The Charlotte News

Saturday, March 7, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

At first, because his duty had ended, he had balked at reporting the sighting, but, over the course of the next seven to eight minutes, his fellow trainee in radar operations, George Elliott, debated the issue and finally insisted they report it, as the radar blips had now moved 25 miles closer to their position.

Promptly at 7:00, at the Information Center at Fort Shafter, the seven or eight plotters who normally plotted the positions of spotted aircraft had left duty. The senior air controller and the aircraft identification officer were not on duty at all that morning. Only a private and an inexperienced lieutenant were present to take the call. Despite being told by Private Lockard that the blips were the largest he had ever seen, the inexperienced lieutenant dismissed the sighting as probably representing either a training mission off one of the carriers or, more probably, a flight of twelve B-17's due in from California at 8:00 a.m. The lieutenant had inferred the B-17 mission from the combination of his having heard Hawaiian music that morning on the radio and the fact that a pilot had previously informed him that the playing of such music served as a guide for inbound B-17's.

Unfortunately, because of the dismissive tone of the lieutenant, Lockard did not tell him that he thought the blips represented at least 50 planes. That would have served as a clue to the lieutenant that these were not Flying Fortresses as scarcely more than that many B-17's existed at the time, even though the approach was following the normal track of such arriving aircraft.

By this time, it was 7:20 and the first wave of inbound Japanese planes, led by Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, was a mere 74 miles from target.

While reporting the incident this close to the first bombs falling at Pearl Harbor would have served little to curtail surprise, especially by the time such information worked its way up the chain of command to either Kimmel or Short, a major problem did result from no one informing the Navy of the spotted inbound first wave, causing the Navy to waste a lot of time later in the day searching for the source carrier task force, enabling eventually the planes to return safely and the task force to escape unscathed back to Japan via its northern and then westward course.

Of course, amid the chaos which ensued with the attack and the concomitant need to coordinate to the extent possible defensive measures to protect ships and planes, it was not an easy matter to provide such information to the proper officers in command. One could not simply drive to the base, tap someone on the shoulder and say that they had seen the inbound planes at 7:02.

The front page also tells of the simple new strategy to be adopted by the Allies in the Pacific, operating from India and Australia: cut the long Japanese supply lines and force them back to Japan. It sounded simpler, of course, than it was.

In Europe, the Russian plan was to have the British and American forces harass the Germans in sparsely defended coastal areas of Norway while the Russians continued their counter-offensive, all designed to eliminate Germany from the war by the fall, enabling combined stress to be brought in the Pacific against Japan. It sounded simpler, of course, than it was.

An AP piece provides another simple plan offered up by none other than Senator Robert Rice Reynolds who suggested that an Aleutian offensive against Japan would be an excellent idea, followed on by the launching of a naval attack from "the Antipodes", as the piece calls Australia.

We pause at the beginning of the fuzzy phrase in the first sentence of the third paragraph. What does that phrase say? We see, "Reynolds, who has __?__ walrus in Alaska, told reporters..." What is the fuzzy word there? The sub-caption suggests that it could mean "visit", but, plainly the word is not "visited". (Or, is it?) We thought, perhaps, it might be "helped" or even "hindered", perhaps "saved", but, candidly, we cannot make out the squigglies among the Antipodes there today, other than that it is some verb stated in the past tense. "Feted"? "Hunted"?

Whatever it is, we have to conclude that the A.P. reporter filing this one had a wry sense of humor and was suggesting either something obliquely about "All the King's Men..." or that Senator Reynolds best be observed carefully as usually his opinions were to be seen through the looking glass, and darkly.

Indeed, such a risky thrust may well have spelled the type of gamble for the Allies reminiscent of Lee at Gettysburg, the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, or just that simple one reported also on the front page made by the young New Holland CCC director from Gastonia who died when failing to heed the war warning of the copper who told him to proceed only at his own risk around the burning munitions truck, involved in a prior collision with an automobile, which then blew up just as the young man and his passenger got alongside its left flank, there in Smithfield, the resulting explosion shattering windows as far away as Selma.

--One little episode communicative in its symbolic lesson of the war in general, perhaps, the eve of destruction: Proceed at your own risk and damn the torpedoes, but don't blame us when the whole thing explodes in your face.

We don't mean thus by logical inference adopted from Mr. Carroll's specie of same to insinuate that the police officer there in Smithfield should be equated necessarily with any variable X filled either by Lee, Yamamoto, Tojo, Hirohito, Roe, Wade, Wallace, or MacArthur's corncob, but the reader may supply the gap according to it sufficient substantive materiality from his or her own imagination properly accommodative to personal taste--based entirely on whether you appreciate the finer attributes of oysters, as well as the haute Cuisenaire Rods which may be employed to count them as they slither down the gullet.

Well, whatever the word was, at least we know now that Senator Reynolds, more likely than not, read either The News on occasion, or at least someone's digested version of it.

Woo-woo, goo-goo, goo-joob.

On the editorial page, "Slogan" conveys the notion that "Asia for Asiatics", as promulgated by the Japanese, really translated "Asia for the Japanese". No better example of such actual intent behind the facade, as practiced by Imperial Japan, and the militarist cabal operating it as marionette, may be found than in the Japanese building by forced POW labor the Burma Railway, connecting Rangoon to Bangkok. Fully 180,000 of the 240,000 POW's so utilized were Chinese; of these, 60,000 died. Of the remaining British, Australian, Dutch, and American POW's, totaling about 60,000, about 16,000 died.