The Charlotte News

Thursday, May 21, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page again addresses the issue of the attempted smear of Senator Walsh, an isolationist in advance of Pearl Harbor. Senate Majority Leader and future Vice-President Alben Barkley had resisted a proposal by former isolationist Senators Nye, Clark, and Wheeler to conduct an investigation into whether the charges of improper conduct and revelation of government defense secrets targeted Walsh and others because of their isolationist stance.

That the pretext for the break-in of Democratic headquarters in June, 1972 was to find, according to Mr. Liddy, evidence of frequenting by Democrats of a "house of degradation" suggests itself to be even more prob'ematic in light of this fizzled 1942 scandal in the making. Perhaps, what he and his fellow third-rate burglars were after, instead, was a list of who among the Democrats had recently the White House vis'ted.

Speaking of sailors being plowed for defense information, we thought we should refer you back to this one. It is something our barber suggested. You may blame our barber. Dang us, if our barber doesn't speak with rhinestones.

Struthers Burt, the novelist living in Southern Pines, writes a letter to the editor printed on the front page re the response in The News of Robert Reynolds to the charge that he was a member of three lobbying committees receiving funding from convicted Nazi agent George Viereck. Mr. Burt indicates that the Senator had laid the present daily sinkings of naval and merchant shipping off the U.S. East Coast by U-boats as well as the lack of gas to the fact of the September, 1940 destroyer deal in which the President traded 50 World War-era destroyers to Great Britain on the suggestion of General Pershing, in exchange for naval and air base privileges in British possessions. This deal at the time had been a favorite football for the isolationists to throw about, contending that it would be received by Germany as an act of war.

Mr. Burt concludes instead that the fault for the war lay with Senator Reynolds and his isolationist compadres, not the destroyer deal—which, of course, preceded attack by Japan, not Germany, on Pearl Harbor by 15 months. But, perhaps Senator Reynolds had some inside information from some of his pals which suggested a closer connection between the attack at Pearl Harbor and the destroyers-for-bases deal of September, 1940. Curiously, although not known at the time in official circles, not known until after the war, long after the war in fact, it was in the wake of this destroyer deal that planning in Japan for the attack first began. Perhaps, the Senator had special extra-sensory powers at work on the matter which enabled him to receive information long before others in the government.

The editorial column, however, informs further that the Senator’s perspicacity, as stated, extended only so far as the presumption that, had the destroyers not been provided Great Britain, they would have been available to the United States Navy to destroy U-boats in the Atlantic. As the editorial indicates, however, the Senator’s usual demonstration of brilliance overshot reality in that, had the destroyers not been provided, the likelihood was that England would have gone the way of France and with it, the Royal Navy. And then...

John Barrymore is reported ill with pneumonia in Los Angeles this day. He would pass away at age 60 in eight days.

We find in the juxtaposed columns to the right side of the page perfectly opposing statements on the Kharkov and Kerch battles, confirming the editorial from the previous week remarking anent the confusion engendered generally by the routinely conflicting reports from the Russian front, depending on whether distributed by the official organ of the Bear or that of the Wolf. Rather than consult Aesop on this problem, one might find the better answer residing this time with Goldilocks.

We note from the Herblock today that Herr Goebbels appears to have been distracted of late from his fastidiously accurate propaganda duties, and had turned instead to other pursuits.

Dorothy Thompson provides the probable reason for his distraction, the puzzling question of just what Der Fuehrer might in his genius have as a goal once he managed to triumph on the Kerch Peninsula, in light of the protection afforded by Sevastopol to the strait separating it from the Caucasus, given that the presumptive object of that offensive would normally be assumed to be the Caucasus and its badly needed oil and timber.

But, perhaps, as Paul Mallon speculated a few days earlier, the actual reason for the Kerch offensive was to prevent flanking maneuvers from the Crimea into the Ukraine offensive which had as its object the re-capture of Rostov and from there, south into the Caucasus. One must not question too closely such demonstrated genius as Der Fuehrer had presented daily, unerringly for such an extended time, as is evident by the depiction of Herr Goebbels's relaxed state of being.

An eleven-day, 700-mile ordeal at sea was recounted on the front page by a Goldsboro native after his U.S. merchant ship was sunk off the northern coast of South America in March, an example of U-boat activity around the Isthmus of Panama. Thirty-four of the thirty-nine man crew arrived safely in Dutch Guiana. As they floated along in their lifeboat, they passed the penal colony in French Guiana, Devil’s Island. At that point, perhaps, they had the sudden urge to call out to their Nazi sinkers: "We’re still here, you ________." If not, we shall supply the thought to them by proxy.