The Charlotte News

Friday, March 6, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

In the lower left corner, there is a curious report from Japanese Imperial headquarters, that a nighttime armada of ships attacked Pearl Harbor after the morning air attack on December 7, inflicting many casualties and sinking the Arizona. None survived the heroic suicide thrust, the account continued.

That, of course, differed not only from the Roberts Commission Report and every published eyewitness account but also from the photographic evidence of the attack. Moreover, why, if so, would the American military command have withheld such information as to time and method while reporting the damage thus inflicted, including the sinking of the Arizona? The report, of course, was, as the piece indicates, merely for the purpose of instilling among the booby doubt in the government version, to try to create thereby an atmosphere of distrust.

On the morning of December 9, the account went on, though not reported, a trillion specially bred killer red ants were released from hover craft sprayed with a newly devised invisible paint, specially designed personally by Her Majesty, the Empress, one of which she piloted herself over Pearl Harbor at great personal risk, all to inflict great pain on American. Over 21,000 American soldiers were consumed by the killer red ants as they died in most supreme agony. Give up, American! The war is lost and over. Put down your gun and bomb. Greet your new Empress! She write beautiful poetry. You like. Much better than "You're a Sap, Mr. Jap". Very bad for spirit. "Make the Yankee cranky, and Uncle Sammy gonna spanky"? What that? Bad, bad poem. Better to say, "Make Jappy happy, and Aunty Empress then no slappy."

But, how quickly things change, and mercurially so. Less than two years after he became Prime Minister, there was at least some responsible speculation on his being replaced. Not until the war was over and won, in July, 1945, would he be displaced by the Labor Party's victory out of the popular desire for post-war social reform. Clement Atlee became then the new Prime Minister. Churchill, however, would rise from the ashes once more, again becoming Prime Minister in 1951 until he resigned in 1955. He was the stout old lion in times of distress.

Indeed, had FDR lived on and had the Constitution not been amended to bring it to an end, we daresay that he might have stayed in the White House nigh on through 1960, at least until the country saw fit, as it did then, to pass the torch to a new generation born in the Twentieth Century, those who had served and fought in World War II rather than having led the fight. If not that long, likely at least through 1952.

As for Sir Stafford Cripps, he never became Prime Minister but was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1947 as part of the Labor Government.

And, to demonstrate that the lights had changed, "Stop Lights" tells us that the eight new stoplights ordered by the city would likely sit idly by, monitoring largely empty streets as tire rationing, with the previous day's front page suggestion of the prospect of gas rationing to come on top of it, had already taken its toll on the usually buzzing traffic patterns of the city. That was quite a change from just six months earlier in September when the column growled about an insouciant response from the traffic office regarding a light out of commission for several days at a particularly busy intersection, indicating then that the replacement was on order. Not even a traffic cop had been dispatched to the devilish crossroads to guard against the inevitable mishaps.

It took a war in the Pacific to stop the carnage on the streets and highways of the United States. That mysteriously confluential number, 2,390, perhaps was not mere coincidence.

Ray Clapper writes of the need for planning for the post-war world, in alternative forms, depending on the victors. He suggests that should the Axis reign victorious, America would be forced forever to maintain a readiness posture against potential surprise attack from either Japan or Germany. And, of course, as he pointed out the previous week, based on his Minnesota friend's geography lesson, in concert with the President's fireside chat of February 23, that meant inevitably not just the potential for coastal attacks, but also for air attack either from the north or from the south.

Of course, as ironic as it would be, as ironic as the application of the term "ironic" is to it, though the Allies, the "United Nations", were the victors and the Japanese and Germans thoroughly vanquished, the post-war world nonetheless quickly would find itself fitting readily into Mr. Clapper's alternative scenario of defeat, albeit based on the threat to the West of the formerly allied Soviet Union.

Was this threat real and inevitable, given the necessary sharing with the Soviets the post-war spoils of victory? Or, was it the inexorable concomitant only of foolish paranoia, mutually bred and digested between the Soviets, the Americans, the Free French and the British? Did one move after another between these former uneasy allies in the five years following the war provide the trigger for the nuclear age where mutual deterrence was supplied only through mutually assured destruction?