The Charlotte News

Thursday, March 26, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "[W]e shall win or we shall die," boldly declared General MacArthur to the Australians.

In support of this notion, an Allied information service reported on the front page that since the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan had lost about a million tons of shipping, a quarter of its total tonnage. Further expansion of the area of aggression, with 130,000 tons of shipping necessary to transport a division and its equipment to a particular area of war, would exacerbate stress on supply lines, already stretched razor thin. But also, the United States, the report found, likewise suffered from deteriorating supply routes and hadn't enough men and supplies yet in Australia to mount a counter-offensive on the East Indies.

Governor Broughton of North Carolina writes Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, complaining of inadequate coastal defense. Twenty ships had been sunk off the coast of North Carolina, he reports, since Pearl Harbor. The marauding U-boats had rendezvoused with impunity in broad daylight within plain view of the shore.

The problem of course is explained by Hitler's goal in these repeated attacks, to harry both merchant and naval shipping to such an extent that the U.S. would be forced to divert ships from Atlantic convoys and patrols to protect the East and Gulf Coasts. Keeping the war in its established theaters of operation was deemed of paramount importance. Utilizing ships and submarines to attack the elusive U-boats in U.S. waters would bring the war home, while allowing easier pickings of the crucial supply convoys.

Hail hearty, (or maybe a bit insane), Aussie volunteers for "human bomb" missions were turned down by the Air Minister as unnecessary.

In Detroit, 23-year old Genevieve Samp, who worked in a stamping plant, was made to decamp from her post by her union for being too efficient and industrious in her boxings. Ms. Samp felt that some of her co-workers were little better than tramps, belligerent frustering sockdolagers, who took unnecessary umbrage at her statement after Pearl Harbor that some of the lady workers, anything but dowagers, would be out of a job for never having obtained citizenship, and because of that, gave her the ramp.

In any event, it underscores some of the craziness going on among labor in these days. Whether in this particular instance the counter-efficiency order was a deliberate attempt to sabotage the work force to hinder defense production or just an ordinary expression of querulous pettiness so mires the mind in the swamp that we shan't attempt to descry the matter further. The argument is thus joined, that is to say, the row mergered: Ms. Samp, to the tramps outside the plant, gave a sock but good with alacrity, and thus desparpling, despite her firing, withstood despatching, and, by this tenacity, became the Champ of the wire ring stamps in the gala Motor City sparring floater-bee irascid deed.

But labor certainly was not the only problematic group with mercenary tendencies on occasion. For it is also reported on the front page, for instance, that Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold told Congress that Standard Oil of New Jersey had developed before the war a cheaper and stronger form of synthetic rubber than anything Germany possessed at the time, but, rather than offer it to American manufacturers, sold the patent exclusively to Germany. And, of course, now that America found itself cut off from 90% of its rubber supply ordinarily coming from Malaya, the available synthetic rubber was so expensive as to be impractical for ordinary consumption.

The News, in its editorial column, blames both the President and Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones for not acting in September 1940 to enjoin industry to produce annually 100,000 tons of the ersatz material, as advised at the time by the War Production Board.

At least, however, matters of democracy had not devolved to the autocratic state indicated in Britain by the piece from The Manchester Guardian: one young woman was fined three pounds by a court for leaving her job and another was fined a like amount for staying, both acting contrary to government orders.

"Jay-pan" became "MAC-Arthur" in the North Carolina mountains, reports the first piece in the column by way of News reporter Tom Revelle.

"Possibility" misses the mark in its warning that Hitler might strike Dakar and then mount an offensive by air to take Brazil, ripe with fifth column activity. With that done, the piece continues, America would have to pull in its fleets from the Atlantic and Pacific to shore up southern defenses and protect the vital supply route through the Panama Canal.

It would not occur for the probable reason that, with Rommel tied down in Libya and most of the best-trained German troops committed to the Russian campaign, Hitler simply hadn't the men, officers, oil, machinery, and supplies to accomplish such a far-flung maneuver. Instead, he found himself in the nearly desperate position of having to take the Caucasus during the spring and summer of 1942 to obtain the oil and bread to sustain the German offensive in Europe and North Africa--that on which the Russian offensive had placed its stake for late summer or early fall 1941 for continued success in the war. There was still the question of conquering England before trying to do more than disrupt supply lines around America. The last thing Hitler could consider was a drive to South America.

Perhaps, The News was trying to give the Nazis an idea, knowing that if they took it, such a South American putsch would probably wind up in miserable defeat and deplete forces in Russia and North Africa sufficiently to enable within the year a quick and decisive end to the war in favor of the Allies. After all, Hitler had gambled by invading his former ally the previous June. He was a gambling sort of individual.

"Urgency" and the Raymond Clapper column of the day discuss the implications to Calcutta of the undefended fall of the Andaman Islands to Japan, placing the Japanese navy and air force just 650 miles from India's key port, now, with the fall of Rangoon, more important than ever as a supply base for China and Allied forces still fighting in northern Burma. The belief was that the taking of the Andamans was prefatory to a strike at India. But, for the same problems which beset Hitler in stretching supply lines further, it was not to be, though the Japanese poured bombs on Calcutta several times between December, 1942 and December, 1944.

Mr. Clapper offers as an aside his observations from a supply plane--sitting on bomber tires, sleeping or typing on a crate of aircraft propellers, all efficiently delivered through the war zones into China from India and points west. It was, he suggests, because of these long supply lanes, a war of lonely outposts en route, some stretched 15,000 miles from home, cut off from the news of the West for two months, such that a two-week old issue of a magazine quickly became dog-eared by the voracious inhabitants of one of these posts, eager to experience for a moment, if only vicariously, a little piece of home.

We shall sleep tonight thinking about that overcoat slung over a crate of airplane propellers, and imagine magically that our mattress is really a couple of bomber tires, maybe bomber tires fitted on wheels stamped out at that stamping plant of Ms. Samp, those among the last of the war widgets she boxed before being given the boot for extreme competence; and then we shall imagine further that we are flying on board it all to Bombay or Calcutta to deliver the lines with strength against the onslaught and for preparation of fierce counter-offensive. You do the same. Have a safe trip.

We saw, incidentally, a report today which says that reading among adults has slightly increased since 2002 but that the percentage of adults reading poetry has decreased from 17.2% to 8.3% since 1992. Whether that latter fact suggests that the Clinton era was one more poetic than the Bush era, or whether the natural inclination to the spiritual during the fin de siècle has worn off during the debut de siècle at a rate commensurate with the recognition that, after all, the Millennium did not bring the Apocalypse, or some other earthly explanation, we don't know.

With typhoons, vicious hurricanes, floods, and tornadic winds a-blowing every which way during the previous eight years, to add to the troubles produced of man, we don't know why that should be, but we thought we would mention the factum. Whatever the cause for the decrease, be among the 8.3%, the proud, the few.

In truth, however, one does not properly read poetry. One listens to the muse of the poetic statement as written and conjures in the imagination what the author intended, feeling the images thus conveyed. It is akin to listening to music.

"[W]e shall win or we shall die," boldly declared General MacArthur to the Australians.