The Charlotte News

Saturday, November 7, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports for the first time by name the locales of the fighting west and east of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, that the fighting on the western side had taken place west of the Matanikau River and at Point Cruz and on the eastern side at Koli Point, where the fight continued after heavy losses suffered in the west by the Japanese. Again, these fresh reports with considerable detail, only two to four days old, demonstrated a marked improvement in open communication from the Pacific battle fronts, especially from the Solomons, over the bulk of information to which the press had been accustomed in the previous months of fighting.

From Libya came word that, as the British Eighth Army pressed on to the west of Matruh, fully 70% of Rommel's desert troops were either surrounded or captured. It was the beginning of the end for Rommel.

Meanwhile, speculation from German radio continued on the purpose of the reported 125-ship Allied armada heading into the Mediterranean off Gibraltar. The asserted belief that North Africa was to be used as a launching pad for a second front invasion of the continent was quite accurate. But whether the ships were bound for North African ports or southern France or Italy remained unknown to the Germans. The Allies neither confirmed nor denied the German reports of the presence of the fleet.

An unwilling Czech conscript from the German army captured by the Russians told Leland Stowe that morale was low among the Germans now facing a second winter on the Rzhev front, that, to a man, thoughts had turned to going home, not fighting--not shivering in the cold as the lice bit hard at them to deliver its typhus to their bloodstreams, as in the previous long winter.

The editorial page begins with an accurate assessment of the importance of a quick and decisive win over Rommel's forces in North Africa, enabling control from that point of the Mediterranean and a quick thrust into Sicily. The strategy outlined in the book of Lt.-Col. W. F. Kernan, Defense Will Not Win the War, urging the Allies to invade Italy in the spring of 1942, would be followed, but not before the spring of 1943.

"Wrong Medicine" condemns the recent beatings in Kannapolis and Charlotte delivered to Jehovah's Witnesses, suggests that, while the practices of the group were antithetical to the war aims of the country, the correct procedure to limit their activities lay in the courts, not in the streets.

Paul Mallon and Raymond Clapper continue to pick over Tuesday's election, Mallon offering that the reason for the Republican success was dissatisfaction in the country with both how the war was being prosecuted and the extent of reform programs, that while the country was not growing conservative, it was not in the mood either to have the reforms obtained by the farmer and by labor in the thirties extended further, that instead existing reforms were desired to be continued and made to work more effectively.

Clapper cautions Republicans not to use the victories in the election to throw monkey wrenches into the war production effort, such as the Republican leader who had counseled miners not to accept the shift of their numbers from the gold mines to the copper mines, that the direction of labor by the government was compromising constitutional freedom and should not be allowed to continue lest the country become as Nazi Germany.

That, as the tool and die makers of crucial Detroit industry struck, as pointed out on the front page.

Whatever the cause and course of the Republican turn in the election, it was clear that there were a great number of disgruntled people in the country at this point in time, eleven months after Pearl Harbor. All was not the picture of unity, solidly behind the President and the Congress in the prosecution of the war or in the direction of domestic policy. The post-Pearl Harbor unity and show of patriotism were largely dissipated and gone by February, as the steady daily drone of the dreary war news from the Pacific began to convince the average citizen that the war would not be over in a few short weeks, and perhaps not even in a few short years, as the mounting shortages of goods hit home to create daily sacrifices in every household, to convince that life would not be as usual for some time to come.

Yet another letter writer carps at Tuesday's editorial which found distasteful the song "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition". While assuming falsely that the editorialist, presumably Burke Davis, found the song unsavory because he had discovered its author was not Chaplain Maguire but rather Chaplain Forgy, the writer goes on to heap praise on the song as a war tune with "punch".

Is the writer, in sarcastically portraying the editorialist as a Deems Taylor, the music critic, not casting himself in the role of one of the three blind mice? Is he not allowing himself to become Petrushka, with strings being pulled by a popular song?

We ourselves find the tune sticking with us after five days since listening to it, annoyingly and cloyingly so as we go shopping in the market, following us through the checkstand, out into the parking lot, giving chase as we try to run from it--not therefore without kinship to that old Doublemint gum ad of the 1960's. And so for that reason alone, we find its hypnotically melodic content quite detestable--sugary sweet and banal. We thus wholeheartedly agree with the editorial--praise your lord privately, and pass your ammunition if you must for the sake of defense of the country, pursuant to the social contract, but, for God's sake, don't mix the two and try to do both at once. And certainly, whatever you do, don't write and record a happy-sounding song about it, full of spirited melody to set alongside, incongruously, such gruesome lyrics, all while you realize as you listen that if anybody on the front ever actually sang that song, they probably were dead within minutes afterward--if not from enemy fire for the song's distraction, from the song itself. It is absolutely hypocritical and dumb, both the song and the sentiment. We don't begrudge Chaplain Forgy for the expression: apparently, it was uttered in the heat of the moment of the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor. But the idiot who then took the expression and made it into the song should probably have been sent to the front immediately, without training--that, or tried under the 1918 Sedition Act for interfering with the training and recruitment of the troops.

When you go to war and kill your enemy, you are fighting for country, and only country--not for some god, whether named Jehovah or Allah or some other variant on the theme. God did not make you do it. Your country did.

There is no such thing as a "holy war". All war is quite unholy. So is murder.

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