The Charlotte News

Monday, September 21, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The flagship of the Reichsmarine, the Tirpitz, is pictured on the front page. It was the sister ship to the Bismarck, sunk May 27, 1941, three days after it had sunk the H.M.S. Hood in the North Sea.

The largest ship ever sent down the ways in Europe, the Tirpitz never engaged the Allies during the war, remaining confined to Norwegian waters after the ill fate of the Bismarck. Eventually, in November 1944, the RAF sunk the behemoth, the last of its breed, testimony to a passing mode of warfare.

Speaking of that eight-mile figure, the distance of both the brief incursion by Rommel into the British lines south of El Alamein and the recent Japanese advance over the mountains toward Port Moresby in New Guinea, the Luftwaffe, according to the front page and the editorial column on Friday, had developed two high altitude fliers. The Junker 86-P operated above 40,000 feet and the Heinkel 177, above 30,000.

To counter these birds, the British in November would send aloft for the first time their own eight-mile high flier, the Westland Welkin, capable of an altitude of 44,000 feet. And the Russians produced the Yakovlev Yak 9PD for the same purpose, matching the Luftwaffe in the eight-mile high heavens.

Up, up, and away...

Yakovlev Yak, don't talk back.

Whether "Westland Welkin", incidentally, was inspired in part by Westliche Wand, we don't know.

From Germany, came the report that there was a health crisis, typhus becoming unusually prevalent, likely from the lice brought back from the Russian front by the wounded of the long winter campaign. The precise reason, however, is not provided.

Of course, the Nazis' mental health crisis had been particularly bad since the early 1920's. It extended all the way up the chain of command to Der Fuehrer. Or, perhaps better put, extended all the way down from Der Fuehrer to the common foot soldier.

On the editorial page, Paul Mallon reports that the urging by the director of the War Production Board, Donald Nelson, of workers to the upcoming November polls suggests that his "pure non-political note is being melodiously confused into a jingle-jangle-jingle of partisan campaigning."

Mr. Mallon's phraseology may have been influenced by reading in The News of the Victory Belles' Jingle-Jangle-Jingle Revue a couple of weeks earlier.

It would be consistent with his reference on September 16 to the "Iron Dukes" of the farm bloc in the Senate, potentially causing problems with the President's bill presented in the House by Speaker Sam Rayburn to freeze farm prices (failing passage of which, the President had announced, he intended to undertake the action by exercise of executive power, afforded him under the declarations of war, to take all necessary steps to prosecute the war). "Iron Dukes", of course, was the moniker regularly applied by The News to the recalcitrant members of the city council of Charlotte.

Whether his employment of both of those expressions also somehow subliminally implicated the reversal between the Allies and Axis in possession of the predominant portion of the world's pig iron, as explicated in "Ebb Tide" on Saturday, as well the juxtaposed grimly reminding reference to the pervasive effects of the war stated in "Back Seat", the determination by the the Blue Devils' and Purple Paladins' football coaches to engage their players in combat readiness in addition to football readiness, is subject to debate.

And the little piece from The Atlanta Journal gives some hell and damnation to the hell and dammers among the modern fiction writers of the day, no doubt inspiring the column's piece adjacent to it, "How'sat?".

Today, instead of the "hells", "damns", and "darlings", the run of the mine expressions tend to be "awesome" and "cool", probably quite as jejune and lacking in descriptive expression as the generously sprinkled "damns" and "hells" of yesteryear. For if virtually everything is either subject to hell and damnation or, alternatively, is cool and awesome, then nothing is in fact subject to either variant form of description--logically speaking, that is.

We prefer more interesting expressions, such as, "Yakovlev Yak, don't talk back," or "Welcome to Westland Welkin."

In any event, autumn had arrived, as celebrated in "Little Wind", and not so auspiciously as had the previous one which everyone knew was going probably to involve before its conclusion the United States in war, the questions then only being when and precisely how and where it would begin. Now, nine and a half months on, the questions were to what extent and for how long, and whether it could be still won.