The Charlotte News

Thursday, November 12, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Allied forces under British Lt.-Gen. Kenneth Anderson, commander of the British First Army, and an American contingent under the command of Maj.-Gen. Charles Ryder, moved rapidly across Algeria toward the border of Tunisia, preparing for a thrust into Tunisia to intercept Rommel and prevent Axis threat to the country. An RAF attack launched from Malta, 200 miles from Tunis, took place on a German airdrome located at Tunis, to eliminate any Axis air threat emanating from Tunisia. Meanwhile, Rommel's fleeing forces were now well along the coast road into Libya, between Bardia and Gambut, and continuing to retreat west, all forces having been either captured or evacuated from Egypt. The RAF continued to attack the fleeing forces.

The stage was now set for surrounding and enveloping Rommel's once proud panzer corps. The job would yet take several months, but Rommel was now not only surrounded, his tanks and men were cut off from Mediterranean supply, a problem which the RAF had already created since July by repeated bombing of the Nazi supply base at Tobruk, captured in late June from the Allies.

Already, the opening of this second front in North Africa was having its far flung repercussions on the Russian front, much to the delight of Josef Stalin and the beleaguered people of Stalingrad and Russia generally. It was reported from Turkey that fully 40 German divisions--about 600,000 men and a quarter of all troops previously deployed on the Russian front--were clogging rail lines into Yugoslavia, Hungary, Greece, and Italy, all in an effort to shore up Hitler's southern European coastal defenses against the potential for an Allied attack across the Mediterranean. The move into southern France, reported the previous day, drew up short of occupying Toulon, headquarters for the French fleet. The French commanders there had announced their intent to defend the port to the last against any invader. Hitler obviously took them at their word, to include any invader as part of the caveat. Thus wishing to avoid a confrontation between the French defenders and the German occupying troops, Hitler ordered the bypass of Toulon, obviously out of fear of precipitating any reactive spark, news of which might set off a chain reaction throughout formerly unoccupied France, already known by the Nazi High Command to be a powder keg of widespread dissent among the proactive forces of the Resistance during the months preceding the Allied invasion of French North Africa on Sunday.

Not only were troops being displaced from the Russian front to other spots in Europe along the Mediterranean, but airplanes as well were being redirected. The bombing at Stalingrad had suddenly diminished into light activity delivered by older Luftwaffe planes, inflicting only slight damage and no injuries, suddenly changed from the regular heavy Stuka and Messerschmitt raids characterizing the air activity on the front during the months preceding the North African invasion.

A report tells of the "Message to Garcia" delivered by Lt.-General Mark Clark, right hand man to Maj.-General Eisenhower, three weeks in advance of the Allied invasion of North Africa, to the friendly French forces in Algeria. The effort was to shore up support in the country and to identify friendly forces and weak points in defense in advance of the invasion. Rowan, in this instance, was successful.

The submarine-transported commando-supported task force under General Clark included future Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, then Brigadier General, Lyman L. Lemnitzer. General Lemnitzer was appointed Chairman in September, 1960 by President Eisenhower from his position held since July, 1957 of Chief of Staff of the Army and remained in the position under President Kennedy until shortly before the October, 1962 Cuban missile crisis erupted. Primarily because of dissatisfaction with advice provided in the early tenure of the Kennedy Administration regarding the wisdom of proceeding with the Bay of Pigs operation, complicated in turn by Lemnitzer's approval of Operation Northwoods in March, 1962--an operation involving, inter alia, use of anti-Castro Cubans deliberately posed as pro-Castro Cubans to engage openly in pro-Castro demonstrations and disruptions in the American South, as well as attributing falsely to Cuba attacks on Guantanamo and American passenger planes, actually drones, and other like activities designed to provoke a "Remember the Maine" type incident with Cuba thus to create justification and public support for the destabilization and removal of the Castro regime--, President Kennedy, having quickly refused his imprimatur to Northwoods, six months later asked for the resignation of General Lemnitzer from the Joint Chiefs and re-assigned him, effective in November, 1962, to be Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in Europe. He was replaced as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs by General Maxwell Taylor.

General Lemnitzer, coincidentally, died November 12, 1988, precisely 46 years after the appearance of this date's news of General Clark's secret diplomatic and intelligence gathering mission to Algeria.

And, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox used the occasion of the opening of the new Allied second front to urge from the locale of the big monster on the hill, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, an increase in shipbuilding activity by 20 to 25 percent over the previous eleven months, and doing so without either increase in hours or expenses added to the cost of production. Just how this additional efficiency was to be achieved was not explained in any ordinary terms by the Secretary. Apparently, he relied upon active cheerleading and the resultant adrenaline flow to workers actuating their focus more keenly to their assigned tasks. But, obviously, as the war continued, workers in shipyards, many of whom were formerly inexperienced at even the basic crafts of riveting and welding and ironwork, became more proficient at the occupation through daily repetition, and production did increase over time considerably. Too, the extraordinary rate of industrial accidents, undoubtedly generated by the dual factors of extraordinarily rushed production methods and the presence of large numbers of inexperienced workers, would decrease with time.

So, Secretary Knox, explanation or no, was not merely blowing through his hat a pipe dream for even better performance in the shipyards than the already record-breaking trends evident in the previous nine months or so.

On the editorial page, a piece from The American Mercury by Kingsbury Smith sets forth the basic outline being plotted by the State Department for the post-war world, one which was certainly implicitly followed during the immediate aftermath of the war, the deployment of the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe, its functional equivalent under the direction of General MacArthur for Japan, and the establishment in 1947 of the United Nations as a policing body and dispute resolution forum. The development of matters, of course, quickly took a turn inconsonant with the stated peaceful aims of the plan with the Soviet Iron Curtain erected in Berlin and gradually throughout Eastern Europe, in Poland, Hungary, the Balkans, the Baltic States, and Czechoslovakia, forming that which came to be known as the Cold War, as well as the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949 which led to the Korean War, the perceived threats to democracy posed by each Communist regime then leading to the Vietnam War.

Dorothy Thompson, picking up from the line in Churchill's speech of Monday that the end of the beginning was at hand, analyzes the effect of the North African invasion on the German deployment of forces in Europe, and concludes by warning Hitler not to flee Germany, that the cops were coming to get him soon enough, that he would not be received with hospitable arms as was Kaiser Wilhelm at the end of World War I by the Dutch.

Paul Mallon praises the successful deception and planning which went into the raid, while guessing that the next step might be logically to invade Sicily, something the British had expressed was capable of accomplishment, notwithstanding the presence of Nazi forces there, now sure to be supported in significantly greater numbers. He stresses that, contrary to Vice-President Wallace's speech stating a primary advantage from the attack to be the opening of a route of supply to Russia, such was not the primary goal or that which was achieved: the Bosporous Strait, north of the Dardanelles and leading directly to the Black Sea, still being too well patrolled by enemy shipping and airplanes to be useable as an approach route into Russia; and the rail line from Syria through Turkey remaining problematic from Turkey's insistence on neutrality, still in probable limbo, if less so after the Allies had played their hand with success in North Africa. The primary military objective, instead, he asserts, was the wresting of the North African coast, and with it control of the Mediterranean, from Axis control, thus opening the springboard for invasion of southern Europe--the "belly of the Axis", as Churchill dubbed it the day before.

"Landslide" indicates that Vichy was no more--that all of France was occupied and that Marshal Petain, having set Frenchmen free to defend themselves against the Nazi invader of the formerly declared unoccupied territory, bespoke the thoughts of most French people, that the Nazi invader was now completely an unacceptable intruder to the land which had once enjoyed as its motto, liberté, égalité, fraternité. France, it predicts, while caught between two powerful opposing forces, was on the verge of returning to its natural affinities and renewing its old friendships established in World War I with America and Great Britain.

"Broken Silence" echoes the remarks the day before of Winston Churchill and cites the leadership of both Churchill and Roosevelt in performing, amid public criticism and expressed anxiety over the apparent dire course of the war during the previous eleven months, their duties nevertheless with both the mum reserve of skilled statesmen and the behind-the-scenes alacrity of experienced commanders-in-chief. Churchill had recalled the words of Henry V on St. Crispin's Day, in describing the combined efforts of the British and Americans to actualize Operation Torch as that of a "band of brothers".

Such unrestrained praise from the press, while not familiar or usual during the dark period since Pearl Harbor, was now to become much more the practice and the stuff of which the legends of these two war leaders, Churchill and Roosevelt, would be made and transmitted into history.

"Heroics at Home" snaps at the Congress for its attitude of shoving the war to the backseat while unnecessary debate consumed time on such ancillary issues as the amendment to train young draftees for a year before deployment, now defeated, and the question of whether stubborn white supremacist campaigns among Southern politicians seeking to appease their nineteenth-century dwelling constituents would derail the legislative effort to eliminate poll taxes from the statute books of eight states. The editorial recommends getting back to the business at hand: waging the war and insuring that the war was won.

"Wine and Water" muses of the scrap between the WCTU and the Navy over whether champagne or the less virulent liquid, water, could be used to christen the new Liberty Ship Will Rogers, the widow of the humorist doing the honors. The reason for the temperance ladies' distress was the presence of four children being honored for conducting a campaign to collect scrap metal which helped to build the ship. The breath of champagne, its odor and splatter within their midst, the ladies apparently believed, would lead the children inexorably down the path of irrevocable perdition, turning them to profligate drunkards, if not overnight, surely then in due course. Just as the comedic repertoire of Mr. Rogers had turned them all obviously into decadent humorists and political satirists. Monkey see, monkey do at that age, any slight stimulus obviously being sufficient trigger of the monkey-do part. Which is also why they collected the scrap in the first place.

The Navy, however, voiced their own quibble, that Baptism of the ship by water provided, as assuredly as the fate of Davy Jones himself, a foredoomed damnation to the deep for the ship.

The wet forces, after all, finally prevailed in the intellectually inspired dialectic match of wits which ensued, and the traditional broken glass of the champagne bottle sent it down the ways successfully to the sea.

The ship survived the war, though torpedoed without damage or loss of life on April 12, 1945--the day President Roosevelt passed away at Warm Springs, Georgia.

Perhaps, Ida Ramsey and the ladies of the WCTU put some small curse on the ship for its insistently wayward-leading beginnings--or on the President for doing away with Prohibition.

In any event, it took only 28 days from the laying of its keel to ready the Liberty Ship for launch, at least minus time lost over the stir regarding the method of christening--the same time it takes, they say, to dry out from alcoholism at a clinic. You supply the moral.

And just why the WCTU was partial to Ida's, we cannot explain. Perhaps, some wiseacre had claimed that he had lost his Ida in the flood while seeking, still underage, to purchase some Old Harper outside the neighborhood liquor store, just to impress his girlfriend, and the good ladies determined to shame such juvenile offenders into remission of their wayward sin. After all, the transgression had most likely been the result in the first instance of having witnessed at too close range, or even just having observed in a newsreel, the christening of a ship with champagne. The little tyros might also have gotten the idea from attending one too many weddings or funerals, especially where Irishmen were also in attendance. But, there were only so many hours in the day to wage the work of Christian temperance; thus, the other dissolute activities would simply have to wait their turn for the good ladies to catch up in due course.

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