The Charlotte News

Tuesday, September 29, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: In referring on the front page to the attacks by Allied planes on Japanese positions in the Owen Stanley Mountains 32 miles north of Port Moresby in New Guinea, just what precisely the stutter step means to indicate in the report which says, "These persistent attacks, an Army spokesman observed, --ay have stopped the invaders’ progress by smashing vital supply lines," is subject to speculation. Perhaps it was some sort of telephonic transmission from an Australian reporter whose momentary hesitation was literally translated into print by the receptor in New York at the Associated Press offices. Certainly the absence of proper marks surrounding the quoted material would so suggest. Perhaps, instead of a mere stutter step, the telephonic communicator was about to impart a second resultant object of the attacks when the phone line suddenly failed in its trunk, or else the pen with which the recipient took down the message emptied its cartridge to the last jot without forewarning, the memory then of the pen-wielder simultaneously failing in its otherwise noble pursuits, either way, leaving the second notion unfulfilled in print. Or maybe someone with whom the reporter was familiar, or wished to be so, happened by as the recitation progressed. Whatever the case, reading it carefully may sometimes be more fun than nay, ‘ay?

Don’t you cry now, Charlotte. Neither beast nor man will be right over directly with the anodyne.

Confirming DeWitt MacKenzie’s report of the previous week that Hitler was feuding with Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, his general leading the Stalingrad offensive, regarding von Bock’s desire to concentrate all efforts immediately on the Caucasus and leave Stalingrad to a subsequent thrust, Hitler, having at last once again, as during the previous December, become disenchanted with his reflection cast by his generals in Russia, had now plucked from command before Leningrad Wilhelm von Leeb and from Stalingrad von Bock and replaced them. Georg von Kuschler supplanted von Leeb and Seigmund List, von Bock. List had been the former commander of the Balkan campaign, removed in August from that duty for his heavy criticism of von Bock in the Stalingrad theater. List, the reports states, was a devotee and architect of Blitzkrieg, suggesting that such a strategy, without regard to human losses, would now to be deployed at Stalingrad--as if the daily body counts in multiples of thousands on each side--amounting to 1.5 million Germans, according to the Russians, since May 1--weren’t already indicative enough of a strategy characterized by complete indifference to life.

Suggestive of the types of targets being sought by the sporadic Luftwaffe raiders over England in these times, a single plane was reported to have dumped its load on a boys’ school, killing ten students and two teachers. Brave fliers were those Nazis.

Colloquy with Prime Minister Churchill in Commons tended obliquely to criticize Wendell Willkie’s remarks from Moscow calling for the opening of a second front to relieve Russia at the earliest possible opportunity, and in any event well before the summer of 1943. Nevertheless, Mr. Churchill stopped short of any direct criticism of the statements, calling instead for general discretion with respect to such inferences.

Returning a moment to "First Move" of yesterday’s column, combining it with the chart on this day’s page, Westbrook Pegler left out one fertile crescent for supply of scrap steel, to go along with those front and rear bumpers he proposed be stripped from all the jalopies running about: fenders. And for those older, pre-New Deal models, running boards. Strip those superfluities away as well and, voila! The owner would have been fully a decade and more ahead of his fellow motorists, possessed of the slickest new hotrod on the strip, replete with boiled-down slicks, once the rubber sufficiently wore down soon enough. There was style aplenty even in spare left-overs after the guns received their share of scrap shrapnel for their overweening bellies.

The only remaining problem of course was that you couldn’t pilot the thing faster than 35 mph, nor take it further than four gallons of gas would carry you, about 60 miles per week, maybe a little more once the excess weight was cast overboard as flotsam for government consumption.

In any event, if a garbage can would make two rifles, then a car’s worth of fenders, by the mammoth proportions of them in those days, ought to have made at least eight.

And, come to think of it, who really needed hoods? Throw in a whole regiment’s arms, probably, with just one of those stretchers. Indeed, since you couldn’t drive worth a hoot’s distance anyway, just donate the whole car and equip likely half a division.

"Thin Ice" on the editorial page tells of a rosier picture ahead for the Navy than at first post-Pearl Harbor dismal figures suggested, with tonnage fully equal to 20% of the Navy’s flotilla built since 1934 gone to the bottom of the world’s oceans since the sinking of the Reuben James the previous October 31. The piece points out that most of the 200,000 tons lost were in two ships, the Utah and Arizona at Pearl Harbor, and two carriers, the Lexington at the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Yorktown at Midway. The figures did not yet include the loss of the Wasp on September 15 as that was still maintained as secret.

Nevertheless, as the editorial accurately indicated, the Navy had dealt more blows to the Japanese than the Japanese had dealt to it. The Japanese had only two operational carriers in the South Pacific, Shokaku and Zuikaku. While the U.S. Navy only had left the Hornet, with the Saratoga and the Enterprise in Hawaii for repairs, it had air superiority since the capture on Guadalcanal of Henderson Field on August 7 and its becoming operational just days later. But moreover, the Japanese had less industrial capability at home to bring to bear new ships and planes than did the United States. Ultimately, the failure of the Empire to be able to sustain its offensive drive of the first five months after Pearl Harbor and protect the vast territory conquered while supplying it adequately over the far-flung distances of its fattened girth spelled its inevitable end.

"The Seer" takes up the cudgel lifted with considerable daring the day before by Raymond Clapper, inveighing against the control of Congress by the farm lobby, suggesting it as the first intersection on the road to dictatorship after the war, again the subject of his piece this day as well. He pointed to the paradox of political reality, that for every enemy made in political life with an axe to grind against the politician, it took ten friends to contribute the antivenin, thus inhibiting the will of Congress to dare upset any politically powerful junta of the day such as the farm lobby. They would only do so, he opines, provided the people made it known to their representaives that they would support the effort and eschew attempts to coat the Congressman in pigslop hurled come November for his resistance to the barnyard wooing in September.