The Charlotte News

Monday, April 20, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports of the new official Japanese version of the Doolittle raid of Saturday, this time getting it more or less correct. The identification of the aircraft as B-25’s was accurate (those not to be confused with the fighter plane depicted in the file photograph beneath the headline). The number of planes attacking Tokyo, estimated at ten, is about correct. And, that they fled to China after the raid. The report, however, declares erroneously that the Task Force had three carriers, when there were only two, the Hornet and the Enterprise. It also continues to imply that some of the planes were shot down, having falsely claimed nine bags on Saturday, later changing it to eight.

"Later Denied..." on the editorial page reads through some of the misstatements to find what it deems kernels of truth, betraying probable significant damage in the raid: for instance the announcement that the Imperial family was safe, an announcement usually found to be accompanying widespread damage in Tokyo, such as at the time of the 1923 earthquake. Nevertheless, the claim of the reports that damage was not great proved accurate.

Regardless, the paranoia generated by the attack was quite enough to draw the Japanese Navy into the Midway engagement in early June, trying to capture the atoll for outlying defense of Japan. The engagement would prove costly, however, the converse of Pearl Harbor.

To protect the planes and ships returning from the Doolittle raid, Washington remained mum on the event. Chungking, however, reported that the bombers had landed safely, impliedly confirming the Chinese destination—something which would redound to the detriment of some 250,000 Chinese, slaughtered by the Japanese invader looking for the 64 airmen provided safe haven in the country.

Confusion in such an atmosphere was rampant daily in the news. One article on the front page, we note, says that the cruising range of the B-25 is a military secret. Immediately to its left is juxtaposed a report stating, quite accurately, that the range is 2,650 miles. So much for secrecy.

The 650 miles from the Hornet to Honshu, plus the distance across Honshu and the 1,400 miles stated accurately as the distance to Chekiang Province, which the report had accurately guessed was the destination for the bombers, meant that the total distance traveled by the bombers was an average of 2,250 miles, eventually the confirmed distance in fact. So, since all of the bombers, except the one which flew to the closer Soviet territory, ran out of fuel and either had to ditch or crash, the lightened weight to accommodate greater fuel capacity to extend the range, appears actually somewhat to have decreased the range by as much 400 miles. We have found no explanation for this apparent discrepancy. Perhaps, the added fuel, in the end, actually cost the mission some of its normal operating range; or, evasive tactics to avoid anti-aircraft fire or being spotted down by Japanese fighters required expenditure of extra fuel. And, of course, once the targets were centered and in the bombers’ sites, the bombs dropped, the pilots obviously were interested in skedaddling, requiring speeds significantly in excess of the speeds on which cruising range was based.

The report of the raid also quotes Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy. As we have made mention before when Raymond Clapper mentioned his name November 14, 1941, Mr. McCloy later served the Kennedy Administration, as well as four subsequent administrations, and was a member of the Warren Commission.

We did not mention on Saturday that Lt.-Colonel Doolittle’s raiding crew was eventually found by, of all persons, John Birch, the same after whom the notoriously reactionary anti-Red organization in the United States was named in the 1950’s, thriving into the early 1960’s, until, so shamed by its outrageous public pronouncements, reminiscent of the silliness accompanying pre-war anti-Red hysterics, such as Elizabeth Dilling or Dave Clark, finding Bolsheviki under every bedstead, it faded back into the hole out of which it and its members crawled--or hopped. (Nevertheless, some still do.)

John Birch, himself, though it has been suggested that few, if any, of the members of the organization are quite sure what he did, was a young, idealistic, and by the accounts, dogmatically over-bearing, Baptist missionary in China at the time of the Doolittle raid. He believed passionately that Communism was an equivalent evil to fascism and Nazism and made the oft-repeated fatal mistake of mixing his politics with religion. Ultimately, it cost him his life after the war was over. He had, on Doolittle’s recommendation, joined the Allied war effort and became an intelligence officer in the O.S.S. In late August, 1945, while leading a patrol in southern China to determine the extent of occupation of Chinese Communists in the region, he encountered a Chinese Communist patrol. He argued with the leader of the patrol when the latter demanded that Mr. Birch surrender his pistol, causing the patrol leader to lose face in front of his men. He then had Mr. Birch summarily executed.

Thus, Mr. Birch, at age 27, became the Jean d’Arc for the anti-Communist nuts in this country—not dissimilar to Horst Wessel and his martyrdom memorialized in song by the Nazis. Two peas in a pod, pods of similar makeup pychologically. They know what is right, and right is right and wrong is wrong. Simple. No need to stress details for details confuse and the Devil confuses and so the Devil is in the details. Simple.

Anyhow, we cannot blame Lt.-Col. Doolittle for having been found by John Birch; nor may we blame John Birch for having his name posthumously co-opted by a bunch of right-wing nuts. Guilt by such tangential association does not apply.

The John Birch Society, however, and all of its associates, were and are a bunch of nuts. Dallas, for instance, in the early 1960’s, was chock full of them, and, practically speaking, served as the organization’s prime headquarters.

The other headline story reports that during a rainstorm, Australian and American fighters had attacked over the weekend Japanese airdromes on Rabaul in New Britan off New Guinea. It appears that General MacArthur’s Army air corps were taking the advice offered by The News in "Air Attack" on May 19, 1941, presumably one of Cash’s latter pieces. Soon, the plywood mosquito boats as well would be out plentifully on patrol within the areas around New Guinea and in the Solomon Islands.

Whether Bycolife, the wonders of which the letter to the editor defends this date, was also useable to thwart enemy positions, is a question which, perhaps, the courts never reached.

The report on the front page regarding the Nazis executing thirty French hostages in order to gain information on the perpetrators of a train explosion which killed several German soldiers, suggests, along with similar accounts from both Norway and Belgium in recent days, that the French Resistance and the brotherhood of resistance efforts in the other occupied countries were beginning to have their effect on the Nazi occupiers. The report also suggests the cowardice of the Nazis, as they announced that they would ride henceforth with significant numbers of French civilians to deter subsequent sabotage—hiding as it were behind the apron strings of women and children, the big, bad, merciless Nazis’ favorite ploy, as with most bullies.

Another report has it that the Soviets were taking Smolensk, the third such report in the previous three months. The report posits that the battlefront, eighteen miles from Smolensk, the site of battle described in War and Peace, and lying along Napoleon’s route of retreat from Russia in the cruel winter of 1812-1813, placed the fireworks display within view of the Fuehrer on his 53d birthday this April 20. It then admits that it was not known whether the Fuehrer still had his winter headquarters there. He didn’t. The reporter might have guessed the fact from the Fuehrer’s repeatedly demonstrated cowardice: he had long ago, in late January, skeddadled back to Minsk, well away from the fighting. Indeed, by and large, he had by now turned the fighting back over to his generals whom he had fired in December, and returned to Berlin. Playing soldier, after all, was not the little corporal’s best game.

And, the Normandie again suffers another fire, again caused by an acetylene welding torch. It seems that this stricken ship laying on its side in New York Harbor because of the welding fire of early February demonstrated significant resistance to having its skin ripped apart by welders. Well, you would, too.

Pierre Laval, new head of the Vichy civilian government, is quoted in words sympathetic to the Nazis, the type of words and commensurate deeds which caused him to be put before a French firing squad after the war. Admiral Darlan would be saved from the fate by assassination on Christmas Eve, 1942, at the hand of a member of the French Resistance in Algiers. His death came after he began cooperating with the Allies during his short-lived effort to save his own skin in the wake of the Allied invasion of North Africa in November.

On the editorial page, Raymond Clapper suggests clarification by the Allies of their post-war intent with respect to dominion status and continued empire interests in East Asia, that the failure thus far to do so had been the reason for the failed Cripps mission to India, that resulting in the rejection by the Indian National Congress of the British plan for post-war dominion in exchange for support in the war; that the same failure had provided fifth column support to the Japanese in Burma and Malaya; that it was the incentive-eviscerating tendency of the uneducated classes in these countries to view the immediate struggle only as between which of the two competing forces would carry the future whiphand of overlord in the country, the Japanese or the Western powers.

It is true what Mr. Clapper says. Had the Allies, through the United Nations organization created after the war, been more clear in denouncing continued empire interests, then perhaps Vietnam would never have come to civil war, eventually embroiling the United States after the fall of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the cancellation of the scheduled elections in the country in 1956 out of the fear that Communist Ho Chi Minh would be elected president of a unified country. Thus began the rain all over again, with the United States perceived as the new Boss, same as the old Boss.

Paul Mallon salutes a fallen comrade, General Johnson, finding him to have been brusque but honest, a poor administrator, politically unsavvy, but an excellent writer who wrote of matters as he saw them, damning the torpedoes in the paper battle he waged.

We are not sure that we quite fully agree with that assessment of the General’s writing capability. Sometimes, he was interesting and other times he was downright pedestrian; still other times he lapsed into such an anecdotal mode as to be little more than an armchair weaver of old stale tales of war, dropping names as he went. But, that’s just our subjective reading of it many decades after the fact, long after most of the names he dropped ceased having any relevance to the times and the news. As we said in December, however, when The News stopped carrying his column, replaced by Paul Mallon’s column, we sort of missed him. He was sometimes good for getting the hackles up, and occasionally could wax wise and prophetic.

Speaking of which, since O.R. Champion, among today’s letter writers, seemed to have it all figured out as to what was indicated prospectively by the world conflagration at hand, we retreat back a few days to a little story on the front page of April 10, regarding the inmate who obtained his $10 cash bail in lieu of having left his new false teeth as security with the jailer. Our diligent research during the weekend recess has unturned the ground of an astoundingly subtle coincidental foundment relevant to his story. The inmate nearly became the repository of confirmatory commensation for Brother Starkey’s remarkably outrageous prediction appearing nearly four and a half years before the tooth story, on December 10, 1937, to wit: "Cotton will sell for $10 BAIL." Brother Starkey was obviously related to Cotton Mather and was, no doubt, very soft-spoken. They say he was extremely absorbent of his surroundings, also. But sometimes, when he went much further south than Norfolk, he could become somewhat rotten. He also, it is said by the au courant and others in the know, occasionally rattled as he walked. Whether, however, he was also related to the pair of rabbits caught in the trap laid by Esq. Yokley, as related with estimable credulity ultimately to Esq. Bowers, is nowhere told.

Well, we just thought we would mention it. It don’t come easy, any more than the photograph of Mr. Miller--bail, that is.

Anyway, keep the Change, Bob.

By the way, last night, we were looking out our window over at the Golden Gate, and we could've sworn we saw the Hornet pass right under its orange girders, heading out to sea. But it was a very warm day, and so it may have been just a housing bee fooling our perceptions.

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