The Charlotte News

Wednesday, April 15, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page announces the death of syndicated columnist Hugh Johnson at age 59 of pneumonia, twelve hours after writing his last column against his doctor’s orders for rest.

We don’t often agree with the editorials of General Johnson but sometimes we do, especially his insistence on the preservation of the First Amendment. He was trained as a lawyer and professional soldier which made many of his opinions tedious, but usually thoughtful, even if his most notorious opinion, that favoring isolationism, had branded him less than perspicacious during the last four years of his life. Cash certainly did not care for his writing. The News had discontinued his column on December 23 because it found that he was no longer useful as a gadfly on the issue of interventionism and related issues, with the country united behind the defense effort in the wake of Pearl Harbor and the debate over as to whether the United States should join the war. A less polite explanation was probably that his isolationism had made him intolerable to most readers after the disaster of Pearl Harbor. Even his isolationism, however, was not entirely monolithic; he often favored intervention, but believed it should only be undertaken after there had been an increase in production of war materiel to make the United States competitive with the Axis nations. He favored, for instance, the implementation of the draft. Indeed, it was much the same perspective which Admiral Nimitz now followed, delaying offensive action until the Navy had sufficient ships and airplanes to make an offensive likely of success. The General's worst mistake was to join the America First movement which quickly descended into anti-Semitism and pro-Nazi propaganda; while he readily denounced the outfit for that, he nevertheless allowed his name to remain prominently on their letterhead until December 5, 1941 when he formally and publicly announced in his column his quitting the organization in disgust.

General Johnson had been Time’s Man of the Year for 1933, based on his heading successfully the National Recovery Administration. He quickly, however, fell out of favor with the country and the Administration and by 1935 was out, taking up his cudgel and using his column often to criticize harshly the Administration he once served, sometimes in a manner quite personal, his worst fault.

The offensive raid, utilizing B-17 and B-25 long-range bombers on Manila, Davao, Cebu, and Batangas in the Philippines, as chronicled on the front page, leads to the question why the raid could not have been undertaken before the surrender of Bataan and why more raids of its type had not preceded during the period of the previous four months in which Bataan and Corregidor had been beseiged. The roundtrip range of 4,000 miles was not within the capability of the B-17, as the piece assumes; it was 2,000 miles. The B-25, cited in the piece as having a 1,700-mile range, actually had a 2,700-mile range, still, however, in need of refueling to make the roundtrip. So why did it take so long? The planes were being ferried via Pearl Harbor into the Pacific throughout 1941; it was not therefore for want of transport or for planes.

The cake reported on the page shows what happens when sugar is unduly rationed: the unslaked craving knows no bound by which it might find satiety. The Johnson & Johnson cake, we’ll bet the lady called it. We’ll also bet that it did not lack for inducing great sapience in those who had a piece.

On the editorial page, "Axis Strategy" suggests accurately that Italy would be the obvious entry point for Allied invasion. And so it would be, a year hence, once the Nazis and Italians were driven from North Africa.

Paul Mallon discusses the winnowing down of the German Wehrmacht by the Russian campaign. The Germans had sufferd an estimated 1.8 million killed, and the same number seriously wounded, among them the best trained troops Germany possessed, leaving the field now to be replenished by raw recruits with as little as six weeks of training behind them. The Russian counter-offensive, be it won or lost by the Soviets, was serving well the Allied purpose. But, as Mr. Mallon warned the previous day, the spring thaw was now upon them and with it, a new thrust in the offing from Hitler. Yet, as the editorial points out today, there appeared to be sloth in the works this spring, a departure from the usual Hitler course, with Rommel taking his time in Libya at beginning a spring offensive, now with only a few weeks left until blazing desert temperatures would curtail fighting.

The depletion of troops had begun to take its marked toll on the German ability to wage lightning war. It was now becoming more akin to heat lightning, a little rumble, a little flash, but the Russians had knocked once and for all the notion of Germany’s resistless blitzkrieg into a cocked hat.

And, speaking of waxing thunder and unslaked cake hunger: as we have said before, while we don’t think it cricket to knock someone’s poem offered to the world gratis, we figure that Mr. Johnson’s offering among this date’s letters to the editor was suggestive of the necessity that he plan to retain whatever it was he did as a day job. "Out" and "out", after all, do not rhyme; they are the same word. That is, unless one is to believe, along with the subject matter of the first editorial of the day, that the actual new pronunciation, at least that gleaned from the rad-io, was to be syllabicated, with the patina of Germanic nuance, blac-kout.

We’ll fix it: "And everybody’s light was doused"; "The darkness began to shout"; "Dad looked up and saw the sky".

Anyway, whether this poet’s nom de plume was "Johnny Rotten", and whether he lived in Blue Heaven, we don’t know.