The Charlotte News

Tuesday, June 16, 1942

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Italian Boot: Achilles Heel" suggests that Italy was the weak spot in Europe and would afford the Allies a wedge into Hitler’s Axis empire, cutting Germany off from Rommel’s forces in North Africa, enabling the British to make easy work there, while also softening the German positions in France, Greece, and the Balkans. It defines the most propitious time for such an insurgence as the present, with Hitler’s forces tied down in Libya and Russia, as well as defending the French coast against potential invasion and the besieged German cities being bombed by the RAF, thus unable quickly to come to the aid of Mussolini, the proven weak sister of the Axis.

The editorial was correct in its general assessment of the point at which initial invasion of the Continent would be most effective. Yet, it would not occur until the following summer with the drive into Sicily, only after the North African campaign was won and Rommel and the Italian forces had been completely driven from North Africa and the Germans largely driven from the Mediterranean, thus not allowing a force from within the Mediterranean to mount potentially a pincer move against such an invasion, with diverted troops from Russia forming the other claw.

Dorothy Thompson provides an account of General DeGaulle's attempt to align the the French captains of industry with the French military during the 1930's and the plan's rejection by the leadership of France, its emulation by Germany, leading, she opines, to the weakness vis à vis the Nazi which led to the easy pickings of France by the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe in May-June, 1940. DeGaulle then led the Free French forces in exile in opposition to the resulting Vichy marionette-martinet, until the invasion and re-occupation of France by the Allies in the summer and fall of 1944, at which time General DeGaulle assumed the leadership of the re-united country.

Tried in absentia by the Vichy regime for treason and sentenced to death in 1941 for his deemed treasonous action after the fall, DeGaulle would lead France during the immediate post-war period and again from 1958 until his resignation in the wake of a failed national referendum in 1969, three years before the end of his regular term as President of the Republic. He died 18 months later at age 79.

While DeGaulle's leadership of France in quasi-military fashion, still maintaining his military dress on public occasions through the mid-1960's, stood in obvious contrast to the traitorous clique which sold out France to the Nazis, Laval, Darlan, Flandin, and, to a lesser degree Marshal Petain, Gamelin, and Daladier, the latter for his central role, along with Chamberlain, in forming the Munich accord in September, 1938, DeGaulle nevertheless, after the war, renewed the empire interests of France, in Algiers, in Indochina. It was the latter renewed occupation, of course, which led to the war in Vietnam, eventually involving the United States after the defeat of France by the Vietminh at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the subsequent cancellation, with President Eisenhower's impriamtur, of scheduled elections in 1956 for fear that the Communist Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Vietminh, would gain power in a reunited country.

Especially with the latter conflict in mind, posing post-war renewed extra-territoriality against that which Paul Mallon discusses this day in his piece, did the United States and France completely live up to the spirit and word of the Atlantic Charter formed in August, 1941 between Churchill and Roosevelt, adopted in September by the Soviet Union as well? (In the latter case, the question need not be posed as the answer is obvious.) Had the renunciation of policies of extra-territoriality been maintained in the spirit of that accord, would the Vietnam War have ever been fought?

Of course, tempering a ready answer to this question is the notion that the Domino Theory pervaded the thinking in the 1950's and 1960's on Vietnam: that, based on the World War II model of Japan, if Vietnam fell to the Communists, then the way would be open again for conquest on a similar scale and program undertaken by the Japanese in 1941-42, from Vietnam as a launching pad, into Malaysia, Indonesia (the former East Indies), Hong Kong, and the Philippines, with the wildcards of jets, nuclear submarines, and ICBM's and MRBM's and the establishment of bases for them, the operative principle of satellite bases being the shorter the range the more accurate the target capability, all interjected now to the arsenal, leading to the potential for nuclear confrontation between the United States and the supporting Communist powers of China and the Soviet Union? That nearly became the scenario in 1955 during the Eisenhower Administration over the first of two successive conflicts regarding Quemoy and Matsu, the outlying military buffer islands between Taiwan and mainland China: the Chinese Communists attempted to occupy the islands, leading to the first of the brinksmanship tests, as conceived by John Foster Dulles, that nuclear weapons would be used to prevent Communist aggression.

However unrealistic, with perfect hindsight, was the Domino Theory, born of the fears engendered from World War II, is it not understandable within the context of a generation which had seen what had transpired in World War II? And, even in using perfect hindsight--the notion that the fall of Vietnam in 1975 did not lead to any grand domino effect in East Asia--can it be said that without the Vietnam War as a deadly rebuff to Communist aggression--even if ending in "peace with honor", the U.S. forces' withdrawal under the Paris Peace Accords of January, 1973, leading then to the downfall of South Vietnam to the Communist forces in the North in spring, 1975--, the same absence of falling dominoes in responsive ready sequence would have occurred had the country easily fallen into the hands of Communist forces in 1956, absent the killing fields which Southeast Asia became, especially after full-scale American involvement in early 1965 through fall, 1972? Without the war, demonstrating the dauntless mettle still present in a post-World War II generation of Americans, would Vietnam have not been easy prey for either the Chinese Communists or the Soviets to obtain yet another valuable satellite nuclear base, this time in Southeast Asia? Would that then have set in motion the attempt to re-establish the World War II Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere model with the backing, both in the Soviet Union, and, post-1964, Communist China, of the threat of a nuclear arsenal, all centrifugally governed by the notion that the United States was no longer of sufficient grit to engage in either a conventional war or, consistently, to stare down the newly hatched post-war basilisk watching over the world, mutually assured destruction?

Any such conception prior to October 1962 was blunted by the Cuban Missile Crisis. But after the death of John F. Kennedy, was the thinking in the Communist world that it was the force of his personality which had stood down the Soviet aggression in Cuba? Or, at least, was that the conception at the Pentagon, fueled by CIA analysis? Was there a belief in fact within the Communist world that each successive President of the United States had to be tested to determine the mettle of the newly inaugurated foreign policy, its willingness to withstand Communist aggression, and, if necessary, by use of force, not mere threat of force? Thus, could Lyndon Johnson withstand such a crisis and effect the same resolve and cooperation among NATO allies, as had Eisenhower and Kennedy, to run successfully the dangerous track entailed in bargaining at a table where the stakes consisted of avoiding Armageddon imminent?

Was then the additional thinking on Vietnam, given the formula adopted in the McNamara Defense Department favoring conventional warfare to nuclear standoff, that engaging in a stepped-up conventional war might cut off at the head the prospect of such recurrent nuclear crises by instilling in the Communists the notion that America should not be perceived as soft, unwilling to fight conventionally, and thus subject to repeated aggression with impunity, save in the realm of threat of nuclear exchange between outposts, giving way in each crisis to mere exchange of nuclear outposts?

In other words, had the old pre-Pearl Harbor thinking within the Axis re-surfaced, now re-modeled within Communist perceptions in the nuclear age, such that the Johnson-McNamara response of meeting aggression with conventional force was intended to serve the primary purpose of proving that America's materialistic tide of the 1950's had not created a spoiled younger generation of weaklings, unwilling to fight to uphold democracy? Did it?

Look objectively through any Life or Look issue in the era 1953 through 1964 and one can readily understand how such an impression was transmitted, even if such media representations of American life conveyed in pictures in need of no translator showed an existence for the most part exceptional to most Americans, not necessarily representative of the broad post-war middle class the bulk of whom lived rather mundane lives, in small houses or apartments constructed after the war, drove Fords and Chevys, maybe two or three years old--not shiny Cadillacs and Lincolns carrying Sir and Madame out of a semi-circular drive from their palatial, columned manse to the theater, amid furs tossed rakishly over the shoulder, slightly fluttering in the breeze, and diamond bracelets jangling against pearl necklaces to announce the grand entrance.

The same questions, of course, which we raise with respect to Vietnam may be posed more recently with respect to the Iraq War.

Is the spirit of the Atlantic Charter dead, giving way to paranoia since World War II, in uninterrupted sequence, seriatim, creating in response the very force abroad the world, armed camps of mutual diffidence and occupation, the recurrence of which the Charter was intended to prevent?

Is the Basilisk, even after the end of the Cold War, still with us?

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