The Charlotte News

Thursday, December 24, 1942

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The President, the front page reports, gave his annual Christmas message amid smaller than usual White House Christmas trees in an effort to conserve electricity. All four Roosevelt sons were involved in the war and so only two of twelve grandchildren were at the White House. All thoughts on this Christmas Eve, 1942 were plainly tempered by war.

Donald Nelson of the War Production Board provided respite to the workers in all defense factories for Christmas Day, the first holiday of the year for the arsenal of democracy. They would resume, however, said Mr. Nelson, with renewed vigor after Christmas, stepping up already record production even more for 1943.

In Europe, Christmas for the fourth year in succession was grim. Said a report from the wife of the A.P. bureau chief in Switzerland, Mrs. Thomas Hawkins, “The religious Christmas still exists, but only as a hope for the future in the hearts of the faithful: the French, the Poles, the Czechs, and others whose faith is the only firm thing left in their lives.”

In North Africa, the guns of war were largely silent as Rommel continued his retreat toward Tunisia and the Eighth Army continued its rapid pursuit. In Tunisia, little activity was reported by Allied sources.

But in the afternoon, in Algiers, one Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle, a twenty-year old student, ardently anti-Vichy, member of the French Resistance, entered Admiral’s Francois Darlan’s headquarters in the Summer Palace and, with a Ruby pistol, twice shot him, once in the chest and once in the face. The bullets proved fatal a few hours later, and the very difficult position into which the Allied command had been placed by General Eisenhower’s anointing of Darlan as the head of North African French forces for his cooperation in the invasion on November 8, was summarily resolved. General De Gaulle’s public statement to the Free French just eight days earlier, urging Darlan’s removal from the command, was at once granted, without unnecessary political fallout.

Monsieur de la Chapelle was, himself, notwithstanding, promptly dispatched by firing squad assembled on December 26, after a Christmas Day military tribunal quickly found him guilty and without accomplices. There would be no talking to the press at any future time by the assassin regarding his motivations or whether he acted alone or in concert with others. At the time, that would have been a most politically disadvantageous set of circumstances, Señor Rick.

In Russia, however, where there was no Christmas, the sleigh bells were nevertheless jingling with ample loudness across the frozen tundra of the Ukraine and northern Caucasus, seeking to enjoin further German supply from the key railhead at Millerovo, moving from both the east and west to capture the town, on the way to Rostov, singing the while, as the Nazis continued to amass in pile after pile.

Christmas or no Christmas in the land of the Soviet, to millions in the West, the headline of the day was a sure sign that Santa Claus was on his way.

A final statistical analysis of the 1942 mid-term election tended to bear out Vice-President Wallace’s contention that the Republican sweep in Congress, and the commensurately low turnout among voters, producing the least Democratic majority in each house of Congress to take the oath in early January for the duration of President Roosevelt’s ten-year tenure thus far in office, was the result of the war, both for the absence from home of those in military service and of those too caught up in war production jobs to vote. In consequence, Republicans turned out at the polls in greater numbers than Democrats for the first time since the election in 1928 which saw Herbert Hoover defeat Al Smith, amid anti-Catholic sentiments expressed among obscurantist Democrats.

And, Santa was having a chat with Johnny Jones all anent the rationale for Johnny receiving only war bonds from St. Nick this Christmas. More of that conversation, we were able to obtain from eavesdropping upon it ourselves. It went:

"But, Santa, I'd really rather have the electric train. Or, jeepers, you know, an erector set don't require no electricity to run, at least unless’n you get one of them fancy ones, and I could sure wait a couple o’ years for that. Just the regular one will do me fine right now. But, you know, Santa, I just don’t want one of them war bonds. That's just stupid. What am I gonna do with a war bond? Like as not, I'll burn it with your toes in the fireplace if you insist on that."

"But, Johnny, ho, ho, ho, you know you want to support me and Uncle Sam and all the guns and tanks and airplanes fighting overseas such that we might have other seasons merry in the future. Surely you understand, youngster. And then, someday, you can be a soldier, too. And then ol’ Santa…"

"Don't wanna be no soldier. Don't wanna die. No. You can go hang, Santa. I want a erector set for Christmas. Not no war bond. I'll build a fire tonight and you can roast. Just, don't even come if what you plan to bring is some ol’ war bond.

"I was wonderin’, though, Santa, come to think on it."

"Yes--ahem, ahem--ho, ho, ho. What the, what that’s you were wonderin', Johnny?"

"How’d you ever get down the chiminey in them days a hunderd year ’go, 'fore they had coal furnaces, that is, without gettin’ your feet burned?"

The editorial column begins with a letter to the readers from brothers W. C. Dowd, publisher, and J. E. Dowd, editor, the latter about to join the Navy for the duration, as indicated on Monday. It was, as it turned out, a form of farewell. W. C. Dowd at age 50 would also soon pass into uniform. The Dowd family would sell the newspaper in 1947 to a Charlotte business group, while J. E. remained as editor, at least for a few months, until accepting a job as general manager of the Charlotte Observer. But, as the 1948 biography of the newspaper suggests, the war changed everything for everyone. And things would never again be quite the same in the world. The News was no exception.

Elsewhere on the page, the last segment of A Christmas Carol is printed, informing at its conclusion, as always, that Scrooge swore off necromancy for the duration.

We could only hope that Hitler and his minions, some of whom still persist, might have done and will do in the future likewise.

The salutary quote at the conclusion of the letter to the editor, along the Abbey Road, out of the Department of Religion at Morris College in Sumter, S.C., originates from Edwin Markham. Mr. Markham also said:

On the dark he left God’s smile
Lighting up Ierne’s Isle;
And forever lives his name
As the rose upon her fame.

Imagine that.

May your Christmas be merry, and to all a good night.

And if you’d rather trace the end of Santa’s ice floe rather than Santa this Christmas Eve, go here, and remember to turn left at Greenland

For they may declaim all the funny little e-mails and other disinformation they might wish in obscurantist vision, but the eyes do not deceive and a picture remains the worth of millions of words. Santa will be around this Christmas again, still able to slick his sleigh rails, if barely. But for how long, unless we change our methods of getting about, and soon, very soon?

You can take a ride for now in your big, black shiny car, Higgins. But where are you going to go when the gas runs out?

From the spare fragment cut off by the machine, the mostly missing quote of the day nevertheless, we are happy to report, reveals itself: "Only the spirit of rebellion craves for happiness in this life." --Henrik Ibsen.

And, as Cash said so well once, "All of them are sung."

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