The Charlotte News

Saturday, May 30, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page describes the German DNB report that the Kharkov offensive had been defeated by encirclement of the Russian troops and artillery, leading to the capture of 240,000 prisoners, "enormous" numbers of dead, the destruction or taking of 1,249 tanks, 2,026 guns, and 538 planes. The report was essentially correct. Subsequent estimates of the Russian captured or dead would be 200,000 to 250,000 against about one-tenth that number of German casualties. This particular counter-offensive under the leadership of Marshal Semeon Timoshenko had failed.

Rommel’s late drive to try to take the critical supply depot of Tobruk was being pushed back in fierce fighting by the British.

From Prague came conflicting reports of the state of Reinhard Heydrich, an Italian bulletin indicating his critical condition, another dispatch, presumably the one from Bern, finding the Hangman to be dead.

Of course, he had been dead for two decades; it was only a matter of time for the bullets and the bomb to catch up with him at the right intersection of time and place. As indicated, it is not beyond reasonable suspicion that Heinrich Himmler had already pulled the morphine drip from his immediate subordinate’s arm in order to justify the massive killings to follow, not only the 13,000 in Czech territory, but the six million in the Final Solution, all to appease the Hangman still at large among them.

On the editorial page, Dorothy Thompson likewise speculates as to whether the Gestapo itself, with its "wheels within wheels", might have wanted to eliminate Heydrich.

Ms. Thompson advocates, similar to the Churchill warning of tit-for-tat should the Germans start the use of gas on the Russian front, following the report a couple of weeks earlier of large shipments of gas being shipped by train to the Eastern Front, that for every Czech hostage killed, an undefended German village should be bombed.

It sounds gruesome, of course, but it was gruesome indeed to be the facilitator of the Final Solution and it was gruesome indeed to be rounding up indiscriminately thousands of Czechs and executing them for the "crime" of being without papers, having on their person a firearm, or simply being Jewish.

The sentiment was not confined to Ms. Thompson. It was precisely echoed in the editorial column in "Eye for Eye", advocating "meeting [the Nazis] on the common ground of terrorism, unafraid to strike at any exposed spot." The editorial stated with greater accuracy than the front page the status of matters in Prague, that there were two assailants being sought, that some 15,000 hostages were held in concentration camps awaiting execution should the assailants not be given up to the Gestapo. Eventually, on June 16, they would be, by one of their fellow planners of the attack.

The front page also reported that eighteen Norwegian hostages had been murdered by the Nazis in retaliation for the killing of two Germans in a fishing village near Bergen, extending the pattern which had developed more clearly in recent weeks preceding the Heydrich attack.

"Italian Style" finds a parallel between the initial Italian claims of sinking of a U.S. battleship of the North Carolina-class with Italy’s earlier initial claim of an Italian "victory" in its own debacle at Taranto November 11, 1940, one thought to have given the notion to the Japanese of the value of surprise attack by air—though it would seem that so long as it could be accomplished, such a simple-minded plan could not have needed much positive example. The editorial mocks the fact that the North Carolina-class battleship was slowly diminished in stature and finally transformed entirely into a British merchant ship.

It need not have been so harsh. Mussolini and his fellow fascists were merely about dancing the Tarantella, having been bitten by the Wolf spider. Unfortunately, Monsieur Pasteur's remedy notwithstanding, the virulence of the toxin thus injected by the Wolf was too great and there was no ridding its vitriol save in death.

Paul Mallon writes of the Scottish Laborite who favored nationalization of all industries in Britain after the war, a result which Mr. Mallon suggests would be tantamount to Nazism. The Scots-woman had found the British system prior to the war to be a failure. Mallon contrasts the American system where thus far in five months of war, Administration-nudged labor and management had effected a rapprochement to produce in harmony for the war effort, one which had not only met but exceeded the President’s January projections in all areas except shipbuilding. Mallon wistfully hopes that the cooperative effort might last after the war.

"Our Chicks" in the editorial column brags of the 21% increase registered by the hens in the barnyard, fulfilling and substantially exceeding the Government’s established quota for increase of 13% over 1941 laying, and, though unstated by the editorial, fulfilling P.R. McCain’s wish registered in his ornithophilistic letter of May 13.

"Labor’s House" compares the high salaries paid to labor union bosses to those of elected officials, finding the ousted vice-president of UMW, Philip Murray, earning more than Vice-President Wallace. And, in his new position as president of the steelworkers’ union, earning yet again even more.

An employee of Sam Bolton Leather Co. writes in a letter to the editor that when he informed the Government that he needed to travel 2,500 miles per month, he received, double-quick, his ration card for a commensurate allotment of gasoline from the rationing board, because his papers were in order.

Those in need of leather, such as the air raid warden in New Jersey a few weeks earlier, to enforce discipline and prevent recalcitrant cigarette smokers from lighting one up during blackouts, would not be forced to subsist therefore without ready replenishment.

But we do question, in light of the fact that leather was also in short supply because of the need for shoes for the military, and because the supply of rubber for the soles of shoes was de minimis: what the devil was this travelling salesman doing in need of 2,500 miles of road per month on which to burn rubber and gas to sell leather? Wethinks instead it may point out the deviltry which accompanies inevitably any overly stratified, non-holistic bureaucratic process, bound to be full of holes. But, it’s good to receive good news in happy-happy land.

The other letter conveys the continuing tempest in a teapot simmering out of Lumberton, hammering The News for its editorial of May 25 re Lumberton’s Protestant incensement over Catholic sponsorship of the USO center to be operated there, thirty miles from Fort Bragg. The eye of the hurricane appeared to have developed from the rudeness exhibited to a Lumberton Baptist minister by the head of the USO center when he stated that he didn’t give a damn what the community thought about Catholic sponsorship of the center, but was interested only in the welfare of the soldiers.

And rightly so. He should have told this silly parson and the rest of them to go jump in the Lumbee River and obtain re-Baptism--as essentially The News did in response to the tempest brewing letter. We are sure that we shall read more of this mordant issue of global importance.

Be it resolved: A religious sect should run a USO center thirty miles from a key military installation during the thick of a world war, except when the local clergy of another sect objects.

We have no report that the Catholics running the center were in some manner attempting to proselytize the soldiers or insisting that they wear crucifixes or even so much as genuflect while receiving the amenities of the USO. But, of course, as Catholics, they were given to consuming Baptist babies and so the alarum had to be sent far and wide to warn the unsuspecting of the clutches into which patronizing such a heathen center might lead the soldiers to slide.

Getting back to that report out of Bern, Switzerland...

Framed Edition
[Return to Links-Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i>--</i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.