The Charlotte News

Thursday, September 17, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note:

Aaron:

Why, so, brave lords! when we join in league,
I am a lamb: but if you brave the Moor,
The chafed boar, the mountain lioness,
The ocean swells not so as Aaron storms.
But say, again; how many saw the child?

Nurse:

Cornelia the midwife and myself;
And no one else but the deliver'd empress.

Aaron:

The empress, the midwife, and yourself:
Two may keep counsel when the third's away:
Go to the empress, tell her this I said.

He kills the nurse

Weke, weke! so cries a pig prepared to the spit.

--Titus Andronicus, Act IV, Sc. 2, by William Shakespeare

A story on the front page indicates that, with a typical loss of about five percent of its forces, the RAF is reported to have conducted another large raid, this time comprised of 800 planes, having crossed 400 miles over France during daylight to attack its industrial targets in the Ruhr Valley and at Wiesbaden after nightfall. A sergeant from Billings, Montana, serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force, reported that the anti-aircraft fire from the Ruhr Valley targets was "hot", but that the searches by the coneheads nevertheless did not sufficiently find them to fix a target for anti-aircraft fire.

Similar to the Rommel incursion a couple of weeks earlier, as reported September 1, in the desert stretch of minefields between the Qatarra Depression and the southern flank of the forces of the British Eighth Army defending El Alamein, the Japanese had, through the Owen Stanley Mountain range, approach to the crucial remaining Allied base on New Guinea at Port Moresby, penetrated the jungle region by eight miles. Why this eight mile incursion factor had become for the Axis twice redundant in rapid succession is subject to speculation. It may be mere coincidence of spatial radii or it may be some spooky conehead mysterica of a sort, or it even could be predictive of 1960’s rock ‘n’ roll, though the latter suggests some undue connotations inherent to rock ‘n’ roll, and so we think probably it was the former two at work, apart or in combination. (Don’t forget, after all, that Wagner, not rock ‘n’ roll, served unwittingly to inspire a good bit of the Reich’s esprit de corps, so that if Wagner also served to inspire musicians, consciously or unconsciously, composing rock ‘n’ roll music, it is merely a coincidental source, not necessarily indicative of Nazi influence on rockers.)

Perhaps, the eight mile incursion coincidence was the result of Herr Goebbels smoking his hookah.

In any event, the advance was made eight miles from Efogi down the south slope of the mountains to within 32 miles of Port Moresby, airline distance that is, the scene of the fighting against the Allied forces arranged before the Japanese position held at Ioribaiwa.

Thus, at this time, the dual Japanese conehead foci were Port Moresby, to gain traction for attack against Australia and simultaneously to oust from New Guinea the traction of the Allies against Japanese positions there trying to create airfields, the Allied bombing raids on which were as fast destroying those efforts, and, second, Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, that for the purpose of pre-empting the supply route to MacArthur’s forces in Australia, attempting thereby with these dual foci to strangle and ultimately starve the Allied forces into submission, much as the successful effort had proceeded against MacArthur’s forces formerly engaged in protection of the Philippines.

To the same end had been the unsuccessful attempted invasion of Milne Bay on the southeastern tip of the peninsula on which Port Moresby is located further north on its south shore. (Turn Florida, for instance anti-clockwise to the right from 5:30 to 4:00, and you would have approximately the same relationship between the Tampa Bay region and Miami as between Port Moresby and Milne Bay.) Gaining the foothold at Milne Bay would have provided the Japanese a base for both air and naval support to the infantry attempting to penetrate directly south over the mountains to Port Moresby, thus enabling a pincer lock from both south and north, much as with Singapore where in January into mid-February the Japanese, under the command then of the Tiger of Malaya, General Yamashita, utilized both infantry incursions slashing the thick jungle approaches from the north and naval and air strength deployed from the south to strangle the vital port into submission.

Major de Seversky offers the penultimate segment of his abstracted chronicle on the unchained merry melody of air power to come, already beginning to demonstrate its prowess over the "W" Hump of the Himalayas to supply the valiant Chinese forces of Chiang Kai-Shek, under the command of General Joseph Stilwell, a route of air-power penetration quite flowing with gasoline-laden and parts-laden planes by July, 1943. Nevertheless, for the obvious reasons which de Seversky lays forth in today’s segment, this alternative to the Burma Road route went unmentioned in the 1943 Walt Disney film based on his book.

The delayed-transmission photograph of the August 7 burning of a Japanese fuel depot on Tanambogo Island, where the Japanese had been building a seaplane base, shows Florida Island, Tanambogo, and Gavuto, all east of Tulagi and immediately to the north of Guadalcanal. Thus, the former strategic importance of these islands to the Japanese in protecting the airbase they had been constructing at Henderson Field, nearly complete at the time of the August 7 Allied invasion, each of these islands then falling into Allied hands.

A further delayed account of the heroic end of the Yorktown at Midway on June 4 also appears, in sequence from yesterday’s first public report of the sinking.

Masayuki Tani is reported to have been appointed to fill the post of foreign minister of Japan, vacated recently by Shigenori Togo, filled temporarily by Premier Hideki Tojo. For the fact that Togo had been instrumental in delivering up the Russo-Japanese mutual non-aggression pact, the move was being interpreted as presaging an invasion of Siberia. (America had been hoping for a more moderate appointee to the cabinet post, such as Sukiyaki Takout, but one can’t have everything.)

Meanwhile, the mad Hata was delivering comments interpreted to be threats of invasion of India.

Speaking of whom, as well as General Yamashita, Messr. James Riddle Hoffa appears on the front page of The News for the first time. He was organizing AFL Teamsters to force hotels in Detroit to boycott CIO-affiliated milk producers, an effort, he stated, which was retaliatory for CIO attempts to organize workers in the Fanny Farmer Candy Shop Kitchen shops. Had the hotels not complied, said Mr. Hoffa’s union lawyer, exhibiting in the process Mr. Hoffa’s most patriotic zeal in this time of perilous war in the country’s most vital hour and locus of war production, then the hotels, restaurants, and supermarkets would be without Teamster truck deliveries of milk.

In that event, obviously, all the little occupants of perambulators perambulating about would then have begun caterwauling in unison, thus producing redounding effects to the aircraft, tank, and anti-aircraft gun industries abounding at this time in and around Detroit, such that, in due course, and in short order, the war likely would be lost, and, no doubt, Mr. Hoffa would Mr. Hitler’s chief steward of labor become—probably, given Mr. Hoffa’s future, one not too radically different from the path he actually followed anyway, including his most untimely final disappearance, to this day unresolved as to its wherefores.

Whether this action in Detroit in 1942 by Mr. Hoffa and the Teamsters foreshadowed the Kitchen Debate between Vice-President Richard Nixon and Premier Nikita Khruschev in Moscow in July, 1959, or any of the other numerous cuisine-oriented fare associated with Mr. Nixon through time, we don’t know.

After the May 1, 1960 U-2 incident in which Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Soviet territory and publicly tried as a spy in the Soviet Union, the cordial relations evident in the presentation considerably cooled between the United States and the U.S.S.R., that despite the release of Powers in a prisoner exchange in February, 1962.

In any event, Kitchener wants YOU.

Don’t forget it.

As also we have mentioned before, and thus remind again, one should not confuse Fanny Farmer with Frances Farmer, the actress who in 1937 perspicaciously led a boycott of Japanese silk, advocating in substitution for it either lisle or the bare-legged look.

Boom-a-locka-locka-locka. Crab-a-locker fishwife.

We told you—

--That totemic building in Monroe which they call "Christ of the Ozarks". You know the one.

And, it is also reported that, alas, Willi, after a long rowing adventure on the salty flotsam of the Atlantic, no doubt, avoiding in the process manifold attacks from predatory creatures of the bounding main, had arrived at Long Island in New York. He was, thus far, able successfully to outwit and avoid interception by the local gendarmerie. How long, however, this state of intermission, with Willi in animated suspension, would last, is subject to considerable and, for Willi, unenviable speculation. Willi was, you will have to admit, a very fine rower of rafts.

And, the watchmen pickets of the other watchmen pickets must have been viewed with some credit by these individuals who appeared in this short film which we offer for your amusement.

Whatever the case, time along the watchtower surely was nigh up for Stalingrad before the Nazi onslaught, now penetrating fully the Don Bend to achieve territory within the city’s gates, and with it, the Volga and the Caspian Sea, once Astrakhan fell, would soon belong to them, with Baku therefore and the vast oil fields to which it held key in the not too distant time following, as they closed in on Grozny’s oilfields and backed the retreating Timoshenko forces into the Caucasus Mountains where winter would be especially harsh. The war, in short, was plainly about to be lost by the Allies in this most crucial of theaters. Best prepare your swastikas and Nazi salutes and practice your German accents.

But, hold. Although Paul Mallon on the editorial page has pretty much given up on the hopes of survival in Russian hands of Stalingrad and the Caucasus, he nevertheless finds hope for the Allied cause generally from the fact that Hitler had been forced to call up reinforcements from home ground in Germany and from Rommel’s Afrika Korps, indicative of failing troop strength from the long campaign necessary in Russia since July 22, 1941, belying the original estimate of Hitler’s generals that the deal would be consummated with a vanquished Russia after four to six weeks of unrelenting blitzkrieg.

But even this time around, after the failure of the 1941 blitz to subdue the stubborn Bolsheviks, when all now appeared unsalvageable in Russia, those slippery oil fields would prove hard not only to obtain, but the territory thus far gained to reach them would become, once again, since the rains came, harder to maintain.

There is a nice summary by Pete McKnight, out of The Baltimore Sun, regarding the eight month progression of the investigation of the mental institution at Morganton, the origins of the inquiry coming from the newspaper series in late January and early February by former patient, lawyer-reporter-former Merthodist minister Tom Jimison, who left the facility in May 1941 after a year there spent voluntarily on an original voluntary commitment.

Pete McKnight, as Mr. Jimison, was a friend of W. J. Cash, indeed, the person Mary Cash first called, even before family, to provide the news of Cash’s death in Mexico just fourteen and a half months earlier.

He still wrote for The News and so whether the article’s appearance in The Sun was the result of new employment there or just a bit of free-lancing is not told.

The three former North Carolina governors to whom he makes reference were Charles Brantley Aycock, governor from 1901 to 1905, Cameron Morrison of Charlotte, governor from 1921 to 1925, and O. Max Gardner of Shelby, governor from 1929 to 1933. North Carolina, until 1976, limited governors to one four-year term in office.

Well, all that said, we must go now and view "A Canterbury Tale", the 1944 British film. We happened to have got it just today before reading today’s page, having wished to see it for several years. Although the quote of the day is not from The Canterbury Tales, it is close enough to provide a goosebump or two.

Margaret Mitchell, you will recall, died five days after being struck by an off-duty taxi driver while crossing Peachtree Street in Atlanta on August 11, 1949, on her way with her husband, John Marsh, to see this particular film.

We shall in due course let you know our opinion.

Here is another clip for your edification, the song being one, along with others of its time, which always tends us to sadness, especially as fall approaches, for our first hearing it during that year of hope, doused in an instant’s news by the inarticulable on a fall afternoon, in 1963.

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