The Charlotte News

TUESDAY, APRIL 29, 1941

THREE EDITORIALS

Fair Enough

Lindbergh Is Not Entitled To Status of a Sacred Cow

Lindbergh deserves credit for having conducted himself with dignity in the matter of his resignation as a reserve colonel in the Air Corps. He is thoroughly out of sympathy with the views and purposes which now prevail in the Army, and his presence on active duty would be very dubious--not because anybody thinks he would be disloyal but because his views would be certain to breed dissension.

But if he behaved himself with dignity it does not follow that he has the ground for grievance which he suggests.

To call him a quisling is thoroughly unjust, for there is no evidence to bear out any such view. But to think and say that he is an appeaser--the historical meaning of Copperhead--is entirely justified.

The nation has adopted, by majority suffrage, a foreign policy of all possible aid to Britain, a policy of trying to insure her victory. Lindbergh opposes that policy. England, he tells the people of the country, is certain to be defeated. And what we ought to do is to abandon her cold, retract our commitments, and bring pressure to bear on her to yield to a so-called "negotiated peace"--i.e., abject surrender to the slave system of Adolf Hitler.

It is not only a proposal for a coldblooded and cynical betrayal. It seems to most competent observers to be admirably calculated to leave us without a friend in the world and to place the British navy, and with it, the command of the Atlantic, in Hitler's hands.

Lindbergh has a perfect legal right to advocate it, nevertheless. And nobody has challenged that right. But no man who makes proposals like that may demand that he and his motives shall not be subject to criticism.

Tank Line

Mass Production of War Engines Begins at Detroit

 

According to the Washington Merry Go-Round, when opposition leaders in the House of Commons asked Mr. Churchill why Greece hadn't been sent tanks, he had to confess that there weren't enough to go around for all the fronts.

Where were the tanks the United States was supposed to furnish? Not a single American tank had yet come to Britain, said Mr. Churchill.

But he will not have to wait long now. Near Detroit, where there was cornfield nine months ago, a Chrysler factory five blocks long has at last begun to turn out the M-3 twenty-five-ton tank by mass production methods. There are no more if, ands, and buts about the matter. They are coming off the assembly line now, ready to roll--and to shoot.

The machine is said to be far more versatile and far more heavily armed than any tank of the same size that Hitler possesses. And large numbers will be produced each week.

Hitler prophesied that the American industrial machine would not get going on war materials until the war had already been won by himself. He may yet prove to have been right. But so far as tanks go, he'll have to hurry. For, with what is already complete and about to be completed, the production rate will soon eclipse Germany's.

Grim Words

Which Show a Realistic Attitude Toward Germany

 

Mr. Churchill was in a grim mood.

"There are less than seventy million malignant Huns, some of whom are curable and others killable . . . "

It is a far cry from the mealy-mouthed attempt to distinguish between the German people and their leaders which characterized the utterances of such men as Chamberlain in the early days of the war.

And it is a fundamentally more realistic approach to the German problem. Nobody leads any people save by giving them what they admire and desire. And if Hitler has been able to get control of Germany it is precisely because the great body of the Germans have admired and desired what he proposed. There have been many thousands of individuals in Germany who did not desire and want what Hitler is now doing, and many more who did not desire all of it.

But that he is the incarnation of the will and wish of the German nation as a whole is as certain as anything can be.

And Hun has now been proved to be the correct name for that nation.

It has placed itself outside the pale of common humanity with its attempt to enslave mankind by terror. And the world will never be safe again until it has been destroyed beyond all chance of rising to do the same thing over again.


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