Wednesday, March 17, 1943

The Charlotte News

Wednesday, March 17, 1943

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Red Army had captured Igorievskaya, a rail town on a spur line off the Vyazma-Smolensk main line, thus another key point on the way to Smolensk in the central sector of Russia.

Further south in the Ukraine, southeast of Kharkov, however, the Nazis were preparing for a major thrust across the bend in the Donets River, precipitating a major fight. German communiques claimed that the Russian forces in the area were surrounded and ripe for annihilation.

Preparations suggested an imminent major offensive brewing for the Eighth Army to be launched against the Mareth Line in southern Tunisia, held down by Rommel and 250,000 Axis troops.

Elmer Davis, head of the Office of War Information, reported that one of the central problems in the initial failure and considerable loss of life suffered by the American troops defending Kasserine Pass against Rommel’s steady tramp through it was their failure to deploy mines to inhibit Rommel’s progress. Mr. Davis attributed this failure to the inexperience of the troops.

The War Department, through an anonymous spokesperson, indicated, in apparent disagreement with this assessment, that the flaw occurred from lack of time in the retreat to enable the placement of mines.

General Ernest Harmon, not reported, had already submitted his field analysis to General Eisenhower, criticizing General Lloyd Fredendall for this exiguity, among others, in the field operations during the period February 14-23, resulting on March 6 in General George Patton having been assigned from Morocco to assume General Fredendall's command of Army II Corps, sending General Fredendall packing stateside to a position training troops for the duration.

The House Naval Committee approved the bill sponsored by Lyndon Johnson to require the armed forces engaged in supervision of civilian war work and civilian employees of manufacturers acting under war contracts to supply to Selective Service local boards the names of absent workers and rates of absenteeism so that those obtaining deferments for being engaged in essential war-industry service might be reclassified. The bill also provided for the limitation of duration of deferments to no more than six months. The aim of the bill was deterrent, not punitive, to stem the rate of absenteeism, a major concern after the first year of total war production.

And, to show that much ado might become of nothing, the Army air forces indicated the prospect of severe punitive sanctions to be levied against 8,000 workers who had, for four hours the previous day, walked off the job from the Ford Rouge plant, responsible for production of aircraft. The ultimate genesis of the protest had been one union committeeman who sought entry to the plant while in his cups, being thus thrust backward, barred by a protection agent, against whom then the committeeman proceeded to provide a haymaker in detestation of his desisted forward progress, consequently suspended along with other protestant committeemen. The walkout was in symbolic protest of the suspension. For four hours, the walkout arrested dead the production of war planes at Ford and consequently the replacement of forces of Flying Fortresses and Liberators daily shot down while delivering bombs to Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo.

Many more fisticuffian tirades of the sort by such committeemen in their cups seeking entry to plants, and the war fronts might be in consequence lost of their rears to those out of their cups.

And, neutral Fascist Generalissimo Francisco Franco told Cortes that he anticipated a lengthy war, now that Russia was involved, perhaps en actitud belicosa for as long as six to eight more years.

He said, "It is not necessary for the Soviet armies to reach nations for the Red revolution to come."

There was no reply offered by Cortes for quietly wondering why it had taken the Generalissimo fully twenty-one months to ponder this notion before issuing this fateful declamation, in awaiting which all nations had stood palpably by in nail-biting, teeth-gnashing anguish, arms at the ready or not based solely on the Generalissimo's advice and wisdom imparted freely to the world at large.

Balboa, however, was heard to say, in a rich Corinthian accent, leather-Rhett in its implications: "'Tis 3 o’clock. Which side are you on, Scarlett, Lester's or that of yon Cassius with the lean and hungry look?"

On the editorial page, "Anti-South" registers its approval of the report issued by the House Committee on Small Business, chaired by anti-trust, anti-chain store advocate Wright Patman, future chair of the House Banking Committee which in fall, 1972 would be the only congressional committee prior to the election to investigate Watergate, beginning then to follow the money, an investigation on which pressure was quickly placed by the White House sufficient to shut it down, albeit no fault of Mr. Patman who wished to persist.1

In any event, the report presently garnering the column's attention had indicated that the South was not getting its fair share of war industry and recommended that future contracts be spread more evenly across the landscape to embrace Southern small business and small business generally throughout the country to avoid undue concentration of war wealth and commerce in large urban industries, the moment of which would likely continue after the war as would the Newtonian opposing forces toward privation.

"Time of Quiet" strikes the reader of recent editorial columns in The News with inconsistency of theme. It critiques the mentality suggestive of the fact of there having been such great progress in the production of war materiel and the training and transportation abroad of fighting forces that time was nigh for an offensive strike of dramatic proportions on the war fronts and concomitantly to cease defensive postures. It counsels patience and offers the foster of trust of the steady hands of the Allied political leaders, Roosevelt and Churchill, and those of their chosen military commanders upon the tillers, offers that living-room generals should realize their lack of information and experience to offer their two cents on the conduct of the war.

But, isn't that precisely what The News itself had been advocating, an immediate offensive in Europe to take advantage of the Russian success before time would render the action less impacting, enabling Hitler to regain territory lost with the spring thaw, already now begun with the recapture of Kharkov? Indeed, had not the column precisely so counseled in "One Answer" just the day before?

Well, as someone once said, or something very much like it, it is within the reserved rights of man to be wiser today than yesterday.

Tom Jimison offers a piece again from Richmond County, this time counseling the establishment of Victory Gardens and offering the various salutary benefits to be derived from the activity of tending them. He also pleads for placement of tomatoes and peppers and the like, in variegated array, within the front yard garden, not relegated in hiding to the rear simply because the product is edible.

Raymond Clapper discusses the seeming incongruity between Army hospitals stateside lying virtually empty with idle doctors on hand and the presence of hospitals in the same towns or counties only miles away teeming with patients but bereft of staff to treat them for the staff having been drafted or volunteered into the Army. He offers that there may be some hidden logic in the prohibition of treatment of civilian patients by Army doctors but that it ought nevertheless be examined for lack of efficiency. (We can think of one instanter, the prospect of lawsuits against the Government for malpractice.)

Likewise, Mr. Clapper criticizes the military medical corps for having summarily pre-empted service by female doctors, a practice, to be abolished, requisite of legislation. He cites the fact of female lawyers having been deemed acceptable to the Navy WAVE's, that both Britain and Russia had admitted female doctors to their military service, that the eight thousand female physicians in the country could nearly fill the quota for nine thousand doctors being sought for military service in 1943. He thus concludes the policy of allowing in the service only male physicians to be outmoded, impractical, and suggestive of chauvinism worthy of the Victorian era in a war not being fought under Victorian rules of engagement.

No mention on either the front page or the editorial page of St. Patrick's Day having been offered by anyone, we hereby offer it and wish you well in your greenery. Try to avoid socking the doorman at the factory in the face when you return to work and are barred for being slightly out of your cups.

Remember that while Uncle Sam Wants YOU, he does not want YOU in any state less than absolute sobriety. Winning the war requires nothing less. You would not wish to wind up as the Italian soldiers, likely for too much imbibing of wine along the way, who shot at their Nazi allies during the trek back across North Africa during the late fall. Or, maybe you would, as long as they were Nazis.

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1 Today, March 18, 2010, after drafting the above yesterday, we added the following to the entry in Wicked-pedia regarding Wright Patman, except that the reference to the 1983 Seymour Hersh Atlantic Monthly piece, identifying the interference by Gerald R. Ford into the Patman Committee's work, was already present, albeit misstated in Wicked-pedia as referring to Mr. Ford's time as Vice-President, not yet begun in fall, 1972 for another year. (It helps to have lived through it, kid.) We shall see how long it takes the Bulova watch-people to change it to accommodate their satisfactions of Special Purpose. While ventured off the top of our head and quickly, we aver its strict accuracy, even under water. John Cameron-Cameron says so.

...in the sense that the money trail, as revealed in the Washington Post, helped plant the basis for the establishment of the Ervin Senate Select Committee on Watergate in April, 1973. (In the final analysis, however, the most universally adopted reason for seeking Nixon's impeachment was his obstruction of justice occurring in the "smoking gun" tape of June 23, 1972, asking his aides to seek C.I.A. intervention with Director Richard Helms and Deputy Director Vernon Walters to stop the initial Watergate investigation, begun days after the break-in on orders of newly appointed F.B.I. Director L. Patrick Gray, for its supposed threat to national security in uncovering "the whole Bay of Pigs thing"--a Nixon reference which Bob Haldeman, party to the June 23 conversation with Nixon, later equated in his book, The Ends of Power, published in February, 1978 in the wake of the House Select Committee's investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy, with Nixon's code phrase for the Kennedy assassination, though Haldeman later recanted the statement before he died. The revelation of the existence of the White House taping system occurred during testimony to the Ervin Committee by Alexander Butterfield in July, 1973.) The Patman Committee's 1972 investigation was stymied on pressure from the White House, in part led by Congressman Gerald R. Ford, within a year to become Vice-President, appointed to the position by President Nixon after Spiro T. Agnew was forced to resign after pleading nolo contendere to charges of having received bribes during his stint as Governor of Maryland prior to 1969, charges mysteriously surfacing only after the Watergate scandal broke the previous year. Many speculated at the time that Agnew was deliberately being tossed by Nixon onto the fire as a sacrificial lamb in an attempt to calm the furor surfacing from the previous summer's Senate Select Committee hearings on Watergate which had been nationally televised. Conversely, however, by nominating the moderate Gerald Ford as his new Vice-President, Nixon spread that much more the flames of discontent with his method of governing, eventuating in the Articles of Impeachment returned by the House Judiciary Committee in latter July, 1974, prompting Nixon's decision to resign, effective at noon August 9.

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