The Charlotte News

Saturday, April 25, 1942

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Perhaps, come to think of it, the President, in a manner of speaking, when he informed the White House dinner guest of the origin of the Tokyo bombers being Shangri-La, was subliminally referencing, aiming it at the Imperial Japanese, perhaps most especially at the little Empress, knowing as he no doubt did how she enjoyed such a rich and fulsome appreciation for the finer aspects of literature and poetry, the line: "Get thee to a nunnery." Not so far-fetched when you consider that in Lost Horizon, the lamaist monk, Chang, says to Conway on the morning after his and his wayward companions' arrival at Shangri-La, "Truly, as your national poet says, 'Sleep knits up the raveled sleeve of care.'" Ah, but a different play, the informed will say, and so, so what? Well, so what, indeed.

Then, we find this somewhat unusual Twentieth Century usage of "hardly", in the sense of its traditionally preferred meaning, being "with great difficulty", in Conway's self-deprecating muse on his service in the World War and, more generally, his assessment of his own backbone: "Even his D.S.O. had been won, not so much by physical courage, as by a certain hardly developed technique of endurance." Yet, in a Cash piece of February 9, 1939, "A Dizzy Spectacle", we find the same unusual usage of the same word, viz.: "Are [Lord Mussolini and Lord Hitler] supposed to take this lying down, after having poured out Italian and German treasure and blood to enable Franco to win against the overwhelming will of the Spanish people--to let England and France run away with all the booty they have so hardly brought?"

Well, how did we come by this intriguing coincidence? We shall leave you to figure that out within the mists hanging high above the Valley of the Blue Moon.

The front page this date tells of the paratroop demonstration performed at the golf course in Charlotte, as viewed by some 8,000 spectators. The leader of the outifit, Lieutenant Seitz, might likely have preferred that the name of the paratrooper who landed in the tree be left out. Not to worry though, as one of the Victory Belles rushed over to extricate him from his predicament. The best of golfers, after all, sometimes find their way into the trees, and, even so, recover to make a birdie. Whether that was the case here, we don’t know.

Secretary of Interior Ickes corrects the previous estimate for the gas ration: it is now 30 to 50 gallons per month, or about 7 to 11.5 gallons per week, not the 2.5 to 5 rumored a couple of days earlier. That’s a relief.

The largest combined single raid of the war so far had been conducted by the RAF on two successive nights, delivering in excess of 400 tons of bombs on the German Baltic port of Rostock, hitting a shipyard and airplane factory.

From Mexico City came a report that a female member of the German-American Bund had been arrested as a spy on a tip from the United States government. She led authorities to an offshore cache of aviation and submarine fuel located on Mujeres Island, off the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula. After her cooperation, she was turned over to U.S. authorities. Whether this cache of gas was supposed to fuel an attack on the wife to the husband at Pearl Harbor, by it to show the fidelity of Hitler to Tojo, in response to Tojo's having demonstrated in December his fidelity to Hitler, thus to permit raids anew by the Japanese either on Hawaii again from the other side of Oahu, or on the West Coast, thereby to cut off the shipping route of supplies from the U.S. to Australia threatening the newly acquired Japanese booty in the Southwest Pacific, will never be known.

Regardless, still, after deportation from Mexico back to Germany in February of nearly 250 Nazi spies, it is evident that there were Nazi spies, even if hidden in plain view under the cloak of their being Americanos, continuing in Mexico such pro-Axis activities.

Raymond Clapper tells on the editorial page of the strategy being discussed in American Army circles, whether to eliminate first Japan or to concentrate first on Germany or to spread forces relatively evenly between the two fronts. To go initially after Germany with a sweeping blow via invasion of Europe, while maintaining defensive lines in the Pacific, seemed to be the consensus approach. For to concentrate at first too much on Japan left it up entirely to Russia to withstand the German offensive, failing which it would then be left to Britain to stand too much on its own against the potential for German invasion from the French and Norwegian coasts. Once Germany was defeated, the thinking was that Japan quickly would succumb.

In some ways it turned out that way, albeit much more slowly with the first invasion and clearing coming in North Africa, then sweeping up through Sicily and Italy prior to D-Day, thereby cutting off from the south what would have otherwise enabled a flanking maneuver by Germany and Italy against any immediate Allied invasion, even if the time presently, with the Nazis tied down in Russia, made Central Europe appear now especially ripe for the taking. And then it is true that the Japanese, after V-E Day, quickly succumbed, even if in the meantime, there had been considerable counter-offensive action being undertaken by the Allies to free by spring 1945 much of the territory taken by the Japanese in 1941-42.

Nevertheless, it was a quick fall for Japan after Germany's succumbing, but only because of the successful product of the secret Manhattan Project taking place in the New Mexico desert.

Had the atomic bombs not been deployed, then slugging it out in the Japanese islands could have dragged the war on for years. The Allies were tired of death, tempers were short. The wisdom and humanity of the decision to drop the bombs may be contested from now until the crack of doom, but in the end it probably saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives on both sides, especially those of the Japanese. Life was as cheap to the Japanese as it was to the Nazis. It is the only reason that a nation of ninety million people could subdue the Allies in the Far East, including the vastly superior numbers of Chinese, for so long as it did. That some 130,000 civilians had to die in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a sad fact, but the Japanese chose the course and continued to do so, and had given no quarter with respect to enemy civilian populations in Nanking, in Hong Kong, in Manila, in Burma, indeed, in most of their conquered territory.

Moreover, with such a total war afoot, the line between draftees and civilians begins to blur. Other than generalized sentiment, what is the real difference between wholesale killing of raw recruits or draftees and those who simply happen by dint of fate not yet to be wearing a uniform? It is one thing for the Italian airmen of Mussolini to have gunned down for training purposes helpless, unarmed women and children in Ethiopia or at Guernica. It is another to use an ultimate weapon to end a war which otherwise appeared destined to drag on until the last of the pre-ordinated Imperialists fighting for the pride and preservation of the Emperor and Empress and their Empire were rendered up to Nirvana, perhaps requiring otherwise another decade of coarse ground fighting to be subdued on their home turf, a quagmire which would have been every bit as convoluted and perilous, and for Japans's industrial might and consequent short supply lines for the nonce, even more so, than was Vietnam beginning two decades later.

Or, was Japan already so on the ropes, and, without any longer the ability by 1945 to obtain the raw materials gained by its acquisitions of 1941-42, so nearly out of gas, that the end would have come very soon anyway?

With the subsequently known capability to end the war with the dropping of two bombs on two strategically chosen Japanese cities with military importance, had President Truman refused to use the weapon and instead the death toll had mounted on both sides by the tens of thousands, including inevitably civilian populations in port and industrial centers, would he not have been perceived by just as many, who today seek to revise history and decry the use of the bomb, as a war criminal worthy of impeachment?

What Roosevelt would have done under the same circumstances, of course, cannot be known, but the fact that he had placed the Manhattan Project into operation in the first instance, even if as a hedge against Germany first developing an atomic bomb, plus the fact that he had ordered the internment of Japanese citizens on the West Coast in 1942, suggest in combination that the decision would have been the same, even if the form of preliminary action and ultimata might have varied before final deployment. Or, was Roosevelt so wedded to a belief in the ultimate value of naval success that he would have instead sought to have the Allied navy and air corps grind it out to the bitter end in a war of attrition? Would Churchill have gone along with such a strategy, knowing of the readiness of the bomb? What about Stalin?

Ultimately, the liability for the decision for use of the world’s first atomic bombs belongs to Imperial Japan, not President Truman. And the decision was made not only in 1945 when it continued to fight despite receiving in late July due warning with an ultimatum attached, but also in 1941 when it chose war over peaceful resolution of what ultimately amounted to a perceived problem of trade imbalance turned by sentimentalists into an over-arching racial and cultural issue, Asia for Asiatics (so long as the Asiatics were Japanese), Germania for Aryans (so long as the "Aryans" were willing to pronounce Hitler their demigod). Japan had a choice in 1941, to turn toward peaceful resolution, retreat from its unwarranted agrression in China, in Indochina, and return to status quo trading with the Allies. Instead, the militarists bent on empire repudiated these tenders with a vengeance and chose to ally with Hitler.

The thief who stole the lantern, in other words, got the penalty of being faithless.

"Word Pictures" sizes up Robert Reynolds not only as a demagogic buffoon but also a dangerously seeded and power avaricious dictator-in-waiting, waiting for the Axis to win and his pal Hitler to provide him the sceptre of power with which he might then rule as Buffoon-in-Chief of the United States on behalf of Greater Germania. And Bob, now with even the Hope Diamoind within his grasp, was daily proving himself the perfect stooge to wield such a sceptre to the delight of his übermeister.

"’Benefaction’" tells of the bequest by isolationist Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, of his vacation mansion located in Aiken, South Carolina, 128 miles from the donee institution, the Citadel, located in Charleston. Just why that made him a pachyderm, we shall let you try to discern for yourself. The piece itself offers little help. The News, however, suggested repeatedly Colonel "McCosmic" as bearing a striking physical resemblance to Hitler. Still, that does not make him a pachyderm. Maybe, an armadillo or a wolf or even a wolfish armadillo. Leave the poor pachyderms out of it. They have enough trouble.

"Lo, How..." tells of the bad reputation enjoyed by Congress among the American people, fully 56% finding the job being performed by Congress to be either just fair or downright poor. The country was not, as it is sometimes portrayed, completely unified and happy-go-lucky at this juncture in history, fatalistically accepting the course laid forth by its leaders. Labor strife, simmering until recently, had been largely quelled through the cooperation of the leaders of AFL and CIO in providing a pledge not to strike and instead to settle their differences for the duration in collective bargaining. But that, of course, did not necessarily mean that each worker went merrily about his or her job without grumbling. It was a cruel world breathing down everyone’s neck. People did what they had to do to survive and stay aboard the planet with some semblance of freedom remaining. They had a right to carp as they went about it.

Whether the cause of some of the world's difficulties could be found in the habitual and recurring drunkenness in society, as recorded in Dick Young's piece of the date, whether it was merely symptomatic of a worse, more pervasive problem then besetting the world inducing the need for escapism, whether the root problem underlying all of it was the tendency of too many of the world's inhabitants toward despotic regulation of human behavior, seeking to lord over and deprive the other of individual worth and dignity, or whether it was just another of many issues merely coincident with the problems which had led with steadily persistent cycloramic, even nearly algebraic, inertia from World War I to Versailles to worldwide economic depression, especially impacting Europe, to World War II, are alternative formulations of an ever recurring cyclotomic problem the exploration of which, even if without empirically verifiable answer, might lead to a better society worldwide in the future. Sometimes asking the questions is to provide the answer.