The Charlotte News

Friday, May 22, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports of the new requirement for draft registration among 18 and 19 year olds, though they would not become eligible for actual draft until the age of twenty.

A second Mexican tanker in a week, the Faja de Oro, seized by right from Italy April 1, 1941 following the same practice of the United States against Axis ships in that time, was sunk by a U-boat in Caribbean or Gulf waters, the first off Florida, this one off Cuba. The actions had prompted such concern in Mexico that the following day, President Camacho would finally declare war on the Axis.

The fact that Mexico had not done so officially for five and a half months after Pearl Harbor indicates the continued influence which a large German population within Mexico had exerted on the country’s hierarchy, military and political. Though Mexico knew of Nazi spies in its midst, having been asked by Josephus Daniels officially on July 12, 1941 to arrest three named Nazi spies, Georg Nicolaus, Friedrich Karl von Schleebrugge, and Paul Max Weber, it nevertheless took no official action against any of them until November, 1941 when it issued warrants which were then delayed in execution until late February, 1942, when 240 spies were rounded up. Nevertheless, of those, only two were tried for espionage; they were acquitted. The rest were simply deported to Germany.

Regardless, Mexico was finally about to hop off the fence and issue a formal declaration of war on the Axis.

President Roosevelt, amid some cautious optimism being expressed in press accounts in the wake of the falsely assumed devastating blow to Japan in the Battle of the Coral Sea, though rightfully heartening it was to have at least stood down the Japanese Navy and air force and battled it to a draw, and the equally falsely optimistic reports from the Russian front that the Russian Army continued its winter success against the Nazi horde in the Russian Kharkov offensive and the German Kerch offensive, both soon to have their counter reports, warned the country that the war would be a long one. It was this wise hand of guiding leadership by FDR which provided the continued confidence of the American people in his apt steerage of the ship of state. He had left the talk of post-war planning to Vice-President Wallace and FDR’s 1940 opponent, Wendell Willkie, not the least bit unwise, but nevertheless not properly the role of the Chief Executive until in fact an end was in sight, not the case at all in spring 1942.

Indeed, the Allies still stood very much in peril of losing the war. But weakened morale, resultant from the persistent parade of stories freighted with news of predominantly crushing blows delivered during the time since December 7, had to be bolstered somehow, especially when confronted with continual daily doses of Nazi and Japanese propaganda printed amid the stories provided by percipient reporters.

South Carolinian Robert Best, who chose to remain in Germany and was now being heard attacking the United States and FDR via shortwave broadcast, is described in a front page piece as reminiscent of the obnoxious Lord Haw-Haw, who was similarly an English-speaking German propagandist holding forth on the shortwave.

The term applied to a series of four such announcers, but William Joyce, who occupied the Haw-Haw seat from 1939 through the end of the War in Europe, is the person most usually associated with the term. Mr. Joyce was an Ameican, raised in Ireland, who became a member of the British Fascist Union, the BFU, (or perhaps we mistake that for BUF), the organization led by Sir Oswald Mosley who had wed Diana Mitford of Asthall Manor located beside the River Windrush, with Der Fuehrer and Herr Goebbels proudly looking on with approbation at the new bride and groom of Aryan purity and Fascist Asthall manners. You will recall that the Hon. Unity Valkyris Freeman-Mitford, also a Buffy sort of person, shot herself in the head in January, 1940, but recovered, as undoubtedly little damage could be inflicted to her head, and lived on until 1948.

Oh dear, that's terrible, isn't it?

Anyway, it all goes to show that, at the time, the BUF did swing like a pendulum do. All they had to do was act naturally.

Rita Hayworth won divorce from her first husband in Los Angeles. Her visage adorned one of the two August, 1946 atom bombs, named Gilda, exploded in the first of the Bikini tests and which, among other damaged or sunk ships, irradiated the Prinz Eugen, Nazi heavy cruiser, target of the RAF during the war for its role in the May, 1941 sinking of the Hood, including the incident reported Monday which had it hit and severely damaged in a bombing raid on Trondheim. It nevertheless survived the war, having successfully fled Brest in February, only to be irradiated by Rita Hayworth at Bikini in 1946.

That is where the practice of eugenics leads behind the Siegfried Line, we glean.

Louis Lochner, Associated Press reporter recently released from internment in Germany, reports of the celerity with which German glaziers and carpenters go about, rabbit-like, making provisional repairs to bombed buildings, beginning on the morning after the raid, such that, by the second morning, a sufficient façade is put forth to the world, in emulation of Hollywood backlots, that the observer sees little or no damage, thus making the reporter's job very difficult in assessing the true overall impact of the RAF raids, both in terms of actual physical damage and psychological distress inflicted to the populace behind the crumbling walls.

On the editorial page, a letter to the editor from Dictaphone tells The News of its error of the April 27 issue, in which it printed a story off the wire which had improperly described as a Dictaphone the listening device upheld by the Supreme Court as legal for use under the circumstances of that case, though a decision later overruled; in fact, it was a Detectaphone, correctly Dictaphone’s advertising manager asserts.

We have it, however, on positive authority that the White House of 1972-74 had Dictaphones doing the secret recording of the President’s company, not Detectaphones. (They also used Chapsticks, apparently, but that was likely only when they went skiing.)

Another letter writer writes in eloquent defense of Robert Rice Reynolds’s career. He neglects to point out, however, as had the Associated Press on the March Hare, that the Senator, while promoting that highway through the Canadian "corridor" to Alaska and the establishment within the Aleutians of a naval and air base, had previously "loved"(?) walrus there. The Senator, we remind, had, the previous summer, married the daughter of the former owner of The Washington Post, and, by that nuptial, had moved into line of accession to possession of the Hope Diamond owned by his bride’s mother.

"Guide to Robert" in the editorial column responds directly to the letter writer with some elucidation, even if begging the point considerably regarding the land in Russia being closer to Japan than the Aleutians, as that Russian land was not available for use to the United States or Britain. But at the time, it was not yet known what the or'gin of the Doolittle raid was and, privately, speculation may have been that it came from one of these locales.

The piece adds that the Senator, in a reverse twist usual to his mindset, had sought to lay suspicion for the September, 1939 sinking of the Athenia to Russia rather than the Nazis.

In fact, however, we have instead heard rumours to the effect that simply the tusks of an off-course walrus hit the ship. In any event, as we have previously pointed out, the sinking of that ship led to many things. Take it away, and would the world be the same today? Indeed, would we even be here to tell the tale?

And the Sergeant thinks that the Sky Pilot is an okay guy, says the Fort Benning "Soundoff".

We have to inquire, however, as to whether the sound which was off came from Part 1 or Part 2. And whether it was with callipiver or without. Accompanied by a caliginous charivari or not?

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