Site Ed. Note: The front page today bears a photograph of a young woman arrested in Atlanta for impersonating a WAAC. You figure it out; we can’t.

Gas rationing took another turn to empty the tanks, restricting the ordinary A-card holders to three gallons of emergency fuel, albeit without the order defining what “emergency” meant. People lined up at service stations to beat the imposition of the restriction.

A Congressional subcommittee hurtled obloquy at the Office of Price Administration for, contrary to its mission, impeding the war effort, forcing small businesses out of operation with its heavy-handed price ceilings, in many cases, said the Congress, below replacement value.

As these two events occurred, as further indicated on the editorial page, Leon Henderson tendered his resignation as head of OPA. It was anticipated that Senator Prentiss Brown of Michigan would be his replacement.

On the editorial page, Sam Grafton attempts to raise his readers’ consciousness to the ongoing Holocaust in Europe, the Final Solution formulated to the “Jewish Problem” within the Reich and its occupied nations, made official policy at the Wannsee Conference in late January. Its leader, Reinhard Heydrich, had been shot in Prague May 27, leading to the Lidice massacre ordered by Heinrich Himmler after Heydrich’s death on June 4.

Mr. Grafton estimates that between one and two million Jews had already been put to death in Europe pursuant to Hitler’s direction; more would follow. He urges that those closet anti-Semites within the United States check themselves against allowing their prejudices to sway their emotions toward Hitler, the apparent design for the timing of the mass executions, to attempt to appeal to such prejudices in the West, both in England and in America.

Meanwhile the daily death camp tolls continued to rise faster than the little Nazis could accommodate efficiently the disposition process. Treblinka, the most efficient of the camps, ending 870,000 lives in a mere ten months of operation, began its death task in July. It extinguished the lives of an average of 3,000 persons per day for every day it existed. Sobibor and Belzec began operation in November, 1941 and March, 1942, respectively, and between them took 850,000 lives. The most notorious of the camps in Poland, in operation as a “work camp” from 1939, was Auschwitz, responsible for 1.3 million deaths until its closure by the end of the war. These four death camps in Poland thus accounted for fully three million deaths, half the estimated number of deaths attributable directly to the Holocaust.

Thus, matters were actually likely far worse in terms of death tolls in the camps by the end of 1942 than even Mr. Grafton’s grimmest figure of two million suggested. Three million Jews were moved from the Warsaw Ghetto to the camps during 1942. The walled, crowded Ghetto, actually a large prison, had existed since late 1939. Pervading starvation had already caused the literal piling of emaciated dead bodies in its streets prior to the transfer of its inhabitants to the camps.

That it was happening should have come as no shock to readers of The News. Editorials by Cash as far back as January 2, 1936 and April 10, 1936 had provided evidence of the groundwork for the mass murder of Jews in Europe, on occasion extending his intuitive analysis into the ostensibly fictional literature of the time coming out of Europe. He would write more, far more on the issue, often in the process making the psychological interconnection to the axis around which the problem centrally turned, before leaving The News for the year in Mexico at the end of May, 1941.

Dorothy Thompson addresses why Hitler invaded Russia, contrary to the advice of his generals who advocated the continued viability of the Bismarck Rule: Never wage war on Russia. She first suggests that Hitler was responding to his own inner demonic forces of anti-Semitism, believing that Russia was, as he had ranted and stated long before in Mein Kampf, led by Jews and consequently ripe internally for collapse at the mere whiff of the gunpowder from his invading panzer divisions.

She also offers, quite astutely and, we think, accurately, that his thrust was in part to fulfill a commitment to the Japanese.

At the Imperial Conference of July 2, 1941, Hirohito and his generals determined a strategy whereby if the war in Russia, begun ten days earlier, appeared to be going in the direction of the Nazis, then the Japanese would consider an attack at Vladivostok. At the same conference, the determination was made to push south, to occupy French Indo-China, enabled by Vichy’s acquiescence to the Japanese at the direction of the Nazis pulling their strings. From there, the Mikado would undertake its expansionist policy to create the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

This centrally important conference was the beginning of setting in motion a contingency plan, on the drawing board since fall, 1940, to attack Pearl Harbor. The Japanese Ambassador to Germany had been reported to be in talks with Hitler and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop in the days immediately preceding the attack on Pearl Harbor. Nazi agents were reported during the summer of 1941 to be in Japan barking orders to their stooges.

Thus, it is quite consistent logically to conclude, as Ms. Thompson does, that the attack on Pearl Harbor was a quid pro quo of the Japanese for Hitler taking away the historic threat to the Japanese, Russia, by keeping the Soviets occupied on their western front. She theorizes that the thrust toward Moscow in the fall of 1941, stopped dead in its tracks by General Semion Timoshenko’s fierce winter counter-offensive initiated December 7, was an effort by Hitler to impress the Japanese sufficiently to obtain their cooperation in the Pacific with the attack on the United States.

While the overall reasons for the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor involved quite a lot more than this single factor, Ms. Thompson properly intuits a major part of the puzzle. But, in addition to quid pro quo arrangements with Germany, Japan was primarily seeking for its own continued expansionist interests in China and for the broadening of these interests throughout South Asia, oil, rubber, tin, mercury, manganese, and other war materiels obtainable from the Dutch East Indies, that made especially necessary after the United States had terminated trade relations and frozen Japan’s assets in the United States during the summer of 1941 because of the expansion into Indo-China and the refusal to end the war in China. That Japan never attacked Russia was not only the result of the turn in the Russo-German war in fall 1941 but also to maintain the tenuous Russo-Japanese Mutual Non-Aggression Pact. Neither nation wanted to open another front with a hostile nation. After Pearl Harbor, Japan had its hands full with the British, Americans, Dutch, and Australians, first trying to wrest territory from them, then trying desperately to hold onto it as the Allies kicked back against the pricks.

“Wellspring” analyzes that which takes place universally in the minds of the people of a nation once its peace has been disturbed by attack: it summons from itself all the survival instincts characteristic of man since the caves and uses every bit of that hunter-gatherer instinct, contrary to all which has been instilled to socialize and civilize him, to combat the invader to his den. The piece begins with a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville which stresses the disadvantage initially in warfare of democracies, but which, after time and sacrifice and continued interruption of peaceful pursuits, turns more and more fiercely to its advantage as life becomes more uncomfortable by the day from the war.

“Caution” suggests again that the war in North Africa might take some time to complete, now counseling patience for months into the future, rather than merely weeks, as the column just a few days earlier had forewarned. It attempts to anticipate and meet public frustration with the war in that theater, now stymied after so much initial success and quick movement during the first three weeks after the invasion on November 8, that after two weeks of steady progress by the British Eighth Army from El Alamein, beginning October 23. The fact that it was felt necessary to shore up continued public support and avoid further setbacks in attitude noticeable in the earlier part of the year, remarks on the profound positive effect which war news of continued and sustained progressive drives had on the mentality of the populace, and by equal and opposite measures, the negative impact of stultification on a front where headway to victory appeared imminent just weeks before.

“Sucker Trap” speaks to a modern problem, as well as one in 1942. The difference is that the loan sharks charging the high interest in 1942 have been replaced by "respectable" banks and bankers in the present times. North Carolina has even tougher laws today against usury than in 1942. If you have been victimized by a high interest loan which gave you no "reasonable, tangible net benefit" over your old loan, you have a remedy in North Carolina under Chapters 24-10.2 and 75-1.1. The penalties, if the loan is shown not to provide a "reasonable, tangible net benefit" to the borrower versus the old loan refinanced, is either forfeiture of all of the interest accruing prior to judgment on the suit or treble the actual damages proved by the borrower to have been caused by the loan. An election between these alternative remedies must be made prior to trial. So, if accumulated interest by the time of judgment would be greater than treble damages, that would be the elected remedy; or vice versa. The statute of limitations is three years from the origination of the loan on the treble damages remedy and two years on the interest forgiveness. It is four years on action by the Attorney General under the statutes. Incidentally, that you may have signed some purported waiver of this law is likely inconsequential for its being void as against public policy and without sufficient explanation as to that which the waiver actually related.

We could add quite a bit to this note right now. But, for the present, we shall leave it as it is. We may get back to you with some additional anecdotal information in due course.

Incidentally, that second segment of "One Step Beyond" to which we linked you yesterday might well have been titled "Speedy".

Anyway, we have to wonder why, with all that training in the high schools in vehicle mechanics, in preparation for war service, as announced on the front page, no bright student ever found this effervescing pill to separate out the hydrogen from the oxygen in water and make the car run exclusively on hydrogen.

The answer, however, is not the lack of American ingenuity, but rather the crookedness of politicians swayed by fascist corporate money to withhold patents. For that simple method of running your automobile has been done, and three decades ago. But, apparently, the automobile manufacturers--two of whom are now in bankruptcy with one 60% owned by the United States Government--and the oil companies got together back in 1981 and 1982 and killed the whole idea so that Arab Sheiks might continue to get rich and contribute vast sums of money to elect buffoons and crooks to public office, while funneling other money to terrorists to attack us.

Try looking up Mr. Smith, incidentally, in the Wicked-pedia, and you won't find a single mention. Quite a full page exists, however, on Ronald McDonald.

Let’s see, 1981 and 1982. Who was in the White House then?

Write your Congressman. Ten to one, most of the present body of lawmakers have never even heard of any of this technology.