The Charlotte News
Thursday, October 29, 1942
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports of the desperate campaign for the Caucasus Mountains, a battle joined with a third mighty participant, the insuperable crack troops under the command of General Winter, more experienced than the combination of all of the other generals participating in the war on any of the widely scattered fronts.
Ski and toboggan troops were now be employed by the Nazis in the mountain passes as their cave-dwelling counterparts froze in their temporary refuge from the blitzkrieg arrayed against them by frigid temperatures whipped by bitter winds. Meanwhile, Der Fuehrer was cozy back in Berlin, planning his world conquest after Baku and its rich oil reserves finally fell into his hands.
The Alaskan Highway was opened to traffic, reported Secretary of War Stimson, supplying the Allied personnel defending at Dutch Harbor and launching periodic bombing raids against the Japanese defensive positions being held along the Aleutians at Kiska, Agattu, and Attu.
Walter Clausen reports of the imperiled and surrounded Allied forces securing Henderson Field on Guadalcanal and speculates whether it would become another Bataan, ultimately overrun and captured. Actually, things had improved considerably for the Allies since supplies and fresh troops began reaching Guadalcanal over the previous 45 days. During the first forty days of the offensive, however, operations to secure the vital airfield were indeed tenuous.
And a sergeant in the Army from Gastonia, stationed at Fort Bragg, appeared to be home on leave after what he claimed was a harrowing adventure of derring-do worthy of a swashbuckling epic starring Clark Gable. The ineluctably trenchant sergeant had, according to his own report of the matter, stabbed two Japanese guards and effected his escape from a Philippine prisoner-of-war camp--presumably under fire the entire time, and probably swimming from Bataan to Australia strapped to the back of a giant sea turtle, using his beard hairs to fashion a harness and bridle, eating the while for survival shark meat the possessor of which had been duly dispatched by the sergeant with his bar' hands, strangling one of those gleaming kings of the deep each day with the facility which the ordinary man might have to exert to overcome a common trout or bass.
In fact, however, the adventure occurred only within the sergeant's cranial spaces. He was instead AWOL from his base. Now, he was a prisoner in fact, but in the Army brig.
In a disparate range of topics, the editorial column tackles in turn: Caesar Petrillo's triumph over justice and the continued unfettered playing on the radio of recorded music by the fortuities of a lenient (Hoover-appointed, anti-New Deal) Federal judge in Chicago who decided the whole matter was beyond Federal control as a labor dispute, while Congress now took its turn to stop Caesar's reign over the turntables of America; a revisit to Black Tuesday thirteen years earlier, the day the stock market crashed; a cryptic communique from London signaling that the outnumbered Allied forces on Guadalcanal were about to be equalized by some mysterious naval contingent, the origin of which becomes the source of News musing; the wary suggestion posed by the 187 labor strikes involving 80,000 workers in September, though only a small fraction of the labor force, indicative, with mounting numbers of men being taken by the armed forces, that there might soon come a crossroads which could cause harm to the war production effort, despite the steadily rising rate of production during 1942; and, finally bemoaning the fact that the rationing of coffee, limiting each person 15 or over to one pound per five weeks, meant ultimately that there would be left one of every five weeks without a single cup available, else, to fill the void, resort would need be made to the worst of the grounds remaining in the percolator or some form of ersatz product.
Somehow, upon looking at it all, maybe the topics were not so disparate after all. The shortage of coffee to enable a sober, wide awake view of this perilous world where the dictatorial, extortionate methods of labor bosses might win or lose the war against dictatorships, where it had taken a war to climb fully from the depths of the Depression brought on by over-speculation in the twenties, a war still quite in danger of being lost both on the warfronts themselves and on the home front by too much insistence on war profiteering and not enough cooperative effort to defeat the totalitarians threatening world freedom. Coffee, more coffee.
Of course, rather than dishwater percolations or ersatz forms derived from ground nuts or boiled shoe leather, they might have turned to the drinking of tea.
In any event, speaking of coffee, we note the piece from The Christian Science Monitor on the ordeals and misadventures of buses and bus drivers in and around Washington, making special mention of the bus headed, without a destination marquee, to the Watergate concerts, offering to pick up the government stenographer ladies along the way, even if their destination was elsewhere, forcing them cheerfully to decline amid giggles at the solicitous offer of the driver for a ride.
Well, imagine if you were her, or one of them, with the prospect of Greater German productivity having you down waiting for the bus in wartime Washington, then only to be offered a ride by a wise-cracking driver to the Watergate. Wouldn't you decline the ride? Or, would you accept and put your foot on the treadle, bend way over to answer the phone, and accidentally erase his incriminating tapes?
Regardless, just as with the example provided by the frustrated driver who took his cashbox and unceremoniously announced his leave from the employ of the bus company entirely, all for the refusal of the passengers to pay the slightest heed to his requests to stand clear of blocking avenues of egress, there are days when, we confess, we feel much the same way.
Yet, we still have not a whit of empathy for Mr. Nixon.
"Well, look, didn't they do it, too? It's all well and good for them, but, no, not for Nixon. You see how it works, don't ye? Liberals."
No, not the way you did it.
"Coffee, more coffee, Lydie."
See how they run, see how they run.
We assume, incidentally, that the Herblock referred to Mrs. Roosevelt's trip to England, the spirit and the diplomacy of which are applauded by Raymond Clapper as he remarks in a postscript that fellow columnist Westbrook Pegler doth protest a bit too much the First Lady's odyssey. Whether or not Herblock intended it so, Mrs. R's "My Day" column of this day stimulates considerable, indeed--especially as it was on the thirteenth anniversary of Black Tuesday--downright spooky, notions.
Ye Fala?
Framed Edition
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