The Charlotte News

Monday, November 24, 1941

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Today's page offers little about which to comment. Between the quote of the day and the letter from one of the fairly regular letter writers to The News, J. B. O'Meara, comes to mind the line, "If God is on our side, he'll stop the next war."

In the United States, the coal strike threatened by John L. Lewis and his UMW was tentatively settled, with the union agreeing to accept arbitration in lieu of a strike. Mr. Jones, in black face down in the mines, would not hold up national defense.

In Japan, preparations for the sailing of the Task Force, set to embark from Hitokappu Bay the following day, continued.

In Washington, preparations began for a four-day war council, to start the next day, between Secretary of State Hull and Ambassador Nomura and special envoy Kurusu. The effort would be to bridge the ocean, if nothing else, to buy time. The terms, however, for the Japanese to offer, were intractably set. No bridge would be built; no time would be bought.

Last night, we discovered from a book that the dormitory in which we resided our freshman year in college in 1971-72 had been, precisely thirty years earlier, starting in May, 1942, one of ten dormitories on campus, all of that which is known as the upper and lower quads, utilized for one of the five pre-flight schools nationwide between spring, 1942 through 1945. These men had come from the country's elite campuses, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, among others, to train as Navy pilots. The attrition rate was high in the school, 25%. In all, 18,700 men were trained on the campus, including 360 Free French who arrived in May, 1944, just before D-Day.

The men termed the upper quadrangle "hell's half acre". We had always wondered about the fact ourselves that no grass ever grew on that quadrangle while we were there, and for years afterward, spookily so--as if it was attempting deliberately to make joinder with that familiar North Carolina ghost story titled "The Devil's Tramping Ground"; now, through the miracle of some agronomist, probably a graduate of N.C. State, grass grows plentifully there. Then, however, it was barren, windswept, except for the ghostly fall winds breaking through the trees.

It was rumored about during that freshman year that Thomas Wolfe had lived in the dormitory, built during his time on the campus. But that we have never confirmed, and that which we have confirmed casts considerable doubt on the rumor.

Well, we knew about the pre-flight school; we just never realized that the dormitory in which we had lived and slept that freshman year had been home to some of these men for a few months, just before they were shipped off to war to man the Flying Fortresses and other bomber wing squadrons. Many never came home again. Of the first third of those trained there, fully a quarter, some 1,500, were killed in action. Odds are, therefore, that of those, about 150 had lived in that dormitory wherein we had lived, as men still fought and died in Vietnam thirty years later, the same wherein we listened one spring day to the lottery call for our draft number, the last lottery call this country has ever held.

Remember it all, should you be a student there now in one of those residence halls on one of those five campuses. One day, perhaps especially in time of war, you may meet a ghost of one of those lost pilots on the hall. You will know then to say hello and ask how it all came to be, and how to stop it. It may help you on the upcoming pre-flight examination, and then to stop the next war.

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