The Charlotte News

Saturday, November 21, 1942

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the British Eighth Army continued to hammer away at Rommel’s panzer divisions, driving them now to Agedabia, a hundred miles south of Bengazi and within about 70 miles of El Agheila, where Rommel was expected to dig in his heels for his last stand. The British phalanx had pressed the Nazis hard since October 23, fully half the distance from El Alamein to the border between Libya and Tunisia, more than half the distance also to Tripoli.

The map shows the triple approach of the Allied forces to bottle up and crush Rommel: from the east along the coast into Bengazi and Antelat; from the west along the coast to seal off the prime Axis ports of Bizerte and Tunis in Tunisia, with a spur force heading southeast toward Tripoli; and in a loop from the south, through Tunisia and Libya out of Algeria, also toward Tripoli.

Meanwhile, RAF pilots flying from Malta bombed Sicily, hitting airdromes at Catania, Augusta, and Cosimo, the source of primary air support for the Axis in Tunisia. Turin was also attacked yet again, said to be the heaviest raid yet on the city by the RAF, the Fiat factory there being the primary target in recent days. (Having driven one once upon a time for a couple of years, it was probably one of the better selected targets of the entire war.)

Not unlike the ideals and interests which Robert Rice Reynolds had exhibited through time, Pierre Laval was pressing for entente between France and the Nazis, contending that if the Roosevelt forces of American empire in North Africa got their way, it would become a world dominated by “Communists and Jews”. M. Laval proposed that America, being upset by the loss of its empire interests in the Pacific, was simply substituting for it by stealing French empire interests in North Africa.

The thusly simpatico publicly disseminated conversational pursuits at nearly the same juncture with time of both M. Laval and M. Reynolds perhaps stemmed from mutual company kept at some earlier point in a tête-à-tête, maybe just before Bob gave up to his friend, the Abwehr agent, the French shipping information, presumably involving Toulon, in spring, 1940.

“Far Echoes” on the editorial page reveals the extensive effects of the North African invasion now being experienced in Russia: the weakened Nazi divisions were being pinned down, pierced, and forced into retreat from their high water marks in the Caucasus and in and around Stalingrad. Fully a quarter of the troops there during the summer of 1942 had been re-deployed to positions along the Southern European coast within the previous ten days.

The piece notes that while Stalin initially had publicly greeted the invasion with great optimism and appreciation, Churchill had revealed during the week that, privately, the Russian Premier had expressed indifference--at least until more recent consequences of the invasion had begun to show themselves on the Russian front.

Raymond Clapper extols the virtues of Lend-Lease, depreciates the notion that it was high-priced charity for foreign countries. He paints a conceptualization of it as essentially payment in lieu of the shedding of American blood, either overseas or at home.

Indeed, an analogy may be drawn to the Civil War practice in the Union Army whereby a conscript could, by law, purchase for a fee of $300 a substitute to serve in his stead. America, as the “arsenal of democracy”, was in essence purchasing to a degree its young men’s lives in exchange for providing the implements of war, as well as additional supplies, to the beleaguered Allies, primarily Britain, China, and Russia.

Regardless of how it is framed conceptually, the exchange was a cheap price to pay in the bargaining amid the Grande Illusion.

Still, of course, America would lose 295,000 men in the war, a figure which nevertheless pales beside the millions lost by Russia, 7.5, and China, 2.2, and the 452,000 military personnel, excluding civilians killed in the two blitzes, lost by Great Britain.

A letter writer indites in praise of country buttermilk while berating the Charlotte smog, invites the City Fathers to attend a theater at night when it is hot, then stroll into the stagnant, humid air and try to breathe.

With an RFD address, Mr. Burkholder, we take it, was staying in the country.

As the traffic and smoke-belching factories got even worse in the 1950’s and 1960’s, before the Environmental Protection Agency and its regulatory scheme came into existence, Mr. Burkholder would have likely thought himself, by comparison, in pig heaven in 1942’s version of downtown Charlotte.

Paul Mallon returns to the topic of the post-war world to be, discussing the concept of world unity orchestrated from within a United Nations organization, as advocated by Vice-President Henry Wallace, Wendell Willkie, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles and others. Mr. Mallon uses the Vice-President’s simple remedy set forth in his May speech, suggesting a quart of milk a day for everyone in the world, as the symbol of this post-war world to be. But he cautions that China, the House of Orange in exile, Russia, even Britain, with Churchill’s recent statement that he did not intend to be the King’s First Minister who presided over the dismantlement of the British Empire, did not appear yet onboard with any such spirit of rapprochement, disavowing all extra-territorial pursuits and recognizing each nation’s inherent right to sovereign integrity. The concept of a United Nations after the war, the hint seemed to be to Mallon, was more likely not to be.

Riki, tiki, tavi...

Indeed, it would take another nearly 50 years to iron out the differences between the Western democracies and the Iron Curtain bloc over which Russia would cast its large shadow through 1989.

Someone finally got wise and broke out the quarts of milk, obviously. Who knows? Maybe, Mr. Burkholder’s suggestions on November 21, 1942 ultimately went a long way toward ending the Cold War.

General Eisenhower addresses Admiral Darlan during the previous week, as photographed for Life. By pre-arranged promise, Eisenhower provided Darlan with command responsibilities over all French forces in North Africa, in exchange for Darlan's call for the surrender of all Vichy forces at the point of the North African invasion by the Allies on November 8.

The caption might have read:

"And you better know that you are going to toe the mark if you are going to have this position long. We'll be watching."

Darlan would be dead from an assassin's bullet, relayed from within the French Resistance, by Christmas Eve.

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