Tuesday, March 16, 1943

The Charlotte News

Tuesday, March 16, 1943

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page indicates the fall of Kharkov again to the Nazis, a month after the Ukraine steel center had been recaptured by the Soviets.

Movements of the Red Army west toward Smolensk and Bryansk in the central sector, however, continued.

Maps of the central and southern sectors of Russia indicate the battle lines.

In Tunisia, the First Army occupied a key wooded ridge near Sedjenane in the northern sector.

In the south, a successful infantry operation was conducted on Axis armored vehicles at Gafsa.

A piece informs that the initial miscalculation of Rommel's advance from Faid Pass during the period February 14 to 16 was the result of faulty intelligence and a determination that Rommel was about to strike at Pichon, in the area of which, consequently, the Allies concentrated their forces.

German SS troops had searched so far in vain in the Haute-Savoie region of France, near Lake Geneva, along the Swiss border, for a band of some 5,000 youthful Resistance members who had taken up arms in defiance of the Nazi draft to be dispatched to Germany and into enforced labor. The band of insurgents were said to be led by Free French generals and officers. "Seething unrest" was also reported from Marseille.

The Associated Press heard for the first time a Berlin radio broadcast announcing that no Allied raids had taken place over Germany the previous night or day. No bombs falling was now newsworthy.

The editorial page indicates in "Behind-Scenes" that Lend-Lease shipments to Russia were being transported with impunity across Japanese shipping lanes, that apparently Japan was not resisting the shipments so that the Russo-Japanese mutual non-aggression pact would not be infringed. If Japan had attacked any of these vessels, then Russia could have been provided grounds to afford bases in Vladivostok for American bombers to launch air attacks against Tokyo. Should the sinking of American merchant ships have been sufficient to make a substantial dent in Russian wherewithal to prosecute the war against Hitler, then, no doubt, to protect itself, Russia would have done precisely that.

"The Beginning" finds good tidings in the fact that the Senate had issued a draft bill to establish a post-war United Nations organization, even if it was only a first step and there was active dispute on the details. The editorial offers it to be a refreshing change from the refusal of the Senate to approve joinder by the United States in the League of Nations post World War I.

"One Answer" plays Cassandra on the Russian situation after the loss of Kharkov, indicating that it might foredoom the Soviet battlefront so heartily won at such great cost during the previous four months, making the necessity of a strike on the Continent by the Western Allies the more exigent.

Samuel Grafton seeks to clarify government intentions on post-war policies being promulgated by the Administration, against the backdrop of obscurantists trying to misrepresent them. He offers that two primary plans for the post-war period were simply, first, to demobilize government-run factories by selling them to private industry and spreading the sales out among a large number of businesses, among other plans favorable to American commerce and to Labor. It was not, as the obscurantists were seeking to suggest it, a plan to socialize industry by placing it under government control.

Second, the government, to insure against want in the post-war environment, with millions of returning veterans to the marketplace in which jobs had been taken by newly trained and skilled workers, some older, some female, who probably would return to their pre-war status, but nevertheless many others who might remain in the jobs to which they had by then become accustomed, to provide unemployment insurance to all who sought but could not obtain employment. Those who were criticizing the plan for its potentially high cost to the taxpayers, says Mr. Grafton, were merely admitting their belief that the post-war environment would yield high unemployment. The solution was to insure freedom from want by delivering full employment.

Raymond Clapper urges that the conference just beginning in Washington between U. S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Foreign Minister of China T. V. Soong, (brother of Madame Chiang Kai-shek), Foreign Minister Litvinoff of Russia, and Foreign Minister Anthony Eden of Great Britain, was an important step toward realizing any cohesiveness in the post-war world. It was especially crucial, he warns, that Britain and the United States find common ground in this conference. For if they could not cooperate, there was little hope that the other United Nations, historically less compatible with the United States on trade and mutual defense, could establish any viable and durable rapprochement.

Dorothy Thompson focuses on Conservative Anthony Eden, predicts that he would be a future prime minister, and believes that he would lead this conference in a direction of planning for a cooperative post-war world among the United Nations, notwithstanding his traditionalist background and appearance.

But, she also issues the caveat that not too much concrete should be expected generally from this particular conference which was by its design, along with others of its kind before and to follow, primarily exploratory, not either predicatory or declaratory.

She was correct in her prediction that Anthony Eden would become prime minister, even if it would take another 12 years for him to do so and even if he would only be in the position for two years, in between the second run as prime minister, for three and a half years, by Winston Churchill and the term of Harold MacMillan, who remained in the position for nearly seven years, from early 1957 through October, 1963.

And, you may count us likewise accurate in predictions, should you so wish to credit it, even if a bit Cassandra-esque in its tendencies. On February 22, just three weeks past, as unlikely as it was to become at the time, we suggested, not with tongue in cheek, that our school's basketball team, the way things were going, might consider a return to its old hant, Carmichael Auditorium, the smaller, more practical arena in which it played its games from December, 1965 until January, 1986. That last game, indeed, seems not so long ago, frankly, ourselves being as old as Methuselah.

In any event, by the steady hand of fate, even if not so much a fate desirable in the abstract, our school wound up being chosen for the NIT with an overall record of 16-16--worst in the field, albeit with one of the toughest schedules in the country--an unusual position for our school's basketball team, but one of which they are making the best, making lemonade of lemons as it were.

So, our prediction, if you wish to call it that, came calling by that stroke of serendipity, an Irish hand at work somewhere in the greenery of the bluery no doubt, ye little leprechaun, ye, which somehow combined with the fact that the regular facility was unavailable for its being under scheduled repairs after the regular season ended, to necessitate use of Carmichael as a locus for a men's varsity basketball game for the first time since 1986--thus also causing the late Jim Valvano, former coach of N.C. State, to lose one of his claims to fame, that he was the last man to score an unofficial basket in Carmichael Auditorium.

And, incidentally, they won tonight, beating William & Mary by eight points.

Somehow, therefore, it manages to link up with the visit to Washington of Sir Anthony Eden in 1943.

Sail with the Pilot.

Now, the Phants go to the great State of Mississippi.

We suggest, next year, even if for the sake of nostalgia and experiment, that our school's wisdom suppliers employ the smaller facility on a semi-regular basis for all home games ordinarily unlikely to attract a full house.

Good for glass.

We also suggest that you see "Capitalism: A Love Story", which we just watched a couple of nights ago, a very frightening but accurate film about the way things are going in this democratic country of ours, the grand experiment to which the rest of the world ought be, but isn't currently, looking for example and guidance.

The only quibble we have with this interesting film is the title. It really should have been, "Fascism: A Love Story of Hate for Democracy". For when the deck is rigged, it is no longer capitalism.

Here, "An Irregular Ode", by Lord Lyttelton, from which and whom comes the quote of the day, from 1746, dedicated to some "Miss Lucy F____" who may, or may not have, been in the sky with diamonds.

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