The Charlotte News

Tuesday, July 14, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Made in U.S.A." relates the story of the little town in Illinois, Stern Park Gardens, which, being comprised of citizens primarily of Czech descent, decided to honor the slaughtered and burned village of Lidice in Czechoslovakia by rechristening itself Lidice. Wendell Willkie had spoken on Sunday at the ceremony; the citizens of the new Lidice cheered the Czech heroes of the resistance, booed any mention of Reinhard Heydrich whose slaying had been the rationale for the destruction of Lidice, the rounding up and murdering of all of its male inhabitants, sending its females and children to concentration camps to die.

No one positioned too far outside the Nazi High Command understood fully at the time to what degree Heydrich had been responsible for deploying the plan to eradicate all Jews remaining in Central Europe; they only understood that he was an evil force within the structure of the Reich and had been an evil overseer to the enslaved people of Czechoslovakia prior to his death.

Lidice would live on vicariously in the State of Illinois.

The Czech village of Lidice was rebuilt after the war close to its original location and the former site was converted into a national memorial.

"Real Peril" comments again on the tentative Russian situation as the Germans had broken through the lines established in the winter counter-offensive and apparently interrupted the Soviet supply line between Moscow and Rostov by capturing Voronezh, cutting off supplies to Rostov, key to opening the way for the Nazis to capture the Caucasus oil fields supplying 80% of Russia's oil, enabling capture of Russia as a whole, potentially of the entire Mediterranean, fortifying their forces for an invasion of Great Britain. Thus, much depended on this key defensive line being supported now in Russia against Nazi incursion.

But, the editorial reassures, the Russians had fought a battle the previous year and during the winter with more tenacity and bravery than any other demonstrated thus far in the war and there was no reason to believe that they could not repeat the performance again during this summer of 1942. In the same breath, it cautions that such a stand might not be enough this time with the situation so dire as it was on the southern front.

The piece by Colonel Frederick Palmer provides the various tactical considerations on each side, German and Russian, which could be gleaned from the battle reports, confusing and shrouded in secrecy from Western observers though they were. He predicts that now that the Germans had cut across the Don, had cut the rail line at Voronezh, had secured Sevastopol and the Kerch Peninsula to prevent flanking maneuvers as they move down into the Caucasus should they first capture Rostov, their armies would be exhausted and busied by the need to repair roads torn from battle to re-establish their own supply lines in captured territory. Their offensive strength would thus be diminished and their forward progress slowed significantly. He cautions that if the Russians were cut off from their supply lines from the north, all would be lost to them in the south, and thus the war itself lost.

Yet, as with the News editorial, he reckons with that intangible, the will to fight for presrvation of home and family, not just an abstract concept of patriotism or ideology, but rather the concrete, the sensate, the things which count. Indeed, it was this motive which ultimately enabled the Russians to stop the Nazi juggernaut, this time at Stalingrad, as in the previous year's offensive outside the portals of Moscow and Leningrad. The wholesale sacrifice of men to thwart and then eviscerate the Nazi advance into their homeland worked, even if inelegantly.

Casting aside as so much waste paper the sterile, abstract war scenarios and strategies plotted truculently by Hitler and his generals on maps pinned to the walls of conference rooms at Berchtesgaden or in Berlin or at the Wolf's Lair, far removed from the fronts, the insubordinance to invasion inherent to humanity would ultimately appertain to that intangible thing, ingratiating the spirit to withstand all manner of slaughter and torture, rapine and plunder which the otherwise would-be vanquishers of man and nature might seek to distribute among their contemnors, that which had been required of the generations before them to obtain the present parcel on which they fastened as familiar, which would finally win this war--just as it had been through the many wars of history against such an enemy of superior strength invading native territory, from Napoleon's incursion of Russia 130 years earlier to Vietnam, indeed, in the American Revolution itself. It was that intangible thing which finally won the war.

Ring Lardner's son John tells of the extensive training, 3,000 to 4,000 hours of it, before any pilot could obtain sufficient skill to handle one of the four-motor Flying Fortresses or Liberators ferrying supplies or running bombing missions. The Air Transport Command required that the pilot first become acquainted thoroughly with the aircraft to which he was assigned before beginning any extensive flying of the worldwide sea and land routes now being daily negotiated to replenish the troops in the various theaters of combat. The varying routes were incidental, could be learned overnight. It was the airplane itself with which the pilot had to become familiar.

Contrary the routine prior to the war, record feats of daring in flight, he reports, were now being routinely accomplished without so much as a whisper of recognition from the press. It was a stern business requiring courage, but also insistent on healthy fear, respectful fear, of the death-defying task. The good pilot was wary of the mission's attendant risks and heedful therefore of the incessant dangers incumbent with each escape of the earth's floor. The pilot who was unafraid was soon washed out of the ATC. Flying by the seat of the pants, adjusting instantly to vicissitudes of nature and the enemy, was necessarily concomitant to success; but insouciance, cavalier devil-may-care wistlessness, quickly fused with the enemy's opportune fusillade to enforce the smell of death to the cockpit.

"Detroit Reports" sets forth the high production figures released, without detail of actual numbers, by the former auto industry. Relatively, it was producing now 75% of the airplane motors, 40% of the tanks and their parts, 33% of the machine guns, half the diesel engines, and all of the motorized transport vehicles. Production was high, but transport of the produced equipment to the fronts remained the nation's significant problem.

"Pot Lucky" cracks wise on the campaign to collect fat for the glycerine it provides to production of explosives: take, for instances, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, former CIO head John L. Lewis, Chicago Tribune editor Robert McCormick, Father Coughlin, Georgia Governor Gene Talmadge, Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, take them all, the editorial counsels, and throw them in the pot, cook them up and pour out the fat thus adduced in substantial aid of the war effort.

Ah yes, the man in the ice cream suit just wouldn't look the same, even to the King and Queen of England, without the slight hint of corpulence around the jowls. Perhaps, the Hope Diamond would drop right off his thusly emaciated finger to the floor and roll back from whence it came.

Paul Mallon writes of the cotton problem, the dumping of cheap cotton from South America onto the world market with the potential to depress American cotton prices, and what the Congress and the Administration were trying to do to arrest glut at its source--buying it up, storing it or paying the Venezuelan farmers to leave acreage fallow. The program was similar to that used with the South in 1937-38 when there was a surplus crop depressing prices--that same cotton stored by the government on consignment which almost, but not quite, became the intermediate security instrument for William Rhodes Davis to use to shield from public view the barter arrangment he enabled between the Third Reich and Mexico in 1938, Mexican oil for German railroad equipment, helping to fuel the panzer divisons which rolled into Poland to start the war.

In any event, Alabama Senator Bankhead was behind the legislation to provide the lifeboat for the cotton farmers, both in the South of 1937-38 and now with respect to foreign cotton threatening their market stability once again.

Sail away on a cotton cloud, Gus. The life of Riley awaits you.