Thursday, May 6, 1943

The Charlotte News

Thursday, May 6, 1943

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The British First Army, reports the front page, took Djebel Bou Aoukaz in the Medjerda Valley at 5:00 the previous afternoon, opening the plain before Tunis and the road to Tebourba to the Allies. North and south of Lake Achkel in the north to the west of Bizerte, the Americans and French took two key heights, Djebel Chiniti, the most significant height left before Bizerte, and Djebel Achkel, running Axis troops from those positions. An armored column swung from above Mateur closer to Ferryville, eight miles from Bizerte. Further south, another contingent of U. S. troops moved east from Eddekhila toward the key Nazi position at Tebourba, 18 miles west of Tunis.

Said a report from Associated Press reporter Harold Boyle, thirteen German prisoners in the custody of the Allies in Tunisia seemed happy to be in the predicament after being captured at Djebel Achkel. He also reports in another piece of a gleeful French farm wife in the hills outside Mateur, who wanted the Allies to let the Nazis have more of the same pounding which the Allies had been putting forth in recent days. Madame Jacques told of the experience of Mateur wherein the Nazis had looted everything. She added that, for fifteen days, they occupied the town, during which time "they ate like pigs".

Pushing from the northeast toward the Black Sea port of Novorossisk in the Kuban River Delta, the Russians pounded the Germans with artillery barrages, moving well beyond the town of Krymskaya, seventeen miles northeast of Novorossisk. This action, in addition to placing the Soviet Army within striking distance of the port, also cut off the railhead between Novorossisk and Protoka, 36 miles northeast. Protoka connected with a major highway which led west across the Kerch Straits which led to the Crimea. The Soviet fleet was parked in the Black Sea ready to interdict attempts by the Nazis to evacuate troops to the Crimea.

General Jacob L. Devers was appointed the new Commander of U.S. ground forces in Europere, replacing Frank Andrews, killed in a crash of a Liberator over Iceland on Monday.

On the editorial page, "The Smile" was neither pertinent to the Beach Boys nor the Ukraine Girls, but rather referred to substantially improved U.S.-Soviet relations, especially during the previous two months since March 10 when the story had surfaced anent Admiral Standley’s complaints that the Russian people were not being informed fully by their government of the extent of U.S. aid to Russia, much to the chagrin of the State Department. But now, all was getting chummy and happy between the two countries, the more the war effort progressed toward opening by the Western Allies of a second front in European.

"Case of Nerves" reports of Mussolini’s entreaties to Hitler for assistance in protecting Italy from Allied invasion, imploring that Italian soldiers fighting in Tunisia be allowed the same opportunity as Germans to evacuate to Italy.

Given the track record of feeding the Italians to the Lion all the way across North Africa from Egypt during the previous late fall and early winter, it was not likely that Hitler would answer affirmatively the desires of his severely weakened and increasingly short-lived Axis partner, now reduced to little more than a puppet in control of German satrapy.

Raymond Clapper, in Sweden, tells of the Swedes' customary fear of the Russians being dampened by the Allied effort, that the considerable trepidation which the Swedes had been undergoing in expectation of a separate peace between Germany and Russia, exacerbated by the recent conflict with Poland regarding Russians' supposed responsibility for the dead Polish officers at Smolensk in 1940, was now relieved in the face of Stalin's May Day speech to the Russian people, joining Churchill and FDR in their enunciated stance at Casablanca in January, firmly determined to sail an exclusive course of unconditional Axis surrender before any peace could be struck.

Mr. Clapper recounts a long-forgotten experience from this neutral country when he began rubbing elbows in public places with Nazi soldiers, a discomfort to his feeling of security. But, despite tolerance of various forms of Nazi propaganda in Sweden, the government also, he states, gave ample voice to Allied propaganda. America’s OWI had an overseas branch office in Stockholm. Most Swedes, he assures, were happily on the side of the Allies.

A letter writer, the Secretary of the Forest Farmers Association of Valdosta, Ga., writes to inform the public of the highest amount of acreage ever being consumed by forest fires across the South, 95% of which appeared intentionally set. He implies, without saying it, that the arsonists were saboteurs seeking to harm the timber industry to put a dent in the war effort.

Samuel Grafton finds it a hard week for conservatives as the president of Harvard declared conservatism dead, the Supreme Court gave Jehovah's Witnesses the right to distribute their literature without a licensing tax impinging freedom of the press and exercise of religion, Congressman Ham Fish being roundly called on the carpet by a New York Republican leader for too rabidly criticizing Wendell Willkie, and Booth Tarkington, author of Alice Adams and The Magnificent Ambersons, telling a Republican revival group in Chicago that the United States was already engaged in a form of a league of nations among the Allies, that such a league neveretheless was a sine qua non for winning the war without unnecessary sacrifice, all as the Republicans tried in the Congress to sidetrack the renewal of the reciprocal trade agreements set to expire June 30. Liberals stepped up while Conservatives took strides backward.

Dorothy Thompson pokes right squarely in the eye the pretentious propaganda being disseminated the country by "Mission to Moscow", a Warner Brothers film just released. The film sought to convey the role of former American Ambassador to Russia, Joseph E. Davies, in the lead-up to the war, including rose-colored views of the striking of the Soviet-Nazi pact in August, 1939, the purges of Stalin being portrayed as some vague form of justice against recalcitrants and enemies of the state, the British and Polish ambassadors being presented as “asses” while President Roosevelt became the deus ex machina of the piece, Churchill and Stalin left to being mere mortals. All in all, she finds, it was a bust not worth seeing in the theaters.

Well, judge for yourself, as Walter Huston plays Ambassador Davies.

Up there, up there is where we have to go. Up there.

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