The Charlotte News

Wednesday, April 29, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Hitler’s spring offensive, expected to be at a strength of five million men by May 1, had been delayed until June 1 and diminished in size for the reluctance of Rumania and Hungary to send as many men to the slaughter as they had the previous year. Now, the expected contribution from the two Nazi satrapies combined would likely be only 20 divisions, whereas Rumania alone had sent that many the previous year. No one now was quite as eager to be cannon fodder for the failing Fuehrer.

Paul Mallon on the editorial page explains that Hitler was busy accumulating troops in the Ukraine, taking Italian troops from Rommel in North Africa, as well as the Balkan and Hungarian troops, to try to build up his front lines, while moving vast numbers of his own troops from the north and central part of Russia to the south, his superior transportation facilities enabling quicker mobility between sectors than enjoyed by Russia. Hitler was hedging his bets that the still ongoing spring thaw in the north would enough slow the Russian advance that he could get away with concentrating troops in the south for a thrust. But, still it had not come. Nor had the expected Libyan offensive by Rommel on Alexandria. Why?

Shortage of oil was a principal part of the explanation; shortage of trained and seasoned troops was another. Hitler’s gambling expectations for a quick Russian defeat in 1941 had produced an irreconcilable problem for his continued offensive, and the inexorable law of diminishing returns had now begun adversely to affect German morale.

On the domestic front, price freezes, beginning May 18, were announced by OPA, to cap prices at March levels for the duration of the war. Prices had risen 13% since the beginning of the war in September, 1939, 3% since March. Exempted from the freeze were fresh vegetables, chickens, fresh fish, live animals, flour, and dried prunes. Just why dried prunes were exempt is anyone’s guess. We trust that there was no sudden hording of them as with sugar.

The editorial column begins by advocating the combining of the only two telegraph companies remaining into one operation, and to have it operate from within the post office. By way of justification of this monopoly, it incidentally speaks of there being only one express company, one mail system, and one telephone company. Time was.

"Old N.C. Custom" explains how New York, because of the shortage of farm labor triggered by the war industries, exacerbating an already growing trend in labor drifting away from the farm to the city, was now following the rural counties of North Carolina in proposing to start school in August, then adjourn for a month during harvest time to allow the farm children to help at home. That was in a time when the school year lasted but eight to eight and a half months across the country.

Now that it is generally ten months, are we better or worse off? How much can the average child really learn in the course of one school year? Do we not overdo it? Does a break of at least three months in summer not enable the mind to process better that which it stored for months on end during the fall, winter, and spring? The answers, we suggest, are self-evident, the desire to compete with Oriental cultures in their year-round schooling an absurdity. If what we seek are unthinking, robotic automatons, young little fascists in the making, then that is a great idea. Let children be children while they’ve the chance.

"Fair Enough" praises the President’s speech of the night before, the text of which accompanies yesterday’s editorial note, finding in it an equable proposal for distributing the hardship and sacrifice of war throughout the society. It postulates that the whole of the society is more important than its constituent parts and that, since the continued viability of the whole of society was now at stake, the necessary economic changes for the duration of the war would have to be borne not only by all, but also more heavily by the parts of society which could most afford to contribute. Notably, the editorial does not decry or even mention the President’s proposed after-tax ceiling on income at $25,000, the most anti-capitalist, purely socialist proposal likely ever put forth by any President in the history of the country. But these were also the most challenging and extraordinary times ever faced by the country. That this most controversial proposal was treated without special exception by the editorial is thus not surprising.

If using gasoline meant that tankers would be sunk in the Atlantic while transporting it, if using sugar meant that men in the Pacific would die for want of sterilizing alcohol, if using rubber meant that men on the front would not have adequate mobility, if having silk stockings meant that there would be insufficient parachutes, if raising wages and consequently prices meant that war production would suffer, then the country, the piece opines, was prepared to sacrifice. And so it did.

Raymond Clapper writes of FDR’s continued popularity with the American people despite nearly five successive months of bad news, from Pearl Harbor to the loss of the Philippines, all as the Atlantic quickly became a graveyard for merchant and naval vessels sunk by Nazi U-boats. He suggests that America’s greatest moral strength in the war would come, with respect to Asia, in renouncing all post-war aims of territoriality, thus enabling the Asian fighters to have a plain choice between the feudalism promised by Japan and freedom promised by the Allies. Mr. Clapper indicates that his travels throughout the Near and Far East during the previous month had convinced him that the expectations for the post-war environment in that entire region of the world were no less.

Did the failure of those expectations to come to full fruition in the post-war world leave the door open for Communist propaganda and promises thereunder of a socialist workers’ state where all could live prosperously and in harmony, in China, in Korea, in Vietnam?

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