The Charlotte News

Wednesday, April 29, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports the fall of Lashio in Burma, splitting the British and Chinese defenders of the last of the Burma Road, already severed at its port juncture at Rangoon since the beginning of March. Since the fall of Rangoon, it had been a foregone conclusion that Burma would fall, the only question being when, and to what degree in the meantime the defenders could inflict damage on the Japanese, commensurate with the strategy in the Philippines. The last major city in Burma, Mandalay, was now gravely imperiled, its defenses cut in two and the Japanese able now to flank and encircle it from the south and northeast.

A report came from Australia that shot down Japanese airmen who survived the crash or bailed out were then, to prevent their revealing secrets to the Allies, regularly machine-gunned to death by other Japanese fighters. One was supposed to fight to the death, nothing less. Most honorable.

In the midst of a rubber shortage where tire thieves, as reported from Los Angeles, were sentenced to six months in county jail, it is also reported from Britain that the RAF struck in a Paris suburb a B. F. Goodrich plant, albeit one which the American company had ceased to operate with the fall of France.

Tabled in committee by a single vote was a bill to limit wartime profit gouging and extend the hours limitation on labor from 40 to 48 to reduce the necessity of overtime pay. This action, coming the second day after the President’s speech urging sacrifice equally by everyone in the country.

A report from the Free French states that three times since March, Hitler had approached London with peace tenders founded on the premises that Hitler would maintain his empire interests in Central Europe, have control of the former French, Belgian, and Dutch colonies, and annex certain undefined lebensraum within Russia. As quid pro quo, the U.S. would control Latin America and Britain would maintain their current empire interests. The British denied their receipt of any such offers by Hitler.

Parenthetically, it should be noted that the Belgian interests included the Congo where much of the world’s supply of uranium had been identified at the time, as stated by Albert Einstein in his August 2, 1939 letter to FDR.

Meanwhile, for whatever reason, with so much fodder on today’s front page alone, the editors pushed to find amid the morass of otherwise dreary news anything of proper offering for the regular springtime awakening to the "Silly Season".

Rather than stressing, say: the sugar shortage and potential consequent jailtime for hording it while the local moonshine king, probably consuming more bootlegged sugar and rubber than anyone in the county, bid au revoir and received only probation (though no pardon); the President’s attribution to Shangri-La the origin of the bombers over Tokyo; whether, posed Socratically, the chickens’ laying would be improved or not by their and their eggs being eliminated from the price freeze; or whether the elimination of dried prunes from the list of things frozen portended the semblance of the faces of the consumers when they finally received the news about gas rationing; rather than any of these things, "That Season" strains to find but four things silly, not all that funny, in a world gone mad.

Maybe that was all they could find at the time about which to smile, even grimly, but, in hindsight at least, it seems pretty funny that Hitler was still playing the mad genius Napoleon in Russia, as chronicled by Dorothy Thompson, and doing so three years to the day before he would blow his brains out in his bunker, never stopping to realize that the end of the idyll which he emulated, whether that of Napoleon or Siegfried, was not so good.

"Lost Supplies" discusses the shift of the available tin and rubber, which once, before December 7, had been to the clear advantage of the Allies, since, with the fall of the Dutch East Indies, belonging to the Axis, the only consolation being that the Axis could not yet exploit the resources it now controlled. Nevertheless, the piece darkly reminds, the denial to the Allies of these resources was complete.

Still, even with this shift combined with the losses of all the raw materials in Japanese-conquered territory, and in the Ukraine not yet conquered by the Nazis, the advantage in iron ore, coal, and oil remained strongly with the Allies, as the chart to which the editorial refers, appearing in The News December 13, 1941, demonstrates.

Moreover, on the issue of morale, Germany and Italy, the Bully States, were now suffering, whereas the Allies enjoyed the role of underdog just beginning to fight. Paul Mallon reports that the Italians were getting but 1,700 calories per day and the Germans, 2,500.

Today, the FDA assumes an average diet of only 2,350 calories, but those were different times, when foods were not prepared with calories in mind, when people thought that being reduced to a half pound of raw sugar per week per person was a sacrifice.

Nevertheless, perceptions supplying in great part the foundation of morale, perceptions ran, by relative measures, that all of the best food was going to the soldiers while the average citizens perceived themselves to be on a starvation diet. As the tanks and guns and airplanes, once built at a white-hot pace by meticulous German hands, had worn out or been destroyed on the Russian front, the subsistence dwellers back home living on ersatz food, walking in used or ersatz shoes, had the blues, and from them had reduced their pace to a crawl. Germania was quickly becoming Germanacled and by its own ploys.