anniversary of the Russian Revolution without any preceding mutual recognition from Stalin on July 4.

But, peace has to start somewhere. If not in a democracy, where? Had the Wallace optimism prevailed in the post-war world rather than the mutually pervasive paranoia which led to the arms race, might the Cold War have been avoided? Or, is that too much a Polyannish viewpoint when conceding the reality of the post-war times? Or, did the post-war heady nectar kiss and comfort of victory simply allow to re-surface in both the United States and Great Britain the old pre-war and pre-June 22, 1941 suspicions of everything communist?

As for the queer piece on what Stephen Leacock calls the "queer race" of Americans, it is probably as true today as it was 67 years ago, probably even more so. But do we give a damn? Probably not. Maybe, it's because Americans came from all the other lands to settle a wilderness in a patchwork quilt constantly seeking common threads to pull together an altogether amorphously shaped melange into some common understanding of a common stew. But the question remains unanswered from where those of the other lands originally came. That's for them to figure out, we suppose. Americans don't really give a damn. Spend it fast as they can.

And, to the smart aleck who wrote the question over the "Visitin' Round" piece from the Transylvania Times regarding Cecil Sanders being thrown from his bicycle, we can answer the question thus posed. It happens when the manufacturer puts pedals on your new bicycle which you purchase in 1979, having on them reflectors on each edge which hang down a half inch below the normal plane of the pedal, such that when you round a sharp curve on one of your maiden flights on the bike, you misapprehend the ordinary clearance distance to which you are accustomed from years of prior flight on bikes, and wind up with the half-inch difference managing therefore to grab just enough touch of the pavement on which you are flying to throw you over the handlebars onto your unprotected head, generating thereby a large gash over your eye, from which you retain a scar for the remainder of your life, even if it healed without too much difficulty or undue harm to your appearance for your otherwise good health at the time of occurrence. That is what "being thrown" means.

Who did the throwing? It was the idiotic, unthinking little devil who designed the pedal, and the other see-no-evil idiots who, without considering its likely effects, manufactured and sold it routinely to the public until they finally got wisdom enough to ban such silly pedals from the market, we suppose.

Anyway, we empathize with Cecil Sanders.

And to the smart aleck at The News, don't ask stupid questions.

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