The Charlotte News

Tuesday, April 21, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: DeWitt MacKenzie on the front page reports on the guessing game as to the origin of the bombers which hit Tokyo and five other Japanese cities on Saturday. The Japanese continued to report accurately, based undoubtedly on the message sent by the maru sighting the American Task Force Saturday morning before it was sunk, that the planes had flown from carriers several hundred miles out in the Pacific. American reporters had guessed that either the Aleutians or Soviet bases secretly ceded to the Americans were the source.

It is probably a good thing that neither of the latter guesses was true as it could have provoked an attack on either Vladivostok or Alaskan bases. That was likely another reason why the Aleutians were not used, in addition to the fact that they were heavily patrolled by Japanese submarines, thus negating the surprise element had they been used. The Soviets had denied permission to use Vladivostok for any part of the mission, take-off or landing, for the very reason that they feared counter-attack by the Japanese and the need then to divert substantial troops away from their western front to defend against the Japanese. And, again, utilizing Vladivostok or nearby Soviet territory as a point of departure would likely have been spotted by Japanese patrols and spies. Land-based airdromes and naval facilities were relatively easy marks for monitoring: witness the ease with which the Japanese learned of positions of ships and airplanes at Pearl Harbor. A fleet on the high seas, as also confirmed by the circuitous course followed in the attack on Pearl Harbor, was much more difficult to detect.

As it was, utilizing Chinese territory for destination was the most astute plan: the Japanese had already been actively at war in the country for nearly five years and were not in a position to make it worse, indeed had been forced in recent months, because of the offensive in the South Pacific and the considerable losses being regularly inflicted there by the Allies, to divert substantial numbers of troops and airplanes to that region from China. The danger thus posed by the attempt to land there, however, was precisely for the same reason, that the Japanese would potentially have patrols afoot in the area.

The Japanese, smarting from the raid on Saturday, were undergoing air raids periodically, not dissimilar to those fed by rumors which circulated rampantly after Pearl Harbor, prompting air raids in New York, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, accompanied by claimed sightings of enemy planes, the one in San Francisco reporting a very specific sighting of a Japanese squadron over the Bay flying to San Jose.

Japan now got a taste of the psychological impact of such a raid.

The map on the front page shows the demarcation line between Nazi-occupied northern and central France and that of Vichy, so-called unoccupied France. The latter was of course a misnomer. Instead of "unoccupied", it was in fact better called "stooge" France or "collaborationist". In truth, except for the Free French operating under DeGaulle in Africa and in certain outposts within the empire interests of France, and the underground French Resistance among the citizenry operating throughout the country, all of official France was at the mercy and beck of Berlin.

The editorial page largely concerns itself with the French situation. Dorothy Thompson tells of the fallen star of the hero of Verdun, Marshal Petain. He had condemned Laval as a traitor after his collusion with the Nazis, but now had ushered him back into the Cabinet and provided him control of the civilian government. Ms. Thompson gives Petain no quarter from the fact that his strings were being operated by Nazis: he should have stood on principle to the death, she believes. She concludes that the rumors which followed in the wake of World War I, that he only stood his ground at Verdun because he had no choice, must have been true.

The editorial column warns of the two-faced Laval, that his friendly sentiment toward France’s old ally America, was only so durable a position as the Nazi puppetry would allow it, to make way for the softening of the French will to withstand the invader and ultimately to make its palate find the equivalent distaste for America that it had for the British, who, according to Laval, had sold the French out by evacuating Dunkirk after insisting that they ally against Germany after the invasion of Poland.

Paul Mallon writes of the Nazis’ attempt to woo the French fleet to its corner in the Mediterranean in order to perform a flanking maneuver around the stubbornly neutral Turkish barrier between the Black Sea and Syria and the rich oil fields beyond in Iran and Iraq. Mr. Mallon posits that if the French fleet were so disposed to Hitler’s will, then the British might well be vanquished in that theater and the Mediterranean, and its consequent access to the oil and to a linkage with Japan potentially in the Indian Ocean might thus quickly become available to the Axis.

Thus, the focus on the French suddenly became important to the overall scheme afoot, all the more so, given the report on the front page that the Nazis’ vaunted spring offensive, being touted by Hitler since January, had now been postponed for want of experienced troops at the fronts, in Libya, in Russia, until summer. As Paul Mallon had been recently pointing out in his column, the weather window for any Libyan offensive was nearly closed for the summer, as it would soon be too hot in the desert. Weather still remained an ally to the Soviets on the Russian front, with melting snow and slush still blocking the way for the substantial advance of the German Wehrmacht. And manpower shortages in Germany, after the slaughterhouse of the previous ten months in Russia, now became inihibitory of Germany’s ability to continue to wage effective warfare on any front. Would the French Navy now come to the rescue of the hobbling Third Reich?

Raymond Clapper points out that which is obvious: the Russians had performed an invaluable service for the Allies in withstanding the onslaught and giving it back to the Nazis in kind. Indeed, without it, the war might have been lost in 1941.

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, as the front page indicates, the textile industry was ordered to ramp up both war production, especially sandbags, and that of civilian work clothing. Bedding production, towels, draperies, and sportswear were decreased to offset it. Utilitarian work clothing and uniforms, sandbags and shorter dresses. The textile industry, as with most other major industries in the country, was now largely under the control of the government.

Combine this story and the story of the sinking of the Panamanian merchant ship, one story over, and perhaps Brother Starkey’s dream in December, 1937 had its interpretation finally laid forth in a way he did not anticipate. Whether such is reinforced in any Freudian sense as against the Goosesteppers by the quote of the day from Epictetus, rests in the realm of subjective conjecture.

Somewhere between that quote and the story the previous week of the rawhide whip wielding air raid warden lady in Newark who let the cigarette smoker have it with the barbed lash before turning him over to John Law, there is conveyed perhaps some of the inevitable harried, wooly tension surrounding such total warfare fought on a global basis. Sometimes, indeed, it looks a bit like a flying purple people eater to us.

The Herblock of the date would have had more impact through time had he chosen for his cat a panther rather than a leopard.

Anyway, everybody's talkin' 'bout osnaburg, slushedaburg, cotte'bird, Rottebrug, cutarug, gotajug, this-a-burg, that-a-bug...

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