The Charlotte News

Wednesday, April 8, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page tells of a building force by the Nazis operating under Rommel in North Africa, indicative of a spring offensive on the way to try to take the Suez Canal, thus to break through to the Red Sea and attempt joinder with the Japanese, now preoccupied with solidifying Burma and attempting inroads to India. The British forces had been steadily depleted during the winter by the need for troops in Malaya, Burma, and India, and, as the piece points out, by the departure recently of Australian troops, now needed to bolster General MacArthur’s forces in Australia.

Meanwhile, as pointed out on March 27 on the front page, Major-General George Patton was preparing his new special desert corps of 8,000 men in the California-Nevada desert, west of the Colorado River, in the Imperial Valley below Palm Springs. This corps would begin battle in early November as part of Operation Torch, the American and British invasion of the Vichy-held north coast of Africa, in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, thus enabling eventually, beginning in March, 1943, after Patton was assigned to command Army II Corps, a pincer movement from Egypt by the British under General Montgomery and from the western part of the north coast, Tunisia, by Patton against Rommel’s forces in the middle, within Libya.

And for ogglers, the news comes that the War Production Board, as earlier contemplated, now had ordered dresses to be trim and short. To everything there is a season.

On the editorial page, "A Contrast" tells the bloody story related on the front page of the previous day, the merciless execution of Australian prisoners on the island of New Britain off New Guinea, by the Japanese. The piece ends by siding with the growing public sentiment which favored the notion that if Japan was going to fight a war of extermination, then so should the Allies, beginning with the bombing of Tokyo.

The opinion would not have long to wait for manifestation: the Doolittle raid on Tokyo was now but ten days away. For news-weary Americans and British, it would be the first good news, outside the Russian campaign, itself problematic for many Americans enamored of Russo-phobia, in many months--arguably since the outset of the war in 1939.

"Five Old Men" comments on the Southern S.S. Co. case on which we commented two days ago. As the piece questions the position of the dissent of Justice Reed, in which Justices Black, Douglas, and Murphy joined, we shall focus a bit on that. (Presumably, incidentally, the two justices to whom the piece ascribes better New Dealership than jurisprudence were Justices Douglas and Black; nevertheless both, by the end of their long tenures, eventually were to register more profound impact on the Court than all but a handful of justices in the Court's history.) The dissent stresses the single point that the mutiny found by the majority of the Court to have occurred onboard the City of Fort Worth was not serious enough criminal conduct to deprive the NLRB of its broad discretion to reinstate the discharged seamen.

For the NLRB to exceed its discretion, the dissent opined, requires more serious criminal conduct, of the type the Court found in the 1939 Fansteel case, 306 U.S. 240, concerning the seizure of a steel mill by striking workers and holding it by force against repeated attempts to re-take it. The dissenting justices believed that the NLRB’s findings of no trespass, no interference with the operation of the ship, or compromise to its safety, rather only passive resistance, even though unlawful, so diminished the gravity of the conduct that there was insufficient hazard to deprive the Labor Board of its wide berth of discretion to implement remedial measures with prophylactic extensibility. (For, sounding back to the majority's reference to the ill-fated Normandie, there is also danger to be had in unreinstated discharged seamen who may then turn around, and, in revengeance, "accidentally" sabotage the hold of the ship, with acetylene welding torches no less--whether then traceable as Nazi spies being quite problematic, it calling into question the axiopisticality of the subjects of the discharge.)

The difference, therefore, between the dissent and the majority turned on whether, as the dissent favored, degrees of activity by striking seamen should determine the extent of NLRB discretion, or, as the majority favored, an absolute rule should provide the limit of discretion, such that strikes onboard ship, whether in port or at sea, pre-empted the Board's ability to reinstate.

Who had the better of the argument, the narrow majority or the dissent?

The News strongly adhered to the majority position. Bearing in mind that editor J. E. Dowd was a Navy reservist, this stance is not surprising. And there can be no question that a ship’s confined environment presents a different kettle of fish from that of a factory. As the majority pointed out, the ship’s master remains liable for the well-being of the striking seamen, to shelter, feed, and provide them with first-aid when needed. The factory owner has no similar stewardship responsibility under law or by contract typically. Looking at the matter from a practical standpoint of the strike’s goal, ameliorative effect on wages and conditions of work, is a dockside strike as effective as an onboard strike while a ship is docked?—other than the latter being unduly disruptive in a manner similar, if distinct on the issue of violence, to that carried out at Fansteel?

Regardless, the majority decision left it to Congress to determine by statute whether the NLRB specifically should be given broader discretion to reinstate workers even when engaged in unlawful conduct, making the strike itself illegal.

"Canada’s Plan" suggests the success of Canada’s wage and price freeze to Senator Claude Pepper of Florida for citation in support of his plan to renew the fight for such a freeze in the United States.

"Not Enough" cavils once again against government bureaucracy, a favorite topic of late in the column, finding that the Federal executive branch had blossomed to an overwhelming 1.7 million employees by the beginning of 1942, more than in the armed forces at the same point in time. It issues the caveat that no war was ever won by sheer volume of bureaucracy. Though probably true, nevertheless, red tape or no, the war was won. It always helps to have a credible and reasonably capacious, articulate captain at the helm, of course, as both Britain and the United States were fortunate in this time to have.

Raymond Clapper has now moved on from India to Chungking, China in his globe-trot through the war zones. He reports of the hardship and the destruction from bombing there, every bit the equal of London during the Blitz of 1940-41—the results of which Mr. Clapper had also seen first-hand from his trip to Britain in August, 1941. He stresses the need for the supply route via India to remain open lest, with India’s fall to the Japanese, all supply to China would come to a halt, precipitating its fall and with it the release of the pressure being kept on Japan outside the Southwest Pacific theater. For, if China fell, Japan would be less concerned about home waters, less saddled with the need for men and materiel in China itself. Thus, men and equipment would be freed to provide support to the present operations on New Guinea aimed at maintaining defense against U.S.-based operations out of Australia while simultaneously interrupting the lines of supply across the Pacific from the United States.

Paul Mallon discusses why Mandalay in Burma is important to retain—oil for China. But Mandalay would soon fall. The gasoline would henceforth for the duration be carried across the "W Pass" in the "Hump" of the Himalayas by airplane manned by U.S. and British pilots. By late 1943, the art of these flights had been so perfected that four-fifths as much gasoline, 12,000 gallons per month, was being carried by air as had been the case by rail and truck on the Burma Road prior to the fall of Rangoon.

Mallon discusses further that enough oil to supply indefinitely the war machine in the Pacific, 3% of the world supply, twice that previously controlled by all of the Axis nations, was already available to Japan from their mid-January conquest of Tarakan off Borneo in the Dutch East Indies, thus making the Mandalay oil and refinery in Burma largely superfluous except as a defensive measure to keep it from supplying China. Moreover, because of the Tarakan crude’s superior grade and its being subject to delivery via wells dug by water-well digging equipment, it was readily available, despite the Dutch having destroyed all the oil wells and refineries before they evacuated on January 13.

The ready availability of use of this oil in Borneo was precisely why Hitler needed to undertake his offensive in Libya, to gain access to the Suez and attempt to link with the Japanese, the grand strategy initiated with the attack on Pearl Harbor--to encircle and cut off supply to the Heartland, Russia and China, to enfeeble the opposition while enabling in the process prosecution of the war with sforzando to go with blitzkrieg.

A long piece on the page by William Ziff, publisher of aviation magazines, favors a strategy of victory by air war. He contends that in the modern age, it is not any longer possible to overcome land-based air defenses with naval invasion. D-Day, as well as its aforementioned predecessor, Operation Torch in North Africa, would give the lie to this conjecture, even if Mr. Ziff’s observation would be borne out, that such land invasions carried with them the certainty of enormous loss of life, as D-Day would sanguinarily confirm. In the end, however, bomb and bomb away as the Allies would, in cities such as Dresden post-D-Day, it took the invasion of the Continent by sea, combined with the Russian offensive from the east, finally to bring Nazi Germany to its knees.

Booma-locka-locka-locka, booma-lock-locka-locka.