Monday, May 17, 1943

The Charlotte News

Monday, May 17, 1943

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports of the dire situation afoot in Italy as Italians swarmed toward Rome from the southern coastal areas to escape the feared Allied invasion. Rumors swirled around the supposed instability of the Italian leadership, both King Emanuele and Mussolini. It was true as to Mussolini.

The RAF in one night had managed to knock out two of Germany's 30 dams, the Mohne and Eder in the Ruhr Valley, controlling two-thirds of the Ruhr's hydroelectric storage capacity, flooding the areas below each dam, causing numerous casualties.

Eight Lancaster bombers and their crews had been lost in the attacks.

The dam-busting raids were the first of their kind of the war, involving low-level flying against heavy artillery fire and dropping of bombs which skipped along the surface of the water to strike the dam.

Fifteen miles southwest of Rome, another RAF raid hit a seaplane base, Lido Di Roma, at the mouth of the Tiber River.

More American troops were reported to be landing on Attu. The entire 2,900 Japanese contingent of defenders would be wiped out, save 29 taken as prisoners at the final surrender of the island on May 31.

Kiska would undergo continuous bombing until the Japanese were able quietly to withdraw on July 28, in advance of the Allied landings on August 15 which then found a deserted island.

The map below shows the three-pronged attack forces of American personnel on Attu, as described by the Japanese Army spokesman via Tokyo radio, and their directions of movement during the brief offensive undertaken amid inclement conditions of snow and ice.

Drawing a line in the sand which risked its existence, the War Labor Board ordered bituminous coal operators not to negotiate with the UMW and John L. Lewis until both parties agreed to submit the negotiations to the board for determination, per its lawful authority over such contract disputes.

On the editorial page, "Eleventh Hour" observes that the Continent was now bracing for the Allied offensive about to begin. Everywhere the signs were that the Axis was crumbling. It again warns, however, that the inevitable victory would be paid for in blood, American blood, and that the estimated 180 American casualties per day currently suffered on all fronts would soon soar.

The piece was right of course in this grim prediction.

"The Heroes" quotes at length from a propaganda communique issued by the German High Command, giving praise to the surrendering Axis forces in Tunisia who, it claimed, had only succumbed because they were out of food and ammunition, despite their having been previously the superior fighting force.

Of course, nobody expected them to talk of Kraut and Wop cowards who laid down their arms at the first hint of defeat and retreated like little pansies.

"Japan's Number" over-optimistically predicts a dual offensive, together with the invasion of the Continent, against Japan during the summer. It finds both the Attu raid and the attendance of General Archibald Wavell at the third Washington conference to foreshadow such an imminent summer offensive against Japan.

It concludes that now, with the Allied victory in North Africa, the Allies would choose the time and place of battle on all fronts and that there was no chance for Axis victories in the future.

Samuel Grafton discusses Hitler's dwindling choices in Russia, to retreat slowly and fight the Russians to his forces’ increasing depletion or to retreat quickly, leaving behind his equipment. Meanwhile, Der Fuehrer himself had to move his headquarters west.

Raymond Clapper, again reporting from Sweden, finds one of the more disconcerting aspects of Swedish reality to be the necessity of Sweden's trade with Germany, iron ore and lumber for coal, since Germany had blockaded trade with Britain.

He spends most of the piece on reports reaching the Swedish newspapers from Germany that disintegrating internal conditions in Germany made the country ripe for revolt, even communism, especially resulting from the unpopular shutting down of small businesses to enable internment of shopkeepers into the manpower-short Nazi war effort. The move signaled, says Mr. Clapper, a post-war environment in which the last vestiges of free enterprise would be gone, leaving a vacuum in which communism could thrive.

Erich Brandeis proposes that the simplest way to end all future warfare was to follow the Ten Commandments.

Ah, it is so simple it seems. But yet so very complicated, once the killing starts and the eye for eye business sets in, as he also recognizes was now taking place in the war. Then it becomes a matter of determining who plucked the first eye, doubt of which Hitler was always quickest to exploit propagandistically, stretching the argument, if need be, back to Biblical times.

A Congressman, W. R. Bradford of Fort Mill, South Carolina, takes issue with The News editorial the previous week on the tearing down of the Phifer House in Charlotte, the supposed locus of the last meeting of the full Confederate cabinet. The piece had mentioned parenthetically that the last actual meeting had occurred in Fort Mill, immediately to the south of Charlotte, under a sassafras tree.

Congressman Bradford, however, claiming horticultural superiority, contends that sassafras is a bush, not a tree, but that, in any event, no sassafras probably ever was permitted to grow on the immaculate lawn of Colonel William E. White, upon which was held the actual last meeting of the full Confederate cabinet, in Fort Mill. Yet another meeting, he finds, congregated further south in Abbeville, S.C., but with less than the full complement present. The letter also picks at the editorial's comparison of the likeness of Jeff Davis to that of Abraham Lincoln, concluding that the editorialist, presumably Burke Davis, indulged in considerable imagination in drafting the piece.

The News rejoinders that sassafras was either a bush or a tree, sometimes growing to a hundred feet in height, that Jeff Davis's image on a Confederate stamp was so startlingly similar to that of Lincoln that there arose complaint among the Confederate populace that Lincoln was on their stamps. It also defends its contention of the last full meeting of the cabinet as having occurred in Charlotte by reliance on Jefferson Davis's own memoirs so describing it.

So there.

Somehow the idea of congregating under a sassafras tree seems wholly fitting as having been venue for the last full meeting of the Confederate cabinet and so we adopt it, along with the story of the Phifer House.

Some contingent of them probably met for decades afterward in Mexico. Some descendants of them may have met into modern times, and under many a sassafras tree.

And, "Experiment" reports of a California power company finding that 99 percent of a small town’s population were honest enough to read their own meters.

The other one percent apparently used no or little electricity at all.

They were reported electrocuted by the power company as punishment for their dishonesty after claiming as defenses poor eyesight and conscientious objection to payment for freely associating electrons along a current as impelled through a wire. The power company was said to have left them without meters and instructed them to touch both power bars at once while holding a bare copper rod and standing in a tub of water to test the circuitry. Problem was, said a subsequent report, half of the one percent were Amish. The other half were legally blind.

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