The Charlotte News

Wednesday, January 21, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

On the warfronts, the page reports that while the Japanese launched an assault on Singapore's surrounding fortifications, Domei saying the bombers had encroached within six miles of the city, the RAF successfully struck back, shooting down 13 planes. In the meantime, RAF bombers assaulted Japanese airdromes at Kuala Lumpur, until recent days allied territory, now the object of attacks to eliminate Japanese-held military installations. As the Japanese had not had time to erect bases in these areas, they were obviously left behind by the evacuating British. As to why the British did not blow up the hangars to avoid the prospect of their falling into enemy hands, as they were doing consistently to the oil wells in Borneo, is subject to guesswork. Likely, the notion was that they would act as an easy trap for Japanese planes to be concentrated and subject to attack from the air. Obviously, there simply wasn't time to plow under airstrips themselves, and doing so would have only allowed the quick laying of make-shift runways in any event. Besides, accomplished pilots could land on any flat level strip of ground. We make assumption that the landing strips were any more than bulldozed ground in the first instance. So, the notion was likely that it was better to leave the strips as they were, to enable easy targeting. At least, they knew where the Japanese would be, not out in some "vacant sea".

And just as calculated by Roosevelt and Hull in advance of Pearl Harbor, the concentration of troops in southern Indochina, having spilled over to Thailand quickly after the attack, had enabled the Japanese now to utilize airbases established in Thailand to attack points in Burma, with the goal of cutting off the Burma Road supply route into China, one of the chief objects of the overall Japanese strategy. By capturing the lightly fortified coastal city of Tavoy, the Japanese had split in half the narrow Tenasserim Peninsula, the strip of Burmese land dipping south off of the main portion of Burma into the Malay Peninsula. Moulmein, where the Burma girl was settin', to the north along the Tenasserim peninsula, appeared the next objective. A short hop from there was the key to the Burma Road, Rangoon, the capital of Burma on the southern coast. These objectives would soon be taken and the British forced to retreat to India.

There were also attacks along the Bismarck Archipelago in Papua New Guinea, at Kavieng on New Ireland, near the Japanese Mandates, the former German islands of the Carolines provided Japan as part of the Armistice in World War I. The attack suggested a widening of Japanese operations into the Australian and New Zealand territory.

General MacArthur's American-Filipino forces fought fiercely to hold their position along Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines, inflicting substantial Japanese casualties while suffering "moderate losses".

On the Russian front, the Russians re-captured the salient at Mozhaisk, formerly a Bosch stronghold for 100,000 troops during the three months it was in Nazi hands, and were now headed along the highway to Smolensk, to chase der Fuehrer back to Berlin. Being the chicken-livered piece of insane trash that he was, he wouldn't have stayed and waited for the inevitable. He had to prolong the matter until the Soviets chased him finally all the way to the bunker in Berlin itself, three years and several million lost lives hence, ultimately to the fate he chose for himself the day in 1933 he became dictator.

In domestic news, Donald Nelson, newly-appointed production czar, ordered production of passenger vehicles to cease as of February 1 and appointed a long-time associate of Henry Ford, Ernest Kanzler, the sub-czar of conversion of automobile factories to war production. Kanzler's operations would be established in Detroit to coordinate production among the major automakers, Ford, Chrysler, GM, and Studebaker.

"Navy Censors" tells, in the context of the sinking of the Malay and torpedoing of the Allan Jackson within sight of the North Carolina coast, of the delicate balancing between secrecy to protect against revelation to the enemy of ship movements and the need for relevant information properly to inform the public of the danger extant and to instill therefore the determination both to fight and to produce in aid of the war effort. While, after Pearl Harbor, no one could much any longer doubt the facts that Hitler and Tojo intended to conquer the world, with Hitler as the ultimate Boss, still, the matter had not hit so close to home as in the previous week, with repeated U-boat attacks off the East Coast from Nova Scotia to Long Island to North Carolina.

"Volunteering" tells of the ironic notion that volunteers to the armed forces had become so plentiful since Pearl Harbor that the practice of accepting them for service was halted in Charlotte, as they were confusing the orderly process of drafting men and assigning them to duties which suited their particular skills, a quite different quandary from the one eventually faced by the United States in the latter sixties with Vietnam raging before a public who understood little, if any, of the strategic significance of the conflict in world terms. There was, simply put, a failure to communicate--perhaps because the explanation was considered so complex that there was little point. But merely captioning the idea the "domino theory" and proceeding to draft men to fight in such a conflict did not work for very long. That is not surprising. The country has never had patience for long with war which did not immediately and obviously threaten them at their back doors.

Amy Bassett speaks winsomely and wistfully of the potential return of the horse and buggy days as automobile production ceased and tires for the old ones were strictly rationed, with the problem attendant with it that the younger members of the human species had become acquainted only with the internal combustion replacement for the rig and knew nothing of the complexities of the horse and buggy, citing her eighteen year old son as Exhibit A. That with which she did not reckon, however, was that, with the passing of the slower time, came a newly ingrained emergent complex, the need for speed. When one travels for long distances at 70 m.p.h., say 400 miles, without stopping, one immediately grasps the idea when confronted with even a short stretch of road where the speed limit is 35 or 25. The car suddenly feels as if it is hardly moving at all. The dynamic of that process is precisely what grips us collectively in our lives with the advent of the automobile and airplane age. We wind up with little tolerance for any form of sloth. Sometimes, there is a need for speed with efficiency, but the loss of the appreciation for the finer aspects attendant with sloth, and the failure to appreciate its ameliorative facets, to enable the human mind to grasp things more deeply and thoroughly, more poetically and symbolically, is one which cannot be supplanted by speed and more speed, potentially an addictive habit to the point of insanity. Old Stewball has his merits.

Meanwhile, Raymond Clapper speaks of old cavalry officer Harry Truman and his committee uncovering the numerous abuses and shortfalls in production which had preceded Pearl Harbor since the President's May 27 declaration of a national emergency and the various inartful attempts at coordination during the interim. The whole thing had resembled a sixth grader we once knew who could do many things, mentally and physically, with skill and aplomb, but could neither shoe a horse nor do a jumping jack, let alone both at the same time. It took practice. Harry, himself having been shown, had to show them.

And in a letter to the editor from the WCTU is printed a petition to the Governor to close all North Carolina ABC stores in the interest of the public welfare in time of national emergency. That was a brilliant suggestion. Then, instead of state regulation and control, the bootlegger system could thrive again, with it being ripe for introduction of Fifth Columnists to soldiers to obtain secrets on troop movements from their inebriate customers, and, by it, start a whole new form of bootlegging, likely something which had already been taking place in North Carolina's dry counties having military significance, such as Mecklenburg. "Here's a pint, my friends. And by the way, where you boys headed next? --That right? Well, go kill some Japs for me, mein herrs--that is, gut sirs." Anyway, we hear that by the 1960's they were serving vodka at the WCTU.