The Charlotte News
Monday, July 28, 1941
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: "'Anarchy'" says much--even through 1972. But before the right-wing, pro-Vietnam lobby gets its hopes too high, we are not suggesting an equation between the anti-war protesters of the Vietnam era and the America First isolationists of World War II--hardly. While we would not suggest a full disconnect, albeit a generation removed, in terms of the quite natural self-preservationist interests projected by each of those groups, the identity, even between parent and child, was tenuous, if not non-existent?
"'Anarchy'" suggests that, because of the America First Committee's favoring the Vichy coalition with Japan in its aggressive move into Indochina, there was essential coalition also by it and like groups, such as the American Bundists, with Nazi Germany. To complete the equation, the identity of Vichy as a Hitler stooge was, of course, without dispute, except perhaps in the most dissembling halls and parlors of occupied France.
In the war protests of the latter 1960's, there were ample measures of disgust, projected by each side to the other, which might have provoked comparison of the other by either to Hitlerites or Nazi Youth. But whether each might properly be identified as such may be determined only by variance in perception, depending on the side one found one's self at the time of the engagement. It was not unlike a house divided against itself which nearly no longer stood.
"Cloud in the East" had fairly predicted it August 6, 1940. "Bumble Plan", (and perhaps, too, "Weary Road"?), August 13, 1940, had fairly cautioned of the likely result of not checking the Japanese aggression then and there, at Shanghai.
But, as we have pointed out, the problem was lack of preparation during the isolationist Thirties, the ignoring too much of Hitler's aggression since 1935, and his tacit rescission of the Versailles Treaty in building up armament, nearly since the day he became Chancellor in 1933. The United States was, as a result, not prepared militarily to fight Hitler in 1940, let alone tread the great political hill which had to be climbed to obtain the full support of a still very divided country on the topic.
Japan, as we again note, was our ally in World War I. And while having abrogated the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, limiting the tonnage of ships allowed even to the Allies in an effort to preempt war by dissuading the forging of the implements of war, by beating them to ploughshares as it were, Japan was not perceived as so great a danger as that posed by Germany's and Central Europe's instability after the recurringly disintegrative Balkanization brought on by not just World War I, but also by the continual 54-card pick-up, Jokers wild, being played in Europe for centuries before the Great War to end all wars.
Was there not also substantial relationship, philosophically, should one allow any such thing any more descriptive credit than the ramblings of sophists and Philistines, between the subject of "An Intruder" in the dust, August 9, 1940, and the America Firsters and Bundists? Thus, did the most sedulous fangs of the Firsters, Vindicators, and their like, not protract most virulently into the South? And therein, once puncturing the skin, strike the vein most critically in the most vulnerable region for sympathetic reaction to its bane, the Deep South?
Whatever the proper object of identification of the Firsters in 1941, whether anarchists or protestants of what they perceived, in the government's new policy of cessation of economic relations resulting from the Japanese incursion to Southeast Asia, to be anarchy, it is the case that this incursion into Indochina during this week in history was the very grain of sand which led to the accretion down river, the internal revolt of Ho Chi Minh and his small band of ardent followers in the jungles, the Vietminh, which in turn led 24 years later to that which we know as the War in Vietnam.
That war began with Ho's forrces first attempting to extricate the French occupation post World War II and the defeat of the Japanese, leading to the fall of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the promised July, 1956 elections of the 1954 Geneva Conference to unite the country, then refused, with the active consent of the Eisenhower Administration and former isolationist, Nazi-as-Communist-bulwark theorist, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, over concern that the Vietminh, and thus Ho as a Communist, would prevail; leading then to the Cong guerilla warfare which followed against the continued government of the Diems in the South, the continued division of the country between North and South, the sending of military advisors by Eisenhower in 1958 to train South Vietnamese troops against the Communists in the North, those erroneously thought to be sympathetic with the Red Chinese, the fear of a new Korea, the fear of something called the Domino Theory, a fear generating out of World War II and the Japanese incursion of this week in history leading inexorably to Pearl Harbor--an entirely natural fear for those who had fought preternaturally in those Pacific theater jungles between 1942 and 1945.
All of which led to an incrementally increased commitment of advisors and materiel to South Vietnam, until the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the attack on the U.S.S. Maddox by two North Vietnamese torpedo boats on August 2, 1964, followed by a suspected, but in fact non-existent, torpedo attack on the U.S.S. Turner Joy and U.S.S. Ticonderoga on August 4, finally prompting full-scale deployment of troops in early 1965.
In reaching that decision of full commitment of troops to Southeast Asia, it could not have escaped the attention of Lyndon Johnson or of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara--who had, pursuant to his duties during his stint in the armed forces in World War II, assessed the efficiency of B-29 bombing missions led by Curtis LeMay over Tokyo in 1944--, that the sinking of the Athenia with American passengers aboard, in early September, 1939 within hours of the start of World War II, that the sinking of the Zamzam, bound for the west coast of Africa in April, 1941 with three-quarters of its passengers being Americans, or that the sinking of the Robin Moor on May 21, 1941, also with American passengers, had not caused immediate retaliation by the United States, and, at least within the 20-20 aftermath perceptions of many, that to which such appeasement had led.
Vietnam claimed 58,000 American lives, 34,000 of whom died between 1966 and 1968. Of the remaining 24,000 deaths, 20,500 occurred after Richard Nixon became President, promising, as his primary 1968 campaign plank, a "secret plan" to end the war, a plan which took his entire first term in office to accomplish in secret, one which then led to the downfall to the Communists of South Vietnam a mere two years and three months after the secret plan had resulted in the Paris Treaty of January, 1973--a downfall eight months after the broad sweep of that secret plan had led to Nixon's own downfall as well, on August 8, 1974.
The end result of this 15-year debacle, in other words, beginning with American involvement during the Eisenhower Administration, ending it during the Nixon Administration, was only that which the entire effort of the Vietminh from 1941 forward had intended to bring about, the unification of Vietnam under a communist regime. Yet, 58,000 Americans, millions of Vietnamese, lost their lives in the process over the time to prevent it, to prevent home rule of a sovereign country, to prevent empire from intruding on their homes.
How would we feel were we invaded and told what to do by outsiders? How did we feel when King George imposed stamp taxes without representation in Parliament? Who threw the tea in Boston Harbor? Were they communists?
Too many died.
Many others were fortunate, for age, for high draft lottery numbers, or for physical ailments of one sort or another, not to have to go.
We may only hope that we shall never again as a land have to endure the tension and disruption to our lives which such a draft endues. One's mind never quite gets shed of it, in truth--that is, even the threat to one's general security which one perceives when one is draft eligible, or about to become so, at a tender age, tender in mercy, tender in foot. The rearview mirror, looking forward down the road, is constantly in tow to one's mind bent to it, at least subconsciously, through its duration:
Will one be hardened by a jungle fight to the death, by the viewing of one's friend whose face is now indiscernible from the mud and muck surrounding it, as the war stories of those returning reach one's ears?
Or will one be permitted to finish the four-year study afforded by the serene, serenading halls of academe?
But, even so, then what? Will the study wind up a waste in a rice paddy, bloodied by one's own last savage breath, gasping for home and country against the enemy who took you there?
And if escaping the dreadful answers to these questions finally, is one's luck, by dint of either the mere fortuity of age, or the mere fortuity of the rock and the roll and arch and depth of the reach-in to a barrel in Washington full of 365 birth dates on one fine spring day, to be perceived later, by those who were volunteers or who were not so fortunate, as the equivalent of cowardice in the face of the Enemy? Is it to be perceived as the product of a spoiled, weak, and heretical generation, one lacking that quintessential, impenetrable substance the mettle of which is thought too often generationally only to be tested by active combat on the front lines, facing actual shrapnel?
And, thus, is the barrel forever to be turned again and again without learning the lesson taught to us by the dead who died too young properly to have lived in the first instance?
Well, as the Kilimanjaros, out amid the Himalayas, call to us now ever more pressingly, we must go first to the fields and pick the cotton, bale the hay, to insure provender and clothing for winter's reckoning frosts and winds to come.
Framed Edition
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