The Charlotte News

Wednesday, February 25, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

No one, not even the schoolchildren, could blink the peril facing them. The battle was for the very survival now of freedom; yet the battle was being lost, and even the formerly good news since December offering some hope, that on the Russian front and in Libya, was now tempered and tamped down by pessimism as spring approached.

"Blueprint" tells of how the President's fireside chat had reminded of the Japanese communication of plans to take the offensive in the Pacific as early as the fortification of the Mandates, the islands to the east of the Philippines acquired from Germany at the end of World War I, fortification of them probably beginning sometime in the twenties. And on top of it came the 1931 seizure of Manchuria, and in 1936 the public statement by the commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet that unless the United States ceased its supposed expansionist trade policy, namely insuring aid to China and any other country sought to be invaded by Japan, it would deem it necessary to take over Borneo, Celibes, and New Guinea in the Indies, and establish itself in Formosa and in the mandates of the South Seas, all for its own claimed self-protection as an island nation against isolation and consequent starvation. The piece suggests that the time to have taken action against such announced intention of aggression was then.

But the problem, of course, was that the country was still within the throes of the Depression in 1936 and earlier from 1929. After World War I, it had steadily reduced its armament, especially the Navy, and was not building new ships or much of anything else militarily. It was hard enough, as apparent, to muster support in the country for war with all of Europe, save Russia, in chains, and the Japanese showing steady signs of aggression prior to Pearl Harbor; it was hard enough even after Pearl Harbor. The war was still considered by many to be "over there". A country such as the United States could not simply mobilize and stop that kind of aggression without the general support of the people abroad the land. President Roosevelt warned of the aggression and warned of its serious consequences in his October, 1937 Chicago speech, aimed primarily at the recent forays of the Japanese against Shanghai and the beginnings in earnest of the war in China. Yet, there was no hue and cry raised in the country to go across the Pacific or the Atlantic to stop the aggressors.

Thus, what should have been done in hindsight and what could have been done practically, not just then, but at any time in history, are two very different things. As the experience in Iraq demonstrates, a pre-emptive war is unpopular from its origin, even when no draft is thereby necessitated, and if a gamble is made based on a specifically expressed reason for the war and afterward that basis is not borne out, the leadership looks at worst to have dissembled, at best to be bumbling in the dark, on no premise very good or astute or worthy of following.

And, with the stakes much higher then in any prospective war with Japan, bound to trigger a war with Germany and Italy, with the necessity of a draft being a foregone conclusion to supply the requisite manpower to fight such a war, the government had to be careful how it proceeded lest it get itself into a predicament whereby not only might such a war prove unpopular, but, because of that very unpopularity and consequent lack of zeal necessary to fight it, it would be lost, and with it freedom and democracy.

Had America sent over its Navy, along with the British, and attacked Japan in 1937 over its aggression in China, not only would a war have been started which would have fueled the propaganda mills of Japan but also provided Hitler and Mussolini with the basis for a claim of "unprovoked" aggression against a fellow traveler on the road to empire, a claim they needed to fuel and confirm for the soft-headed their denunciation of Britain and, in that case, America, as having been the initial aggressors who started the war. Thus, not only would a war have been started in the Pacific, but a two-front war involving the Nazis and Italy in Europe would have been started, and at a time when neither Britain nor America was at all prepared militarily or economically for such a war.

The track thought most likely therefore to avoid war and at the same time, should Japan prove recalcitrantly determined on their course, to establish the fact of their aggressive truculence while maintaining both a coign of vantage behind the fortress walls and the apparent desire of peaceful coexistence, was through maintaining diplomatic and trade relations, trying to woo the Japanese away from aggression and to a cooperative partnership in the Pacific with Britain, France, the Dutch, and America, one built on capitalistic trade and some semblance of democratic ideals. That this consistent policy followed by the United States at the time, right to the eve of Pearl Harbor, was unsuccessful was not the result of lack of determined effort, rather the insistent will of the militaristic feudalists in Japan to have an empire--regardless of the expense in life, regardless of the piratical aggression needed to achieve it and to maintain it, and, in the end, in order to capitulate to cooperative terms with Hitler, occupy the British and Americans in the Pacific in exchange for Vichy providing the Japanese unfettered occupation of Indochina, the keystone to the entire region, enabling from there sufficient embarkation points for both naval and air operations to conquer that entire corner of the world and all of its valuable resources, notably tin, oil, and rubber--just as in fact matters transpired in these months immediately ensuing the hobbling of the Fleet at Pearl Harbor. And the tin and oil were crucial to the Axis, while the rubber not only was useful to it but deprived the United States of 90% of its then current supply with potentially disastrous results or at least requiring that a significant amount of industry be devoted to the production of high-cost synthetic rubber as replacement.

"Eight Hours" and the long piece from The New York Times discuss the insistence of organized labor on adherence to the 40-hour week and condemn it in the face of the national crisis and the need otherwise to train skilled workers to fill another shift, slowing emergency defense production in the process. There is a suggestion that labor was being unpatriotic and should relax its demands, conform more to the model in Britain where the norm was a fifty-five to sixty-hour week on standard pay, with strikes outlawed, that such a drastic measure might become necessary to compete with Germany's 60 to 70-hour week.

All in all, "The News" was bad and getting worse by the day. And, with it, so was national morale.

And, we are not sure that the Biblical quote of the day from chapter 2 in the Song of Solomon was altogether improving of that state among readers of The News. The chapter speaks of the coming of spring, that "the winter is past, the rain is over and gone", but then proceeds to entreat with the idea that the flowers appear, the birds sing, and "the voice of the turtle is heard in our land". (As we have never heard a turtle's voice, perhaps this reference was to a turtledove, but we shall take it literally for our present purposes.) It is troubling because the President had on Monday suggested in his fireside chat that the country did not want to follow the turtle policy, meaning, we suppose--though he, like Solomon, did not elaborate--that the country should not in defense of itself draw into its shell its head and its...whatever.

The President also did not want the national bird to become a turtle and so it is probably all quite consistent and perhaps, he, too, was referring to a turtledove rather than the shelled amphibious terraplane version as we could not quite well imagine a turtle as the national bird. Pigs maybe, but not turtles.

Nevertheless, when the Biblical quote reminds an already dispirited population that the voice of the turtle is heard in the land, an harbinger of spring, and with spring, as in each of the past two springs, probably coming Hitler's new offensive, either again in Russia or perhaps toward Britain, all while the President says that the voice of the turtle being heard might be the country's undoing with respect to the encroaching enemy on the distant fronts, the whole thing could not have been very encouraging of a sound hand at the steerage, either beside the fireside or by whomever it was that selected the daily Biblical quotes, one or the other, maybe both.

Moral: In time of war, when having the task of selecting quotes for an editorial page, be sure to read at least a little of the context before sending it down to the typesetter. Of course, maybe they did.