The Charlotte News
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 30, 1941
TWO EDITORIALS
Double Talk
President's Cleverness Makes Our Policy a Mockery
From the remarks of Admiral Stark and President Roosevelt, it now appears that American warships are all over the Atlantic, and not merely the western half, on "patrol." Their function is supposed to be the spotting of Nazi submarines, surface and aircraft, and warning "all shipping," i.e., the British.
For a more amazing example of double-talking you have to look to the current antics of Russia,which apparently means to join the Axis and fight it in the same breath.
What we are doing is more specifically and clearly an act of war than convoy would be, but the President dodges the latter because the isolationists have been bawling opposition to it.
The blunt fact is that we are already at war with Adolf Hitler and that we are daily committing acts of war against him. What, in the last analysis, do you think is the real difference between advising a British warship where it can find and sink a Nazi submarine, and sinking it ourselves? And precisely what is our navy going to do when (as it certainly will) it at length comes upon the wolves at work on a convoy?
It doesn't suit Hitler's purpose to start shooting. at us as yet. Like our isolationists, he prefers for the shooting to start only after he has destroyed England and got control of its navy and the Atlantic.And the upshot of it is that we wage war ineffectively.
The sole excuse for it is that the people are still bemused by isolation nonsense. If they really are unable to face facts, then the quicker we know it and resign ourselves, the better. But in reality, the thing hasn't been tested out by any candid appeal of the President to their common sense.
Pretty Thin
Darlan Is Merely Trying To Ease France Into Axis
It is more than a little odd that Admiral Darlan only now recalls that the British tried to abandon the French at Dunkerque.
It is so odd, indeed, that we may assume with a good deal of confidence that the story, which he is now having peddled to the French by the Vichy radio, is a fabrication out of the whole cloth.
Darlan is the man who once solemnly gave Churchill his word of honor that he would himself sink every French warship rather than let one of them fall into Nazi hands. And who then connived with Petain and Pierre Laval to turn the fleet over to Hitler. In self-dense the British had to strike the French ships, and ever since Darlan has been trying to use that incident to incite the French to hatred of the English.
He hasn't accomplished much in that direction--not enough, anyhow, to make it certain that the French people would stand for an attempt to turn Vichy into an all-out Axis partner to the end of opening the way to an attack on Gibraltar and the use of the French fleet against the British.That is what Hitler is reported to be demanding.
And Darlan's story is pretty plainly just another desperate effort somehow to get the French people angry enough to make such a move feasible.