Tuesday, April 6, 1943

The Charlotte News

Tuesday, April 6, 1943

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in the largest single air score of the Tunisian campaign, American Lightnings shot down 48 Junker transport planes, apparently loaded with oil and other supplies headed from the Sicilian Straits to Tunisia. The Americans lost but 12 planes in the furious 25-minute battle.

Infantry action in Tunisia was limited to patrols.

Volunteering for what they were told was a suicide mission, American pilots flew at an altitude of twenty feet over targets at Crotone, Messina, and San Giovanni in southern Italy, and returned without a loss. The night attack occurred with such stealth and surprise that the enemy had no time to retaliate, offering only light anti-aircraft fire. The quick raid dropped its bombs and headed home.

Bombing action over France was light, with only a small coastal raid north of Dieppe, while Germany was left alone for the nonce.

The Russians continued their advance in the Kuban River Valley, as the river began to overflow its banks, washing out roads in the area. A report provides some geography of the region and its primary road from Krasnodar to the Kerch Strait, a road partially in German and partially in Russian possession.

President Roosevelt appeared to have garnered enough support in the Senate to prevent override of his veto of the Bankhead bill by a two-thirds vote.

Senator Vandenberg of Michigan urged the Senate, utilizing a quote from Thomas Jefferson, to adopt a two term limit for the presidency. The Senator quoted Jefferson as positing that if a term limit were not placed on the presidency, it would be for life and then quickly become an inherited position.

On the editorial page, "Fateful Day" recalls the beginning of American involvement in World War I on April 6, 1917 and then the perilous trench-stuck hardship being endured along the French lines a year later.

The present fighting, while seeing the daylight in Tunisia, would, it offers, be long and hard into the future as an invasion of the Continent lay ahead.

"Old Marshal" laments the passing from greatness of Marshal Petain in his World War I incarnation to the tarnished puppet of the Nazis, now complaining of air raids by British and American raiders over Paris and the French countryside. It expresses the hope that he might find his former valiant self by war’s end before bullets found him.

Dorothy Thompson supports the President in his veto of the Bankhead bill, finds it quite as inflationary as the President's argument made it to be. She points out the paradox of Congress trying to override this veto while not having passed for the previous two months a bill before Congress to appropriate funds for an agency to alleviate the most critical problem on the farm, shortage of manpower, a bill which would look to youth and Mexican migrant workers for supplement to the farm labor base.

Tom Jimison provides an elegy for Grover Bond, a pastor who had passed away in December, a friend and fellow pastor when Mr. Jimison was starting out as a man of the cloth, wayward though he confesses himself to have become, nevertheless always gathered to better fettle and action by his friend, who now, he offers, had to be watching over the knight-errant angels themselves.

A letter writer from Southern Pines rips into Samuel Grafton's piece of March 30. He had criticized America's foreign policy as it coddled Franco and supported Vichy sympathizers in Algeria and Dakar in the previous months since November 8, finding the stances emblematic of a diminishing status on the world stage for the United States, also the subject of his previous day's editorial anent "our indecisive plucking of petals from the enigmatic daisy no longer impress[ing] or depress[ing] the rest of the world"--possibly the most unerringly brilliant single line ever to come true with global implications and endurance through time to be set down by any columnist since Gutenberg invented the printing press, certainly one of the more unheralded bits of precognition ever recorded.

The letter writer emotively accuses him of not marshaling his facts accurately, even Hitlerizing the conclusion of his thesis, but then offers not a single fact in contradiction, only questions. The letter writer should have practiced her art of debate a little better and paid far less attention to her wielding of vacuous prose, (while also merely being careful enough to spell every word, by the metes and bounds of language poseusely posed, in the course of a mere 300 or so, correctly). Nicely framed sentences do not necessarily an argument make. None was made and so we leave it without the dignity of counter-argument, except to answer her first question: It is, madame, by the rights expressly recognized, or, more accurately, specifically forbidden from being prohibited to us by the government, as provided by our Constitution, with reference to the present instance, those set forth in a single sentence of the First Amendment--in the estimate of Thomas Jefferson, constituting therefore but one indivisible freedom, each clause interdependent on the each of the others for its sustenance and viability.

Too bad, in her Americanization of "old roots", she never bothered to read that sentence any more closely than she did Mr. Grafton's editorial. Perhaps, as with a lot of Americans even today, her roots extended too far on the one hand, and not far enough on the other, such that she was in fact not so much an American as an obeisant Loyalist still in the retinue of King George and the Crown.

Mr. Grafton had offered the axiomatic premise that great nations through history had lost their power over time, "not with a bang, but with a whimper"--and, to paraphrase another, more contemporary line, with a whimper, we are finished for the day.

Framed Edition
[Return to Links-Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i><i><i>--</i></i></i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.