The Charlotte News

Monday, August 10, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports the scant news available of the new offensive by the Allies taking place during the previous three days at Guadalcanal. As we have covered on Saturday the high points of the operations thus far, we shall leave it for you to read.

With the Navy now gone, the problems for the mostly young Marines, left without means of immediate supply to swelter in the heat and swat the malarial carrying mosquitoes, with or without sufficient quinine to set them out of harm's way of Nature itself, while also forced to fight alone without Navy or Air Corps cover against landing Japanese beginning to swarm onto the island, would now begin. These combined plagues unto an islanded group of mostly young men, some barely old enough to sprout whiskers, would continue for weeks to come.

It tolls for thee.

"Offense", in the editorial column, displays astute immediate awareness of the strategic significance of "Operation Watchtower", at least to the immediate area of the southwest Pacific--protection of the supply lanes to Australia, and establishing stepping stones to the north, to get back New Guinea and the Netherlands East Indies, ultimately the Philippines, finally subduing Japan itself.

Meanwhile, predictably, the Nazi organs of propaganda were already grinding out reports condemning the executions of six of the eight Nazi saboteurs and imprisoning of the other two, claiming they were falsely convicted. The reports promised similar treatment to suspected saboteurs in Nazi-occupied countries.

Of course, the latter promise, in light of Lidice and other examples of indiscriminate Nazi reprisal to whole villages and towns for suspected harboring of saboteurs and assassins, could not have been a more hollow retaliatory threat for its already having been exacted and repeatedly so.

The only problem with the swift executions of the saboteurs after the swift military trial was that it created an atmosphere in which, to the uninformed German, such propagandistic statements could thrive to harvest the emotions engendering a feeling of martyrdom and thus cultivate more volunteers among the young to become themselves saboteurs to avenge what they were told were false executions of the innocent.

An open, public trial in the civilian courts, while taking a few months longer, would have had the decided advantage of airing the evidence against the saboteurs more thoroughly in the press than the closed military tribunal with its findings ordered held in secret until after the war. While perhaps of no consequence to the kept native German, brainwashed anyway by Herr Goebbels and his kept press, the wavering German-American at least would have been less susceptible to the German propaganda mill with the full facts underlying the saboteurs' conviction aired to the public. Perhaps, in part, this notion prompted the Supreme Court in its full October opinion in Ex Parte Quirin to render the facts underlying the arrest of the saboteurs in fair detail.

Elsewhere on the front page appears the hearsay report of a backroom deal cooking between the Russians and Japanese, supposedly stalled over Japanese demands for Vladivostok, in addition to the Kamchatka Peninsula, immediately to the north of the Japanese Kuril Island chain, and Sakhalin, the large island area to the north of Japan, the southern portion of which Japan had held since the treaty ending the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. The speculative report stated that the Soviets had agreed to give up Kamchatka and the remaining four-fifths of Sakhalin in exchange for continued maintenance of the Soviet-Japanese mutual non-aggression pact of 1941. Vladivostok, it was said, remained a sticking point.

Whether true or not is not known. The Soviets never entered into such an arrangement and Sakhalin, Kamchatka, and Vladivostok remained status quo for the remainder of the war. So, the hunch by the correspondent, who had been interned in Japan subsequent to the attack on Pearl Harbor, that the rumor was perhaps the result of a propaganda effort, aimed at the interned Americans to sow the seeds of distrust for the Soviets, was likely true.

The obvious object of any such negotiations would have been primarily to deprive the Allies of an embarkation point for offensive bombing operations on Japan. That Japan would have wanted to bargain for such defensive bulwarks and counter-offensive launching points, that they perhaps made such a ludicrous offer to the Soviets, is likely true. That the Soviets ever seriously considered acceptance of any part of it is quite unlikely: it would not only have harmed Soviet relations with the other Allies but would have also opened a back door for Japan to attack Russia from the east, especially if the Nazis made further inroads into the Caucasus and captured Stalingrad before the Russian winter.

The Japanese had, after all, on July 2, 1941, at the meeting of their High Command with Emperor Hirohito, agreed that should the war in Russia progress well for the Germans, they would consider an attack on Vladivostok to split the Russian forces in two. They were never sufficiently confident, however, in the fighting prowess of the German displayed in the harsh environs of Russia to undertake such an operation, rumors during the year ensuing to the contrary notwitstanding.

An harried American Associated Press correspondent in Bombay, Preston Grover, reports of rioting between police, Hindu demonstrators, and Moslems in the second day of Gandhi's call for a general strike and non-violent civil disobedience to end British rule over India. The police killed eight demonstrators and wounded 159 others on Sunday.

Just who started what, of course, whether the police fired first on the demonstrators to break them up, prompting the hurling of bottles and stones, or whether the bottles and stones and otherwise unruly conduct of the mob fairly precipitated the police attack, is not told.

In short order, the nervous British authorities would jail Gandhi to try to thwart a mass revolt at a particularly bad time for the Allies in prosecution of the war effort.

The Japanese in the region in neighboring Burma, however, were now, as they had been since May, primarily occupied with securing the Burma Road and making headway into southern China.

The editorial page remarks on a recently enacted statute providing that landlords may be held accountable for knowingly continuing to rent premises to persons engaged in prositution. That statute could have been applied as well to hotel owners.

It is still on the books in fact in North Carolina. Chapter 14, Section 204 of the North Carolina General Statutes provides:

Prostitution and various acts abetting prostitution unlawful.

It shall be unlawful:

(1) To keep, set up, maintain, or operate any place, structure, building or conveyance for the purpose of prostitution or assignation.

(2) To occupy any place, structure, building, or conveyance for the purpose of prostitution or assignation; or for any person to permit any place, structure, building or conveyance owned by him or under his control to be used for the purpose of prostitution or assignation, with knowledge or reasonable cause to know that the same is, or is to be, used for such purpose.

(3) To receive, or to offer or agree to receive any person into any place, structure, building, or conveyance for the purpose of prostitution or assignation, or to permit any person to remain there for such purpose.

(4) To direct, take, or transport, or to offer or agree to take or transport, any person to any place, structure, or building or to any other person, with knowledge or reasonable cause to know that the purpose of such directing, taking, or transporting is prostitution or assignation.

(5) To procure, or to solicit, or to offer to procure or solicit for the purpose of prostitution or assignation.

(6) To reside in, enter, or remain in any place, structure, or building, or to enter or remain in any conveyance, for the purpose of prostitution or assignation.

(7) To engage in prostitution or assignation, or to aid or abet prostitution or assignation by any means whatsoever.

The offense, as with prostitution itself, is regarded as a Class 1 misdemeanor, the most serious form of misdemeanor in North Carolina, subjecting the guilty party to six months in jail. If there are two or more convictions in the space of a year, however, the person may be placed in a reformatory institution for an indeterminate term of from one to three years, parole from which is determined by the institution.

"The Hard Fact" frankly attests to the accuracy of the frank testament, provided by the Office of War Information, created in mid-June, in its report, released the previous day by the head of that office, writer and radio commentator Elmer Davis, entitled, "Four Freedoms--the Rights of All Men Everywhere", drawing on the President's "Four Freedoms" speech to the Congress of January, 1941.

The frank news, as the editorial reports, was that the Allies were losing the war and, with the state of merchant shipping in peril in the Atlantic and with most of the war materiel and men still on this side of both oceans, the Allies could lose the war in 1942.

It does not make remark on how that would come to be, but the news of increasing German pushes deeper south into the Caucasus with its plentiful oil supply provided ample reason for this belief to be affirmed in the mind of the attentive reader, especially as new reports of unrest in India amid demands for independence from the British Empire boded ill with that critical bulwark for the Allies should Japan decide to invade it--enabling thereby potentially in short order Hitler's and Tojo's forces to link up with full store of Middle Eastern oil and control of both the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean at their cooperative disposal. In other words, the fate of the world might well be at stake with the fate of India as Gandhi and his immense following in India demanded immediate independence as the price for aid to the Allies.

Raymond Clapper's piece asks rhetorically whether Gandhi was oblivious to these facts or just didn't "give a damn". Mr. Clapper revisits his time in India during March and his personal visit with Nehru, (on the eve of the wedding day of his daughter Indira, the future prime minister of India). Nehru, the practical man, did understand India's strategic significance to the Allied cause, reaffirms Clapper, and more or less understood that the Allied cause was superior to that promised by the Japanese, but was hamstrung by his Hamlet complex of indecision. By contrast, to Gandhi's current call for civil disobedience, he ascribes the "potential" of "an act of treason" against the Allies. He concludes, "It's all as weird as a bad dream."

Thus, the strategy now being deployed, to establish footholds in the Solomons to protect the supply route to Australia, had more to it than just its immediate significance to the southwest Pacific theater. It had global strategic importance, to keep as many fighting forces of the Japanese as possible in that region and away from any potentiality for attack on eastern Russia or India. In that way, this offensive was a "second front" of a sort, though obviously not as immediate in its impact on the Nazi's business in Russia as the Russians might have hoped and desired. Nevertheless, such a front was also in the works, scheduled to be set into action in three months.

Paul Mallon remarks on the fluidity of the lines in the war for the Caucasus, that it resembled a series of Nazi fists being plunged into individual towns, railheads, etc. to achieve position as the Russians steadily retreated, usually leaving behind scorched earth--similar to their actions the previous summer and early fall to the north around Leningrad and Moscow. He informs that one could not view the war as a solid line of trenches or fortifications, that it meandered and was spotty, involving at present in the Caucasus few direct confrontations but rather primarily jockeying for position: the Nazis seeking as in a chess match to surround pockets of Russian troops, as in the 250,000 defenders of fallen Rostov whom the Germans had sought to trap and capture but who, through the superior skills of leadership demonstrated by Russian General Semeon Timoshenko, had escaped; the Russians seeking to move into protected sanctuaries, the Don and Volga rivers' eastern banks in the northern area, the Caucasus Mountains in the south. Thus far, General Timoshenko had effectuated his ends in the apparent evacuation of the quarter million troops from Rostov, where just a couple of weeks earlier, all looked hopeless and the fall of the Caucasus, with the loss of this key defensive city, imminent.

Thus, while matters in Russia appeared on the surface bleak to the reader, Mallon cautions that all was far from lost.

The piece by Joseph Baird on the gradual demise in power and prestige of Benito Mussolini since 1935, when Hitler kowtowed to him and bowed before his border feint in 1934 when Hitler first tipped his designs to annex Austria, (realized in March, 1938 by rigged plebiscite), to the point now that Mussolini's fate was written, probably in blood, would have suggested to the astute among the Japanese the inexorable fate which likely also awaited them as Hitler's ally, just as surely as the daily testament across the front pages on the Russian front attested remarkably to that same outcome for anyone so stupid as to try to effect business with Nazi Germany. One might as well have entered a treaty with a rattlesnake.

But then, as for the Russians, there was always the neatly available excuse to which to resort: that they were dratted Communists, despised by the Nazis from the start. But what of Mussolini and his fascist philosophy which in 1923 gave contemporaneously effective inspiration to the fledgling Nazi Party in Germany? How were they to be rationalized, even by some military blockhead given to rationalization, blinded by his irremediable bent for booty to form Japanese Empire?

Framed Edition
[Return to Links-Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i>--</i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.