The Charlotte News

Wednesday, November 18, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The usual conflicting reports after a naval battle in the Pacific arise on the front page regarding the losses at Guadalcanal during the four-day battle the previous week. The Japanese claimed to have sunk thirteen or fourteen ships and damaged eleven or twelve others. In fact there were two cruisers and seven destroyers sunk. Indeed, the entire complement of the U.S. Navy ships engaged in the battle numbered only twenty. But, likewise, the report of the Navy was equally exaggerated, claiming 23 ships sunk and seven more damaged; in fact, there were 17 sunk, including eleven troop transport ships.

While some of the bloated figures no doubt derived from propaganda aims, a good part of it resulted simply from the confusion of battle, especially that waged in the nighttime. It was simply difficult to determine accurately the extent of battle losses inflicted on the enemy, and of course there was a reasonable desire on each side to withhold accurate assessments of the damage to its own forces to keep the enemy guessing. Too, it must be borne in mind consistently that the figures provided on combatant losses of the Axis are always going to be estimates. The records were burned prior to the surrenders, both in Germany and in Japan. Thus, whether the Japanese losses in the battle were approximately 1,900, as reported finally, or closer to the contemporaneously estimated 20,000 to 40,000 is, in truth, not really known. In all likelihood, the loss did not range so high as 20,000--but then with eleven transport ships sunk, one has to assume a substantial loss of life, probably greater than 1,900. Rescue in the midst of battle was obviously difficult, the proof being found in the desperate tragedy of the hundred or so men who survived the sinking of the Juneau not being rescued for eight days, their numbers by then so decimated by starvation and sharks as to leave only ten still alive.

From the shipyard boom town of Richmond, California came the report that eating establishments were closing for want of meat, their rations having been cut to an allotment sufficient to feed only 15,000, when 100,000 men and women were now employed in the once relatively sleepy village on the edge of San Francisco Bay. The Secretary of the Navy was urging greater efficiency to achieve 20 to 25 percent higher output from the shipyards, while the men and women doing the riveting and welding couldn't even find meat to eat for lunch for the quotas established by Leon Henderson in the Office of Price Administration. What a life.

The quote of the day on the editorial page seems somehow to fit the meatless existence of Rosie the Riveter with Cinderella perfection.

It probably also fit Patton.

"Day of Roses" exempts from any gleeful reception the decision to hold the Rose Bowl again on the West Coast, symbolically delivering thereby a boost to American morale, implying that all was safe now in the Pacific. The editorial finds the prospect hollow as more and more American casualty reports came to families--as the 18 and 19 year olds of the country would begin registering for the draft on their birthdays, the result of the President's proclamation pursuant to the passage and signing into law of the bill lowering the draft age, as reported on the front page.

One can readily empathize in reading the dreary print: these times were neither normal nor happy, best faces at times put on to cover the valley sharps, to the contrary notwithstanding. The News, most of the time, resisted sugar coating reality.

By way of portraying the success of the North African invasion as a close shave with fate, Raymond Clapper tells of the derring-do of General Mark Clark's swim to the submarine awaiting him and his packet of documents detailing the results of his reconnoiter of Algeria for the Allies prior to the landings of November 8, as he narrowly averted disaster in the process. In the same vain, praising ostensibly fortuitous concordance between the actions of man and the environment through which he bestrides the earth, Clapper reports that on the one out of four good seashore weather nights off Casablanca and the Moroccan coast where Patton was scheduled to land, Patton landed. Obviously, the General had sent for and received from the sky pilot one of his good weather prayers, specially indited for the occasion.

Speaking of which, we should note that the repeated landing takes for the newsreel footage, of which we made mention, actually were panned in Sicily, not at Casablanca; we time-compressed the matter for our version, soon to be released as the new movie, "Monsieur Rick Meets Patton As Time Goes By".

And as the squib from the Statesville Daily perhaps suggested sub silentio, the obvious number of the Beast was not, as foretold by Revelations, 666. Rather, it was 3882. Maybe, according to the Mayan legend foretold in 1870 B.C., the world would end 3,882 years hence, precisely on December 23.

Well, we don't know.

But Richard Nixon was born in 1913 and took office in 1969, the sum being 3,882.

For omitting, in computing the calculation, both the time of term in office at some certain point and his age at inauguration, we fudge in verisimilitude to the chart from Statesville.

Or, was the fate of the world, according to the prophecy of doom, actually set to be realized January 20, 1969, and Nixon determined to be ageless at the time, the zero hour appointed to be precisely at noon, thus with no time in office at all by the puncture juncture with destiny?

One thing is certain: had it been so, Nixon would have fared infinitely better in history.

As to letter writer Louis Phillips, exercised about the sectional bias inherent in the omnipresence of the word "Yanks" to the exclusion of "Johnnyrebs" in the war prints, shoot, there was no reason to get hair-lipped on Bear Creek over it.