The Charlotte News
Monday, July 6, 1942
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page this date details more fighting at El Alamein, a lunge at the Nazi infantry by the Maori of New Zealand, fighting with the British Eighth Army.
Rommel's tanks had been stopped in their steady advance since the British retreat from Tobruk; speculation now began as to whether Rommel would beat a retreat from Egypt back into Libya, the path for which was clear, the British presently incapable of cutting it off from the rear.
In Europe, the first U. S. airmen, at least those not flying as part of the RAF, had formed a six plane bombing mission against German bases in Holland.
In China, the first official U.S. bombing missions had been flown against Japanese positions at Nankang, Hankow, and Canton between July 1 and 4. Many such bombing missions had been flown before of course by United States civilian pilots for Chiang Kai-shek as part of the recently disbanded mercenary squadron in China.
In the Aleutians, U.S. submarines had sunk three Japanese destroyers on July 4 and left a fourth in flames.
The United States, especially its air corps, appeared to be going on the offensive now, albeit in small operations. It nevertheless provided encouraging news, with Liberators and Flying Fortresses being quickly produced for shipment to Europe and the Mediterranean.
On the editorial page, joining Raymond Clapper in his month-long hiatus shortly to begin, Dorothy Thompson also offers her last column for four weeks as she embarks on her annual leave from her column for quiet contemplation. In this last pre-vacation offering, she draws a brief comparison between the complete militarization of the German and Russian societies, each primed by revolutionary motives, and the relative disorganization of the American and British social and military models. She recommends greater organization in America, using as example the failing campaign to obtain scrap rubber, that having recently been extended by the President for ten days for want of sufficient response during its initial fifteen-day run in the latter half of June. The implied negative pregnant was that if America could not even muster sufficient organization to rally support for obtaining much needed scrap rubber for the military, how could it hope to compete, using relatively inexperienced armed forces, against the professionally disciplined ranks of German soldiers and officers, hardened now by nearly three years of active combat? She wants to know whether the definition of "scrap" rubber includes the White House doormat?
Paul Mallon informs, however, that this disciplined, professional German army had at this time about three million men fighting again in Russia, about the same number poured into it the previous summer and fall, but German losses nevertheless were reported to be far higher than among the Russians during the previous month of the new German spring offensive in the taking of Kerch and Sevastopol.
Now, as the front page piece reports, a million of those men were engaged in the Kursk offensive, spread along a line extended 120 miles, from east of Orel to east of Kharkov, with an immediate objective of cutting the rail line south from Moscow to Rostov, the key entry point to the Caucasus. With supplies cut off, a siege could begin on Rostov, with it being only a matter of time before the way then be open to the rich oil reserves south.
"The Good and Bad" in the column summarizes the quickly changing pace of the news, the good news for the Allies coming from Egypt and China, the bad from Russia.
Yet Paul Mallon tempers that bad news with his conclusion that with German losses running heavier than those of the Russian army, and with the Russians now stacked deep enough that mere tank penetration and flanking maneuvers could no longer be successful, it was likely that the Russians could hold indefinitely, especially if supplemented by American materiel moving through Murmansk.
"The Good and the Bad", however, warns of the ugly: that there were still more ships being lost daily in the Atlantic than were building, and if materiel and troops were to get through to the European front at all, it would take these ships in relatively unobstructed passage to do it.
The overall conclusion thus was that the Battle of the Atlantic had now become a major priority for the sake of saving Europe and the Mediterranean and thus potentially the whole Axis house of cards from falling into place, potentially irrevocably.
On the home front, "End of Luck" tells of "Lucky" Earl Teter, flying automobile daredevil of his day, teetering for the last time on the edge of doom, passing over the chasm finally to quench the Devil's thirst for blood which "Lucky" Earl had for so long dared to tempt.
One has to wonder--with the front pages daily filled with stories of the dead and dying abroad, with daily sinkings of ships off the Atlantic coast, with each man between 20 and 45 standing at the ready any moment to receive orders to report for training, first to survive the training itself, then to withstand the torturous climes of the Pacific, North Africa, or Europe, the malarial carrying mosquitoes, the blistering sand, the blinding wind-blown desert grit, the winter lice with their typhus, surviving which to become the unwelcome guest at the banquet of death had ingloriously and alone at the end of a bayonet's stick, from a machine gun's fusillade, from the shrapnel of a grenade, from the crater-making blast of an aerial bomb, from a tank turret's deadly aim across the river--just who in their right mind would have needed at this moment in history then to attend a daredevil show in the evening to cap the day's attempt at satiation of the apparently insatiable expectation of spectacle at another man's suffering, the vicarious thrill of conquering the mortal fear of death by watching another gamble with his own life, with the palpable sense pervading the night air that yet the smell of blood might fill the nostrils with an incalculable sense of calculated sacrifice to the gods' unquenchable appetite for human provender. One has to wonder at that.
Framed Edition
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