The Charlotte News

Monday, February 16, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The day before, Sunday, Singapore had succumbed before the Japanese invaders after one week since their crossing the Johore Strait from the north to invade the island city.

As explained in "Somber Speech", Churchill had addressed Commons on January 29 explaining the series of events leading to the fall of Malaya and the probable fall of Burma--lack of available air support, the necessity of maintaining a large contingent of troops in Britain to defend against potential invasion, the need to have a second front in Libya to divert Hitler's forces from Russia, the need to send aid to Russia to keep Hitler busy and away from a land invasion of Britain. He also attributed the fall to the unexpected strength of the Japanese both in air superiority and trained troops sufficient to slash through the supposedly impenetrable jungle to the north on the Malay Peninsula. Because of the vastness of the region over which Japan was now spread, from the Philippines to the Dutch East Indies, within the Indies from Borneo and Celibes to New Guinea, and from Thailand to Burma, the air superiority came as a particular surprise.

Churchill had guessed incorrectly that the stationing of the battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales in the Far East would deter a Japanese attack. Instead, on December 10 they were sunk off the coast of Malaya while seeking to cut off Japanese troop landings on the Kra peninsula. There was no carrier available, Churchill explained, to muster air support to the region; there was a failure to appreciate the extent to which the Japanese could use air bases established in Indochina to launch an attack and overwhelm the sparse Allied forces in the region.

At base, there appeared a failure to appreciate that the days of naval battles unsupported by sufficient air strength were gone. Admiral Nelson was no longer to reign on the waves supreme for Britannia. It would take planes, American-built planes, to accomplish parity and eventually superiority. And those, the Brits and Aussies defending Malaya found in woefully short supply.

Churchill, however, found optimism in the recent landing of American troops in Eire, enabling the departure of more seasoned British troops to fight on other fronts. He found further optimism in the fact that the American auto manufacturing behemoths were about to become completely devoted to building planes, guns, tanks and trucks.

The heart of the Prime Minister's speech follows:

I am by no means claiming that faults have not been committed in the minor sphere, and faults for which the Government are blameworthy. But when all is said and done, the House must not be led into supposing that even if everything on the spot had gone perfectly--which is rare in war &emdash; they must not be led into supposing that this would have made any decisive difference to the heavy British and American forfeits which followed inexorably from the temporary loss of sea-power in the Pacific, combined with the fact of our being so fully extended elsewhere. Even that is not exhaustive, because, before the defeat of Pearl Harbour--I am speaking of eight or nine months ago--our ability to defend the Malay Peninsula was seriously prejudiced by the incursion of the Japanese into French Indo-China and the steady building-up of very powerful forces and bases there. Even at the time when I went to meet the President in Newfoundland the invasion of Siam seemed imminent, and probably it was due to the measures which the President took as the result of our conversations that this attack was staved off for so long, and might well have been staved off indefinitely. In ordinary circumstances, if we had not been engaged to the last ounce in Europe and the Nile Valley, we should ourselves, of course, have confronted the Japanese aggression into Indo-China with the strongest possible resistance from the moment when they began to build up a large military and air power. We were not in a position to do this.

If we had gone to war with Japan to stop the Japanese coming across the long ocean stretches from their own country, and establishing themselves within close striking distance of the Malay Peninsula and Singapore, we should have had to fight alone, perhaps for a long time, the whole of the Japanese attacks upon our loosely knit establishments and possessions in this vast Oriental region. As I said on Tuesday, we have never had the power, and we never could have had the power, to fight Germany, Italy and Japan single-handed at the same time. We therefore had to watch the march of events with an anxiety which increased with the growth of the Japanese concentrations, but at the same time was offset by the continuous approach of the United States ever nearer to the confines of the War. It must not be supposed that endless, repeated consultations and discussions were not held by the Staffs, by the Defence Committee, by Ministers, and that Staff conferences were not held at Singapore.

Contact was maintained with Australia and New Zealand, and with the United States to a lesser degree. All this went on; but, when all was said and done, there was the danger, and the means of meeting it had yet to be found. Ought we not in that interval to have considered the question which the House must ask itself--I want to answer the case quite fairly--whether, in view of that menace, apart from minor precautions, many of which were taken and some of which were not, we ought not to have reduced our aid in munitions to Russia? A part of what we sent to Russia would have made us, I will not say safe, because I do not think that that was possible, in view of what happened at sea, but far better prepared in Burma and Malaya than we were. Figures were mentioned by the hon. Member for Seaham yesterday. He will not expect me to confirm or deny those figures, but, taking them as a basis, half of that would have made us far better off, and would have dazzled the eyes of Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, who so repeatedly asked for more supplies of all those commodities of which we were most short. We did not make such a reduction in Russian supplies, and I believe that the vast majority of opinion in all parts of the House, and in the country, endorses our decision now, even after the event. If they had to go back, they would take it again, even although they see now what consequences have arisen.

I entirely agree about the vital importance of the Burma Road and of fighting with every means in our power to keep a strong hand-grasp with the Chinese Armies and the closest contact with their splendid leader Chiang Kai-shek. Nothing has prevented the employment of Indian troops in that area, except the use of them in other theatres and the immense difficulties of transport in those regions. So much for the Russian policy, which, for good or for ill, has played a very great part in the thoughts and actions of the people of this country in this struggle, and I believe has played a very important--not by any means a decisive part, but a very important part--in the crushing defeats which have been inflicted on the German army and the possible demoralisation of the wicked regime which uses that army.

Raymond Clapper echoed this view, writing of a coming day when the exiguity besetting the British in Malaya presently would be remedied by the presence of sleek new bombers being manufactured in wholesale lots at the Willow Run plant by Ford, that the tanks now at work in Libya would be supplemented by those being built at Chrysler, just 16 days earlier turning out Plymouths and Dodges from the same factory space.

As the Japanese rolled over territory stretching 3,000 miles from its home ports over consequent thin supply lines to take over new and vital resources for its continued war effort in China, the American industrial giant was dropping away its civvies and donning full military accouterment for the duration. Of the two million men in the Japanese military, the 400,000 to 500,000 which they had to spare for the six-month assault--at least by the original plan--to establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, while the American Pacific Fleet was crippled, would prove sufficient for the nonce to deliver pummeling blow after pummeling blow. Yet the Allies staggered back from the canvas and continued punching the while, until the guns and planes could be delivered.

West of Hawaii, the Pacific was now lost, save one base remaining in Java--and that was now made vulnerable by the Japanese presence in Celibes and Borneo with transgressions into Sumatra from newly acquired Singapore to begin shortly. Java would fall by triangulated strangulation.

The letter to the editor from Mr. Lane on the supposed exhortation by The News to defeat every effort of Congress to prepare for war prior to Pearl Harbor is, as the Editor's note following it suggests, so misaligned with reality that it does not need response. A quick perusal through our files will convince the gravest skeptic that Mr. Lane was the other side of the pole on this point. And most of the interventionist sentiment emanating from The News came from the typewriter of W. J. Cash. Yet, after Cash left The News, it remained consistent, even if less fecund and profound, in its urging of an offensive strategy, a couple of times during the last two and a half months before Pearl Harbor even counseling direct attack on Japan. No one could find in The News, as the letter writer breathlessly assumes, promotion of isolationism. That category of newspaper was located primarily in the midwest, The Chicago Tribune leading the way, those areas preserved by the fortuity of insulation from threat of coastal attack. It is easy enough to speak of the insularity afforded by oceans when, in addition to the ocean itself, the advocate of that perspective is at rest 1,500 miles inland.

And, of course, as to the Editor's note on the attacks by The News on Hugh Johnson, one of Cash's last tirades from the book-page underscored the point in "Hell-Bent for War", April 16, 1941. General Johnson's column stopped appearing in The News after December 22 because J. E. Dowd deemed it no longer appropriate to have aboard the page in the wake of Pearl Harbor a kibitzer, a punching bag adversary to act as counterpoise to the foreign policy generally espoused by the other columnists. The General, as we previously pointed out, hadn't long to live by this time. He passed away April 15, 1942.

Quod erat demonstrandum, the letter betrays some of the difficulty in reaching consensus in the country during the two years prior to Pearl Harbor. Misinformation was rampant; those who were sympathetic to sending aid to Great Britain but generally uninformed could be turned against others of like viewpoint by informal Fifth Columnist propaganda.

And we hope that the little Empress in Tokyo got wind of the piece in Collier's of which "Loss of Face" makes comment. The Tahoe, under the command of Captain Vartnaw, plying its way out of Oakland to the sea to deliver to the gulls its daily gift of provender, did its hull-splitting duty admirably and kept on going. Whether the sub it plowed in half had at the time in its periscope a raven sitting atop one of the masts of the Golden Gate Bridge or just a photograph of Mr. Edgar Allan Poe, and whether a gargoyle dropped first fast from the Tahoe onto its hull to alert them of the garbage-laden torpedo coming full speed at them, we don't know. But somewhere in the episode we would have to find poetic symmetry.

Perhaps, the Empress wrote a poem about it:

To all the brave, valorous
Who perished in San Francisco Bay,
Into graves went in that lady gray,
We hold your pride dearly,
Great Spirits of the deep.
Into our hearts and souls
Your souls and hearts do seep.
Bad Tahoe, we shall hunt
You in our sleep
And make you pay
For your wounding
Our face in swells
With Garbage.
Then we shall ring as Victor
From the tintinnabulation
Of your Purloined Lettres' Belles,
Crossing 'neath the bar bridge
In this lingering picture
Of your cur-foined fiery Hell.

Perhaps not.

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