The Charlotte News

Friday, April 10, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page continues the story of the ill-fated course of the American-Filipino forces embattled on Corregidor and surrendered on Bataan. The editorial column suggests it as an object lesson in depending not on miracles for salvation in the war but raw determination to produce and supply the military machine with sufficient men and materiel to succeed. In all, during the Battle for the Philippines in 1942, the American-Filipino forces suffered about 16,000 casualties, including those during the ensuing four weeks on Corregidor. For the very reason stated on the front page of this date regarding unreliable reports from Japan on losses incurred and inflicted, there are no reliable numbers of casualties for Japan. Records were burned prior to surrender in 1945.

Elsewhere, a London source reported that with Manila Bay in the Axis arsenal, and the ever-growing prospect of the French Navy being turned over to the Axis by Vichy, as the front page of yesterday suggested in one story, the tide of naval superiority was turning to the Axis.

Such an inferior position, however, was not so detrimental to the overall prosecution of the war as it had been in the past; the airplane had become the overriding force to be brought to bear in any battle situation, including those at sea.

Moreover, the Liberty ships, starting with the launch of the Patrick Henry on September 27, 1941, were fast building, would include no less than 2,700 hulls laid and launched by the end of the war across eighteen shipyards, from Wilmington to Richmond, California, from New Orleans and Mobile to Portland and Vancouver, from Houston to Savannah, from Jacksonville to Providence, from Los Angeles to Portland, Maine—Rosey the Riveter would beat out the tunes, whether "The Hut-Sut Song", as Herblock had suggested back in the previous summer, or a rendition of "Boogly Woogly Piggy" being blown by the band in Darwin, with her drills and welding equipment tapping rhythm in time.

The average rate of production was one ship every ten days for four years for each of the eighteen shipyards. The actual rate, of course, became higher as the war proceeded. The average time for completion of a ship went from 244 days to 42 days, with the record being one completed ship in less than five days, three completed ships per day being the ordinary course by mid-1943. These ships plus the fast, maneuverable PT boats in the Pacific quickly offset the combined navies of the Axis nations.

The editorial column prepares Charlotte for its upcoming blackout--lights out, not a flicker of even a candle for the Luftwaffe to spot--while the University student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, exhorted more gravity toward their own blackout drill and fewer quips anent where their fantasies might take them in such a darkened theater... Ah, spring in Chapel Hill...

Paul Mallon warns of the Axis propaganda, that a report had been let loose by Italy’s puppet organ that 10,000 troops being transported onboard the Queen Mary went to the bottom when it was sunk. The report, he says, was based on the hope that an Allied denial would provide clues to the whereabouts of the ocean liner turned troop transport. The Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth served in that capacity during the war, their fast speeds providing the facility for escape from U-boats. On a single voyage, each ship could deliver 15,000 troops. Both ships survived the war and since 1967, the Queen Mary has been docked as a museum and hotel at Long Beach, the Queen Elizabeth succumbing to the welder’s torch in 1974. (Beg pardon to the Queen; we mean no disrespect, Love.)

Raymond Clapper’s column today, telling of the resourcefulness of the Chinese with less and inferior equipment vis à vis the Japanese, requiring doubling of the number of enemy troops committed to each engagement and battle en plain as a means to overcome mechanized superiority, suggests perhaps why the symbolic standoff in Tiananman Square in 1989 between the lone student protester and the Chinese tanks was able to occur. The impetus for the individual temerity and fortitude of the unknown student, later believed to have been killed by the government, as well as the discretion of the lead tank driver to stop before this hubristic display of indomitable will, may have come from residual inter-generational memory flowing through Chinese culture out of the long and sanguinary common struggle with the Japanese in World War II, a struggle more prolix than that endured by any other country among the Allies, even if Chinese casualties, numbering about 2.2 million, were trebled among the Russians, who suffered 7.5 million.

The eight year struggle was twice as long as the Civil War in the United States, the same length as United States military involvement in the War in Vietnam, meaning that children at the outset turned to young men sometimes before being called into service.

Dorothy Thompson contrasts with the resulting reality the Nazi promise of socialism in Germany, promoted originally as a boon to the workers and the middle class and small entrepeneurs, winding up, as most usually such demagoguery does, being no more than racist bile spewed to stimulate the masses in a common negative zeitgeist, so full of emotion that the workers forgot their actual abject conditions; they were spirited away by such ploys as "Strength Through Joy"—not two cars in every garage, but rather one Volkswagen--Heil, mein Füehrer ist ein Genie: Vier Krüge, luftgekühlt, erzieht Stoß, gut--and such vague notions as lebensraum to enable the imagination of lots of open territory at which the joyful crew in their Volkswagen vier-banger might oggle.