Monday, March 15, 1943

The Charlotte News

Monday, March 15, 1943

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Eleanor Roosevelt's "My Day" entry for this date, incidentally, provides an interesting reference to a film based on a novel by William Saroyan, "The Human Comedy".

The front page reports muddled dispatches from the Russian front, the Russians admitting being forced back in Kharkov but claiming to have held their ground, while the Nazi communiques contended recapture of the city, having first fallen to the Soviets again on February 16.

The Soviets meanwhile slowly closed pincers toward Smolensk in the central sector, west of Vyazma.

Following on vague agreements made between Generals De Gaulle and Giraud at the Casablanca Conference during the latter half of January and vowing to abolish all of the remaining vestiges of Vichy control in North Africa, General Giraud embraced the principles of the August, 1941 Atlantic Charter and made it clear that he intended to work arm in arm with De Gaulle's Free French in ruling the former Vichy states until the French republic could be fully restored.

Bad weather and the necessity of shoring up supply lines stilled, for the most part, ground and air operations in Tunisia, the only activity reported having been Allied air raids on Rommel's positions before the Mareth Line.

In the sixth such raid in ten days, and the largest of the war in the theater, American bombers were reported to have deposited on Friday over 26 tons of bombs on the Alaskan Japanese base at Kiska, warning that more would follow as the weather improved.

In Timken, Ohio, 600 workers of the first shift walked off the job at Timken Roller Bearing Company for its having promoted 27 blacks to replace whites who left for war duty. The president of the CIO United Steelworkers Union, Finas Reynolds, said that the walk-out was unauthorized and that his union members were proud to work alongside blacks, acceptable to them since they were acceptable to the white soldiers on the front lines.

A guest at the Kearsurge Hotel in Portsmouth, N.H., who happened to have survived the Cocoanut Grove Nightclub fire in Boston November 28, discovered and reported a fire which raked through a block of single-story buildings nearby the hotel. Only two injuries, to firemen, were reported.

Actress Judy Canova was married. Louie, Louie.

Playwright Noel Coward, in London, had the flu.

Yehudi Menuhin, the concert violinist, landed in Britain for a series of concerts, albeit later than anticipated, necessitating the delay of his Liverpool audience until March 23.

Somebody, rattling his mother's jewelry from the balcony, a bit precocious for his age, a full-throated bird, was heard on the 23d to mutter, amid the goo-ga-gees, "He is Einstein disguised as Robin Hood. Walk right in and sit right down."

And in a scene in large, appearing as a scene in little from Altamont in the Appalachian Mountains, the back hills, or barrancas, as the Spanish called them, 26 years and eight months hence, the San Francisco police made a three-day Fascist sweep of dance halls and juke joints, hauling in a thousand arrestees of the street fighting variety, to avert chaos and general anarchy among the longshoremen and shipbuilders in the city for a pint, after a hard day’s keel haul.

It's always good to see the Finest on the Beat, hard at work, fighting crime along the Thin Blue Line, of the City.

Meanwhile, a music lover was born this date in Denton, Texas, soon to move with his family to the dock of the Bay.

On the editorial page, Dorothy Thompson contrasts the plan for broadening the American and British middle classes to embrace more of the proletarian masses with the engulfing of the middle class into enforced government labor in Germany, finally totally accomplished in the previous six weeks. She concludes therefore that the German middle class which put Hitler in power--actually the Junker military class more than the "middle class"--had already lost the war, despite their purpose in delivering Hitler to the Chancellery having been to ward off the perceived radical proletariat on the one side and the monopolistic capitalist interests on the other.

But does she not on this occasion elevate too much the Nazi ideal at its genesis to the realm of theoretical politics? Was it not simply and purely an appeal to rank sentimental prejudices held in about a third of the German population, appeals to anti-Semitism, to "law and order", to racism, to xenophobia and emotionalist nationalism, all in one breath, fervently preached with the necessity of unified breathless response to complete the circular show in hoop-dress?

We posit that there was no theory ever to it. It was, as with its Southern Confederate inspiration, nothing more than a loose coalition of nuts who hated anyone not like themselves, anyone not of the Fascist corporation, nothing more, nothing less. Any ascribed theory was accidental, engrafted after the fact of its coming to power by this megalomaniacal idiot, Hitler, who made a great strutting pretense of eclecticism, when, in fact, he had no more refinement than a cat, merely a churlish, childish appreciation, alas, for his shepherd dog, the blind leading the blind.

Samuel Grafton once again examines the many paradoxes abroad the thinking of the land, characterized by the notion that men could stay home and tend the farms to curtail shortage in domestic food production, also win the war by enabling Russia to fight it out with Germany and then, after the war, control, as Clare Boothe Luce had advocated, the world's war-expanded air lanes, leaving Russia without the ability to acquire buffer territory in the Baltic States for its own post-war protection and also assuring that the West would dissociate from Russia after the war, likewise leaving it undefended.

Raymond Clapper once again finds increasing Republican support in the Congress for Administration policies necessary for continued efficient prosecution of the war, the Party's nearly unanimous consent to extend Lend-Lease another year on the second anniversary of its creation, and the unanimity being sought by Party leaders for extension of the reciprocal trade agreements, in need of re-enactment by June 30.

"Nazi Stonewall" examines in the column Erwin Rommel's study of Stonewall Jackson's stuttering, stalling feints and forceful movements by scripture against Union lines during the spring of 1862, as Rommel and other Nazi generals had accomplished the surveillance firsthand in the Shenandoah Valley once upon a time a few years before the war, at the behest of Der Fuehrer--graciously permitted in so doing by the American hosts. Burke Davis finds the blueprint of Jackson stamped heavily upon the conscious mind at work in the desert plains of Tunisia.

Indeed, the 66-mile charge from Faid Pass through Kasserine Pass, toward Tebessa and Thala, was remindful of the tactic deployed the third day at Gettysburg by Lee, Pickett's Charge, even if, by then, Stonewall Jackson was two months in his grave, shot by his own pickets during the Battle of Chancellorsville.

Stonewall's maneuvers, we glean, were not the only thing Rommel picked up during his visit to Virginia. Whether he passed through Wytheville and stopped to work there a few days is not told.

By equal strokes, however, it was not lost on the more astute American generals. As we previously stated, General Lloyd Fredendall's viewing from the heights, as Burke Davis had lauded on March 2, the attempt of Rommel to cut through the last natural fortifications beyond Kasserine Pass before Tebessa prevented disaster not unlike that of Major Gouverneur Kemble Warren calling for Union reinforcements to defend Little Round Top on the second day at Gettysburg, after having spotted the contingent of Confederates below in the Devil's Den, ready to take the unguarded heights and flank the Union line.

"We're In Trouble", cataloguing one-line entries culled from social work write-ups on relief applicants, might be instead titled "The Home-Wrecker and the Iceman Cometh".

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