The Charlotte News

Thursday, June 4, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: This day, the Battle of Midway commenced. It started with two waves of carrier planes launched by the Japanese against Midway. While some damage was inflicted on the Midway base, the Pacific Fleet got the better of the day’s action, scoring in the afternoon a direct hit on the carrier Hiryu, sinking it. Eventually during the four-day battle, all four of the Japanese carriers involved in the action would be sunk, delivering a crucial blow to the Japanese Fleet. It left it only with Shokaku and Zuikaku among sizeable carriers, and Shokaku was being repaired from the severe damage it suffered a month earlier in the Coral Sea.

Today’s fighting would prove fatal to the American carrier Yorktown, knocking it out of the battle, leading to its sinking on June 7. The carrier was hit in two waves. The Japanese had thought each wave had sunk different carriers, the Yorktown and the Enterprise, and so believed mistakenly that the Pacific Fleet was down to only one operational carrier, the Hornet. They were in for a shock.

By the end of the four days, not only had Japan lost the heart of its Fleet, but also one cruiser, 248 planes, and 3,057 men killed. The Allied Fleet, by comparison, suffered little: besides the Yorktown, it lost only one destroyer, 98 planes, and 307 men. It was finally, in fact, the decisive victory in the Pacific for which everyone among the Allies had hoped, and which the American press had been falsely led to believe by General MacArthur was the case in the Coral Sea. The attack on Pearl Harbor, alas, six months westward, was avenged.

Of interest today is the footnote that film director John Ford was at Midway as a Naval Reserve commander filming the battle, footage which he later included in a documentary about the attack. Commander Ford was wounded during the action. One of John Ford's early successes as a moviemaker was "Stagecoach", in 1939. "Stagecoach", in addition to John Wayne, Claire Trevor and Thomas Mitchell, starred John Carradine. His son, David, a well-known actor in his own right, was found dead at age 72 this date in 2009 in Bangkok, Thailand, the apparent victim of his own hand by hanging in the closet of his luxury hotel suite. His last major film appearance was in "Kill Bill, Vol. 2" in 2004. Strange, sounding as pulp fiction, even more so given that which has appeared here over the previous couple of weeks, but, nevertheless, true.

As we said yesterday, what is good for glass is not so good for Tyre.

We still have not watched "For Whom the Bell Tolls", but we did, last night, watch "Valkyrie". That’s a good one; we recommend it.

Consistent with the theme of that film, Dorothy Thompson today discusses on the editorial page her previous exhortation to bomb undefended German villages to deter the mass indiscriminate executions of hostages undertaken by the Gestapo to deter resistance reprisals against the Nazis and sheltering of resistance members in the occupied countries. She expresses also that she does not believe that Reinhard Heydrich, who officially died in Prague this date in history, was attacked by Czechs. Instead, she believes it was a Gestapo inside job for the purpose of justifying the reprisals.

One has to examine the incident through the looking glass to see it, but it is entirely possible that it was, in one sense, a Gestapo operation for the sake of rationalizing reprisal and lending apparent moral force within Germany to the Final Solution. That is to say, that while the British-trained Czechs who carried out the plot on Heydrich were obviously not Gestapo agents, but in fact resistance members, the plot was perhaps known by the Gestapo in advance and allowed to occur because Heydrich had accumulated more power than Himmler wanted in competition to his position, as well as to provide the moral force for the program that Heydrich himself had approved at the Wannsee Conference January 20. Such would be entirely consistent with the Nazi mentality. Certainly, their predatory nature included their own, even including the Fuehrer himself.

When looking at Nazis and Nazi-inspired methods, one has to examine them through this lens, a carefully sheltered attempt at rationale for all wrongdoing, hiding from themselves the evil nature of their actions, indeed inverting, through provocation of others to commit acts in retaliation, the moral ground entirely, thus giving to themselves the apparent right to act in self-defense when in fact they were the initial aggressors not entitled under any moral code to avail of its justification.

"Ex-Beast" in the editorial column once again echoes the sentiment expressed by Ms. Thompson, advocating merciless treatment to the merciless Nazi. One understands the sentiment in the context of the times, times in which the whole world was in danger of destruction at the behest of this relatively small coterie of madmen who had gained power in Germany through the apparatus of the Gestapo. Yet, as Ms. Thompson points out, without considerable popular support in the matter to begin with, such a movement could never have obtained traction in any society. No society, in the final analysis, is totally helpless or paralyzed in the face of even a horde of barbarians in ostensible control of the institutions of government, who remain nevertheless representative of the interests of only a small minority of the society.

Paul Mallon points out why the Nazis had to stop waging the Battle of Britain and turn to the Russian front. In nine months, the Luftwaffe had lost in their heaviest raids 145 to 150 planes per raid, nearly 20% of each complement, such that in five such heavy raids they lost the whole complement. Overall, they lost 10% of the planes sent out. It was simply proving too expensive. He contrasts this rate of loss with the relatively sparse 4.4% loss in the British raid on Cologne on May 30, 45 planes. One reason cited for the higher success rate was the British use of fighter pursuit planes to protect the bombers, the first time such protection had been afforded a night raid. The other reason cited was that anti-aircraft batteries were much sparser in Germany because of the need for soldiers and artillery on the Eastern Front and in Africa, likewise the aircraft available to be scrambled in pursuit of British bombers much more divergently spread out, especially given the situation on the Eastern Front where the devastation in men and materiel was so rapid and rampant as to form a virtual daily meatgrinder--two million men lost in ten months of fighting.

Another view of the Lumberton USO controversy, this one enlightened, comes from a Lumberton attorney, head of the local American Legion post which was responsible originally for donating the now controversial USO hut, expressing his continued view that the ministers who expressed opposition to the hut being operated by the Catholic charity organization was one inconsonant with practical concerns and no more than the expression of raw prejudice. The editorial note following the letter conveys that the Lumberton Robesonian had already refused two tendered expressions of the recreational attributes of the USO hut being enjoyed by the soldiers, benefits, insists the letter writer, bestowed without any hint of religious proselytization in the meantime.

"Woods Army"` bemoans the loss of appropriations for the Civilian Conservation Corps, a vital part of the New Deal effort, along with WPA, to revitalize America out of the Depression by offering government employment to otherwise unemployed youth, trained to work the forests, three million young men having trained in its ranks. Now, it was gone for the duration of the war.

Raymond Clapper writes of the young rising star of the Republican Party, Harold Stassen, Governor of Minnesota, who served two full two-year terms, quitting in early 1943 at the beginning of his third and last term in political office to join the Navy. He ran for the Republican nomination for president in 1944. He liked the process so well that he kept on doing so for the ensuing 48 years. Mr. Stassen would eventually acquire something of a joke status by becoming such a perennial Republican gadfly as to be considered a bit of a nut, aspiring to the presidency not just once or an historically acceptable twice, but fully ten times between 1944 and 1992. Even so early in his running career as 1964, his fourth run for his party’s nomination to be the candidate for the nation’s highest office, the mere mention of his name brought an immediate chuckle.

Which reminds us to look in on the Minnesota Senate election held last November: Right.

The incumbent continues to play spoiler to the former comedian, despite the results having been certified in early January to the former comedian. We hope that Minnesota fills its vacant Senate seat sometime before 2015.

"Noah’s Noun" expresses, in the context of labor disputes, the inevitability of division in everything, asseverated by the word "dichotomy". It also suggests, as the song said a few years ago, "There is a crack in everything." That would include, no doubt, a smile. Every day of your life, after all, enjoys a crack, does it not? At least down until the crack of doom.

We understand that Confucius also said: You may swing on tire, but not on glass may you do.