The Charlotte News
Monday, September 28, 1942
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: Because News editorial writer Burke Davis would eventually author a book on Lt.-Col. Lewis B. ("Chesty") Puller, we note an operation which he partially led during the previous four days, from September 23 through 27, in an effort to dislodge Japanese forces on Guadalcanal which had congregated near the village of Matanikau, on the western side of the river of the same name. The enemy force threatening Henderson Field from the west actually numbered about 1,900 though intelligence reports had placed it at only 700. Colonel Puller, supported by Colonel Merritt Edson, leader of the successful defense of Lunga Ridge on September 12 through 14 against attack on Henderson Field from the eastern approach, led a force of 930 Marines, supported by other battalions, in an unsuccessful raid which resulted in 89 killed against about 50 Japanese losses.
Sunday’s last attempt to take the Japanese positions proved especially harrowing and heroic. Three companies out of Colonel Puller’s battalion landed early in the afternoon at Point Cruz to the rear of the Japanese position to attempt to take them by surprise. The men forged their way up a hill designated "84" and were there besieged on two sides by enemy fire. Stuck without radio communication, the Marines used invention to spell out "Help" with their tee-shirts. Air support spotted the signal and alerted the operation’s commanders. Puller was able then to signal a naval support ship which landed and, under heavy fire, saved all except 32 of the men trapped on Hill 84.
Another raid on Matanikau would take place from October 7 to 9, this time successfully forcing out the Japanese with a larger force led by Colonel William J. Whaling, with Puller’s battalion in support. This latter raid suffered 65 Marines dead and 125 wounded against an estimated 700 Japanese killed.
The photograph shows one of the Marine units crossing the Matanikau River during the previous four days of fighting in September.
Whether, incidentally, "Chesty" Puller's nickname and his first claim to fame coming at Matanikau, had any inspiration arise from "'Ware New Words", we don't know. But, as we have pointed out before, judging by the far-flung origins of letters to the editor, The News got around quite a bit further than merely the limits of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, especially in a state with a heavy concentration of military personnel.
The front page reports of Wendell Willkie, having stirred from Russia the waters of complacency, at least in Parliament, prompting Labor Party leaders to echo his call for opening an immediate second front, and amid toasts from his new Comrade, Josef Stalin, now moving on to China, continuing as FDR’s personal emissary to shore up Allied morale in the most deadly and distant theaters of war.
In occupied France, three hundred American "hostages" were taken by the Nazi government, to be held presumably until an exchange might be arranged for Germans in America. The only difference, of course, was that Germans in America were either being held as spies and saboteurs or were not being held at all, certainly not as hostages rounded up willy-nilly without formal charge, (though of Japanese on the West Coast, it is true, there were about 100,000 in that category, but they were not those whom the Nazis sought to avenge or whose release they deemed necessarily desirable).
Another dramatically daring lifeboat's faring emerges from the Atlantic, this one concerning seventeen survivors of a merchant ship adrift for twenty days at sea while stalked by sharks. Having been dropped food from an airplane on the fifteenth day, the survivors nevertheless still had to wait another five crows for sea rescue. To add insult to injury, they suffered through not only a torpedo blast from the U-boat which sunk their ship, but also a torpedo blast from the rescuing Allied destroyer which first spotted them down as an enemy sub.
That begs the question why the plane which dropped the food didn’t properly alert the rescue patrol to their precise position. As well, what happened to the captain? The story cryptically states that he "cracked under the strain of the days of drifting and died."
Was there a mutiny? Was the rescue ship one commandeered temporarily either by an escaped lunatic or Willi once again returning to sea, perhaps as a stowaway now, after escaping the gendarmes when he came ashore initially on Long Island back on September 17?
Perhaps, amid the collision between this story, that of the Nazis taking as hostage the friend to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Mr. Bedaux, recent visitor to Cannes, and the anecdote related by Paul Mallon on Saturday regarding the labor troubles besetting cotton farms harming crop yields, as told by Senator Bankhead, only the Master of Suspense ultimately would be able to sort the wheat from the chaff and extricate from the ostensibly inextricably intertwined the appropriate exegesis of this nearly Eleusinian mystery, at least with any probity and éclat.
They drank rain water. But did they fish with a Cartier?
On the editorial page, Raymond Clapper makes the rather astounding suggestion that America was headed for dictatorship, not just a transitory version for the duration of the war, but one continuing afterward; not one based on that which Paul Mallon had indicated on Friday that Senator Lister Hill had feared from the bill he prepared at the Administration’s behest, affording the President the right to draft labor to better distribute resources for farm and industrial applications in the war effort. But rather troubling Mr. Clapper was the notion that the farm lobby had gained such inordinate control over Congress that there essentially was no Congress, or one so water-sopped by influence peddling as to be emasculated into impotence, one at least no longer with any independent will to serve the people on the premise from which it derives its bona fides constitutionally. Its purpose, says Mr. Clapper, appeared now to be only to serve the farm lobby, not the citizenry at large.
Well, arguably through time, Mr. Clapper’s Cassandrian forecast, post-war, would come true. But it would not find its fulfillment in any power exerted by farmers. The virtual dictatorship would come, nevertheless, from the nearly insuperable power politically exerted by lobbying groups, and lobbying groups of various stripes. Name a substantial special interest and the highly paid and highly paying lobby acting on its behalf, and you will name one of many problems besetting Capitol Hill for decades now, increasing to such alarming proportions in the past 30 years or so that indeed there may be very little vestige of truly representative government, republican democracy, remaining in the country, certainly little of what Jefferson and the Founders conceived as the basis for the country’s government. And that despite various laws enacted to curtail lobbying activities and limit political contributions directly made by them and their immediate handmaiden, political action committees.
The whole ugly system, of course, will never change until the people demand that its government return to a system closer to that which the Founders conceived out of the Revolution. That is not to say, of course, that, at times, some lobbies do not serve an admirable purpose in a society comprised of 300 million people whose individual voices may scarcely be heard above the din. But nevertheless, these special interest groups ought not be heard above and before the individual. Even in town hall meetings, where the individual is supposed to have his or her voice heard, we have witnessed during just the last several months persons claiming to act as individuals who, by obviously seeking to hog the podium, are merely acting to deprive others of their say, in fact are not speaking as individuals at all. These deliberate disrupters of the common weal are obvious hirelings of insurance companies bent on destroying any chance of health care reform, to kick up through dishonest efforts rumors and myths to serve the lobby which paid them to do it, which paid them to interfere with the town hall meeting designed to tap the vox populi, not to have the vox populi drowned out by a boombox bearing coterie of vilifying Villiagos voicing popular lies, the vox nihili.
Well, enough with politeness. If you want your country to be governed based on some guiding principle other than moneyed interests, you must be a little demanding, a little less polite, and tell these well-paid lobbying groups and their groupies to shut up, to wait their turn and speak no more than their allotted piece.
Dorothy Thompson saw 1942's problem in terms of the vast bureaucracy, much as did the editorial column in giving praise in "Relief at Last" to Elmer Davis, Director of the Office of War Information, for his having cut out the chaff from that agency. Ms. Thompson cites the example of the chicken farmer seeking to build a $1,200 chicken coop, to supply four or five hundred additional head to his laying crew, and the vast morass of bureaucratic machinations through which he had first to pass, eventually all the way to Washington, even beyond it to a construction committee in New York, just to obtain license to build his paltry little additional coop, all to get more eggs on the table, both at home and abroad, to meet the increased government demand for lain yokes. She grimly compares it to the system employed by the dictatorships whereby one person granted or denied a given right, in a matter of minutes. Of course, she does not, by that bit of hyperbole, mean to suggest that such a system would be literally fit for the United States. For the dictatorships obviously worked on two bases: the degree of tenderness favored the applicant by the Reich (setting aside the obvious notion of whether the supplicant was first and foremost a properly obeisant, pure Aryan); and whether payola properly had been slipped the overseer to grant the sought favor. But streamlining of the bureaucratic threadwork in America nevertheless was in order.
The Depression, the New Deal as a catharsis for the Depression, had lent to an already over-bureaucratized government even more Balkanization of its departments and sub-departments, executive committees and sub-committees, such that with the outbreak of war, the government, local, state, and Federal, was ill-equipped to deal with emergent circumstances, smoothly to distribute authorization for the simplest of matters in any reasonably celerious manner through the various trips and trials and stumbles along circuitous secants bisecting elipses radially interfacing circular sequels to the point of inharmonic absurdity inside an apparent riddling enigma which hadn't a clue to the question, let alone its resolution, by the time it reached its final destination--as it so often still manifests itself. To find a remedy to this abyss of chaotheocracy, wearing Sánkhya at its head, was a large part of the adjustment process taking place in this the first year of America’s participation directly in the war for salvation.
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