Thursday, March 18, 1943

The Charlotte News

Thursday, March 18, 1943

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, along with the first public announcement of General Patton's previous appointment on March 6 to command the Army II Corps in replacement of General Lloyd Fredendall, of the taking of Gafsa at 12:30 p.m. the day before, accomplished with little resistance, the town having been garrisoned primarily by Italian troops who fled before the American entry. It was the first offensive operation by General Patton in Tunisia.

From Gafsa, lying to the northwest of the Mareth Line and to its rear, patrols were launched toward El Guettar, twelve miles southeast of Gafsa, and toward Sened, 28 miles to the east.

With the Eighth Army to the south of the Mareth Line regularly softening its positions, the two forces now had Rommel's forces, estimated to be 250,000 strong, apparently trapped between the Devil, the Deep Blue Sea, Blood and Guts and Monty. His options were few.

In the northern Donets Valley region of Russia, the Soviets engaged in a fierce tank battle with the Nazis.

U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, William Standley, coming under recent criticism for his remarks suggesting that the Soviet people were not properly informed of the amount of American Lend-Lease aid being sent them, now took remedial action for the exiguity of which he complained by showing to Red Army generals 32 newsreels depicting war factory workers in the United States and the war effort ongoing against Japan, keeping that enemy occupied and away from Russia’s back door.

It was also reported that in the wake of his controversial remarks, the Soviet press had begun, as Raymond Clapper had instructed a few days earlier had been reported in The New York Times and Associated Press, to inform copiously the Soviet people of the amount of Lend-Lease aid being provided by the United States.

On the editorial page, "Invisible" ponders the fate of the Luftwaffe, some believing it to be completely spent save the active contingents still flying in Tunisia and Russia, others guessing that its greater portion lay hidden in Germany awaiting the day of invasion. It cautions that Allied air superiority in Tunisia was coming at a hard premium and that a long fight still lay ahead against German air forces, but nevertheless finds the recent boasts broadcast by Berlin radio, that soon air strikes would thunder again across the Channel to Britain, to be hollow propaganda, that the claim of some miracle weapon on the horizon, faster, more maneuverable planes, was simply likely the product of Herr Goebbels's daydreaming.

In fact, however, Britain would again taste the second Blitz from the V-1 and V-2 rocket-planes in mid-1944 through early 1945 and Hitler's engineers would develop rudimentary jet aircraft, though never produced in significant numbers or made sufficiently practical and efficient to make any substantial dent in the war effort. Preceding the second Blitz would be moderately intense waves of bombing from France, lasting three months at the beginning of 1944. The failure by then of the North African campaign released Luftwaffe pilots to the coast of France.

"Accommodation" praises the new spirit found among the young fighting men on Guadalcanal, one local product of whom had offered that since the young Japanese wanted so badly to fight and die for their country, the American soldiers felt obliged to allow them so to do. "We let them," was the succinct summary of the policy by Sergeant Jim Stewart of Gastonia, to which the column joined in hearty approbation.

"Ho, Hum" summarizes the new spirit of Congress, not apparently bent on spitefully curbing presidential power, as it seemed a couple of months earlier, or supplanting it with its own renewed vigor, but rather quietly working to compromise with the Administration, current example being the effort to work out some middle ground between the flat curb on salaries to $25,000, sought by virtue of the war powers granted the executive in the declarations of war to be implemented in the fall by the President through Office of Economic Stabilization head James Byrnes, now threatened with overriding legislation by the Congress. Instead, however, of simply making the order unlawful by clarifying the absence of intent to extend the power to prosecute the war to embrace such measures as curbing salaries, it appeared that Congress wanted to provide some plan to effect control of salaries without allowing the President a free hand arbitrarily to set limits. Yet, thus far, the alternative plan remained in the cloakroom under the rose, bespeaking, opines the piece, perhaps a timorous attitude after all toward reigning in the President's powers.

Samuel Grafton at once praises the fine speech by General Henri Giraud just delivered in Algiers at the Alsace-Lorraine Club for its unyielding announcement of democratic reforms, prime among which was the abrogation of the anti-Jewish laws in place under Vichy rule. But, Mr. Grafton also once again sees a fly in the ointment in the form of the continued presence of former Vichy sympathizers, Marcel Peyrouton in Algiers, General Bergeret and Governor-General Nogues in Morocco. He advocates their removal at once, to complete reforms toward restoration of the free French republic. He warns that unrest among the youthful French in North Africa, in New York Harbor aboard French ships being repaired, where young seamen deserted Giraud and joined the ranks of the Free French under General De Gaulle, bore ill portent otherwise for the continued viability of morale of French troops under Giraud's command.

Raymond Clapper elaborates on the bipartisan support and sponsorship of the bill germinating in the Senate, not one proposed directly by the Administration, to engage the United States post-war in a United Nations organization. While already apparently favored by a majority of the Senate’s membership, for it to be binding as a treaty would require a two-thirds vote. Mr. Clapper offers that in all likelihood the body would await that super-majority before putting the bill finally before the full membership.

Among the supporters of the bill were Senator Truman, Democratic Majority Leader and Truman's future Vice-President in 1949, Alben Barkley of Kentucky, as well as the Republican Minority Leader, Charles McNary of Oregon.

Gerald Swope, writing in Free World, discusses the Prussian Junker class of militarists which had been responsible for both world wars and the Franco-Prussian wars, having been engaged in the business of attempted conquest of their neighbors continuously for 200 years.

From The Greensboro Daily News, a piece eulogizes Stephen Vincent Benét, having just died on Saturday at age 44, author of John Brown's Body, published in 1928--a narrative poem, as we recounted last June 9, which we once saw recited live to great effect in 1976 by Rock Hudson, Claire Trevor, and Leif Erickson in San Francisco.

Incidentally, They Called Him Stonewall, Burke Davis's 1954 biography of the odd, stilted, stern, Biblical, but feared and fearless Confederate general, of whom he made mention in Monday's "Nazi Stonewall" as having inspired Erwin Rommel's Tunisian stratagems, begins with Jackson's presence on the day of John Brown's hanging at Harper's Ferry, December 2, 1859, a day of microcosmic focus on the opposing forces seething beneath the surface of the country, including in the mix of soldiers and spectators John Wilkes Booth and Robert E. Lee, all such lesser and fallen angels of the cosmos coalescing in Appolyon tendencies soon to be impelled into the open by the election of Abraham Lincoln, followed quickly in succession by the secession of South Carolina and, one by one, the remainder of the South, and, finally, the firing on Fort Sumter setting the four-year struggle in motion, all to occur within the ensuing sixteen months.

The partially excised quote of the day read in whole, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." --Samuel Johnson.

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