The Charlotte News

Wednesday, March 11, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The major news of the day on the front page was that Churchill promised India complete independence as a dominion after the war in exchange for their loyalty to Great Britain in the coming fight with Japan, thought now to be possibly days away from beginning with the fall of Rangoon, just the other side of the Bay of Bengal, and the Burma Road now basically in control of the Japanese.

Indeed, Subhas Bose had led an Indian national army which fought with the Japanese against the British in Burma during the previous ten weeks.

The general promise had been extended in August, 1940, just before the beginning of the Battle of Britain with the Germans, but had not been followed by any precise plan for implementation. The new offer carried with it such a precise plan to be implemented by Sir Stafford Cripps.

In response to this promise and the precise proposal delivered by Cripps that there would be an immediate interim sovereign government except that foreign policy and defense would still be controlled by Great Britain until the end of the war, the Indian Congress was formed in 1942 which quickly demanded that the British leave India, following the call of Mohandas Gandhi who had launched the Quit India movement when the British refused acquiesce to the demand of immediate full sovereignty in exchange for cooperation in the war.

The British then abolished the Congress and, until 1944, jailed Gandhi, long a proponent of India's right of sovereignty. Gandhi had supported Britain in World War I, but, after 12 years of non-violently resisting British rule, called for satyagraha, that is to say a general strike or passive resistance to British rule, when the promise of sovereignty came with the proviso of delayed implementation. Nevertheless, it had been a step forward offered by Churchill, long a proponent of continued British rule in India. The quid under this plan, however, had to precede the quo and was deemed therefore an inchoate and untrustworthy contract by Gandhi, not only a spiritual leader of his people but also a lawyer, one who had made a success of the practice in South Africa during the fin de siècle until eschewing materialism for an ascetic existence in 1905. It was then that he began his first satyagraha, which literally translates "pertinacity to the truth".

After the war, in 1946, Clement Atlee's Labor Government promised complete self-government to India, to become fully effective on British withdrawal in June, 1948. One of the conditions of withdrawal was that the Muslim League must reach an agreement with the Hindus on apportionment in representation within the Indian Congress, the two religious and sub-cultural groups having manifested for centuries antagonism to one another within the sub-continent. The alternative would be that Britain would provide the apportionment itself upon leaving. The result was that the Congress formed out of India's northwestern territory Pakistan for the Muslims in August, 1947. Gandhi, influential in the post-war Congress, had opposed the partition for its displacement of too many people, favoring instead passive co-existence between the hostile religious factions.

There were several smaller princely dominions which gravitated to one or the other, India or Pakistan, at the time, but among them, Kashmir remained independent.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the former Muslim League, became the first Governor General of Pakistan and Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi's swinging protege, became the first Prime Minister of India. With the former country now partitioned into two separate sovereignties, Hindus and Sikhs were left in Pakistan and Muslims in India. Hostilities erupted in the clash of religious cultures and in late 1947, over half a million people were killed as sixteen million fled to one of the two countries from the other.

Gandhi toured the depressed areas on a regular basis and during one such visit on January 30, 1948, was assassinated by a Hindu religious fanatic who believed Gandhi had sought too hard to pacify Muslims.

Later in 1948, war broke out between Pakistan and India over control of Kashmir and another unallied princely state, Kashmir's neighboring Jammu, both in the northern sector of the former British India.

The other major front page news was the continued landing on New Guinea by the Japanese in preparation for an expected thrust into northern Australia. Port Moresby, just 300 miles to the north of Australia's jutting coast, had become the repeated target of Japanese air raids in the preceding couple of days. The Australian Royal Air Force struck back with heavy bombing of the approaching transports to New Guinea, reporting the sinking of seven Japanese ships.

And, the first lighter news to appear on the page since Pearl Harbor came in the form of the announcement of a gala wedding celebration for that well-known movie star and native Charlottean, Virginia Dale, slated to have a local ceremony for her mother to repeat her Gallup, New Mexico nuptial affair with former prize fighter, also well-known, Courtland Shepard. (Get your kicks out on Route 66, about the length of Madagascar.) The famous couple had arrived in Charlotte with great hosannas from the awaiting throngs arriving to greet them. Ms. Dale, Miss North Carolina for 1941, as you will no doubt remember, appeared in such Hollywood extravaganzas as "No Time to Marry", "Idiot's Delight", and "The Kid from Texas". Certainly, her performances in those hauntingly brilliant epics were nothing less than stellar amid a star-spangled cast who wilted in the face of the star's blonde luminosity. "Extraordinary", "superb", "best performance of the year", "not to be missed", were just a few of the words which were hurled, almost as careless afterthoughts, at the feet of the glowing thespian with the great bulk of her brilliant future in cinema yet ahead of her, starting with her unforgettable 1942 performance as Lila Dixon in "Holiday Inn".

Surely it was a ceremony which gave Charlotte a breather from the otherwise dismal war news and buoyed spirits far and wide. Indeed, some say to this day, that it was this very episode and Virginia's gleaming grin which enabled the war finally to be won.

It's always the unheralded, simpler things which make the difference. Here's to Virginia and her husband, Courtland.

On the editorial page, Raymond Clapper darkly reminds, as he sails to Africa to cover the Libyan-Egyptian theater of the war, that the fight being waged between the Jerries and Tommies for control of the Suez Canal was crucial to the outcome of the war, crucial to whether the war might be won in a couple of more years or whether it might stretch another decade or more. The prize was not just the canal, of course, but the access to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, the rich oil states in between, and then, worst fate of all to the Allies, joinder with the Japanese moving from the Far East potentially into India, enabling not only possession of the rubber, tin, and oil captured in the previous three months of fighting in the Pacific, but also the means to transship it through the Axis to manufacturing facilities and back again as refined product, thereby also to enable finally the sequestration of Great Britain and America from these necessary raw materials and finally the invasion of Great Britain, leaving America alone among the industrial democracies to fight the war.

Returning to the front page, we find the disgruntled father of two sons, one killed at Pearl Harbor and the other fighting with MacArthur in the Philippines, slapping a woman on a Santa Monica bus who had bragged that she was earning so much money that she hoped the war would last forever. The bus driver, opting for discretion as the better part, then quickly pulled up and announced it to be her stop, ahead of her pulling the cord.

But all of that was so dark and depressing. Let us go back and re-read that article about Virginia Dale. What color dress was she wearing? Who designed her shoes?

Anyway, here's a Ripley's sort of a riddle: What do Buncombe Bob and Bungalow Bill have in common?

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