The Charlotte News

Wednesday, March 18, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Signal of the need to read carefully the reports of losses, even those published by the Allies, the front page feature story on the loss of 23 Axis ships, including 12 warships, to Allied bombing in New Guinea needs consistent clarification through the first four paragraphs of the story. The third paragraph qualifies the good news of the first paragraph with the description that the Aussie and American planes "'sunk'" or "'probably sunk'" only eleven ships, including six warships. The next paragraph then allows that four warships and six others were "possibly sunk".

Still, with the reported loss of only one plane among the Allied bombers, the score appears a good one on this bombing mission. That news, of course, had to be tempered somewhat with the notion that the Navy and Army, especially the Navy, did not provide figures on losses typically for weeks after a particular engagement, though usually related to ships and submarines, to enable the vessels to obtain safe waters. That delay was not deliberately performed with aircraft; but sometimes, even in bombing engagements, missing aircraft were not reported immediately for obvious reasons.

Regardless of what story was accurate, it was important to maintain morale back home. The fog of war itself kept figures from being entirely accurate. Not all of the false reporting was accomplished through deliberately dissembling communiques, but as to whether Smolensk was taken, the absence of reporters accompanying the Russian Army no doubt contributed to the temptation to manufacture false reports of success well in advance of the fact--not dissimilar to that which The News editorialized the day before was the usual case in Italian dissemination of battle news--to encourage optimism among the native populations and the soldiers fighting on other fronts.

The problem for Japan of course was dwindling forces in home waters and in China, drained by the offensive in the southwest Pacific and by their other Nazi-dictated task of trying to take India through the lines established in Burma and Thailand. But all the while they had to be wary of maintaining their supply lines to Japan while new air bases and supply depots supplanted those destroyed by the retreating Allies in the lands captured. ha After the oil wells of Sarawak on Borneo, for instance, had been destroyed by the retreating Dutch and British forces in December, new ones had to be constructed before the rich oil reserves located there could be tapped. By contrast, Singapore was inexplicably left largely intact as a port for the Japanese as the British evacuated. But on all of these fronts and key points of acquisition, the Japanese were still operating in unfamiliar locales and waters thousands of miles from home, with native populations still around who were none too friendly to their presence.

Such extant circumstances of conquest form the ultimate paradox of such belligerent imperialism: to maintain and restore to productivity the conquered territory to insure maximum harvest of the very supply for which the target was taken requires increasing supplies from home, stretched over thinning supply lines made increasingly vulnerable in proportion to the distance stretched. So, while there was a need of Hitler for an attack at Vladivostok, to alleviate the thrust against his spring offensive and enable a breakthrough this time to Moscow and Stalingrad, the attack would not come from his partners, the Japanese. There would also be no full-scale attack on Japan by the Allies in 1942, nor any Aleutian-based raids.

Nevertheless, speculation on these notions caused the Japanese to have to retain a strong contingent of forces--naval, air and ground troops--in and around Japan. And that left other possibilities for offensives, against India, against Valdivostok and Siberia, forestalled.

Moreover, Japan had formed a mutual non-aggression pact with Russia. Whether that was trumped by the mutual assistance tripartite pact with Germany and Italy can only be determined in light of the subsequent fact that Japan never attacked Russia. The major part of that assessment, however, was likely based in simple pragmatism, certainly not any sense of the Japanese that honor between competing loyalties to one of the two treaties necessitated one track over the other. Pragmatically, Russia appeared to be winning the war with Germany at this point, and nothing could be more disastrous for Japan than for Russia to eliminate its western invader only to be free to turn its attention to a full-scale attack on Japan for the Allied cause. Had the converse been true, had the Nazis succeeded in taking Moscow in the fall and merely been under siege conditions during the winter, then the decision of the Imperial Conference in Tokyo on July 2, 1941 to attack Russia should the Germans appear to be winning the war, might have been the alternative track implemented.

Paul Mallon writes of the tires left rotting on stationary trailers, about one for each of the dead at Pearl Harbor, which were furnished to defense factory workers throughout the country since summer, 1941. The rubber comprising those tires, he asserts, should be reclaimed and used to attenuate the rubber shortage. While probably true, the tires were small ones, we assume. But then, so were those on the wheels of most fighter planes.

The piece from The Baltimore Sun on the evacuation of Japanese from the West Coast explains the inanity of the project from an economic standpoint, that the fishing industry, the cannery industry, the agricultural industry, each populated by large numbers of efficient Japanese workers, would be depressed by the removal of this force. Among the solutions being considered for resettlement options, the one discussed of internment camps along the border region of California and Nevada above Death Valley would be one adopted. If you have ever visited the site, you will appreciate the description. It is essentially a barren wasteland, not devoid of scenery with the distant mountains, but nevertheless not an area deemed enough hospitable to man to be actively populated in the century and a half since westward expansion began in the United States.

The evacuation and re-location was a sorry exhibition of paranoia in the country, and the one executive decision made by FDR which was without redeeming understanding. While the times were desperate, the removal of persons from one part of the country and placing them in resettlement camps in another to which they were neither acclimated nor in which anyone else much desired to live, merely because of their race and national heritage, was an obvious outrage to democratic principles and the Constitution, regardless of war. We ask again where were the German and Italian resettlement camps, accommodating equal numbers, to go along with them. German-Americans in fact were known to be a much greater menace in fostering fifth column activities than the Japanese, who by their very physical identifiers, were instantly suspect wherever they went in these times, certainly anywhere near defense production or military facilities. Yet, the numbers of Germans and Italians interned were only a few thousand, paling by comparison to the 100,000 Japanese.

We might note in passing that the bellicose text from Joel 3:9-10, quoted by the editors in response to the letter on the page, was made in the context of the selling of the children of Jerusalem into the captivity of the Greeks.

It is a lasting testament to the ultimate patriotism of these interned Japanese and other Japanese citizens in the country that they did not turn on their captors and indeed foment an uprising. The country probably deserved in fact no less for this particularly pernicious evil of the time. Nothing since the days of institutionalized slavery in the United States equals it.

Raymond Clapper, having arrived in Egypt, tells of his journey across Africa via a new air supply route, 4,000 miles long, chopping the time from eight weeks to eight days for transportation of supplies via air versus the long sea route around the Cape of Good Hope. The advantage over trucking supplies was likewise evident, reducing the time from a 25-day journey. He tells also of the importance of the Middle East as the critical transport hub to deliver supplies to China, India, and Turkey, the axial sine qua non in fact for accomplishing this task, one fundamental to the outcome of the war. The maintenance of the area was of course also primarily crucial to retain within the Allied sphere the critical oil reserves which Hitler so badly needed to supply both his Russian invasion and his Atlantic operations to strangle to death or invade Great Britain.

The establishment of this new air route across Africa for delivering supplies, much as the soon to be established air route through the Himalayas to supplant the Burma Road into China, would offset the strategic importance to the Axis of taking Madagascar or, as London intercepts had just reported on Saturday, the intent of Hitler to have the Japanese take from bases in Madagascar points in eastern and southern Africa, to cut off the southern oceanic transport route of the Allies.