The Charlotte News

Saturday, August 8, 1942

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page tells the story of the execution of six of the eight convicted Nazi saboteurs, after the President’s three-day review of the military tribunal’s findings, following the previous Friday’s Supreme Court ruling leaving the trial before the military tribunal. The President personally approved the death penalty for the six, swiftly carried out at high noon this day, sparing the lives of two, one receiving life at hard labor and the other 30 years, the lenience accorded for providing information to the Government on the operation.

One of the problems of trying this case before a military tribunal was that the President had to dirty his hands with this final review, by personally giving his imprimatur to the death penalty or refusing same. Acquiescing to public and press pressure to this end of death for the saboteurs, we suggest, was a major mistake, possibly the worst FDR ever made in his twelve years as President, a tenure marked usually by wisdom in his steerage of the ship of state.

That all eight deserved death for little more than being Nazis, no one may doubt, except another Nazi. But, we suggest that it would have been better to let the normal wheels of justice turn, notwithstanding military tradition in time of war providing for military trials for spies and saboteurs and summary execution. There was no particular rush, and celerity in the process before civilian courts during these days of war was remarkable.

The case of Max Stephan stands as Exhibit 1 for that proposition. His acts were committed in April; his trial concluded in late June in Federal District Court; his sentence was pronounced August 6, death set for November 13; his appeal, staying execution of sentence, affirmed the conviction February 6; his petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court was denied April 5, 1943. But for the President’s commutation of his sentence to life imprisonment, he would have been executed, no doubt, within days afterward, about a year from the commission of his acts.

That was quite swift enough justice to stand as a deterrent to spies and saboteurs, insofar as any such deterrent could exist for such hard-bitten individuals who would undertake such a suicide mission. It is hard to imagine any greater deterrent than would have occurred from the process in the civilian courts inside of a year accorded by the more swiftly proceeding military tribunal, leading to the execution of six of the saboteurs just 52 days after they landed in Florida and on Long Island on or about June 16-17.

It is obvious understatement to suggest that their acts were inimical and highly dangerous to the defense efforts of the United States. Obviously, they came equipped with explosives for one purpose, to undertake sabotage. Moreover, as with suspicions surrounding the welding fire, determined to be an accident, aboard the Normandie while undergoing retrofitting as a troop transport in New York Harbor in early February, acts of sabotage could easily be shielded as "accidents", often were. Whether those 30,000 industrial deaths since December 7, of which Herblock made mention a few days earlier, were all the result of accidents is impossible to know. The mere suspicion that such accidents might in some or many cases have been the result of underground activity of Nazis or cooperating German-Americans who were employed in strategic and sensitive defense industries was, in itself, demoralizing.

Further, spies did more than provide information from defense factories on new weaponry or seek to interrupt production; they did more than provide information obtainable from soldiers and sailors on troop movements and sailings of troop transports: one of their primary tasks was to monitor the embarkation of merchant ships to enable by ham radio signals and telegraph the U-boat captains to spot down their prey. And, they were obviously quite active and adept at that practice in recent months, as U-boat activity against merchant shipping had reached "second front" proportions for the Axis, as noted on the front page the Pearson and Allen "Washington Merry-Go-Round" opined this date.

Thus, the problem posed by such spies and saboteurs could not have been graver. The question we pose is whether American justice stood in sharply delineated contrast to that form of rubber-stamp "justice" provided in Nazi Germany and throughout the totalitarian world, characterized by sham trials with the foregone conclusion of swift death resulting, and was thus well-served by this spectacle of a military tribunal with the swiftest justice imaginable followed by the President’s own personal stamp of approval on the death sentences for six of the eight.

It was not, along with other aspects of 1942, the internment of the Japanese on the West Coast standing as prime example, the nation’s finest hour.

Meanwhile, the author of that policy of internment of the Japanese, Attorney General Francis Biddle, was busy trying to get Congress to pass legislation enabling even swifter justice for trials of treason and sabotage. In other words, he sought legislation to overturn due process rights in the Constitution, premised on the war emergency.

But, of course, the Congress may not do that. The Constitution is the law enacted by the people, the only Supreme Law of the land. It requires amendment through the tedious process of ratification before any such change may be made. If two-thirds of the states or the Congress decide to offer an amendment to abrogate the Bill of Rights, and that amendment is then ratified by three-fourths of the states, then it would be the prerogative of the citizens to do so.

Viel Glück.

Francis Biddle was the chief American judge on the Nuremberg trials tribunal after the war. He was the first cabinet official to be asked to resign his post by Harry Truman after the death of FDR. His prosecutorial ardor against Nazis was laudable, but perhaps his zeal carried him too far in the direction of using the enemy’s tactics against them. An eye for an eye does not usually justice make. Few in this country would, today or in 1942, accept literal corporal punishment as an appropriate means of deterrence or retribution when weighed against its shock to conscience with respect to the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Yet, many would nevertheless subscribe to the ultimate penalty of death for certain capital crimes. Is a life for a life any the less cruel and unusual, any the less staining the hands of the people with the blood of another human being, sometimes one completely innocent of the crime--as modern DNA analyses in the last two decades have repeatedly borne out--than any other form of corporal punishment?

In any event, the six Nazi saboteurs were executed, their final fate determined by President Roosevelt this date and quickly carried forth.

And, just 16 days earlier, on July 23, the Navy had buried 29 U-boat crewmen in Hampton, Virginia with full military honors. Were they, in their prosecution of "lawful war", not performing, in the abstract, just as much, if not more, damage when caught and killed than the eight saboteurs when their actions were interdicted by the FBI before being initiated?

A few days before this military funeral for the enemy, a Coast Guardsman had shot and killed a U-boat captain in a small North Carolina coastal town, where the crew was under detention by the Coast Guard, when the captain slapped another Coast Guardsman in the head and the first feared an incipient attempted escape.

Were these episodes displaying of consistent policy toward the enemy? Did they send a message to the Nazis who were fighting for Hitler? Did they diminish German morale? Did they instead give them their "strength through joy", as much as did the "Horst Wessel Lied", as did any cause which suggested to them blood sacrifice to satiate for an instant their otherwise insatiable desire for blood and more of it spilled at their Will, to avenge the martyred causes for which they fought in the first instance, their supposed victimization as a white race of pure-blooded Aryans?

On the war front, oddly enough, the attack on the Japanese base at Kiska in the Aleutians garnered the big headline; not so as history unfolded.

Spare mention is made for the first time of what would be the big story ultimately, the attack initiated the previous day by the Allies on the Japanese installations in the Solomon Islands at Guadalcanal and Tulagi. Those operations continued this date with great initial success and largely unopposed. Tulagi was secured by the Allies.

Admiral Jack Fletcher and Admiral Richmond Turner had determined to remove the carrier force protecting the operations and the transport ships and convoy which had brought them to the area.

Beginning in the wee hours of Sunday, however, the Battle of Savo Island would occur, one of the most thorough defeats for the United States Navy in its history.

Hearing of the landings by the Allies on Tulagi and Guadalcanal, Admiral Mikawa sailed his fleet from Rabaul, several hundred miles northwest of the the area, on the evening of August 7. He arrived in the battle zone at around 4:00 p.m. on August 8. The map below shows Mikawa’s route.

Admiral John McCain, grandfather of Senator John McCain, had been asked by Admiral Turner, commander of the Allied Naval forces in the area, to order additional reconnoitering over the sector north of Guadalcanal to detect the approach of enemy craft. Admiral McCain, however, did not order the extra missions and failed to inform Admiral Turner of the fact. Consequently, Turner believed the approach to Guadalcanal was clear of enemy craft when in fact they were bearing down hard on his fleet preparing to leave the area.

On the night of August 8, crews of the ships which had been for two days standing wary watch while covering the landings, had gone to half duty watches, to allow half of each crew time for rest.

At around 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, the first Japanese ships heading toward Guadalcanal, in an area south of Savo Island, encountered Allied warships and began firing. The naval battle ensued there and north of the island for the next two hours. In all, 939 U.S. personnel were killed, compared to only 35 Japanese. Four Allied cruisers were sunk, including the Canberra with 84 killed, and one destroyer was damaged, compared to only three Japanese cruisers moderately damaged.

On Sunday morning, the Allied warships which had been covering the troop landings, already scheduled by Admiral Turner to depart, continued with this plan and were gone from the area by late afternoon.

Admiral Turner laid the cause for the defeat in the Savo Island engagement to a superiority complex held by his men and their commanding officers over the Japanese, causing a "lethargy of mind", compounded by the intense heat and humidity, to pervade the operations.

A subsequent investigation of the battle conducted by Admiral Arthur Hepburn, Chairman of the General Board of the Navy, laid responsibility for the loss primarily on Captain Howard Bode of the heavy cruiser Chicago for his failure to place his ship at its usual place in the lead position in a patrol force scouting south of Savo Island, about two hours before the force confronted the Japanese. Instead, he went to bed. As a result of this inaction, the investigation determined that the more vulnerable Canberra, left to lead the patrol force, was sunk. Moreover, after encountering the Japanese ships, Captain Bode failed to alert a patrol force scouting to the north of Savo Island, causing that force also to be caught by surprise.

In April, 1943, Captain Bode committed suicide. Captain Bode had been left in charge of the southern patrol force when its commander, Rear Admiral Victor Crutchley of the British Navy, left for a late night meeting with Admiral Turner to determine the procedures and schedule for departure of the Allied warships and transports from the area. ("Righto, well, so sorry, chap; had to be somewhere else, you know, important and all that. Mistakes happen. Sorry you got stuck with the bag, old man. Better luck next time.")

Because of Captain Bode’s tragic end, we shall resist the inevitable pun which the battle harbinged for the operation at its outset. Nevertheless, the entire campaign, while a long and tremendous struggle, ultimately would prove successful in chasing the Japanese away from interference with the critical supply route to Australia and moreover would begin the process of forcing them entirely from the southwest Pacific.

On the domestic front, cotton prices dropped two dollars in recognition of the bumper crop, best since 1937, thanks to good rainfall in July, holding down boll weevil infestation. Baby, the rain must fall.

As we said, understand a little about cotton and silk and their interrelationship, among a few other commodities, and you pretty much can understand the war.

We refer you back to our note accompanying the pieces of July 5, 1938 for higher learning in this regard.

On the editorial page, we find first Kit Marlowe, one of the early rock 'n' roll singers, inspiring, along with Fosdick and Poulton from 1861, Elvis in 1956.

Then, the editorial column provides a quick glimpse at the recommendations of the Governor’s blue ribbon panel investigating Morganton, issuing findings quite consistent with Mr. Jimison’s report of late January and early February: badly prepared food and poorly balanced servings amid plentiful supply; poor medical attention for distraction of the staff amid routine duties, that is, inured to fail to see the forest for the trees; in some cases, wilful mistreatment of patients by staff; and, finally, a determination that a new, energetic administrator be appointed who was committed to aggressive change, the latter not being a recommendation offered by Mr. Jimison.

From out of the heat of the night had come not just a sugar-coated rubber stamp of the status quo but genuine criticism and suggestions for major change at the institution.

Which is why they called him that.

Dick Young clarifies the problem with removal of the old streetcar rails for scrap steel production, that which had been the subject of a critique by Burke Davis on Wednesday. It was simply that there was no insurance against claims brought against the city resulting from the street repairs, and, he further enlightens, the City Council lacked legal authority to authorize an indemnity bond for the purpose. But the situation was resolved when Mayor Currie called the War Production Board and explained the issue, resulting in the Federal government authorizing the underwriting of indemnity for all such claims, paving the way for the unpaving of the rails and their removal to make steel to hurl back at Japanese and Nazi war planes and ships and submarines. All was well after all in Charlotte, no laggards, slackers, or quislings among the lot of them.

Of course, were it not for the critique by Burke Davis, the Mayor undoubtedly would not have picked up the phone the following day and called Washington.

No one in government much wants to be told by anyone what to do and when to do it, but if nobody does, they sure will be likely not to do it when the time comes.

And, while the salesmen shouted back at Mr. Hargett who had written a few days earlier suggesting that the salesmen should not be getting preferential treatment on gas rationing, a little piece by British General Wavell tells the way of a Nazi’s sense of humor. Nazis simply could not, we conclude, catch a wave.

And, it is reported that there would be no potato famine in North Wilkesboro in the coming year.

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