The Charlotte News

Friday, May 1, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reveals that in Bayboro, N.C., it was reported by a couple of the local boys that three parachutists had landed in the woods shortly after noon. Seven hundred local residents dispatched themselves immediately to the search behind the sheriff. They hadn’t found anything. General Weatherred at Fort Bragg said not to worry; probably nothing.

Whether they were Nazi swine, Japanese swine, British irregulars off their beaten path, or some Lejeune Marines training for deployment later in the year in North Africa, the world will little note nor long remember. We’ll keep you posted as we search the woods. Probably just some aliens.

Somewhere from an advanced Allied air base in Papua New Guinea, John Lardner writes of his many comforts, save the absence of running water, electricity, food, clothing, the mosquitoes and the Zeroes flying overhead. Other than that and the war, life was swell. Where else could you find Australian anglers blasting compleatly the holy mackerel out of their quarry from the depths with hand grenades and gelignite?

A factory producing artificial fertilizers exploded in Belgium, killing 750, injuring a thousand more. It was in an area where the Belgian anti-Nazi underground, the White Brigade, was particularly active. No cause was given for the blast.

In contrast to the report the previous day of the Japanese machine-gunning their own downed pilots, comes the report of the rescue of two American pilots shot down by Japanese planes. One parachuted into a harbor and had to swim for six hours to find safety. The other landed on an island beach and after wandering all night among nightmarish mosquitoes and sandflies, was tracked by natives and Army trackers. Both were rescued to fight another day.

Mussolini and Hitler met in Salzburg to discuss their many victories and toast to the grand future ahead. Conspicuously absent was any Japanese representative, including the Ambassador to Germany, Hiroshi Oshima.

A piece from William Hipple of the Associated Press and Honolulu Star Bulletin provides a day in the life on New Caledonia, the Free French island north of Australia and presently of central importance as a hedge against further Japanese encroachment into the region south of New Guinea. To the author, as the Allies established a large naval base on the island, the scene reminded of the French Quarter in New Orleans, bands playing both "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "La Marseillaise". But did they have the beignets and the French chicory? Could they play "Joe Avery"?

On the editorial page, "The Double E" tells of the swift and sure hands of the riveters and iron workers laying keels at the Richmond, California shipyard, establishing first a record of building a Liberty ship in 44 days, then beating it the previous week by six days. They would eventually weld and rivet with squared double the speed of light, setting the all-time record at 4 days, 15.5 hours in November, 1942, at the Richmond yard. That ship, the Robert E. Peary, set sail November 22, 1942, 14 days after its keel was laid. The ship was scrapped in June, 1963.

It was a good thing that ships were building so fast. Even at a pace of one every five days, let alone the average rate for the war of 42 days for these cookie-cut Liberty ships, the rate of sinking of naval and merchant vessels in the Atlantic since the beginning of American involvement in the war was in excess of a ship a day—131 as had been reported the previous day from the floor of Congress and as discussed in "S...O...S". The editorial reminds that an editorial in The News of March 24, "Expedients", had recommended precisely that which Senator Brooks of Illinois and Senator Shipstead of Minnesota had suggested the previous day, building barges to run on the Inland Waterway and employing a civilian aviation corps to spot submarines in the path of a ship, drop depth charges, and send for bomber crews. Senator Shipstead had reported that 1,000 planes were already available for the job.

The piece by Louis Graves from the Chapel Hill Weekly bemoans the mangling by even dictionaries into wisteria of wistaria, named for anatomist Caspar Wistar. Oxford, we report, gets it right. Thomas Nuttall, the botanist and ornithologist who provided the name, the piece reports, was the origin of the misspelling. Mr. Nuttall also had his namesakes, among which were a woodpecker, a poorwill, and a thieving magpie. The songwriters later on may have at least rhymed it a little wrong, but that is alright. For how could one say anything else besides "We’ll miss the cafeteria that’s crawling in wisteria," when musing treacly of Ross Barnett and Ole Miss in 1963?

In any event, it’s all a bit fuzzy today on the page and so we shall try a little later to get you a clearer version.

Come to think on it, those parachutists who landed in the woods of Bayboro may surreptitiously have set up shop and signaled the crew of the craft which landed in Mayberry in October, 1973 of a good place to light down, as we once reported to you at Halloween, 2005 of our percipient observations. But it’s not Halloween right now, and so we’ll save that one for later.

In reading the fuzz of the Paul Mallon and Raymond Clapper pieces, it all does lead us to muse that what FDR was fighting during his tenure, when boiled down, was treacle-down economics. Whether they had the cure for it in Le Vieux Carre, however, remains to be seen.

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