The Charlotte News

Monday, April 13, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: We should point out, incidentally, that Hans Habe, the author of the American Mercury piece on Saturday’s editorial page, ironically would have his own daughter murdered in Los Angeles on the day before New Year’s Eve, 1968--a week after man first orbited the moon--while she was home from college visiting her mother. At the time, Mr. Habe was living in Switzerland and had been divorced for ten years. He had fled the haunt of Austria and Germany at the start of the war and fought with the French Foreign Legion until the fall of France in June, 1940, after which he escaped internment and came to the United States where he eventually became involved in working with the O.S.S., to be founded in June, 1942.

The front page this date indicates that the Russians were warning the Japanese that they expected continued fidelity with respect to the mutual non-aggression pact of the previous year, now reaching its first anniversary. Thus far, it had held up. The warning communicated to Japan that the Soviet Union neither intended, of its own force, or by proxy, by letting the United States use its bases, to attack Japan from Vladivostok. It was a reaffirmation of the accord, serving the dual purpose of effecting continued rapprochement. It placed both countries, however, in the uneasy position of serving two masters, as Russia was considered one of the United Nations while Japan of course was part of the Axis at war with Russia. And, Japan’s Triplice Pact with Italy and Germany provided that if a formerly neutral nation became involved in the war against an Axis nation, then each member would prosecute the war against such a nation. Technically, however, since it was Germany which broke the mutual non-aggression pact between Russia and Germany and not Russia which invaded Germany, the pact did not obligate Japan to attack Russia. Such are the problems of entangled alliances, especially those executed with honor among panarchic regimes, and other thieves.

The editorial column first preoccupies itself with trying to meet the President’s challenge to find a new name for the war, one befitting the new nihilistic panthelematism characterizing the fight, extending to far wider territory, especially in the Far East, than did World War I. Somehow, at this point in time, "World War II" seemed to the President to understate the complexity and totality of the multi-continental involvement. The News settles on "We or They War". Somehow, it didn’t catch on.

Perhaps, The News should have thought simply to offer to lend the world the North Carolina state motto: "Esse Quam Videri". Its latin would have bespoken somehow several volumes on the world conflict while the phrase captured the existential angst pervading the struggle: To Be Rather To Seem. And since it was, after all, the motto of the state encompassing the first English settlement in North America, it would have also fairly embraced the initial core relationship of the Allies, while the melting pot of America captured the spirit of the many lands represented by the Allied cause.

The column lashes out again at Nehru and the Indian National Congress for refusing the deal offered by Britain and for adding gratuitously that it would not object to Britain and the United States waging the war effort in India. The News found this arabesque exhibiting false largesse, essentially saying, "We’ll let you and them fight for preservation of our country."

As we indicated on Saturday, however, the actual fighting waged by the Indian armed forces would be substantial. The resistance to the deal offered by Britain was in the end more symbolic than practical. Britain continued primary control of defense, as under the offered deal, and India did participate in full measure in the war effort. The only real consequence was that there was no guarantee of dominion after the war; yet, independence would come in 1947-48, and with it, the problem of settling the conflict over territory between the Hindu and Muslim populations, the perilous and continually uneasy resolution having been the partition of the country to establish Pakistan as the refuge for Muslims.

Paul Mallon discusses the prospect of attack by the U.S. on Japan as being quite as unlikely as the prospect of Japan again attacking Pearl Harbor or attacking the West Coast. Both required the extension too far of supply lines. He believed that Japan would settle into a defensive war to protect and exploit the territory it had just acquired during the previous four months.

The forecast would largely be accurate, as well the method by which the Allies would re-acquire the territory, in the reverse order of its taking, albeit in much slower fashion, consuming in the process far more life.

But, it would only be another five days until the Doolittle raid would surprise everyone as to the ingenuity of the American Navy and air corps in the face of extreme adversity. Tokyo would be raided.

Initial appearances in the Pacific theater to the contrary notwithstanding, no one afterward could lay it to the Americans that they were as guilty as the French of the shrinkage communicated in those dreaded invocations, as Mr. Habe had expressed it, planquez-vous and sauve-qui-peut.

The editorial column also, in addition to finding that Victory Garden managers in the South were planters, not diggers, applauds Charlotte’s response to the planned blackout of the previous evening, but issues the caveat that only when spontaneous air raids occur would the true mettle and resilience of the community be adequately tested. It also noted that the traffic signals, continuing to operate during the blackout, stood in contrast as pronounced beacons in the blackness.

They noticed that the lights had changed and counseled the community to paint it black. England had done so in the last months of 1937 when the threat of war first raised its head with the invasion by Japan of China, and the attack on Shanghai in the house of mirrors.

Speaking of beacons in the blackness, going back a moment to the crash near Las Vegas on January 16, 1942 of the TWA liner carrying 15 bomber ferry pilots and Carole Lombard and her mother, it had attendant with it, according to one percipient witness whose account was provided at the time of the crash to authorities, a bright yellow light suspended about 2,000 feet above ground on a line with the plane's path. The light had appeared a few minutes prior to the crash. A Civil Aeronautics Administration employee helping to search the crash site found this report interesting because, on the night of January 12 or 13, he had also witnessed such a light in the vicinity, about 15 miles distant, while driving near Baker, California, some 50 miles from the crash site, and on a line with the airways, that is the designated flight path of air traffic; the light was similar to a normal beacon light, but, rather than having the usual red lens, was simply a bright white light, appearing without any lens or reflector. At the time, the C.A.A. man questioned what the light was. His companion, a mechanic, also saw the unidentified light and found it problematic.

Well, was the light observed just before the crash a false beacon, an ignis fatuus as it were, set up by Nazi agents against the side of Potosi Mountain, to cause the crash of the plane carrying the all-important ferrying pilots to Los Angeles? wherefrom they would have soon begun another run of bombers to the east coast, ultimately to cross the Atlantic and bomb German positions in France or German cities with vital defense facilities, such as the recent RAF bombings in the Ruhr Valley. The estimate of the eyewitness that the light was suspended, motionless, 2,000 feet in the air "like a lantern", (or, as we might reinterpret the account, a magick-lanthorn in mid-winter), would not confute the theory as the peak of Potosi Mountain is 3,000 feet above the desert floor. Thus, a beacon light set up at around 2,000 feet, ostensibly to guide aircraft over the mountain, would instead guide the airplane into the mountainside, just as, by the eyewitness accounts, the crash occurred.

The question thus arises as to whether Carole Lombard, along with the 15 pilots and other passengers of that flight, were the first victims of the war on American soil after the attack at Pearl Harbor.

The truth just twists...

Incidentally, as temptingly mystical as the irony would be, "The Misfits" was filmed in summer and fall, 1960 in and around Reno, not Las Vegas.

We are glad to hear, by the way, that Captain Richard Phillips and his crew escaped harm from the Somali pirates who boarded the American Maersk cargo ship last week in the Indian Ocean, the first act of piracy against an American ship in over a hundred years. We think, however, that any real pirate would find it most objectionable to have that nomenclature applied to such nitwit pretenders to the realm as these Somali fishermen, brandishing, as they do, AK-47’s and speeding about in motorized, self-sufficient, highly mobile "lifeboats", protected entirely from the elements by a shell.

These aren’t pirates; they are spoiled brats. Real pirates, we hear, are rugged, swashbuckling bounders of the main who stick to the Code, and for protection, brandish only scimitars, sabres, and cutlasses. Pirates attack and fight it out to the death for the booty onboard ship, then bury the treasure with a proper map left for prosperity peradventure something untoward should befall them during their derring-do from secret coves to sea and back again.

No, these aren’t pirates, matey. They’re bloody extortionists and kidnapers, imposters of the lower depths, peasants, common criminals. They ought be ashamed of themselves calling themselves pirates, adopting an appellation reserved to but a select few possessed of the necessary éclat with which properly to infuse the term with its traditional connotative expression. Death by the gibbet is too time-honored and otherwise respectable an end for these rapscallions unworthy of the Rime, absit omen. They ought be marooned on an island, matey, one inhabited only by scorpions, mosquitoes, and vile reptilian creatures of which no man, even Darwin, has ever dared so close an association as to be able to deliver up description--and a thousand miles from the nearest place habituated by mankind or even monkeys. Either that, or sent to Tortuga without a return ride, conversationless absolute.

And, on the Herblock of this date, matey, we make no comment.