The Charlotte News

Friday, May 8, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The major story this date on the front page is of the Battle of the Coral Sea, a two-day sea battle, the first to pit carrier forces directly against one another and the largest sea battle ever fought at the time involving the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The Japanese claim of a battleship and two carriers sunk was nearly correct. The Lexington was fatally damaged this date and the Yorktown suffered severe damage but was not sunk. The Allied claim of ten Japanese ships sunk was correct and included a light carrier sunk, plus severe damage to the new 32,000-ton carrier Shokaku , part of the Task Force of the six carriers, and one of the two newest and largest, which carried out the attack on Pearl Harbor. Although this latter fact was not known at the time and Shokaku would yet sail again, yet another measure of revenge for Pearl Harbor was thus exacted in this battle.

The Lexington was an older carrier, dating from 1921, but was large, with a displacement of 36,000 tons and thus a major loss to the U. S. Fleet. It had been one of two carriers, along with the Enterprise, operating out of Pearl Harbor in December.

The Allies lost 646 men and the Japanese, 917 in the battle. The Allies lost 67 planes and the Japanese, 92.

The Japanese had sought to invade by sea Port Moresby, on which they had been conducting bombing raids since the taking of Rabaul on New Britain in northern New Guinea in January. Port Moresby, being within 300 miles of the Australian mainland, was a crucial stepping stone in edging close to Australia and, moreover, in providing protection of the holdings in the East Indies against counter-attack.

A Task Force departed Rabaul on May 4, set to invade Port Moresby on May 10. Another Task Force departed Truk on April 28 with the goal of invading Tulagi Island in the Solomons to the northeast of Australia, with an immediate goal of establishing a seaplane base for air reconnaissance, ultimately to station enough air and naval strength in the Solomons to harass and eventually sever supply lines from the United States to Australia, an attempt to try to do to MacArthur again what they had just finished doing to his forces in the Philippines.

This invasion force landed on recently abandoned Tulagi on May 3. The Yorktown, alerted to the invasion force, was positioned nearby and sent forth sorties which attacked the Task Force on May 4, sinking a destroyer, three minesweepers, and inflicting damage on four other ships.

On May 5, Admiral Jack Fletcher, commander of the U.S. Task Force in the area, received a message from Pearl Harbor indicating the position nearby of the Task Force headed for Port Moresby. The remainder of the Japanese Task Force which had landed at Tulagi, meanwhile, had sailed into the Coral Sea.

In the early morning hours of May 7, the U.S. Task Force engaged the Japanese Task Force. It was at this point that the light carrier Shoho was dispatched by bombers from both the Lexington and the Yorktown. The U.S. Task Force lost the destroyer Sims to Japanese aerial torpedoes. Heavy air dogfighting transpired into the early evening with heavy losses inflicted on the Japanese airmen.

On this morning of May 8, the fighting continued. Bombers from the Lexington inflicted the heavy damage on the large carrier Shokaku, forcing it to withdraw from the area. That decisive hit came at a price, however, as Japanese Zeroes scored the fatal blows to Lexington and severely damaged Yorktown at the same hour, before noon. Admiral Fletcher then withdrew the carrier Task Force from the battle area in the early afternoon, reeling from the damage to his only two carriers.

The following day, Admiral Yamamoto gave orders to the Japanese Task Force commander, Shigeyoshi Inoue, to pursue the U.S. Fleet through the Coral Sea. After a lengthy patrol, however, he found nothing and was given permission to return his own crippled Task Force to Japan.

Thus, the battle ended inconclusively, a bit different from the initial glowing reports of success issued from either side in the Japanese and U.S. press, with heavy damage to both sides, more ships and planes lost by the Japanese, but damage to heavier and more vital ships being inflicted on the U.S. Fleet.

Significantly, however, the Japanese had been stopped from further incursion south for the nonce, and the invasion of Port Moresby was thwarted. More importantly, the ground was laid for the Battle of Midway the following month.

The Lexington was scuttled and the Yorktown sent to Pearl Harbor for repairs. Shokaku had to return to Japan for repairs; its companion carrier of the same class, Zuikaku, also a part of the Pearl Harbor Task Force, was undamaged but suffered sufficient loss of aircraft that it, too, was ordered to return to Japan. Neither carrier would be available in the Battle of Midway.

The map below, prepared post-war by General MacArthur, shows the path of action on the two sides, the red lines representing Japanese forces and the black, Allied:

On the domestic front, the major news was that gas rationing for private use would be only 2 to 3 gallons per week, and closer to two, following much speculation in the previous two weeks as to whether the ration would be on the lower end or between 5 and 7 gallons per week. With gas mileage having been not so good in those days, that gave the average consumer a mere 25 to 50 miles of driving per week. But, without tires available, it was, by and large, academic. Everyone by now seemed to be riding the buses, holding on for dear life to the straps.

Nevertheless, no doubt, the faces of the diehards who had become accustomed during the previous 25 years to hopping about in their runabouts--rabbit-style as Interior Secretary Ickes had analogized the stop and go hurly-burly tendency of the deuce coupe crowd the previous summer during a similarly declared gasoline shortage, prompting then limited service station hours--were now resembling those dried prunes exempted from the price controls.

The rationing, both now and in the previous summer, was the result of lack of transportation to get the fuel to the east coast, not an actual oil shortage.

Speaking of which, incidentally, we recommend the new Neil Young record, "Fork in the Road", into which we rode our bike last evening. It may be the first album, a good portion of which is devoted to songs about saving fuel--an apt topic whether in a shooting war or in a war to save the planet from itself and man's big footprint upon it.

On the editorial page, Paul Mallon discusses how those price controls just instituted by OPA only covered about two-thirds of the field, processed foods, for instance, leaving out non-processed foods, a yield to the farmers as well as for the legal bar of farm produce being frozen at a price not less than 110 percent of parity, requiring a price on any given product to be fixed not below 110 percent of the average price between 1909 and 1914. And so it went, on down the line, exceptions to price controls eroding about one-third of the rule.

The editorial column also speaks to the issue in "Not Ready?", suggesting that the Congress was lagging behind the public’s willingness to sacrifice, while the politicians kowtowed to both labor and farm lobby groups, with the President not fully bowing, but nether pushing hard measures which might tend to alienate either major political force.

"Hand-Sewn" points up the problem with rigid Army adherence to tradition in quartermastering, that the Army Quartermaster insisted meticulously that tents manufactured under government contracts include only hand-sewn rope rings, as the manufacturer grumbled that such a requirement would so slow down production as to hamper its contract and lower the effective wages to workers. The machine, the argument went, could produce the loop more efficiently and with greater strength to the tent than the time-consumptive task of needle and thread. The Army wouldn’t listen.

Ditto with its insistence on vat-dyed yarn for machine gun belts, to be used once in battle and tossed to the winds.

They had to look right, after all, or else the war might be lost. Whoever heard of carrying into battle a tent with machine-sewn loops and machine gun belts which were not vat-dyed? The enemy would laugh themselves silly and provoke an immediate surrender for failed morale. You’d sooner be dead than caught out in the open field with such an ungainly array of unfashionable accoutrement as that which those uninformed blokes proposed at Dize Aluminum in Winston-Salem. Why, next, they’d want you to adorn little green hats instead of helmets. Maybe even lace panties.

And, a letter to the editor from a local waitress complains of a News article suggesting that waitresses earned twenty to thirty dollars per week, predicting that such an exaggerated estimate of wages would deter customers from tipping. We mention it because it reminds us of that roman à clef within the novel by our friend in the Caribbean, which we provided to you back in late 2005, in association with the editorials of December 20, 1938. So, we recapitulate it for you here.

Good ‘ay.