The Charlotte News

Saturday, November 14, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports the move of the Allies into Tunisia, headed toward Tunis.

Rommel, meanwhile, had been chased even further west, 40 miles beyond Tobruk to Gazala. A brightly spirited Bernard Montgomery told his men of the Eighth Army, "On with the task. Good hunting to you all!"

A day after his pilot was rescued, World War I ace aviator Eddie Rickenbacker was likewise fished out of the drink, having drifted by raft since the plane in which he was riding had run out of fuel not far from Samoa three weeks earlier on October 24. The crew had at one point been given up for dead but the search nevertheless continued to good effect.

It was reported, if incomplete for blacked-out news conditions, that a new major naval engagement at Guadalcanal had been taking place since Thursday night. This battle lasted until Sunday.

Known as the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal or, alternatively, as the Battle of Friday the 13th, the bulk of the battle took place on Friday.

The Japanese were attempting again to land reinforcements to take Henderson Field, this time via a large task force of ships which had come from Rabaul in New Guinea down "The Slot" of the Solomons toward Guadalcanal. Air reconnaissance alerted the U.S. Fleet, already in the area in force delivering replacement troops and supplies to the tired stalwart defenders of Henderson Field.

The fierce naval battle during the three-day period between the wee hours of Friday and Sunday resulted in the loss of 1,732 men for the Allies and 1,900 for the Japanese. The Allies also lost two cruisers, seven destroyers, and 36 airplanes; the Japanese lost two battleships, a cruiser, three destroyers, eleven transport ships, and 64 airplanes. Despite the heavy losses on each side, the battle was a strategic victory for the Allies as the Japanese were once again turned away from Guadalcanal and Henderson Field, their sole objective in the operation.

Nevertheless, it was the greatest American loss of life in one engagement since Pearl Harbor. Fully 687 of the American dead were from a single ship, the light cruiser Juneau, sunk on Friday while seeking to leave the area after having been torpedoed and damaged. About a hundred of the men survived the sinking, but were stuck floundering in the water for eight days awaiting rescue. All save ten died during this period from starvation and exhaustion, their battle injuries, or shark attacks. Among the dead were five brothers, the Sullivans of Waterloo, Iowa, who passed into the popular lore of the war as a result.

Characterized by confusion in the nighttime firing of ship directly on ship, several of the American ships were struck by friendly fire. It was only one of two sea battles in the Pacific war which involved direct battleship to battleship fighting.

A year after this battle, one of the Japanese transport ships, Kinugawa, beached on Guadalcanal this date, Saturday, was photographed as the rusting hulk appearing below, a symbol of the steady decay of the Japanese formidability on the sea from the point of the Battle of the Coral Sea forward, another in a series of significant incremental blows having been inflicted to the Mikado's mare nostrum at the Battle of Guadalcanal.

For lack of a sufficient quorum to do business, Democratic Majority Leader Alben Barkley had to issue an order to the sergeant-at-arms of the Senate to arrest members in the District of Columbia not present in order to effect sufficient numbers for a roll-call vote on the anti-poll tax legislation before the body. Conspicuously missing were the Southern Senators. Senator Tom Connally of Texas predicted it would never pass. His prediction was correct for the time.

African-Americans were fit to serve and fit to die in the war, but not fit in eight states of the South to vote without the ability to pay for exercise of the constitutional right.

And, as Cash had pointed out in The Mind of the South, often these attempted bars to voting, intended to keep the bulk of the black population from the polls, worked equally, if not more so, to keep poor whites from voting. Yet, that did not deter even some of the South's more progressive Senators, such as Burnett Maybank of South Carolina, from opposing reform legislation on the issue. For these Senators wanted to be re-elected by that significant portion of their constituency which would not hear of such radical notions as allowing free franchise for all. For next would come demands for the dratted social equality. And that was simply intolerable.

For historical completeness, we note that the Duke vs. Carolina game, still in the first half when the score was given on the front page, wound up a sister-kissing tie, 13-13, the day after Friday the 13th. Carolina finished the season, its last game on the 21st to be a win against Virginia, with a respectable 5-2-2 record in Jim Tatum's single season as head coach. An alumnist of UNC, he would return to his alma mater in 1956 after leading Maryland in 1953 to a national title. Duke, being coached by Eddie Cameron, wound up with a disappointing year at 5-4-1. Cameron took the place for the duration of the famed Wallace Wade, who had during the spring at age 50 joined the Army as a Major, after leading the 1941 Blue Devils to a New Year's Day loss in the Rose Bowl, relocated to Durham because of the war danger to Pasadena.

On the editorial page, "Now or Never" predicts that the Nazis likely would strike through Turkey into the Middle East, to draw off Allied troops from the North African theater to relieve Rommel and counteract the threat of invasion across the Mediterranean.

It would not come to be. Without the oilfields of the Caucasus secure, Hitler had not the fuel readily available to venture such an operation. Had he the oil, he would not have been moving 600,000 troops from Russia to protect southern Europe by the relatively slow means of trains clogging all the rail lines, as reported during the week, running the risk the while of sabotage. Trains were powered by coal of which he had a plentiful supply. Trucks, planes, tanks, troop carriers required oil to run. Moreover, he would risk having his armies surrounded, by the British in the south, in Iran, Iraq, and Syria, with the thusly relieved Russians free to attack him in the rear from the north during the fierce winter, a season in Russia which he had already learned in the past year was his troops' worst enemy while the best friend of the seasoned Russian.

"Five-Day Wonder" tells of the record time of less than five days to build the Liberty Ship Robert E. Peary in the Kaiser shipyards in Richmond, California. The record time, which was actually four days, fifteen hours, was short-lived, the piece indicates, as another shipyard quickly reduced the time to a mere three days, eight hours. The namesake ship of the Ultima Thule explorer was completed on Thursday and sent down the ways to sea on November 22. It survived the war and was scrapped in June, 1963.

"Suggestion" advocates that Senator Pappy Lee O'Daniel of Texas be taken seriously by the Senate in his effort to urge the abandonment of the 40-hour work week to alleviate the increasing labor shortage brought on by the war. Senator O'Daniel, however, favored a six-day week at twelve hours per day, 72 hours--more than even the 60 hours Germany was enforcing on its laborers, though not reaching the 112 of the Japanese.

Speaking of excessive labor, Dick Young wrote of the first vestigial trigonometric logarithmic stirrings of the baby boom generation to come over Blueberry Hill, the recording in Mecklenburg County the previous month an historical record for births, 356. The ostensible reason he provides for the sudden increase was that expectant fathers could obtain, for the nonce anyway, deferral from the draft. But with Uncle Sam predicting the need for nearly ten million men to fight the war by the end of 1943, he also warns his readers that the prospect for escaping wartime service by the production of a little dividend would likely soon become mooted by the drafting of men with dependents. Seeking to dodge the draft by artfully bringing into the world a little dodger might wind up as more than a little bundle of twistings.

For himself, Mr. Young says that he would rather help win the war than risk bringing an infant into the world in order to escape combat, only to have the child grow to manhood in a dictatorship run by Hitler and Tojo.

Such conscientious sentiment expressed in the afternoon paper might well have postponed some wooing by hearts and flowers at the theaters of Charlotte over popcorn this Saturday night, November 14, 1942, and, to boot, thrown cold water on the bus ride home. First, would-be papa had to win the war--with the help of course of Papa Joe and Pappy Lee. Other pursuits would simply have to wait their turn. And how.

Our apologies to anyone who might mark their birth date, especially in Mecklenburg, on or about August 15, 1943. We mean no offense to your papa's patriotism and bravery. Honi soit qui mal y pense.

It may well be that having engaged some analysis similar to that which we just suggested, the perfect solution to the dilemma was thus conceived.

As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, albeit in somewhat, but only somewhat, different context, "You cannot fault a man for trying."

And we say that sincerely, any assumption of connotations pregnant with the contrary being unintended and not with standing.

There is likely in this notion, too, another corollary to Catch-22--but we leave that for you mainly to ponder on your own. As a start, it may go something like this: if you were insane enough during World War II to want to become a papa, then you were obviously unfit to go to war; but if you were sane enough to go to war and insane enough not to attempt every avenue to escape it, then you were obviously...

Well, "On with the task. Good hunting to you all!"

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