The Charlotte News

Saturday, August 21, 1943

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports the fall of the Aleutian Island of Kiska to the Allies after intense bombardment for three weeks. The occupying force, which began landing August 15, consisted of American and Canadian troops who met no resistance in taking the island. The Japanese had abandoned Kiska by July 28, probably escaping, surmised Allied command, through fog. They had held it since June, 1942, with troops numbering as high as 10,000.

President Roosevelt, attending the Quebec Conference, and Canadian Prime Minister MacKenzie King, issued a joint statement indicating that the occupation cleared the last remnants of Japanese soldiers from North America.

Apparently heading for Konotop, a key railway junction, the Russian Army took Lebedin, seventy miles southeast of Konotop and a hundred miles northwest of Kharkov.

Berlin radio reported a new thousand-mile front opened by the Russians in the north between Leningrad and Murmansk. The report was as yet unconfirmed by the Russians.

Both naval and night and day bombing from the air struck Southern Italy, with heavy raids conducted against Naples and Avellino Provinces, and again at Gioia Tauro, just northeast of Messina on the west coast of Italy, as well as a naval attack on Scalea, sinking seven ships.

The Allies had now dubbed the area in the toe of Italy "Hell's Triangle".

A map of Italy on the inside page shows the various targets, as defined on this particular map by the crop regions of Italy.

A local American Legion Post sent a letter to FDR asking that, before he would accept the Italian Government’s declaration of Rome as an open city, he should first determine whether the Italians had desisted in bombing and shelling Belgrade and Zagreb, Yugoslavia when those two cities had been declared open.

Art Burgess reports from Munda on New Georgia of the record-time operation by the Navy Seabees in smoothing the bomb-pocked runway of the airfield at Munda, objective of the operation which had begun June 30. It had taken only three days to repair, and planes were flying to and from it within eight days of the taking of Munda.

A report on the front page from Algiers indicated that French women, deported to Germany to work in salt mines, were dying at the rate of 300 per month. Death by firing squad was the penalty for even minor transgressions of camp rules.

On the editorial page, "Unemployment" indicates that an AFL report had predicted between seven and twelve million unemployed at war's end, when war industries would be shut down and forced to close or convert back to civilian production.

"The Slowdown" reports that after the countywide beer and wine ban on weekends had been implemented, cases of drunkenness in Mecklenburg County courts had dramatically decreased.

"Dutch Smiles" finds Holland's quisling puppet leader, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, up in arms regarding the tendency of late, especially since the fall of Mussolini, to sport grins while walking the streets. The losing of the war was a solemn business. No smiling was allowed.

Drew Pearson devotes most of his column to the delayed gift to China of two Liberty ships, originally scheduled to be presented during Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s visit to the United States during the winter. They had finally been presented.

The reason for the delay, explains Mr. Pearson, was the demand by China that Chinese seamen onboard the ships be paid British wages. Britain resisted because of the implications for its own ships which sailed many Chinese laborers at low wages, during both war and peacetime.

Finally, after much parley back and forth, the British had agreed. The Chinese could be paid the British wage, suggesting a new era of equality in pay on the high seas?

Probably not, offers Mr. Pearson. The British could revert after the war to their old ways for the reason that the agreement in the first place was not based on a desire to accord equal pay but rather derived from the fact of heavy desertions of Chinese seamen from British merchant ships in American ports, carrying vital war goods.

Samuel Grafton again looks at the ad hoc approach of the American military to conquering lands, conquering without any preconceived idea of what to do with those lands once conquered, other than to use them for launching pads for more conquering. Mr. Grafton offers praise to the spirit in the sense that it enabled Americans to fight without reflection, but also offers criticism of it for not being consonant with the spirit of that part of Europe which wanted democracy and freedom.

Raymond Clapper again urges Congress, after the summer recess, to take control of foreign policy, so that it would not be solely determined by presidential edict at the cost of reluctant and questioning public support. The question Mr. Clapper foresees to be uppermost in the post-war governance of former Axis and occupied nations is how effectively to disarm them and maintain them in that status.

Should force be used?

He predicts that force would have to be used to keep Germany, Japan, and Italy disarmed. And force meant weapons inspectors and bombing fleets on the hair-trigger ready. (Not to mention missiles with nuclear warheads to be poised at aim at each side--as it turned out, East and West.)

Thus, the Congress, insists Mr. Clapper, needed to begin to address this critical issue.

His own position was to favor force to insure disarmament. But, he argues, use of force nevertheless would not be inconsistent with democratic aims in these countries. In America, after all, he suggests by analogy, it was illegal to carry concealed weapons. Yet, Americans enjoyed free speech, the free vote, and the ability to earn a living freely.

Yet, did all Americans, really?

Dorothy Thompson attributes good planning as the chief reason for the victory in Sicily in only 38 days. The Tunisian Campaign had seasoned the American troops and, along with the Canadians and British, now formed a well-oiled fighting force.

That the Allied armies were able to bypass in lower mountainous terrain Mt. Etna, filling half the breadth of Sicily, was, she says, a prime example of the well-thought strategy which won the campaign in relatively short order, the struggle having taken fully fourteen of the thirty-eight days to get around Mt. Etna's formidable natural defenses afforded the Axis.

She finds the success in Sicily, at a time when Russia was enjoying unprecedented success during the spring and summer months, joined with the ongoing Quebec Conference, to be propitious events for the Allies.