The Charlotte News

Monday, June 29, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

In fact, the total expenditure for the war was 350 billion dollars by August, 1945. That compared to about 26 billion for World War I, 7 billion, in dollars unadjusted for periodic inflation, for all wars involving the U.S. prior to World War I, including the 4 billion spent by the Union and the 2 billion by the Confederacy during the Civil War.

"Daring Man" attributes the pre-war rising debt level to the policies of Marriner Eccles, government spending to raise the society from the depths of the Depression, wise spending which was, however, never curtailed adequately when boom times finally came in late 1939, just as the war began in Europe.

But, as to the much greater debt by this time being accumulated, the war was singularly to blame. In other words, Adolf Hitler was the one man on whom blame could be laid with considerable weight to the argument.

Yet, the question arises fatalistically whether the country, whether the world--for it was a worldwide depression which hit in the mid to late 1920's--could have ever come out of the Depression fully had it not been for the necessity of war production. Hitler's Germany enjoyed full employment in the 1930's only because of the military model on which the Nazis re-built the society. The same became true of the United States once Hitler and Tojo forced the same governing principle down the throats of America, having already done so in 1939-40 to Great Britain.

The New Deal embraced, of course, more than mere government spending to create directly government relief and jobs in programs such as WPA, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Federal Writers Project, the Federal Theater Project, and the National Recovery Administration. It entailed the creation of the NLRB and government direction of collective bargaining and assurance that unions would both be properly represented among employees and that elections among competing union representatives would be fairly held so as not to exclude unions which were less favorable to management. That insured better wages and working conditions for the bulk of the workers involved in industrial and mill labor. The New Deal entailed the Agricultural Adjustment Administration to assure that farm prices remained stable and that, by government loans against consignment, excess crops in boom years would not depress the price unduly of farm commodities such as cotton, enabling, in theory, release of the stored non-perishable crop back into the marketplace in lean years to stabilize prices and prevent inflation which taxed the consumer.

There was in some parts of the public an uneasy feeling that all of this legislation, some parts of which, principally the N.R.A. and parts of the A.A.A., had been struck down in 1934-36 by the Supreme Court as an unconstitutional transfer of legislative authority to the executive, was leading the society into socialism, a word which of itself held the mind in an uneasy state suggestive of alliance with the Soviet Union, compounded then in those same uneasy minds by the actual alliance with Great Britain and the Soviets during the war, which was to say alliance with the godless heathens of Communism, which was to say the Devil incarnate.

But the obverse to these New Deal programs aimed at managing the society and its production of wealth was a runaway train of commerce, the big fish unrestrainedly eating the little fish, the tendency of money to begat more money in the hands of a few at the top and the eventual destruction of the American middle class, leading on to the Depression where too little money was in the hands of the consumer to purchase goods causing business, big and little, to begin to fail. The stock market crashed in October, 1929. Banks failed thereafter at a wholesale rate for want of investment capital to grease the wheels of commerce. The economy spiraled downward as millions lost their jobs and wound up in the bread lines, complicating the buying power of the masses yet further, resulting in less investment capital, etc.

There is, greed being what it is, no such thing as a voluntary cooperative combine which long works in society. Federal regulation has proved itself a necessary concomitant of maintenance of balance to avoid recurrent depressions which, when they have occurred, impact everyone alike, big business and small, wealthy, middle class, and lower class. Big business executives who over time subtly forget the consumers who provide them their daily bread and comforts at the top, quickly go the way indicated by the economic problems of our present society in 2009, after a long period of a largely deregulated economy which sought to return to the luxuriant days of laissez-faire in the 1920's. It doesn't work; history has proved it out time and again.

A letter to the editor on the page remarks on the editorial of Friday, "Dark Commandos", relating of the Nigerian tribal chief willing to sacrifice his best three sons to undertake the mission to kill Hitler, stocking nothing more potent in their arsenal than bow and arrow. The letter writer finds this notion not so funny, that if Britain had spent more effort provisioning its colonials with both military training and equipment, such nations in Africa and Asia might have been able to lend formidable fighting forces to the war effort. Of course, the British did train military contingents in its colonial possessions, including India, Malaya, and Burma. So it is not at all clear that the letter makes much of a point beyond frustrated bluster. Nor is it at all clear that the editorialist thought the chieftain's gesture so funny as it was communicative of frustratingly bitter irony.

That empire, that in Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, and South America, of the British, the Dutch, the French, had given the idea for empire building to both Hitler and Tojo can little be doubted. Yet the empires Hitler and Tojo had in mind were ones being built on the lines of strict regimentation and slave labor, atavistic to a time in the 17^th to 19^th centuries, enforced for the first time with 20^th century mechanized armament and materiel of warfare, thus one promising to enslave the world at once as never before and, if Hitler had his way, for a thousand years to come.

"Shooting Time" is another of those hard editorials appearing during the first month of Burke Davis's associate editorship, this time advocating treatment in kind for German spies, fast trial and execution, as that being meted out to Allied soldiers and underground spies caught by the Gestapo and the Japanese in the occupied countries. In the instanced case, eight Nazi agents had been caught after delivery to American shores via U-boat. The editorial recommends dispatching them quickly to deter other like attempts, cautions that unknown numbers of such agents were then at work among the populace, both to gather information and to sabotage war production.

A nineteen-year old female who worked at the Willow Run bomber plant, a plant built especially by Ford to construct the B-24 Liberator--the same aircraft in which Lt. Gurley and Lt. Holton, both of Charlotte, had been riding with General Tinker when it was shot down on June 7 heading on a mission from Midway to Wake, as memorialized in The News of June 13--went on a plane ride the previous evening and somehow fainted at the controls with the plane going around in circles over Ann Arbor. Eventually, she revived, tried unsuccessfully to land twice, ran out of fuel, finally coasted to a safe landing in a field, got out and promptly fainted again. Whether she was an experienced pilot was not mentioned.

The Japanese were mounting an assault on Kiangsi, wherein a large portion, 5,000 tons per year, of China's tungsten was mined. China's tungsten production, the piece informs, represented 60 to 70 percent of the world's supply at the time.

Tungsten was valuable for hardening steel out of which to make wire, not just for making light bulbs. Most of the tungsten supplied to the United States had been coming via the Burma Road out of China until that route was largely cut off with the fall of Rangoon on March 9 and completely cut off with the fall of Lashio at the end of April. To what degree tungsten was still coming to the United States from these Chinese mines, however, on the return flight of those gasoline junkets now supplying the Chinese over the "W" Pass in the "Hump" of the Himalayas, is nowhere told.

For every commodity necessary to the manufacture of war materiel which the Japanese or Germans controlled, that same commodity was cut off or curtailed to the Allies in like proportion.

In Egypt, Rommel's forces now appeared to have taken Matruh, edging closer to Alexandria and control of the Suez, now only 175 miles away. This three-day old campaign, following the fall of Tobruk and the retreat of the British to Egypt, marked the beginning of what would come to be known as the First Battle of El Alamein, to be fought in the desert for the ensuing three weeks, stopping the advance of Rommel's columns at El Alamein, 65 miles short of Alexandria.

One piece informs that Rommel typically began operations in late afternoon, at 5:00, to escape the intense heat of the day now besetting the Sahara. By the light of a full moon, as in the previous two successive nights, reflecting off the smooth desert scape, a newspaper could be read; yet the protracted shadows caused difficulty in precise aiming. Not only the heat, however, but the reflection from the intense sunlight made daytime fighting even more prohibitive. Indeed, as with the previous summer's fighting, conventional thinking during the spring had it that Rommel would be incapable of any potential for offensive operations after the first week of June. Thus, the surprise to the British inflicted at Tobruk.

In Russia, the Nazis began a new offensive from Kursk, aimed at cutting a rail line between the central and southern Russian fronts, 280 miles south of Moscow. This was the fourth offensive launched by the Nazis since the beginning of the spring campaign, the first at Kerch being the only one so far to succeed, though the final fall of Sevastopol, now still under siege since the end of October, was about to occur. The offensive at Kharkov was still being fought to a standoff by the Russian defenders.

And, a drive to collect scrap rubber begun June 15 had fallen so far short of expectations, having collected only 219,000 tons, that the President announced its extension until July 10. Petroleum coordinator and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes indicated his suspicion that hoarding had been a significant problem forestalling the efficacy of the drive. The Secretary indicated that government offices accounted for significant repositories of rubber which could be utilized for scrap. The Interior Department, however, had refused a request to requisition for the scrap heap floor mats in its own offices.

Somewhere between the full moon over the Sahara illuminating nighttime battle for control of the Suez, the battle for the tungsten mine in Kiangsi, the fainted young lady flier circling Ann Arbor, employee at the Ford Willow Run bomber plant, and the necessity of preservation of floor mats at the Department of Interior, there has to be a common thread which links it all together and makes the whole of it become crystal clear in the mind. But just what that is...

Well, come to think of it, the Japanese undoubtedly were obtaining the tungsten, not so much for hardening of steel and wire, but for the making of a giant light bulb to illuminate the desert for the time soon to come when the moon would wane and render the nighttime fight an impossibility, even among the insane.

Yet, Ford, always possessed of a better idea, was busy building bombers to blow out the light. The lady flier demonstrated that anyone could fly in circles, with or without her light bulb, and land safely. That, in turn, lit the lamp for the idea of "Operation Torch" which would follow in the fall, with the Allied landings at Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.

But that still leaves the rubber floor mats at the Department of Interior, too precious with which to part, for which to account. And we are, admittedly, hard-pressed to account for them.

Ah, now, after some deep and abiding cogitation on the matter, we think we have it: to combat the giant light bulb which the Japanese were going to produce with all of that tungsten, the U.S. Department of Interior would take all of its floor mats and send them to the British in Egypt, whereupon a giant wave would be promulgated by a giant wave-making machine, engulfing the desert for a short time around El Alamein, shorting out the light bulb, yet sparing the British soldiers as they would be grounded, standing safely on the Department of Interior floor mats.

That, or the floor mats simply sufficed to communicate a suggestive acronym for the opening of the much ballyhooed second front, the landing points of "Operation Torch".

Oh, so you think that's all just quite reprehensibly silly? Then you probably also suppose that the Doolittle raiders originated their passage over Tokyo from some place else than Shangri-La.

Framed Edition

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