The Charlotte News

Saturday, June 6, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The editorial page this date speaks in "Sixth Visit" for the first time of the Battle of Midway, speaks of it only briefly, speaks of it in terms of the cautionary expression of victory indicated as apt by Admiral Chester Nimitz.

Indeed, however, as we have indicated, it was a great victory, the single greatest victory by far which the Allies at this point had obtained in the Pacific War. But, Admiral Nimitz, because of the fog of war, yet did not know the extent of Japan’s losses and so wisely hesitated to declare more than tentative success, the affirmative indication only of small losses in the Pacific Fleet.

The editorial says only that it was clear that the Japanese this time had met formidable opposition and had retreated, this the sixth time the Japanese had attacked Midway since December 7.

This time, unlike the reports from the Coral Sea battle, history would bear out the initial assumptions of successful conclusion, and much more. Many historians credit this battle as a turning point in the Pacific War. Indeed, with the loss of the bulk of Japan’s major carrier strength, there is no argument to be made that this attack, designed to lure the Pacific Fleet into deep water to enable the final kill not inflicted at Pearl Harbor, did not miserably backfire. The Japanese Navy and air corps had been repelled at the Battle of the Coral Sea and forced to retreat. Now, it had been dealt a solid blow of defeat from which it would never recover to wage the kind of offensive warfare it had effectively waged in the previous six months as the American air wing was busy building and shipping bombers to the Pacific theater.

The design of the offensive on Pearl Harbor, to afford the Japanese Navy six months to gain control of the Pacific, while superficially effective, had proved in the gaining so utterly costly in ships, planes, and experienced pilots, so extending of supply lines to maintain the tenuous gains obtained, finally leading to this defeat in trying to preserve effectively the gossamer threads of empire thus spun by dealing a knock-out punch to the American Navy and air corps, that in the end the December 7 attack could hardly be counted a success in the long run. All that planning, all that meticulously executed operation in stealth, exacting the damage it sought, taking the toll of 2,390 lives in the process, was ultimately for naught.

No one yet knew it on either side, but the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere had just died, not to be resurrected.

"Nazi Style" expresses the tactic always afoot in the Third Reich, the grabbing onto any sort of ostensibly irregular practice of the enemy and magnifying it to appear back home as a war crime, thus appearing to justify retaliatory action involving war crimes in fact. Here, the Nazi propaganda arm had seized on the interrogation of German prisoners in Libya by the British under supposed orders to starve them of food, sleep, and water until the interrogation was completed. In retaliation, the Nazis were refusing nourishment and sleep to their British prisoners indefinitely, not just until interrogation was complete, but until the British practice was ordered stopped. It was quite consistent, of course, with the even more outrageous practice of executing innocent hostages in response to sabotage and killing of German civilians and soldiers in occupied countries.

There being nothing else on the page today too much worthy of comment, we thought we would refer you to a couple of later references, in 1944 and 1945 respectively, to the Bong of Wong—and how, apparently, India managed to keep itself largely free from invasion by the Japanese during the war.

Whether the Bong had anything to do with it is not told to us, but, candidly, if we had been in the Japanese Army, faced with the prospect of going into territory where, should we be captured, the likelihood was that a shrunken head would result, we might have asked the commanding officer for reassignment to another theater. Anywhere else, it would seem, would have been preferable. If you are going to die in war, at very least you can die without the additional disadvantage of having your head shrunk after the fact and dishonor of having it displayed to others in that grisly state.

Today in history, the shores of Normandy stood quiet except for the busy building by the Nazis of their pillbox retrenchments cut into the abutment overlooking it, the transposition of the Maginot Line to the coast, for the boast of impregnable defense against Perfidious Albion and its officious allies. In the face of open threat of invasion issued by General Marshall on behalf of the Allied command, the Nazi stood, no doubt, at heavy watch, as the surf drifted in and washed out, quietly foaming into the sanded mat on a Saturday evening, as somewhere on the other side of the Channel perhaps played a fife and reel, its players wondering at the cause as the jig was danced to the jug's ceramic base bared just to spite it. Two years hence, on a Tuesday, the watch would be over, the bullets would be flying, cutting in the blind, the sand and the hedgerows coated in blood and torn flesh, as once aboard the beach, there was no gying, just as there was no crying, just death or being missed by its aimless clasp, as someone fell next to you in some sudden painless gasp. All because the little rat-like man leaning on the balustrade at the Invalides Tomb two years earlier still could not separate himself long enough from the fantasy of omnipotent, shielded destiny to understand that playing the plenipotentiary part absent restraint from without, that which he had chosen for himself, meant ultimately serving as the final sacrifice to the Devil's sanguificative prognostic art which the part previously had demanded of all its former occupants, all the way to the end of death, cold, shrivelling, ultimate death, one from which no return is permitted within the Stygian bounds.