The Charlotte News

Thursday, September 24, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page tells of Wendell Willkie's report from Russia, that the Russians were growing impatient with bearing the brunt of the fighting while no second front had yet been opened to relieve them.

Meanwhile, the Russians were reported to be walking on water to fool the Italians.

Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, commanding general of the Nazi Caucasus offensive, was said by DeWitt MacKenzie to be sulking in the wake of losing a feud with Hitler over whether to take the Caucasus first, before trying to capture Stalingrad, the expenditure of troops for the latter thought by von Bock to be too great. As always, however, the military genius of Hitler had won out over that of his generals-invariably to the advantage of the Allies.

Meanwhile, the Russians were reported to be walking on water to fool the Italians.

Tim Pridgen, after just two installments of his series on race relations in Charlotte, reports of having already been labeled by readers anything from a Communist to an agent of the Klan. You can't please all of the people all of the time. But one must still try to effect understanding nevertheless. For no progress was ever made in society by dodging issues, pretending that they don't exist.

The reference to "Gargantua", in the piece on the editorial page summarizing an article from The Reader's Digest, has several possible candidates for its subject. One was the B-35 Flying Wing, which, though the Army Air Corps contracted with Northrop to build just before Pearl Harbor, was never ready for flight until June, 1946. It was capable of 40,000 feet in altitude, not 50,000 as the article projected, but could reach a speed of 393 mph, extraordinary for such a large propeller-driven aircraft of its time, with a wingspan of 172 feet, quite a lot larger and faster than the B-17 with an 102-foot wingspan and capable of 287 mph.

Another candidate for "Gangantua" is the B-36, a plane which possessed a wingspan of 230 feet, larger by 15 feet than even the mammoth B-19 experimental craft depicted in the July 1943 animated film presented by Walt Disney and narrated by Alexander de Seversky. The B-36 was capable of a speed of 420 mph. It, like the Flying Wing, was contracted to be built by Consolidated Aircraft before Pearl Harbor but was not finished and ready for flight until August 1946. Its range was 10,000 miles, two and a half times that of B-17's and B-24's.

In all likelihood, however, the new secret ship to which the article referred was the B-29, having just made its maiden flight three days earlier on September 21. It was capable of 357 mph, had a wingspan of 141 feet and a bomb-loaded range of 3,250 miles, still well short, however, of that much needed capability of flying at least 4,000 miles roundtrip to make a Tokyo raid from then available territory feasible. The B-29, however, was not combat ready until spring, 1944 when it was introduced into India to ferry supplies to China. It began combat missions in that theater on June 5.

With the reacquisition of thje Marianas Islands, positions on Tinian, Saipan, and Guam became available for takeoff and return by late 1944, thus enabling the B-29 to reach Tokyo. On November 24, 1944, 111 of the Superfortresses were sent on their first bombing raid over Japan.

At last the De Seversky vision for a fast, high altitude, long-range bomber capable of hitting Japan had been realized, yet not without first having to expend thousands of lives to take back most of the territory won by the Japanese in late 1941 and during the first four months of 1942.

"Bad Timing" suggests that the attempt by the Southern Railroad to hike passenger rates by 33⅓ percent in the faced of its already high profit margin appeared as wartime profiteering. Perhaps another way of putting it was that Southern's attempt to interrupt a long playing record of reasonable passenger rates reflected the jangling discords of disharmony in society generally of the time.

The nearly clipped off quote of the day from John Fletcher is: "I find the medicine worse than the malady."