The Charlotte News

Monday, August 24, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports of the Germans crossing the Don, just 40 miles to the northwest of Stalingrad. The long siege of the next two years was about to begin.

Not yet reported from the Solomons was the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, a sea battle which was won decisively by the Allies. The Japanese were attempting an air attack from a carrier force against newly occupied Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, now operational for the Allies, the main object of the Guadalcanal Campaign initiated on August 7.

The Japanese were now supported once again by the repaired fast, large carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku, damaged at the Battle of the Coral Sea and at Midway in May and June. The Allies were supported by the carriers Enterprise and Saratoga.

A Japanese bombing raid on Henderson Field began in mid-afternoon this date. Attacking Allied aircraft from the Saratoga claimed the Japanese light carrier Ryujo.

The Enterprise was heavily bombed and suffered a loss of 35 men but was not damaged enough to knock it from the battle. The battleship North Carolina was also in the vicinity and was attacked without being hit.

The Japanese lost 25 planes in the initial day’s battle to only six for the Allies. In the entire two-day battle, 290 Japanese were killed, 90 for the Allies. The Enterprise was knocked out of commission for two months, being forced to return to Pearl Harbor for repairs. In addition to Ryujo, the Japanese lost a destroyer, a light cruiser, a transport, and 75 planes. The Allies lost only 25 planes and no ships other than the temporary loss of the Enterprise.

In consequence of the battle, attempts to land Japanese reinforcements on Guadalcanal and Tulagi were delayed.

On the editorial page appears a piece from The New York Times indicating the replacement of General Auchinleck by General Harold Alexander to lead the Allied forces in Egypt, trying to push Rommel back across Libya and away from the vitally important Suez Canal. General Alexander had assumed the position on August 8 as General Bernard Montgomery took command of the British Eighth Army at the same time.

A segment of the Congressional Record is reprinted on the page, containing the comments of Robert Rice Reynolds favoring immediate independence of India on the premise that India would then support the United Nations in the war. Nebraska Senator George Norris and Claude Pepper of Florida took him to task on this notion, suggesting it would likely start a critically disruptive civil war in India, that between the Hindu and Muslim sects, as it did after the war, while Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire more or less coddled Senator Reynolds by the gentle hand through the colloquy. (We are reminded of Senator Reynolds's comment in February, 1941, and have to wonder whether, forsooth, in part he had this particular interaction on the floor in mind.)

The column reports on implementation of the first of the recent blue ribbon panel committee’s recommendations on improvement of the mental health facility at Morganton. Among the things on the initial agenda was the assurance of at least one glass of milk per day for each patient, release to the outdoors for most of the population, and an end to censorship of mail critical of the hospital. The fact that such steps were considered vast improvements underscores in black and blue ink the dreadful conditions prior to the committee’s investigation and recommendations which came on the heels of the reports from Tom Jimison in late January and early February, initiated in The News and picked up by newspapers across the state.

"Among Friends" and the by-lined piece of J. E. Dowd on the career of one "Blackjack" Hagler provide a view into the seamy alleyways of Charlotte’s crime-ridden underbelly of the time.

Didn’t they sing a folk song about "Blackjack"? Maybe that was Davy.

All in all, a bit of a dull day on the news front. But, for the time, all the readers, no doubt, were relieved at that dullness after being slapped silly in the face almost daily with harsh war news, mostly bad and unfathomably tortured war news, for the previous eight and a half months.

We know that we are.

So, what do you think? Was Walt Whitman's rather deterministic, fatalistic point of view one with which you agree or was it unduly pantheistic, optimistic, pessimistic? Was it the product of its mid-nineteenth century, antebellum time, irretrievably stuck in a pre-industrial, largely agrarian age where little or no urbanity existed beyond New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington? Atlanta, before it was burned by Sherman in 1864, was little more than a big cow town. The country was slow and cumbersome, yawning, yet possessed of enough time to take to the country and smell the roses without fret on any given day. Why did such lassitude and apparent poetic passivity and complacency boil over into the scalding chaudron cauldron which became the Civil War? Was the frontier in the South and the "West", that is Kentucky and Tennessee and the broader frontiers beyond still largely unsettled, so consumed with daily survival among a shiftless lot that it became enmeshed in a cloud of anxious, timorous, reactive complexes bordering on, then shattering the mirror, and finally surpassing the defining Shiloh compulsive into the shining twilight of the minie-death throes' last convulsive? Can man not for long remain complacent, without being stirred to the shallows of bestial id by too much the pastoral, not enough the urbane, the stimulation of erudition and culture? Was Mr. Whitman stating merely a poetic case or posing an argument? Both? Neither? Do you agree with him, completely, in part only, not at all?

Speak up. Time's wasting.

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