Friday, June 11, 1943

The Charlotte News

Friday, June 11, 1943

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports of the surrender to the Allies of the Italian forces on Pantellaria, numbering about 8,000 troops, the first time in history that an aerial assault alone had resulted in such a surrender. The white flags were flown at twenty minutes to twelve and the Allied landing forces, already poised off the coast, came ashore at noon. Some isolated companies did not receive word of the surrender and waged a short fight for twenty-two minutes. The final surrender thus was at 12:22 p.m., local time.

During the previous twenty-four hours, Pantellaria had suffered three times the air assault which London had undergone during any single night of the Blitz. The relentless pounding of the island had been ongoing for nineteen straight days, with some preliminary sorties flown against it during the two weeks prior to that time.

The significance of the fall of Pantellaria, as explained by Wes Gallagher of the A. P., was that it cut in half the flight distance between Tunisia and Sicily, thus allowing short-range fighters the ability to support landing forces in Sicily and return safely to base after being engaged in dogfights. The 90-mile trip each way from Tunisia to Sicily would not allow such short-range fighter support, limiting it to the longer range P-38 Lightnings. Now, the faster and more maneuverable Spitfires, Warhawks, and Airacobras could participate in air operations for the invasion of Sicily--set to occur in four weeks on July 9. The planes could then use the airbase on Pantellaria, even though small, for refueling on the return leg to Tunisia. Thus was opened an invaluable stepping stone onto the Continent.

In Chapter 11 of They Call It Pacific, Clark Lee tells of his continued journey, on December 23, 1941, to the north of Luzon, arriving eventually in Baguio, all the while with Allied fighting, seeking to repel Japanese landing forces, occurring just over the hills.

On the editorial page, "Pantellaria" suggests that the surrender of the island under such a furious air assault of the Allies was prelude to further similar defeats ahead for the Axis on the Continent. It predicts that Italy would succumb in much the same manner within the coming weeks, perhaps making land invasion superfluous.

Unfortunately, however, Italy would not heed the sound advice of FDR, urging surrender and promising restoration of democratic freedoms. Italy, now under the yoke of the Nazi, would be forced to fight until the last days of the war, acting as a buffer between the southern Allied forces and Austria and Germany to the north.

Anne O'Hara McCormick, writing in The New York Times, provides insight into why the battle in Russia had suddenly lapsed into lull after the Tunisian victory. Germany was nervously awaiting invasion by the Allies of the Continent, to determine to which theater and to what degree it might have to divert more troops from Russia. Estimated numbers now in Russia were 190 German and 28 satellite divisions, about three million men.

These were not the crack troops, however, who once populated the armies of the Wehrmacht. Those had been decimated during the long counter-offensive before Moscow during the winter of 1941-42 and in the long counter-offensive from Stalingrad and into the Don River Basin and up from the Caucasus during the winter of 1942-43.

Now, the Russians waited for the Germans to attack so that the Germans would first exhaust their strength. The Germans, still apparently following their pattern of timing the initiation of offensive operations in late June, as in the previous two summers, were waiting to see what would occur in the West before launching any grand offensive in the East.

Ms. McCormick relates that it was predicted by military observers that whatever they did, it would not be on the scale of the previous two summer offensives, that it would consist of smaller, sporadic raids.

For now, the Luftwaffe was concentrating on bombing Gorky, the site of an important munitions plant, east of Moscow.

Thus, for the nonce, the two massive armies, for the most part, were waiting for something to happen, primarily elsewhere.

Yet, Churchill had predicted to Commons that the main event for the summer would still be on the Eastern front, in Russia, where it was expected that the Nazi forces would collapse in defeat. Time would tell.

A former anti-Axis French prisoner in the notoriously tough concentration camp at Djelfa in Algeria writes under the pseudonym "Martin Stone" regarding the horrid conditions he found while imprisoned there in 1941. As foreign press accounts reported in the wake of the November, 1942 Allied landings in Algeria the end of the camps and supposed release of all political prisoners therein, most of the anti-Axis prisoners, in fact, remained enchained. The pro-Axis prisoners, formerly segregated, were mixed in with them in early 1943 to make it a tougher proposition to distinguish between prisoners seeking release under the new orders to set free all anti-Vichy detainees.

The prisoners' treatment while at Djelfa was that of animals, starved practically to death, beaten sadistically at the direction of the camp commandant, thrown into a concrete pit for such offenses as trying to make coffee from date pits and boiled water. Typhoid fever was rampant; medical help was non-existent. Even shoes had to be fashioned from natural materials on hand, such as alfalfa.

By March 30, when M. "Stone" had departed North Africa, only a hundred of the thousands of anti-Axis refugees in the camps, he contends, had been set free.

Raymond Clapper discusses the consternation exhibited in Britain concerning the coal strike in the United States, as well the problem of race relations as raised to the surface in the Packard strike which had resulted from the objection to hiring three black workers in the war industry. Britons could not fathom the American temerity to undertake such actions in the midst of war. In Britain, only a half-hour per worker had been lost to strikes during the previous year. And that was the greatest loss of time from cessation of work yet during the war.

Mr. Clapper again adverts to the Swedish condition he had found during his month in the country, where workers and management got along in peaceful symbiosis and strikes were simply not worth having: management was always encouraging of wages keeping pace with the cost of living; workers, always therefore at peace with management.

Perhaps, the closer to the war zone a country was at the time, the more likely it understood firsthand its bitter duty to work without gripe, just as Britons had also put up with far stricter rationing and for far longer than had their American cousins, still adjusting after only a little over a year of much slighter hardship stateside.

Blackouts had been routine every night in Britain since September 2, 1939, loosened only recently; in America, the drill was sporadic and taking place for only a little over eighteen months, even if fewer such drills appeared to have been ongoing in the first half of 1943 than in 1942.

Thesis: War has some cathartic impact on human relations among the allied peoples, the determination to adhere to the common cause for the greater good of all; and that relationship is directly proportional to proximity to the battle front.

"An Old Story" again blames the liberties taken by the coal miners in demanding higher wages in the midst of war ultimately on the latitude provided Labor generally by the New Deal in the 1930's. As stated a week or so earlier in the column, FDR was finally thus to blame.

"Money's Worth" cites a study published by the University of North Carolina, quoted liberally in the piece, finding that, while North Carolina ranked 41st among the states in per capita expenditure by government, the benefits provided, especially in education and roads, far outweighed those of most of the states, suggesting an efficiently budgeted operation.

"Anti-Zoot", not mentioning the zootsuiter confrontation with servicemen out in Watts, as reported the day before on the front page, but likely inspired by the piece, decries the suggestion to ferret out the origins of the craze. It proclaims, in essence, that sometimes ignorance is bliss.

But the editorial column, itself, had explored the origin of the fashion the previous September 26. We, too, did so at the time, symbiotically, finding poetically some of the roots to the zoot. And, indeed, our research in Oxford might explain, psychologically, why the zootsuiters of Watts threw stones at the servicemen, their own putative source, upon discharge, for etymological origin of their radical fad in sartorial ostentation, fear that soon, as the editorial of this date suggests, they might be in similar straits, in sailors' regalia, manning battle stations, heading off to sea to fight the Japanese or the German U-boat, headed to damnation. They were, perhaps, projecting their battle fear by engaging first in domestic pursuits, to prove their superior masculinity to those already in uniform, thus to prove to themselves that they had nothing to fear but fear itself, even while outfitted in the fantastic ter-zoots, as later luny bags worn, without, to fashion earthly, any affinity, let alone any ill-fitting rags scorned in caustic asininity.

And Abraham Lincoln is quoted on the page thusly:

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people. Whenever they grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."

W. J. Cash had adopted this quote in his first "Moving Row" piece for The News, March 4, 1928, a search for definition to the term "Americanism". In it, he said:

"'The Government of the United States belongs to the people. They may change that government when they see fit. They may even, if they wish, destroy that government.' If you are literate, you'll recognize that for a statement--paraphrased--of Abraham Lincoln's. Laugh that off!"

Over seven years ago, in January, 2003, we speculated on the accuracy of the attribution of the quote, as we could not then find it among the Lincolniana, literate or illiterate versions. Now, lo and behold, we discover that, with the slight change to perfect accuracy afforded by the addition and transposition of a few words to restore it to its original verbatim status, more or less, in ineluctable erudition, as given in The News this date, the quote comes from no lesser speech than Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, delivered March 4, 1861--sixty-seven years to the day before Cash's paraphrase of it appeared in The News, now, providing it proper and complete attribution, by happenstance, not to become these days, confused, sixty-seven years to the time since the verbatim quote, more or less, appeared in The News.

Thus, we duly amend our old note to give Cash credit for his accurate paraphrase of the Lincoln quote. Laugh that off!

It may be later than you think, Fascists and Liars.

Once, in February, 1980, we were driving our little roadster through downtown Beverly Hills. We got behind a white Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow which bore a license tag which read, "WHATAZOO". We were prone to consider driving up beside the Rolls-Royce driver and shouting out, "Yeah, if only you knew."

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