The Charlotte News

Monday, June 22, 1942

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: On this, the anniversary of both the official fall of France two years earlier and the invasion of Russia one year earlier, the editorial column, in "Evil Tidings", echoed by Raymond Clapper’s similar misgivings, exhibits dismay at the immediate news from Libya of the fall the day before, following a surprise attack on Saturday, of the important Mediterranean port of Tobruk, the last Allied foothold in Libya, potentially opening the way of Rommel’s panzer divisions into Alexandria and the Suez Canal it guarded—or so it seemed at the time.

Gloomily adding to this bad turn of events was the desperate position in which Sevastopol was reported to be, tottering on the brink, the fall of which would cut off to the Soviets their vital supply route through the Black Sea to the Crimea.

And, to top the chain of misery, the Japanese appeared still to be harassing the Aleutians.

The gloomy news from North Africa, while slated to become worse in the coming couple of weeks as the British were forced to retreat to within 50 miles of Alexandria, would nevertheless be short-lived. The First Battle of El Alamein would start within eight days, on July 1, and last until July 27, ending with a stalled Rommel offensive into Egypt. And Tobruk would be re-captured by the Allies a mere four and a half months hence, on November 11, shortly after the successful conclusion of the Second Battle of El Alamein, after Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was placed in charge of the British Eighth Army desert forces in August. By this point, "Operation Torch", initiated November 8, would be landing from the west of North Africa, in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, ultimately to squeeze the Nazi and Italian forces between the new thrust and the British forces of Montgomery and then out of Africa completely by mid-May, 1943.

As for Sevastopol, under siege since October 30, 1941, the heavily fortified port city would fall on July 4 and some 90,000 Soviet defenders taken captive, with about 10,000 left dead. The locus of the legendary charge of the British Light Brigade would remain under Nazi control for two years. Its fixed fortifications of huge land-based turrets had, after withstanding for eight months, finally succumbed to the insistently pounding rain of the Nazi big guns.

In the Aleutians, while a contingent of Japanese troops would occupy Kiska, to the west of Dutch Harbor, until late July, 1943, little would come of it. The occupation ended under two weeks of heavy Army Air Corps bombing, initiated in late July, 1943, and an Allied invasion force of 35,000 in mid-August found the island deserted.

"For Obscurity", hoping for an end to the avowed isolationist Ham Fish’s career as a Congressman from New York after 22 years in the position, would be frustrated for one more term. Again winning in 1942, he would be retired finally by the electorate in 1944, never to return to public office. Mr. Fish, you will recall was called up from reserve duty to Fort Bragg on July 2, 1941 and, after a month, was allowed to resume his duties as a Congressman. While serving honorably and with heroics in World War I, he never saw active duty in World War II, the primary reason being his age, 53 in 1942. Mr. Fish lived to be 102 and died in 1991. Whether he had the same romantic illusions about Nazi Germany which were shared by some of his isolationist pals, such as Robert Rice Reynolds, Burton Wheeler, and Charles Lindbergh, can be assessed best perhaps through the lens of his expressed anti-Semitism. Perhaps, however, that is too facile, as many in the country at the time were anti-Semitic without being necessarily pro-Nazi in consequence. Whether he was truly one of the diehard American Herrenvolk remains hard to pin down.

Weygand, however, was not brought in to succeed Gamelin and lead the French forces against the Nazi invasion until mid-May, 1940 when the stamp of German feet on French soil was a virtual fait accompli. Weygand led an offensive against the enemy until it was futile and flirted for a time with turning the French forces in North Africa over to DeGaulle’s Free French. His collaboration was at worst half-measured and when the Allies invaded North Africa in November, 1942, he was arrested by the Nazis and remained as a prisoner of war until the liberation. During his imprisonment, much of which was spent at a comfortable villa, there was at one point apparently within the Abwehr consideration of killing Weygand, that as reported in late 1945 during the Nuremberg trial testimony of Erwin von Lahousen, an Abwehr official and eventual participant in the July 20, 1944 attempt to kill Hitler, Lahousen claiming to have been the supplier of the bomb, out of the Abwehr’s stock of seized British bombs, to Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who planted it beneath the conference table at the Wolf’s Lair in the so-called "Operation Valkyrie".

After the war, Petain was sentenced to death for his collaboration with the Nazis; General DeGaulle, however, commuted the sentence to life in prison, where Petain died in 1951. Weygand was tried as a traitor before a French tribunal in 1946 but was acquitted and lived until 1965.

And Paul Mallon correctly asserts the falsity of the rumor that there was a secret clause in the British-Soviet treaty which would have granted, post-war, territorial demands of the Soviets to parts of Poland and Finland, and all of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, plus Bessarabia and Bukovina. While apparently some prelimary negotiations between Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov and Britain’s Lord Beaverbrook had led to such assurances, they were quickly nullified by Churchill before the treaty was signed, following vehement objection by FDR that such violated the spirit of the FDR-Churchill drawn Atlantic Charter of August, 1941, subsequently ratified by the Soviets. Raymond Clapper had, on June 13, in the wake of the June 11 U.S.-Soviet treaty, applauded FDR’s steadfastness to principle on this point. Mr. Mallon repeats the praise.

Mr. Mallon also speculates, as had Dorothy Thompson on Thursday, that Japan was amassing a force in the Aleutians preliminary to an attack on the Soviet Union, in spite of their mutual non-aggression pact. That would not occur, the probable reason being that the last thing Japan needed at this point was to have Russia attacking it from the west and providing the U.S. with launching platforms for bombing raids from Vladivostok. Stalin had recently reaffirmed his commitment to the Japanese not to take offensive action against them, which tacitly included his continued resistance to use of Russian air bases for bombing raids conducted against Japan by the other Allies. It took little imagination on the part of the Japanese High Command, given the year of problems it saw suffered by Germany after Hitler’s initiating what he thought would be a three to six week campaign to conquer the western half of Russia, winding up not only in the mire in which it found itself in Russia, resulting in the loss of over two million of its best trained troops, but also exposing its Western Front to continued British bombing raids.

Meanwhile, back in Charlotte, "Scorcher" tells of the 97-degree burning summer heat, giving the population a mind to say to heck with all of the war news and threat to the coast, the rubber and gas shortage otherwise inhibiting their vacation plans, and head instead to the mountains or seashore for heat relief, leaving the backyard to welter in the swelter on its own.