The Charlotte News

Monday, June 1, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The big news this day on the front page was of the raid on Cologne, extending into the Ruhr and Rhineland, occurring Saturday night, the largest single raid yet of the war, indeed, the largest single air assault in history, issuing those promised 1,000 plane-loads of bombs on the city.

--Take that, you foul-smelling, dung-heaped Nazi murdering swine, right in your cologne, masking the Oder.

The raid, dubbed "Operation Millennium", lasted but an hour and fifteen minutes, but rained damage from 1,500 tons of bombs over 600 acres of ground. The number of civilian casualties was placed by the Germans at 486; but of course, like everything issuing from the Reich’s propaganda ministry and Doktor Goebbels, this figure is subject to doubt—whether high or low being merely speculation. Whatever the loss of civilian life in this raid on Cologne, it pales by comparison to the 50,000 left dead by the 1940-41 Blitz of England.

Cologne was a strategic target for its industrial center manufacturing munitions and its housing of a provincial command headquarters for the Wehrmacht. It was the second choice for the raid; the primary target had been Hamburg, but weather conditions there provided too little visibility for effective operations. This was the sixth raid on Cologne, which had begun in mid-February; but none of the previous five had exceeded 263 planes, those involved in the raid on the night of April 5.

The dense bombing shower was aimed, as indicated in the report by British Air Marshal A. T. Harris, commander of the RAF and principal architect of the raid, at achieving a morale-destroying strike on the German population, to make Germany "bitterly rue the day" it started the war.

No doubt, in mind, too, was a two-fold purpose: first, the delivery to the Russians of a second front to take the pressure off the devastation in men and materiel being suffered by Russia for the previous eleven months; second, to deter further indiscriminate mass reprisals against civilians in occupied countries in retaliation for limited resistance activity, especially in Czechoslovokia. The British, after all, had trained the assailants in the Heydrich killing.

The German High Command, it was reported, issued advice to evacuate the city, as "the Yanks were coming." The report indicates that the civilian population appeared to be rapidly complying. The 1,000 plane per night prediction issued by the Allied Air Command on May 20 was not, it turned out, merely bluff and boast. Up to this point, the largest single raid on any German city had delivered about 400 planeloads of bombs.

Some 1,700 major fires were touched off by the raid, covering three quarters of the city in a pall of dense, acrid smoke. The Allied Air Command wanted to demonstrate that it was now capable, with the quickly combining strength of American planes and pilots, of delivering every bit the fire-brigade taxing firestorm, and more, which the Nazis had rained on England during the Blitz. Though now a year in the past, memories of lost loved ones and neighbors obviously do not fade in the course of a mere four seasons. The Nazi would now begin to get his hard memories in return. C’est la guerre.

Lt.-General "Hap" Arnold reported that soon American planes and pilots would substantially supplement the RAF endeavors. The expectation, as further explains the editorial column in "The Boot", was that the Nazis would not last beyond the fall. While overly optimistic, the Yanks were indeed coming.

--Yet, cigarettes or rum, or no, it's still a long, long way to Tipperary. No?

There would be 262 raids on Cologne during the war. Cologne was largely evacuated of civilians for the duration and by war’s end stood largely as a burned out skeleton, with the exception of some prominent historical landmarks, notably the Cologne Cathedral, spared by the bombing raids.

In typical spiteful Nazi response, without any reason or rime other than the thrill of counter-responsive childish destruction, 25 planes were sent in three waves to bomb the historic city of Canterbury, causing significant damage to historic sites, but little loss of life. This raid was the most intense of 135 raids targeting the city during the war, dropping a total of 10,000 tons of explosives on its inhabitants. Completely destroyed in this June 1 raid was, save for its tower, St. George’s Church, wherein Christopher Marlowe was baptized.

The intent of this and subsequent raids on June 2 and 6 was expressly to target civilians to diminish British morale. The Nazis labeled the raids, along with others on Exeter, Bath, Norwich, and York occurring in late April and early May, the Baedeker Raids, named for the German tourist brochure which had described these towns as particularly picturesque locations to visit when in England, awarding each burg three stars.

But, of course, the sparse number of aircraft able to be devoted to these raids could not have possibly lent hope to the Luftwaffe command, except among the extremely dim-witted or insane, that such raids aiming their intent on destroying historical relics amid civilians would significantly depreciate British morale, when the nine-month Blitz and its daily psychological impact had not.

The sum of these Baedeker Raids took 1,637 lives, injured 1,760, and destroyed 50,000 homes. The Luftwaffe suffered heavy losses as a result. The "three-star" bombing offensive did nothing but further incense British morale toward the Beast of Berlin.

We note that in August, 1949, Margaret Mitchell was killed by an off-duty taxi driver while crossing Peachtree Street in Atlanta on her way to see the British film "A Canterbury Tale". Said bystanders, she stepped into the roadway without looking, as she often did, according to friends. Her best-selling novel had been published in 1936 and made into the colour film in 1939.

Carole Lombard, you will recall, died in the plane crash January 16, 1942, near Las Vegas, when it crashed into a mountainside, returning to Los Angeles from New York, carrying also 15 pilots charged with the responsibility of ferrying bombers across country for convoy to Britain. The crash occurred on a clear night.

Elsewhere, the front page reports, the British in the Libyan desert had shot down a reconnaissance plane carrying General Ludwig Cruewell, second in command to Rommel in North Africa, and captured him as a prisoner, the highest ranking officer to fall into British hands thus far in the war, second among prisoners in importance to the Reich only to Rudolf Hess who deliberately commandeered a plane and fled to Britain from Germany, landing in Scotland on May 10, 1941.

Well-known A.P. reporter Louis P. Lochner indicates that a reliable source from Germany had informed him that, unless the Allies were successful in opening a second front against Hitler by July, the Nazis intended an all-out assault on Russia, all along the front, with the purpose finally to annihilate the Russian Army. After doing so, his plan was to make a move through Turkey into Iran. Of course, the same speculation had been extant all along since the Russian war began June 22, 1941. Hitler’s plans and the actual capabilities of the Wehrmacht to execute those plans against the stiff resistance it had unexpectedly met in Russia had proved two different things.

On the editorial page, "Mystery" discusses the fact that the President had just commuted the sentence of Earl Browder, former head of the American Communist Party, from four years down to time served of fourteen months, while now the Attorney General, Francis Biddle, was undertaking, not for the first time, to deport Harry Bridges, reputed Communist, head of the West Coast longshoreman’s union, the ILWU. The editorial expresses confusion while recognizing a distinction in the two cases in that Browder was an American citizen sentenced to jail for travelling on a forged passport, while Bridges was an alien, whose deportation was being sought.

And, indeed, the two cases could not be more dissimilar under the law. Browder was released under public pressure because of alleged selective prosecution based on his Communist Party membership. Bridges denied being a Communist or ever having been so affiliated and sought to avoid deportation based on the allegation that he had been.

The Government had sought to deport Bridges in 1938, pursuant to the Immigration Act of 1918, based on alleged membership in an organization the purpose of which was to overthrow the government of the United States by force or violence. But the immigration court found the case against Bridges to be insufficient to prove membership in a Communist organization and dismissed it in January, 1940. Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, then in charge of deportation, affirmed the decision.

Subsequently, however, the Congress amended the Act in June, 1940 to allow deportation of anyone who was a member of such an organization either at the time of entry to the country or who became such a member thereafter, broadening the scope of the Act as originally enacted in 1918. The Attorney General was then assigned responsibility over deportation proceedings within the Executive Branch.

The Government then tried again under the amended act in 1941 and, after an order of deportation was entered in immigration court, the Board of Immigration Appeals overturned the decision for want of adequate evidence to show that Bridges belonged to or was affiliated with any such organization at any time after entry to the United States.

The Attorney General nevertheless found in accordance with the hearing judge that he had been so affiliated and a member and ordered Bridges deported. Bridges petitioned the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for a writ of habeas corpus which was denied. Eventually, in 1945, the Supreme Court would reverse the Court of Appeals, essentially upholding the Board of Immigration Appeals decision to dismiss the proceedings. Justice Douglas delivered the 5 to 3 majority opinion in Bridges v. Wixon, 326 US 135, which based the decision on a narrow reading of the statute and a flaw in the evidence presented against Bridges, thus not reaching the constitutional issues raised by him, alleged to bar his deportation. A dissent was registered by Chief Justice Stone, joined by Justices Frankfurter and Roberts.

The majority held that the deportation statute’s intent in requiring "affiliation" with an organization which had as its purpose the violent or forceful overthrow of the United States Government did not, as the original hearing judge had implied in his decision, include association looser than mere membership but tighter than sympathy. Membership had to be proved. The Court found that the evidence supported only Bridges’s cooperation with the Communist Party for wholly lawful objectives having to do with labor organization, not the overthrow of the government.

Said the Court:

"Inference must be piled on inference to impute belief in Harry Bridges of the revolutionary aims of the groups whose aid and assistance he employed in his endeavor to improve the lot of the workingmen on the water front. That he enlisted such aid is not denied. He justified that course on the grounds of expediency--to get such help as he could to aid the cause of his union. But there is evidence that he opposed the Communist tactics of fomenting strikes; that he believed in the policy of arbitration and direct negotiation to settle labor disputes, with the strike reserved only as a last resort."

As to offered proof of his membership in the Communist Party, the Court found that critical evidence came from inadmissible hearsay in the form of unsworn out-of-court statements which therefore violated the due process rights of Bridges. The evidence was deemed sufficiently important to be considered prejudicial to the outcome, as only one other witness provided evidence of membership and the hearing judge had plainly relied on both witnesses.

Justice Murphy added a concurrence, highly critical of the Government’s relentless efforts to deport Bridges during the previous seven years:

"The record in this case will stand forever as a monument to man's intolerance of man. Seldom if ever in the history of this nation has there been such a concentrated and relentless crusade to deport an individual because he dared to exercise the freedom that belongs to him as a human being and that is guaranteed to him by the Constitution."

He impliedly characterized the 1940 amendment to the law as a bill of attainder aimed at Bridges, as it assuredly was.

The dissent argued that the evidence of membership before the hearing judge was adequate for the finding of membership and thus to sustain the deportation order. It found no error in the admission of evidence on the subject.

Regardless of this outcome in Bridges’s favor, the Government was not done. In 1948, it prosecuted and convicted him for perjury on asserting in his application for naturalization that he was not a Communist. The Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1953. The Government persisted nevertheless in its efforts to deport Bridges, but the case was again dismissed in 1954 and the Government this time did not appeal. The sixteen year battle ended and Mr. Bridges lived out his life in San Francisco, dying in 1990 at age 88.

Also on the editorial page, "That Harold" tells of Secretary of Interior and petroleum coordinator Harold Ickes having seemingly denied the existence of the State of Tennessee. We find the reasoning of this humorous little piece a little flawed and so we shall let you interpret it for yourself. It imparts the fact that the Plantation Pipeline from Baton Rouge to Greensboro provided 32 percent of its pumped volume of 57,000 barrels of gas per day to Tennessee while providing Charlotte 16 percent, the rest of North Carolina nothing, and the remainder to South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. (At least, we think that is what it says.)

Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, in an article culled from Atlantic Monthly, writes of her hope for the future of China, that China did not want to participate in communism, and that the war had provided to the average rural dweller a substantially increased standard of living and increased opportunity for education while hindering the small percentage of intellectuals and those employed by the government. She expressed hope that the wealth would be evenly spread after the war. Her hopes, of course, were not to be realized as the revolution of Mao Tse Tung and the Communists took over the mainland of China in 1949 after the defeat in the civil war of the Nationalist Kuomintang led by Chiang, relegating the Nationalists to Taiwan.

And, Herblock offers a noteworthy comment anent the general efforts of the resistance of late in occupied countries to fight back against the Nazi terror, this one with specific reference obviously to Heydrich and his whiphand previously lashing Czechoslovakia, the heroic act of Jozef Gabčik and Jan Kubiš to stay it, ultimately at the expense of their own lives.

As apt as it was for its time, did someone read the thing differently in another clime, 21 years later? Maybe someone living in Dallas, Texas, for instance.

"Bon appetit."

"Goldberg."

Isaiah 21:12 says: The watchman said, The morning cometh, and also the night: if ye will enquire, enquire ye: return, come.

"Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied,
"If you seek for Eldorado!"

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