The Charlotte News

Friday, April 3, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page tells of the radio operator who, while still onboard a freighter sinking fast after being hit by a U-boat, nevertheless stayed behind to provide the distress signal to establish position for rescue. He then jumped into the dark Atlantic waters carrying only a flashlight and his pet African bush monkey, the latter clutched in his teeth. The bush monkey died; he survived. We hope they gave him overtime pay.

Lieutenant James V. Edmundson, mentioned as having sunk a Japanese sub off Hawaii, eventually flew 107 bombing missions during the war, and 32 more in Korea. He rose in rank to become a Lieutenant-General, served as a S.A.C. commander during the 1950’s, and eventually became director of operations in 1958 before moving to the Pentagon in the early 1960’s.

From Fort Dix, New Jersey came the report that a melee between black and white soldiers, resulting in three being shot to death, had started with an argument over use of a pay phone at an amusement center at the edge of the post. A shot was fired over the head of a fleeing black soldier and other black soldiers in the barracks then returned fire. Well, if you can’t wait to fight the Germans or the Japs, we suppose you could just fight and kill one another over use of the damned phone.

A baby is born onboard a lifeboat after his mother’s ship was shot out from under them by a U-boat, the delivering doctor doing so valiantly with two broken ribs.

The ornery belligerents at Fort Dix could have benefited from the role model.

Bicycle sales were now frozen, says another front page story, because of the rush to buy them, with consequent increase in price. With the same impact having occurred on other consumer items, phonographs, radios, vacuum cleaners, and other small appliances, the Office of Price Administration was now considering an across-the-board price freeze. First, you can’t buy a new car or tires for the old one, and now, you can’t even buy a bike. But, as every cloud has its silver lining, given that enormous consumption of sugar taking place, in need of curtailment to a mere two pounds per person per month, the resulting walk-about likely had manifold ameliorative effects on the country.

On the editorial page, Paul Mallon writes of the vulnerability of merchant shipping to Nazi spy networks operating among the merchant seamen, then able to communicate their easily acquired information to Hamburg via diathermy machines, also employed to like purpose by Japanese spies on the West Coast. A diathermy machine was simply a heating device, commercially available, for treating tissue disorders via the transmission of high frequency electric waves through the body. Its oscillator could be converted to a shortwave radio.

Since the Office of Price Adminstration and the War Production Board was engaged in rationing or freezing sales of practically everything else, there was no good reason to exclude diathermy machines which likely also soon became a verboten item to the general public.

Dorothy Thompson addresses again the subject of geopolitics as taught to the Nazis by Sir Halford Mackinder via Karl Haushofer, the latter a direct influence on Hitler during the writing of Mein Kampf.

Said Ms. Thompson with perspicacity, thus was predicted Hitler’s next move, on Baku, principal petroleum producing port for Russia, located on the Caspian Sea, the other side of the Caucasus from the present fighting in the Donets Basin around Kharkov.

The Heartland theory of Mackinder had now been reduced, in other words, to control of the flow of oil. Control of Baku for Hitler meant cutting off the spigot for Russia and thus drying up its ability to move mechanized divisions against the Wehrmacht. The oil obtained for the Fatherland along the way would nourish Hitler’s further advances south to Iran and Iraq.

So the theory went, once in control of the vast Heartland—that area basically conterminous with the U.S.S.R. and China--, the controlling nation, with sufficient supply lines and industrialization to exploit the resouces it contained, would control the vast "super-island" of Asia-Africa-Europe; and thus the world, the remainder of which was comprised only of outlying islands, would be at its beck, the dream Hitler so cherished.

The theory, of course, turned out to be one for suckers: witness the heavy industrial might of the Sovet Union poured into the exploitation of the natural resources of the Heartland, much of which it controlled during the 45 years after World War II, yet all to naught. The cold theory of geopolitics in practice concentrates too much on maps and encyclopedic references to resources and forgets in the process the sine qua non for harnessing resources, humanity, and, moreover, the treatment of humanity with mutual respect and dignity. Dispiriting humanity, enslaving others to the will of a few, never works for long. Neither Hitler nor Stalin, nor Stalin’s immediate successors in the U.S.S.R., Khruschev and Brezhnev, understood this concept.

It is, of course, the very concept with which Nehru deals in his discussions with Raymond Clapper, which Mr. Clapper terms a part of his "psychosis"—a term harsher in its psychological implications than appropriate to the circumstances of Nehru and India’s subjected population.

Indeed, one could ascribe to Nehru the label of supreme realist, which would be anything but psychotic. His suspicions were that both British and American industrial interests would, as they had previously when talk of industrial development in India was set on the table, quash the effort toward self-sufficiency and subjugate the masses as cheap labor in factories designed to turn out product at the cheapest price possible for the marketplace; that the very inertia of capitalism toward this end would create the conditions of virtual slavery, a condition which nationalists in India now rejected passionately from experience with the British Empire and were seeking to remove as a yoke to their drive for sovereign independence, both political and economic.

Yet, could India realistically, even with 390 million people at its disposal, three times the population of the United States, hope to create the sort of industry required for development without the help of the Western powers, the United States and Great Britain? It was the supreme paradox with which the modernist Nehru had to deal, that which the ascetic Gandhi had resolved with his renunciation of the material world.

Thus, was Nehru the supreme realist or, as Mr. Clapper posits, albeit intended obviously in more editorial than clinical usage, tending toward divorcement from the plane of the rational, psychosis? Was Nehru stuck somewhere in between the worlds of his friend Gandhi and the temptation of the modern world offering up material comfort and prosperity? Was he Hamlet, as Clapper suggested the day before? Was Hamlet insane? Are we all in this post-modern age, with exposure via media to all cultures and most things, even if only experienced and viewed vicariously, tending toward Hamlet in that same respect?

Well, to be or not.

Incidentally, sorry, mate, about the accidental excision of the list of differences, to which the front page piece refers, between Nebraska and Australia, as indicated by the sergeant to John Lardner--son of Ring Lardner, taking time out from his normal sports beat to cover the war in the Pacific--, starting with that headliner which appears intriguing, the lower door knobs. But, we suppose, that is one reason they call it the land down under. You’ll have to use your imagination. (Longer arms or shorter people?)

Speaking of which, we saw a pretty good recent film a couple of weeks back, set in, and in the outback below, Darwin during the early part of the war through this very period of spring, 1942. Called, aptly enough, "Australia", the only fault we lay to the film is its length, being somewhat epochal in stretch, but, still and all, worth a viddy. Afterwards, take your walk-about, especially if you should be consuming two pounds or more per month of raw sugar. Good ‘ay.