Site Ed. Note: The front page continues the war news of the previous day, offering that the Battle for Tunisia had entered a critical phase as the Allies drove a wedge between the Nazi encampments at Bizerte and Tunis. The Nazi airfield at Bizerte was reported to be a shambles with the Luftwaffe considering removing for the present to safer territory in Sicily. The Allies continued pressing their spearheads at Mateur and Djedeida. The Axis sought a more secure beachhead south of Tunis at Gabes, approximately mid-way down the coast between Tunis and Tripoli.

In Russia, fighting continued for the re-capture of Rzhev by the Russian crack troops against an exhausted and dying Wehrmacht. Hitler registered a desperate appeal to his lost army to maintain the position at Rzhev, that losing it was tantamount to losing “half of Berlin”.

It may have been the only thing Der Fuehrer ever uttered in his life with the least bit of prophecy to it--setting aside his self-fulfilling prophecies aplenty--though prophetic in this instance only of his and his Party’s doom and his country’s enduring sufferance of their collective post-World War I hatred for themselves, a sufferance which his and his Party’s self-loathing would cause them through 45 years of division between East and West after World War II.

In domestic news, hearings immediately began in Boston to investigate the terrible fire at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub on Saturday. One man, who had lost his wife in the fire just 85 hours earlier, nevertheless testified before the committee, stating that he and his wife were seated within a few feet of the fire’s origin, that the flames were chasing them so fast, spread by the draperies and other flammable material on the walls and ceiling, that as they left the lounge it was ten feet behind them, and by the time they made it to the nearby stairs, it was ten feet in front of them. He managed to struggle through the pressing crush of people seeking exit to safety out the revolving front door to the street; his wife, however, had fallen down amid the tramping feet at some point in their journey to freedom and never made it out of the trap.

Meanwhile, with war threatening the existence of the world, that part which wasn’t being harassed by such matters as the Boston fire, in the Senate was being urged the proposition that there was afoot a foul plot to eliminate fully one-eighth of the body. Senator McCarran of Nevada chafed amid perceived threats to his life and, he believed, also to all twelve members of the “Silver State Bloc”, those senators who championed legislation to maintain a high cost of silver, a chief commodity of each of their states. Some “ill-advised person” had written the President that he intended to kill Senator McCarran should certain events, not described by the Senator, transpire. The Secret Service had alerted him to be careful, he said.

The source of the collective threat, however, bearing down on the neck hairs of the Senator and his silver colleagues, had come from the editor of The Saturday Evening Post who had declaimed in an editorial that “someone should go into a meeting of the twelve Senators from the silver states and use a lead pipe”. (A lead pipe, no less. At least he could have suggested a silver pipe.)

Senator McCarran had been heard in recent opposition to a bill authorizing the government to release some of its silver for use in manufacturing consumer goods, silverware and the like. Such a bill, of course, making silver more plentiful in the marketplace, would have a depressing impact on silver prices. These threats, therefore, in combination caused Senator McCarran, for his recent stands, to be afraid for his life.

And so he ought to have been. What respectable woman, for instance, seeking a tea service in a time when coffee and sugar rationing prevented the sipping of any other caffeine stimulant, would not have in consequence had it in for Senator McCarran and his silvery pals? They might well not only have employed a lead pipe to dispatch him during a committee hearing but a stainless steel machete.

For, when the editor of the Saturday Evening Post, amid all the Norman Rockwelliana, publicly states that someone ought take a lead pipe to you for your trying in wartime to keep your state’s silver prices high, man, you are in some kind of heap of trouble. Best hide under a rock with a silver bullet and a silver gun from which to shoot it, somewhere outside Carson City, maybe over by the Ponderosa where its inhabitants would surely protect you from the horde of tea ladies after your hide, wanting you to cave to make available those silver tea services at an affordable wartime price. (But keep an eye peeled for the surreptitious actions of the cook; he could be a communist traitor.)

Well, all we can say is that it’s a good thing that whoever threatened the Senator directly didn’t also quote Shakespeare. That’s when, we understand, some of these lunatics who haven’t read a book since the day of their acquisition of the little bit of collegiate understanding they managed to glean in four years of attendance, really get agitated and take things as double-secret really real threats, especially when stated in a non-threatening manner and quoting a passage no one but an imbecile would consider threatening. The more covert the “threat”, the more really real the threat is. It’s a double-secret amendment to the First Amendment of the Constitution proposed and double-secretly ratified, at some undisclosed time, by the Klan And Citizens’ Council Troops of the United States Silver Extreme Rightists, (KACCTUSSER's). They still exist; make no mistake. One of their contemporary leaders is now touring the country in her bus to promote her new book, Going Nuts, the bus emblazoned with the "Going Nuts" logo along its side. The tea ladies, however, we understand, remain quite upset with the KACCTUSSER's, all these years later, and are not quick to forget a Nut when they hear one. In this case, it is more or less akin to listening to the echo of talk radio through a limbeck--the source from which the "Going Nuts" leader got the bulk of her rhetoric.

On the editorial page, Dorothy Thompson explores that which she terms the “second fall” of France, the self-immolation of the Fleet, as Churchill had described it in his speech Sunday. She posits that this second fall, however, was worse than the first because it came out of hope, not despair. It was a suicide, she argues, arising from indecision, much as that contemplated by Hamlet, infectious indecision in the face of a voracious enemy such as the Nazis which always inexorably leads to death.

The French Fleet could have sailed from Toulon into the hands of the Allies at any time in the previous two and a half years, she offers, but Admiral Darlan, its chief commander, chose instead to vacillate, futilely pursuing a neutral stance, waiting to see who might be the victor before committing his ships to a cause. All while observation of the Nazi method of conquering from within, chewing a country up by piecemeal, should have set before them, with Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Balkans as sufficient prior examples, plentiful enough forecast of things to come to allow precognition that such neutrality was not long possible. The fleet commanders and their men, with the notion in play among them of personal ownership of the ships--superseding their patriotism to the French republic--should have made a decision to sail and fight for the Allies, not sat idly on the fence awaiting nothing but sure death in the end, that which they finally achieved in one grand altruistic act of suicide in flames.

Is her take correct? Could the French Fleet have escaped very many leagues into the Mediterranean before the U-boats patrolling its waters would have quickly surrounded them and either hastened the end which finally came or interned them and forced ignominious surrender? Perhaps their waiting game was not so transparent, that their idle moorings were not simply awaiting the expedient, to see who might reign victorious in Europe, but rather drifting in desperate hope that the Allies would find a way to forge a new armada to sail across the English Channel and directly invade to take back France from the Germans. If so, it was a bitter irony which the Fleet’s sailors had to endure in their final hours of existence, that the victoriously pivotal moment of the “end of the beginning”, as Churchill had termed Operation Torch coinciding with the victory in the Battle of Egypt, would also spell the final doom of the French Fleet. After all, the Fleet commanders had one other option, surrender to the Axis and marry the Fleet to their self-immolative cause. They chose altruism. Can anyone really fault them?