Friday, May 28, 1943

The Charlotte News

Friday, May 28, 1943

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that President Roosevelt, succinctly and without elaboration as to its results, had announced the conclusion of the Third Washington Conference, stating that plans had been fully reached in concord among the Allies.

Speculation immediately ran in Washington that this agreement foreshadowed a complete Allied offensive in both Europe and the Pacific within the coming months.

General agreement had it that the war would take a turn in the summer with a mass invasion of Europe, that the presence of General Wavell at the conference signaled the inauguration of an offensive against Burma in the fall and winter, after the monsoon season ended. The strategic importance of the latter effort could not be underestimated, for reopening the vital Burma Road to pass supplies unimpeded into China was sine qua non to winning the war there. Japanese forces, spread thin across their defensive line in the broad arc of Southeast Asia to the Southwest Pacific, were particularly vulnerable to expulsion from China, save only the expedient of open land lines of supply, now truncated by the necessity to provision the Allied forces only by air, through the "W" Pass of the "Hump" in the Himalayas, even if that slower process of supply was beginning its run apace to catch up with that afforded by the land tracks.

Russia would likely not have sufficient means to permit use of bases by the U.S. for bombing Japan because of the vast commitment to the war against Germany. Thus, that left China or the much slower and more costly island-hopping method to effect direct attack on the mainland of Japan.

Predictions ran that the war in Europe would be won at the latest during 1944 and the war with Japan, by 1945 or 1946. The failure of Japan to support in strength by sea and air its forces on Attu was consistent with the trend of the past six months, maintenance of a defensive war. The key goal of the Allies was defeat of the remainder of the Japanese Fleet.

In one of the longest raids yet by British plywood Mosquito bombers, a thousand miles roundtrip, the Carl Zeiss instrument factory and the Schott Glass Works were targeted at Jena, the first time the town had been bombed with concentrated effort, one previous light raid having been made August 17, 1940.

Jena had been the site of Napoleon's victory against the Prussians in 1806.

Another bomber squadron attacked Essen again; twenty-three RAF bombers were lost. Only three failed to return from the raid on Jena.

In Russia, the new offensive of the Red Army, some 150,000 strong, continued against the Nazi positions protecting the Kerch Strait, to the west of the Kuban River Valley.

Cleaning-up operations continued on Attu as the fighting neared its conclusion with the final surrender of the paucity of Japanese left still alive on the island set to occur Monday. One of the remaining forces which had now been trapped was in the area south of Lake Kories.

Former Senator and Supreme Court Justice James Byrnes was made head of the new War Mobilization Board, a completely different position from that which he had held since leaving the Supreme Court after only one term the previous October to become chair of the Economic Stabilization Board. As head of the War Mobilization Board, Mr. Byrnes would have full power to coordinate the various departments of the government in waging the war effectively. He would also implement war strategy and policy, at the direction of the President. The new position effectively made him an assistant President. The move was greeted on Capitol Hill with full approbation.

And as more bombs fell on Sicily, Sardinia, and Pantellaria, Il Duce announced, after a double-secret meeting with his Fascist Cabinet, his plan to undertake a fight "to the end" to protect Sardinia and Sicily.

The end would be a bitter one for Il Duce.

On the editorial page, "The Trap" speaks favorably of a bill pending before the Senate completely to limit by law the President's hand in dipping into one fund to pay for another pet project within the Executive Branch which had been de-funded by Congress. The bill would prevent such cherry-picking by the President.

“A New World” reprints a letter received from a WAAC seeking to explain to those back home how Army life transformed the former hometown ordinary boy into a fighting soldier, completely changed from his former incarnation such that he would not now be recognized back home. She remarks that she, too, had undergone change.

The piece concludes, somewhat ominously, that when the war ended and the soldiers returned home, they might find home so different to their eyes that they could no longer accept it. It predicts that it would be a problem to be solved for years to come.

And, so it would.

Would anybody know their names?

"Invasion Scare" finds the Immigration Committee in the House offering up a contrite apology for Pearl Harbor. For in late 1941, just before the attack, appeared before the Committee one Kilsoo Haan, a Korean, who had told them that the Japanese had an invasion force afloat heading for Hawaii. Now, he told them that the Japanese had its Fleet once again in concentrated force, with as many as 100,000 personnel in tow, sailing for the American West Coast.

Was he right? asks the piece.

It wouldn't matter, it answers without hesitation. For the concentration of its Fleet in such force now would be a blessing to the Allies who possessed the superior air and naval power it did not have in late 1941 to blast the Japanese out of the water and swiftly end the war. It favors, on balance, the belief that the Japanese would not risk such a climactic attempt possessed of such surely fatal portent.

A piece from The Hour reveals that the North Carolina Shipbuilding Company of Wilmington, a company engaged in building ships under contract for the government war effort, had also been funneling money to the tune of $200 per month to a publication called The Wilmington Post, a right-wing, pro-Hitler newspaper which had compared recently the New Deal to Fascism for its embrace of so many restrictive policies during wartime and also suggested, antithetically, that the Administration was rife with Communists.

The tract's thrust seemed in whole to be in furtherance of an attempt by the company to defeat unionism at its facilities by suppressing organizing activity with the denunciatory branding of the organizers as "hook-beaked" "foreign agitators"--that is to say Communist Jews.

But the good niggers who worked for the company weren't falling for the Communist conspiracy of the international Zionists.

The paper propitiously predicted not just evolution in 1944 but revolution, which would spell the end of the New Deal and replace it with good old home-grown respect for American Capitalism.

Down with the hook-beaked Jew-boy Communist conspiracy from Zion and up with the American way, dog-eat-dog.

Raymond Clapper reports that Swedes were unimpressed by Nazi propaganda seeking, without the least hint of artifice in the face of facts daily conveyed through the underground to Swedes from refugees escaped out of Norway, to perpetrate the line that the Nazis would protect the interests of small nations against the Russian Bear. That offer of protection sounding as so much silliness in the abstract notwithstanding, the Allies, cautions Mr. Clapper, needed to effect post-war planning which would implement policy to insure the fostering of just such protection of the identity and culture of the small nations of Europe, lest trouble of the sort evident from the various underground organizations operating in the Nazi-occupied nations, raise its head against the Allies after the war.

Samuel Grafton writes again of the abolition of the Comintern, removing not only the putative thorn in the side of Germans and Italians against which the principals combined to form the European Axis had fought, but also that of its puppet satrapies, such as that led by M. Laval in France, who also had vowed to keep Communism out of the country by being cooperative with the bulwark.

Now, there was no bogey of the ancien régime against which to inveigh to feed the lifeblood through the veins of the movement in Europe enunciated on the premise of "nationalism". In turn, the nationalism favored by the Nazis and Italian Fascists had devolved to the point where French and Dutch were being drafted wholesale into labor service and sent to Germany. The nationalism had shown itself for what it was: enforced internationalism marching, enslaved, to the beat of Hitler's divine Aryan myths, to feed his military machine gone awry, depleting the homeland of all its resources, including manpower of the herrenvolk by whose lot it had been to work the factories to produce the implements of war to strive for lebensraum--now all dead, lying stiffened, greyed corses, half eaten by decadence, on the Russian tundra or strewn at will from Egypt to Tunisia.

The ruse was out in the open and, with it, forced now to argue against its own ideological underpinnings, the predicate for doom of Nazism was likewise in evidence, the end thus nigh.

Realizing the movement away from this hearkening to "nationalism" which had beset Europe for the previous twenty years, Stalin had made his astute decision to abolish the Comintern, standing otherwise openly in contrast to the ideals expressed by Stalinist Russia that it held no extra-territorial motives post-war.

Thus, says Mr. Grafton, "Russia has merely dusted the path a bit, for the avalanche which is roaring on its way against Der Fuehrer."

And so it would be; yet the avalanche which slid the mountain, piled in heap on heap in brace, racing the bottom in Congolese, and thus became the Pleistocene War's fountain face in rondo friese.

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