The Charlotte News

Saturday, December 5, 1942

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: We have refrained until now from making mention of the Battle of Tassafaronga or the Fourth Battle of Savo Island, reported firsthand by Charles McMurtry on the front page, scattered reports of which had appeared already in the previous two days. For there is a large discrepancy between that reported contemporaneously and that recorded, at least in some of the histories regarding this particular engagement. The subsequently recorded results show only one Japanese destroyer lost and 197 dead, while the Allies reportedly lost one cruiser and had three others damaged, with 397 killed. Yet, at the time, an eyewitness, Mr. McMurtry, told of nine enemy warships sunk, four destroyers, two other destroyers or light cruisers, and three transports, confirmed by a U.S. Navy communique two days earlier.

Why the discrepancy?

We cannot tell you. Was the Navy trying to save face and continue positive morale among the American public? Or are the discrepancies the result of some contemporary historian’s naive reliance on Japanese records, notoriously false? Or was it the fog of war again simply intruding as a cordon dropped to block accurate information concerning sinkings of enemy ships?

It makes little difference at the end of the day. We simply note it. One must be careful in relying strictly on accounts of battles after the war, especially sea battles. The war was won by one side; only that fact is centrally important.

Some historians appear to count this battle as a loss for the Allies, even if the interdiction of the attempted Japanese landing of reinforcements and supplies yet again frustrated the enemy mission. Was it really a defeat? We don’t know. We were not there. Mr. McMurtry was, however, and we tend to rely more on his first person account than that of a secondhand researcher decades after the fact, no matter how studiously and conscientiously the research might be approached. While not folly, it is, we suggest, a bit of an idle exercise to focus too much on individual battles, the individual results of which may lead to no firm conclusions except among the highly gullible. Both sides usually claimed victory in the bulk of the engagements during the war.

Winston Churchill reminded the British that, after a sprint through Morocco and Algeria and into Tunisia, it would be the last twenty miles into Tunis and Bizerte which would be the hardest territory finally to conquer and that a hard fight still lay ahead to rid North Africa of the Axis presence. He was, of course, correct.

His full remarks at Bradford are below.

The Allies had just withstood a third major attack by the Axis against their lines at Mateur, before Bizerte, and in the heights of Tebourba and at Djedeida, before Tunis.

Another by-lined piece, by William Hipple, reports of the fatalistic approach to duty which the daring crews faced, mission by mission, on the little plywood mosquito boats, the PT boats, patrolling the waters around the Solomons.

Eight months hence, a particular mission through Blackett Strait, above Rendova Island, would eventually be registered in history as the most enduring exemplar of all of those many daring missions by these audacious young men in their small craft attacking in stealth the larger destroyers bearing down on them.

One PT boat officer told Hipple of his devil-may-care way of viewing the matter: he would do his duty for three months, maybe wind up dead in the fourth, but would in the meantime take as many Japanese to the bottom of the ocean along with him as possible. The goal was attrition of the Japanese. These little craft and their brave crewmen lived dangerously, even more so, probably, than the average danger-riddled bomber mission, which at least did not have to go to battle protected only by an open plywood hull, and, once spotted down, with little or no avenue of ready escape.

And, the photograph on the page probably tells a million words, giving a good explanation why the Allies won the war. Anyone at any age who can hike 40 miles each of three days in a row, especially with full Army gear riding on their backs, is apt to win any war. If you have never hiked even in light clothes any such long distance, then you ought try it sometime, and then you will understand. After such a hike, you don’t much care whether you live or die, as long as you may at least taste some cool water before you breathe your last. Don’t forget your salt tablets--or, these days, your Gatorade.

On the editorial page, Paul Mallon again returns to his favorite topic of late, attacking the President’s limit of $25,000 on after-tax income, again suggesting it as deterring investment and thus curtailing employment opportunities for the laboring class. He might have cited some other example than his Exhibit A, however, that, with such a limit to incentive extant, films such as “Gone With the Wind” would not be made for a million dollars--even if that particular film cost nearly four million to make in 1939, about 56 million in today's dollars. A lot of folks might think the country and its mentality would have been far better off through time had that particular film gone with the wind, unmade, and its amply talented cast and crew pursued other, more fitting projects, as the scenes rendered by the book remained locked in the imagination of its readers, without color film intruding to provide some greater semblance of reality, 1939 country-clubbers of Atlanta set against a backdrop of the antebellum and Civil War South.

Dave Ovens, the subject of the first editorial in the column, would in 1955 have the new auditorium in Charlotte, adjacent to the new coliseum, named for him. In case you should go there or drive by it, you will now know a little of who the fellow was for whom it is named.

That's right, the oven is where they fully bake the crackers. Never mind.

“Cost, Plus” tells of the rewards of investment in major college football, by 1942 standards, sounding cheap, even when multiplied by fourteen for inflation to reach today’s dollar equivalent.

As for “Little Songs”, we might suggest that its first segment conveys the notion of Mean Mr. Mustard being responsible for the deaths of a hundred innocent Frenchmen of Dijon, on the Nazi premise of shoot first in the dark, ask paperhanging questions only a year later--no humor intended.

Its second segment, describing Der Fuehrer’s viewing of the Mona Lisa, which he stole from the Louvre, now in his private steel-and-glass sanctum at Kehlsteinhaus, resting high on the rock face above the Alpine valley below, near Berchtesgaden--still extant--draws an imago of Polythene Pam looking at himself in the mirror through a glass onion, while her mouthpiece squawks his Lies.

That’s who it was. Nine, nine.

But who was Nixon Waterman? You her? Or Elaine through the looking glass?

Anyway, Elmore James 's got nothin' on this, baby--you, there, with that Cheshire smile, while the chestnuts roast on the open fire.

The remarks at Bradford Town Hall this date in England, by Prime Minister Churchill, follow:

We have just passed through the month of November, usually a month of fog and gloom, but on the whole a month I liked a good deal better than some other months I have seen in the course of this present unpleasantness. It was a month in which our affairs have prospered, in which our soldiers and sailors and airmen have been victorious, in which our gallant Russian allies have struck redoubtable blows against the common enemy, in which our American allies and kith and kin far off in the Pacific, from Australia and New Zealand, have also seen their efforts crowned with a considerable measure of success.

A great month this last month of November. But I must tell you, and I know you will not mind my saying it, because I do not think it is wise to deal in smooth words or airy promises, that you must be on your guard not to let the good fortune which has come to us be anything else but a means of striking harder. The struggle is approaching its most tense part. The hard core of Nazi resistance and villainy is not yet broken in upon. We have to gather up all our strength, and if by any chance unexpected good tidings come to us that will be a matter which we can rejoice at but which we must not count upon.

We count upon our strong right arm, honest, hard-working hearts, and our courage, which is not yet found wanting either in domestic or foreign stresses during the whole course of this war.

We have broken into North Africa with our American allies, and now have in a short time advanced from the Atlantic Ocean almost to the centre of the Mediterranean, a distance of nearly 900 miles. But there are still 20 miles to go, and very hard fighting will take place before that small distance is overcome and the violence and military power of the enemy there have been beaten down and driven into the sea. I do not doubt the result, but I cannot lead you to suppose that it will be easily achieved.

Away on the other side of North Africa our armies are advancing, having taken thousands of prisoners, and driving the enemy before them, but here again hard fighting is to be expected.

But what I have felt during this month, when so much fighting has been going on by the British and the Americans, has been the feeling of gladness that we are engaging the enemy closely, and not leaving an undue burden to be borne by the Russians, who have carried this immense struggle through the whole of this year and a large part of last year.

They are defending their own country; we are defending our own country; but we are all of us defending something which is, I won't say dearer but greater than country-namely, a cause. That cause is the cause of freedom and of justice, of the weak against the strong, of law against violence, of mercy and tolerance against brutality and ironbound tyranny. That is the cause we are fighting for--the cause which is moving slowly, painfully, but surely, inevitably, inexorably forward to victory.

And when that victory is gained you will find you are in a better world, a world which can be made even more fair, more happy, if only all the peoples will join together to do their part and if all classes of parties stand together to reap the fruits of victory as they are standing together to bear the terrors and menaces of war.

Our enemies are very powerful. They have many millions of soldiers. They have millions of prisoners, whom they in many cases use like slaves. They have rich lands which they have conquered, they have large, gifted populations in their grip. They have a theme of their own, which is the Nazi theme of tyranny and domination of a race in the shameful idolatry of a single man, a base man, elevated almost to the stature of a god by his demented and degraded worshippers. They have this idea of the suppression of the individual citizen, man and woman, to be a mere chattel of a State machine.

All this, in our view, is at stake. But our enemies are powerful. They consider they will have the strength to wear us out even if they cannot beat us down. Their hope is now to prolong the struggle so that perhaps differences will arise between friends and allies, so that perhaps the democracies they despise and whom they underrate will weary of the war.

All these are their hopes, so I say to you here in Bradford, what I said when I was last here nearly thirty years ago: “Let us go forward together and put these grave matters to the proof.”

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