The Charlotte News

Thursday, May 28, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: A little piece on the front page indicates that the previous night, May 27-28, 1942, ended a thousand nights of blackouts in Britain, begun September 1, 1939 at the outset of the war. The Nazis had rolled their tanks across the Polish border in the initial Blitzkrieg shortly before dawn that day, at around 5:00 a.m.

And, the British could count, accurately, as you might imagine. Thus, Reinhard Heydrich was attacked precisely on the 1000th day of the War, that which Britain had endured for a Thousand Nights.

Meanwhile, the German press reports that, rather than being wounded by the bomb thrown at his car, Heydrich was shot in the attack on his life. The report indicates that shots were fired from an "automatic rifle". Which story is true is not possible accurately to determine. When dealing with Nazis, where the truth ultimately lay is quite impossible to tell merely by their records and their post-war statements. For they were all quite adept at one thing and only one thing: the Big Lie. So, whether Reinhard Heydrich was shot, maimed, cut into pieces, blown up, poisoned by his own superior, or committed "suicide", is subject always to some level of dispute in the realm of the intuitive when dealing with Nazis.

Heinrich Himmler, we are informed, had flown to Prague to take personal charge of the situation. Perhaps, Herr Himmler discovered in the meantime, before his June 2 visit with his understrapper, that Herr Heydrich had been a naughty boy and given his route and schedule away in some ill-advised pursuit inside a "house of degradation"—or something like that. Thus...

In any event, we are at a loss to explain how it was that the route which his car took and the day when it would come through the fatal intersection, were known to the two assailants. Both of them had waited, the report says, for several hours. But this route is not described as one taken by Heydrich on any regular basis.

The hunt was on for the assailants. After the attack, one had run away while the other had escaped via bicycle.

Compulsory registration for all males in Prague had been instituted, to go into effect at midnight, anyone found without a registration card, to be shot on sight. Such were Nazi techniques of justice. --No card? You did not hear the announcement, mein herr? Too bad. Next time, you will open your ears, no? Ho, ho, ho.

The assailants, Jozef Gabčik and Jan Kubiš, were eventually found by the Nazis hiding in a church in Prague on June 18 and were gunned down by machine-gun fire, as they fought to the last to avoid capture and consequent torture to force revelation of the planners of the attack.

OFF, the Office of Facts and Figures, reported that a Japanese broadcast intended for home consumption to the effect that American prisoners of war off the sunken Houston were being beaten by ropes, may have been purely fictitious to appeal to the home audience, as the account differed from impartial observers on the scene. The Japanese military spokesman indicated that the prisoners of the Houston were engaged in "easy tasks" which included the filling of holes in airstrips. Whether they had to count them all is not told.

In the North African desert, it is reported that Rommel, counter to expectations because of approaching scorching summer weather, as set forth weeks earlier and more recently in Paul Mallon’s column, was making a lunge at the key British supply depot and defensive position at Tobruk, along with Bengasi, the keys to any desert action in Libya. Rommel’s aim was to secure Alexandria and thus Egypt, drive the British out of North Africa, and then obtain control of the Suez Canal, to enable linkage with the Japanese Navy in the Red Sea—a proposition made much more difficult by the British having taken in May the island of Madagascar, off East Africa.

To add to the multi-faceted confusion in the stories from the Russian front was the claim by Pravda that the German Wehrmacht had resorted to the ruse of wearing Russian uniforms and flying Russian flags on their tanks to confuse the Russian defenders. They also, said the report, engaged in "psychological" tactics whereby they ran yelling across open fields toward the Russian lines and artillery. In one such episode, the story continued, "1,000 dead ‘psychologists’" were the result. We make no comment.

Secretary of War Henry Stimson warns the country to be on the alert for possible counter-attack to the continental United States in retaliation for the Doolittle raid of April 18. He posits that the loss of Japanese face in this raid compelled the Mikado to react. It would not occur of course; instead, the Japanese were planning to lure the American Navy and air corps into a surprise nest at Midway.

On the editorial page, the Monroe Journal quotes Josephus Daniels on his eightieth birthday as saying the supposed "good old days" were not so good. That from a man born during the Civil War. Obviously, as he looked around him at the tragic, horrible world of 1942, it was a bold statement to make, that this world was no worse than the one in which Daniels had grown of age. But, when we look at the photographs by Matthew Brady, the photographs of the times after the Civil War, the westward expansion, the tales of frontier lynching, of frontier scalping, tales of the old frontier, it is not hard then to see how Ambassador Daniels, from the coign of vantage his eighty years afforded, could make such a statement, pregnant with a good deal of verity, observed objectively, at least insofar as the American landscape was concerned.

Raymond Clapper writes of Mexico’s declaration of war on the Axis, still incipient when he drafted the editorial. He stresses that the sinking by the Axis of the two Mexican merchant ships became the focal point on which anger of the masses could coalesce, but that the issue for the broader society was the general survival of Mexico and other Latin American countries, whether they could co-exist for long independently in a world ruled by the Axis versus one where the democracies were pre-eminent economically. He points to the reality that Mexico, in order to survive, had to sell its oil. In November, of course, prior to Pearl Harbor, the United States, had, to secure the loyalty of Mexico, finally worked out a deal between Mexico and the American and British oil companies for reparations, albeit relatively small, to compensate for the expropriation by Mexico of the oil fields in March, 1938.

Between that point and the invasion of Poland, the expropriated oil had been sold to Italy and the Reich as British and American companies boycotted the purchase of the tainted oil. The British blockade thrown up in the North Sea and at Gibraltar at the start of the war, however, prevented the Mexican oil from getting through any longer to the Axis from the West. Nevertheless, some oil continued to flow to Japan, both from American oil facilities in California and from Mexico, via Japanese merchant ships to Vladivostok. Some of that oil, in turn, was shipped via the Trans-Siberian Railway into Germany.

Then, Hitler did a funny thing: he invaded Russia on June 22, 1941 and cut off his Mexican oil in the process, albeit not supplying enough oil, in combination with that which he was able to secure from Rumania, to sustain an invasion of England, an invasion which had become obviously required to obtain his desired ends of being left to hold conquered Central Europe. The nine-month Blitz, designed slowly to weaken England into peaceful submission, had failed. Thus, by obtaining the oil and wheat from the Ukraine and the Caucasus, to obtain then the oil from Iran, Iraq, and Syria, by being able to effect a launch through Turkey, he would have sufficient oil at his disposal, both to cut off England from its ready supply from the Arab world and then to have that same supply at the disposal of Germany, with which then to effect invasion of England and ultimately, over time, weaken the United States into economic submission. A part of this plan, of course, was to work from within Mexico and Latin American countries, primarily Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, to weaken democratic resistance via fifth columnist propaganda efforts so as to obtain "election" of corrupt and Nazi-acquiescing local, state, and finally national leaders.

Then, Hitler did a funny thing: two of his U-boats attacked a Mexican tanker and merchant ship and sank them. The people of Mexico did not cotton to the idea.

And Paul Mallon tells quite nearly accurately that by February, 1943, Mussolini would be out of the war. It would take until the summer of 1943 for the Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy to fully realize the goal, but by August, 1943, Mussolini would be out of power in Rome, reduced to Hitler stooge in northern Italy by October.

A piece culled from Time lists twelve among the Americans whom Gerald L. K. Smith had placed in his "Hall of Fame", the names of the most prominent having been included in that bracketed note accompanying an editorial of May 19. Added among this abstracted list of twelve was Lizzy Dilling (who makes us Dizzy), Father Edward Curtan of Brooklyn, a supporter of Father Coughlin, and the editors of a Coughlin-supporting weekly journal from Brooklyn—Brooklyn, you will recall, having been the site of the "house of degradation" alleged, albeit falsely, to have been Senator Walsh’s frequented place of relaxation, a house which doubled as an Axis whetting stone through which to obtain valuable information on troop and ship movements, seamen in and out of port, going to Britain in convoys for the staging of a potential Allied invasion of the Continent—or not?

Robert Rice Reynolds, we remind, had provided a Nazi intriguant some valuable French shipping data in the spring of 1940.

"Speak Out" summarizes the U.S. Court of Appeals decision out of the D.C. Circuit in the Sweeney case, the case of a Congressman who, it was alleged in the syndicated Pearson & Allen Washington Merry-Go-Round column, opposed a Federal judicial nominee because he was Jewish. Ohio Congressman Sweeney sued in several jurisdictions, only to have his suits dismissed, but found the law of libel especially hospitable in New York where he won a verdict. The Court of Appeals, however, for the D.C. Circuit held against his right to sue on libel for mere error of reporting, finding that without economic damage shown from the libel or so-called defamation per se--accusation publicly of a crime, corruption, gross immorality, or gross incompetence--the press should be protected as to statements regarding public officials so as to uphold the public interest in obtaining information on their elected leaders. Mere error in reporting, without economic damage shown, was found insufficient to support a finding of libel.

Standards differ between public and private citizens and as to whether the statement is one made in private, with reasonable expectation of the maintenance of that privacy, versus a public statement. Private citizens are entitled to greater protection generally than public officials and public figures; private statements are entitled to greater First Amendment protection on the part of the speaker than public statements. Since this was not a Supreme Court case, we shall defer to some other time to set forth in more detail the standards which govern those dichotomies.

The definitive Supreme Court case on the subject of defamation of public officials is New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 US 254 (1964), which cites to the earlier 1942 Court of Appeals case of Congressman Sweeney, Sweeney v. Patterson, 128 F.2d 457 (1942), cert. denied, 317 US 678, and some of the language quoted in the piece. Sullivan holds that in order for a publication to be held liable for defamation against a public official, the statement must be proved to have been uttered with actual malice, that is to say with knowing falsity or reckless disregard for the truth. Whether such is the case is for the trier of fact to determine typically. This standard applies only to public statements; even greater latitude is afforded the speaker, for obvious reasons, in private statements, generally held not to be subject to liability at all.

Otherwise, we become a fascist state in which little secret policemen run around making hay of private statements uttered by those against whom they have either a political or economic axe to grind, violating the reasonable expectations of the speaker who assumed the statement was made either with an actual confidential privilege in place or assumed privacy by the context of the conversation which the listener was told to keep confidential. But some people, including some journalists, as the thing cuts both ways, cease being human beings when they become pig Nazis, by dint of their greed and desire to steal the property or reputation of others, the font which ultimately produced Nazism in fact.

Thus, while one does not obviously have the right deliberately to utter falsehood with respect to another, as long as one utters the facts on which their belief is based, and demonstrates affirmatively that they are not implying facts not related to the listener, the listener is free to accept or reject the statement within the "marketplace of ideas" concept coined by Justice Holmes, and so such a statement, when balanced against the concept of free speech, must be regarded as non-actionable statement of opinion which the listener is free to accept or reject on the stated premises. Such is the standard in public statements. Again, private statements are afforded even greater protection, usually resulting in protection of free speech--except, of course where fascism becomes the rule in certain places and with certain folk.

Sullivan involved an advertisement taken out in the New York Times in March, 1960 to solicit funds for the legal defense of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on his trumped-up perjury indictment out of Montgomery, Alabama. The ad spoke of non-violent student activities in protest of segregation having been subjected to a "wave of terror" by the police in Montgomery. The ad referred also to "they" several times in reference to the actors responsible for specific actions aimed at the student protesters. Mr. Sullivan, a Montgomery City Commissioner with oversight responsibilities for the police and fire department, claimed that "police" and "they" referred to him, as he was a Montgomery official with oversight over polizia il dipartimento.

Thus, this Nazi racist redneck, with his firehoses and Nazi storm troopers, sued. It took going all the way to the Supreme Court, and an assassination of a United States President in the meantime, but this racist redneck KuKu Bird finally lost.

"Ten Flights Up", one year to the day from Cash’s last official day on the job at The News, announces the elevation to the top of the Ivory Tower of Sports Editor Burke Davis, taking over the job of editorial writer. J. E. Dowd headed off as a volunteer to the Navy. Whether or not Stuart Rabb, Cash’s replacement, stayed on for awhile longer is not indicated. The 60th Anniversary edition in December, 1948 stated that Mr. Rabb did not stay long, and so we might assume that he departed at this juncture or shortly thereafter.

So, we shall keep an eye peeled once again to see if the editorial column changes in its content and demeanor under the guiding typing hand of Burke Davis.

We assess that Mr. Rabb, a young writer still in his twenties, did a highly competent job under strained circumstances of world war, during arguably the most threatening year to freedom abroad which the world has ever known: the war in Russia; the occupation of Indochina by the Japanese, with Vichy’s permission at the insistence of Hitler, as a trade-off for the Pearl Harbor attack; the anxiety over subsequent Japanese feints toward war in the fall, in the wake of demands for resumptive normalization of trade and foregoing of aid to China, allowing Japan retention of its territorial occupation in northern Indochina, demands on the U.S. government which everyone knew would not be acceptable; the attack itself on Pearl Harbor, and the attacks quickly following at Wake Island, Midway, Hong Kong, and the Philippines, and the exhaustive days of News coverage which followed these attacks; the quickly successive, percussive fall of each of Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore, Sumatra, Borneo, Celibes, and New Guinea in January and February; the fall of Bataan on April 9 and Corregidor on May 6 and the evacuation of Douglas MacArthur to Australia in mid-March, the capture of Jonathan Wainwright as a prisoner of war along with some 70,000 of his men, left for a month to defend Corregidor with dwindling supplies and no ready means by which to obtain replenishment, all to inflict as much damage as possible on the Japanese air and navy resources, with the outcome a fait accompli; and now, in May, Rangoon having fallen weeks earlier, the remainder of Burma and the invaluable supply road into China having fallen as well into Japanese hands, 80% of the British contingent in Burmese territory having now retreated into India; the question of India’s role and the failed mission of Sir Stafford Cripps in March to try to acquire the support of the Indian National Congress, Nehru and Gandhi, in exchange for promise of post-war dominion status--all of these negative events suggesting defeat for the Allies, interspersed only by the heartening news of the Russian winter counter-offensive, news of which the average American would be suspicious for its source; the April 18 Doolittle raid on Tokyo; and, more recently, the questionable "victory" in the Battle of the Coral Sea during the first week of May.

To have written this column daily in the face of all of that unrelenting daily dark news, knowing that his predecessor had died in Mexico under strange circumstances a month after his departure for a year to write a novel under the aegis of a Guggenheim Fellowship, suggests the yeoman’s nature of the courageous task performed by Mr. Rabb.

We find ourselves, after reading daily through all of that old news in real time, even with the displacement of 67 years and no incumbent threat to our well-being posed by its daily unravelling stories, quite nearly exhausted. We can only imagine what it was like actually to absorb the stories as they occurred and write about them daily. So, kudos to Mr. Rabb for his diligence during that stressful period of the country’s history.

The column was not as colorful or captivating as during Cash’s three and a half year tenure, but then Cash left behind large shoes to fill, as the staff itself appraised the situation seven years later, as well as in the 1960’s and 1980’s, respectively, when some of them spoke with either or both of Cash’s successive biographers, Joseph Morrison and Bruce Clayton. And, with Americans now dying in the war daily, with soldiers from local families going off to war daily, the need to buoy spirits while sufficiently dealing with the news stories in a serious and dignified manner, required a different balance and approach, a somewhat different sensitivo-rationalis, to the column from that of the period of late 1937 to mid-1941, when the war remained "over there".

"Usurper" informs that even circus gorillas received rationing coupons for sugar. Toto, the 375-pound mate to Gargantua, managed to consume two pounds of sugar per day—the entire monthly allotment for each human since sugar rationing had begun April 16. No wonder Toto weighed 375 pounds. You try consuming two pounds of sugar per day and you would likely weigh at least that much, too, especially if your entire daily exercise consisted of bounding around in a cage.

Gargantua, by contrast, had gone on a diet by dint of grief for his lost Keeper who had died, and so the circus had returned his coupons so that some worthy human or other gorilla could have at them.

For those in need of the sugar they were not getting, there was always the possibility of a night raid on Toto’s stash, we suppose.

We refer you back to The News of October 31, 1941--the day the Reuben James was sunk, the last day allowed for Jews to emigrate from Nazi-occupied Europe--for that old circus poster advertising the Gargantuan couple. All being for the benefit of those for whom the Greatest Show on Earth was performed.

Finally, we make note of our fuzzy print. We duly apologize. Our eyes are as tortured by it as likely are yours. We do not have better versions which we are ruefully hording from you at present, as the government was at the time the gas and sugar. We shall substitute more easily readable versions in the near future and inform you when we do. They will be full of sugar. The larger file takes a little longer to load onto your screen and so we opted for the smallest available for the sake of a fast pace, but, in so doing, we struck the balance a little to the nether side of the Diet, we fear. Don’t blame us though when we substitute the larger files and they take a little longer to load. It is the nature of the gorilla that the Sugar necessary to keep the gorilla happy must be adequately balanced against the size of the Cage in which the gorilla is confined. Or, maybe the better metaphoric allusion would be along the lines of saccharine, or, even better, skim milk versus whole milk or something.

In honor of the beginning of the editorial stint of Burke Davis, we would try to imagine some sports analogy to convey the changing of the guard, but, as we cannot tackle one apt for the moment and are therefore liable either to fumble or be forced to quick-kick in advance of our finding an eligible receiver down field, we shall simply leave it at that, this Thousandth Day of World War II.

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