The Charlotte News

Thursday, February 12, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Double Cross" tells of the use now by Rommel in North Africa of American gasoline, food, and trucks sent previously to aid the French, delivered to the Germans by Vichy. We are shocked, shocked to read that such complicity by Admiral Darlan with the Nazis could go on and that he could violate a treaty with the Americans.

"Epitaph" explains the complaisance of the citizens of Singapore, attending tea dances and the movies as Japanese bombers flew overhead and troops moved in closer to the water supply to take over the city. It would all be over by the following Sunday. Life went on, even in time of war.

Dorothy Thompson reports of the probable sabotage leading to the sinking of the Normadie three days earlier in New York Harbor. It was being converted at the time to a troop ship from a luxury liner seized by the U.S. from the French after the fall in June, 1940. Ms. Thompson had been alerted by a worker on the ship on January 14 that saboteurs were at work; she told him to report it to the FBI which he said he did. Call in Hitchcock to solve the riddle.

The subsequent story was that a welder accidentally lit some incendiary material; no evidence of sabotage was found.

Paul Mallon finds one ray of light in the morass of the Far East: no munitions plants, such as the Skoda Works captured by Hitler in Czechoslovakia, or ship factories had been captured in any of the territory so far seized by the Japanese. And they had no market for the tin, oil and rubber captured. They were cut off from Germany by both the Soviet Union and the British strongholds in India and the Middle East. Their iron supply was for the moment limited to Manchukuo. To enjoy full advantage of the territory and resources thus seized would require that giant cooperative pincer movement with the Nazis, never to occur, to strangle the British first in North Africa, gaining the Suez, with a run by Hitler through Turkey into Iran and Iraq, as the Japanese moved on beyond the Burma Road into India.

The first letter to the editor from a patient at Morganton to provide praise to the doctors and staff there, especially one doctor, appears this date. Unfortunately, it is thus far, among the many letters printed in the previous three weeks on the series by Tom Jimison, a minority of one--even if it is probable that the doctors employed at the hospital were sincere in their efforts at treatment. The primary complaints were not against the doctors, but rather the untrained staff, poor food preparation, and unsanitary conditions generally. The letter writer admits that some "improvements" might be made in the food line.

Yeah, start with taking the rats out of the gravy, Mack. Then the hairs and dead flies in the soup wouldn't look quite so bad.

As to the second letter and its enclosed article re Dr. Pottenger's miracle diet to bring healthy sexual appetite and greater endurance, we understand that his patients, after years on unpasteurized milk, raw liver and hearts and sweet breads, were champions at reproduction, averaging ten to the couple, and could run 20 miles without breaking a sweat and then build a log house in three days without sleep while quilting enough to supply thirty winters worth of warmth for fifty odd families, all as the fortress walls went up around them to protect from the prairie wilderness. Unfortunately, however, all of them died well before the age of 16 from scurvy, salmonella, mad cow disease, and fundamental exhaustion of the body's resources, those who weren't eaten by the wild wolves and bears. They left behind, however, numerous healthy progeny to repeat the short generations with numerous children in each until they finally wised up somewhere around 1940. They had a name for themselves, too--pioneers.

The last letter is a sort of pot-pourri of raw meat itself, on its first leg warning of a misjacked car with a wheel stolen for the rubber, on its second passage giving us his Marine credentials and indicating his temptation to go over and avenge the loss of his fellows on Wake Island. Just how the two ostensibly incongruous segments blend together to form one continuous thought, we shall let you ponder. We are sure it is there somewhere: the shortage of rubber being from the loss of Malaya to the Japanese, the Japanese having laid siege in December to the small band of tough leathernecks holding out against superior forces on Wake Island, that in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the car being misjacked after losing its rubber to thieves and running the risk to children... Of course, one missing piece is that we do not have that photograph for you and so have no way of confirming precisely what it is the ex-Marine found particularly dangerous in the jacking.

And, though no mention of Abraham's Lincoln's 133d birthday appeared on the page today we note that today is his 200th. He is no worse the wear for his age in reputation. Happy bicentennial, Abe.

As we remember well the Bicentennial celebration of 1976, we can place in perspective how early in the history of the republic Mr. Lincoln came to be after the bell rang in Philadelphia that July 4 proclaiming independence from Great Britain. By 1942, America was fighting its second war in 25 years alongside the British, this time to ward off a tyrant far worse than King George III. Lincoln had to contend with a nation foundering on itself over the issue of slavery, the overriding issue of whether the nation was one, indivisible, or several independent sovereignties bound together loosely by a weak overlord, the Federal government, useful only for the states' common defense against a mutual enemy. It was precisely this latter thinking, that which had pervaded the South since the founding and which Lincoln prevented finally from holding sway in the United States, which led to the two world wars over the Balkanization and pervading disunity and mutual suspicions abounding in Europe and Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which very nearly led to the end of the world in the Cold War. Lincoln still has much to say to us in a few words. ...Dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Of course, he did not ask for the war or create it. A few Hotspurs in South Carolina set it afoot. But once thrust upon the country, the war did not cause him to shrink from his responsibility to insure the Union's preservation against disintegration. Likewise, Roosevelt did not shrink from his responsibility to preserve democracy generally abroad the world against its greatest collective attack in human history.

Yet, amid it all, people still went to the theater.

Framed Edition

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