The Charlotte News

Thursday, August 27, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports for the first time the attack by the Japanese at Milne Bay in Papua New Guinea which began late on Tuesday night.

The further report on the Battle of the Eastern Solomons carried a Japanese claim that two American carriers were damaged, one heavily so. This information was inaccurate. Only the Enterprise was damaged during the battle, though because of confusion in air reconnaissance, the Japanese honestly believed they had also damaged the Saratoga. Indeed, this miscalculation led to the loss of many more Japanese aircraft than otherwise would have been risked in bombing operations for the belief having been thusly instilled that Allied carrier air launching capability had been fully neutralized when it remained quite viable. Also, there was no U.S. battleship damaged as claimed. The bulk of the losses were entirely on the side of the Japanese, including both a light carrier and a destroyer sunk.

The editorial page carries a piece by Amy Bassett regarding the dearth of volunteers during the summer, relative to the previous summer of 1941, offering their services for watch duty in the North Woods Interceptor Command, the civilian volunteer program for plane spotting along the U.S.-Canadian border area. She suggests that the fault for the fewer number lay with Republicans and anti-Roosevelt people among cityfolk telling the rural spotters that they were wasting their own resources in maintaining this duty. She puzzles over the problem of these discouraging Republican naysayers, nattering nabobs of negativism, allows that they were not sympathetic to the Nazi Party and its ends, but finds the actions traitorous in their implications, that they were "men without a country".

We stress the piece because it would appear that this experiment in civilian volunteer cooperation in the defense effort perhaps inspired the code name for "Operation North Woods" in early 1962, the brainchild of Lyman L. Lemnitzer, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, having been appointed to the position by Dwight Eisenhower in September, 1960 and retaining it during the early portion of the Kennedy Administration. Lemnitzer was asked to resign from the position as he did, replaced by Maxwell Taylor, effective October 1, 1962, shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis began in mid-October, and was transferred to duty as head of NATO operations in Europe.

General Lemnitzer’s plan, proposed March 13, 1962, was simple: create several fabricated incidents utilizing friendly Cubans to provide the illusion of hostile enemy action sponsored by the Castro government. These actions would include possibly an "attack" on the U.S. base at Guantanamo, a "Remember the Maine" type incident in which a U.S. ship would be deliberately sunk in Cuban waters, a drone U.S. passenger airplane carrying "students" to be blown up deliberately, disruptions of the peace in the American South created by anti-Castro Cubans disguising themselves as pro-Castro Cubans—much as it would appear Lee Harvey Oswald did while working in fact in the employ of Guy Banister in New Orleans during the spring and summer of 1963--and other such provoking episodes, all such incidents carried out deliberately by the U.S. but to be blamed on Castro and reported that way to the press. (We do not, incidentally, rely on any other material for the North Woods general plan of operation than its actual original report.)

In response to these incidents of "provocation" by Cuba, the U.S. thereby would have a pretext to invade Cuba.

That was the plan.

President Kennedy quickly declined to implement the plan.

On October 14, 1962, a routine U-2 flight over Cuba discovered missile erector sites under construction and, after analysis by the CIA, on October 16 the information was provided the President. Thus began the Cuban Missile Crisis, resulting, after a near nuclear confrontation, the likes of which never occurred again during the Cold War, in the dismantling of the nuclear missiles, some of which were by then operational, after a pledge was provided Russia that the U.S. would not invade Cuba, something President Kennedy had no intention of doing in any event until the Crisis itself had placed that option inexorably on the table as a last resort by which to effect removal of the missiles, an option favored heavily by Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay. Also in the bargain was the removal of obsolete Jupiter missiles located in Turkey, obsolete because of the presence in the Mediterranean of Polaris submarines packing missiles with a longer and more accurate range than the Jupiters.

The question ultimately begged is whether Lemnitzer and LeMay set up the Cuban Missile Crisis believing thereby that the Joint Chiefs could manipulate the will of President Kennedy to obtain that which some of its membership wanted, a head-on confrontation with Soviet Russia, even if it meant, as it likely would have, nuclear exchange, after an attack by the Russians on West Berlin in response to a U.S. attack on Cuba—a promise which Khruschev had made clear his intent to keep in the event of attack on his valuable co-balancing satellite in the West, symmetrical to that of West Berlin in Europe vis á vis the East.

Of course, to answer that question affirmatively begs the additional question in rapid succession of just how such a stimulus of deliberate provocation of the Crisis would have been accomplished. How would any part of the American apparatus, whether openly via military channels or covertly through intelligence moles in the Kremlin, have deliberately caused the Russians to place missiles in Cuba? Why would the Russians want to accede to the wishes of a faction within the Joint Chiefs in the U.S. military command structure to set off World War III? Did they think they could win it?

Parenthetically, we might suggest that if one accepts on face the shoe-pounding incident of Khruschev before the U.N. in October, 1960, shoe-pounding in response to a speech by the head of the Filipino delgation to the effect that the Soviets should renounce all imperialism in Europe, as well Khruschev’s November, 1956 vociferous proclamation to the delegation of Western ambassadors visiting Moscow, shortly after the U.S. election, "We will bury you," then perhaps Khruschev was sufficiently an old hawk warrior himself of World War II, veteran of the siege of Stalingrad, to want such a decisive head-on confrontation to get the whole thing done once and for all, one way or the other, win or lose, to meet the inevitable and decisive battle of Armageddon prepared, rather than by accident or surprise. In other words, since much of the world thought nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. was a practical fait accompli merely waiting to happen, better to have the jousting match scheduled in chivalrous array between knights in their proper courses rather than have it precipitate in the dead of night by happenstance, with one side or the other caught thus at unfair, and finally deadly, disadvanatage.

But more to the point, it is entirely conceivable that U.S. emissaries, covert moles within the Kremlin acting as friendly U.S. emigres, someone with such a persona as that Oswald sought to convey to the Russians in 1959, someone sponsored by the CIA, had convinced the military and political hierarchy in Russia of just such benefits of just such a scenario, or that a plan was afoot in the U.S. to attack Cuba based on North Woods, all accomplished by Lemnitzer having circumvented the President's authority and, through the CIA or covert military operatives, placed such a bug in Khruschev’s ear, thus prompting the implementation of "defensive" missiles on Cuba resultant from Soviet perceptions that the island was in fact about to be attacked.

It would not, after all, in the political climate of the time, have been a tough sell.

In early October, 1962, before the evidence of the missile installations was made known to the President and before even the U-2 flight which took the photographs of the missile installations, Indiana’s Republican Senator Homer Capehart, running for re-election against Democratic newcomer to the national political scene Birch Bayh, publicly advocated a blockade or invasion of Cuba. On the hustings for Mr. Bayh, who eventually won the election, President Kennedy had downplayed the Capehart line by exhorting that the time was not ripe for "rash" talk.

Within days, the Crisis began, after shipments of erector parts and missiles had been taking place all through September without apparent detection by American intelligence resources. (Some to this day apparently are so foolish as to believe that Senator Capehart’s public pronouncement made him some sort of seer of truth, even in advance of the military, the CIA, and the Administration; to the contrary, he was probably being funneled intelligence secretly for public dissemination to try to embarrass the Administration, and thus Democrats generally, for cheap political gain in the mid-term elections, making him, in that event, little more than a Judas to the security of his country, quite deserving therefore of the political wasteland to which his memory was consigned by the more astute, those not Quayled. Whether Senator Capehart, incidentally, was the founding model for Senator Frederick Prentice in the novel is only speculation. His company did, however, invent the Simplex record changer which became a part of the Wurlitzer jukebox. So, you may blame him for that if for nothing else.)

Moreover, the Bay of Pigs had occurred in April, 1961 and so the prospect of a repeat performance for the sake of saving face to the Kennedy Administration, ashamed and orphaned as it was at the time over the debacle, would have been consistent political fare with that to which Khruschev had grown accustomed during the Eisenhower-Nixon years.

Unthinkable, you say? Preposterous? Look back at the history of the time. Read the North Woods report. Would a mind dreaming up such a fanciful plan as stimulating an attack on Cuba by creating false attacks on American ships and planes and military bases to be ascribed to Castro's government for the purpose of providing plausible provocation to the public for invasion also be incapable of concocting such a scheme deliberately to invoke nuclear war? For was it not to invite nuclear exchange to promote a staged pretext for invading Cuba?

Nobody except an idiot would conceive that Castro’s first response to such claims of provoked incidents of which Cuba was actually innocent would not be to proclaim to Khruschev his complete innocence in the matter and that Khruschev would not accept this explanation and not react accordingly.

North Woods ultimately was designed to provoke nuclear war, not just stimulate grounds for invading Cuba. General Lemnitzer was not of such a facile mind as to have approved this plan on its superficial plane without understanding its inherent infranatant consequences. Had he conceived that Russia would not take the risk of total annihilation by launching a nuclear attack--probably in Europe, as shorter range insured more accurate targeting--certainly the determined risk was present, and with the perceived emotional instability of Khruschev governing matters, a prospect made all the more likely, at least by the perceptions of the time extant in 1961 and 1962.

Was this notion that General Lemnitzer might have stimulated the Cuban Missile Crisis a suspicion on the part of President Kennedy which led him to bring a strangely silent Lemnitzer into one of the key meetings of the Crisis on Saturday, October 27, 1962 after first meeting with him privately?

Whatever the case, the Crisis ended Sunday morning with Premier Khruschev’s acceptance of the terms proposed as the final tender of peace: removal of the missiles in exchange for pledges not to invade Cuba and to remove in six months the missiles in Turkey.

So much for Operation North Woods which, had things gone otherwise, as far as we are concerned, those of us who were alive in October, 1962, might very well have become our reins by which to give the little horse a shake, just enough to elicit its pallor and cause it to collapse, thus being the last thing ever we would have witnessed on this earth in this life collectively.

Three hundred and ninety days later, the President who saved us from that fate was slain in broad daylight on Elm Street in Dallas.

Well, it may appear that we have gone far afield from the news of the day of August 27, 1942 in offering this view forward through time to the Cuban Missile Crisis twenty years later. But, should you think it, we suggest to you that history is always occurring on a continuum, not on a neatly divided timeline as we learn it in history classes. Human memory, human bitterness over harsh memory, often extends minimally for the course of a lifetime, often beyond merely that course, through generations, even through centuries of time.

It was that memory, harshly bitter in its implications to the perceivers, which led to the likes of Dallas in 1963 and Memphis and Los Angeles in 1968, and that no matter who in objective fact ultimately was responsible for each of those acts or whether the superficial appearances of the evidence surrounding each alleged lone gunman, suggestive that each was simply a lone nut acting out his own individual prepossessing, demonic predilections, is the accurate story and the full and neatly bound one told of each episode, related discretely, as a nice tv drama to which we were all quite accustomed to being spoon-fed daily in the 1960’s, on its tightly compacted and narrow timeline.

In any event, we are compelled to ask whether General Lemnitzer and General LeMay, together with some other, lower ranking, generals of the time, such as General Edwin Walker and General Charles Cabell, both of Dallas, as well some well-known politicians of the time, should be thus consigned to the depths of history as men without a country, for having committed treason in fact against the country they were sworn to serve?

The premise of our question does not assume as the impelling force behind such actions only anti-Communist zeal possessed with practically religious fervor, but, even more to the point, a basic xenophobia, a basic belief that tradition made the white race a superior race and the repositor of all that was decent and good in the tradition of Western culture and thus the saving grace of the world. However complex that combination might work itself out sometimes in practical application, we call it by its proper name: racism.

And if our premise is correct, were these men not Nazis in all but name and symbol sewn to their sleeves and chests? If so, did they become so by fighting this enemy of whom we read these harsh daily reports, both of the Japanese and the Nazis? Or was it in them all along?