Tuesday, July 6, 1943

The Charlotte News

Tuesday, July 6, 1943

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports of the beginning belatedly of the Nazi summer drive in Russia along a 165-mile front from Orel to Belgorod. The ground offensive was preceded by a massive artillery barrage and air attacks, which had begun at dawn the previous day. Thus far, the Russians claimed to have the better of the endeavor, knocking out 203 planes and 738 tanks, including many of the new 60-ton Tigers. The Russians claimed to have killed 6,000 Germans in less than two days.

Flying Fortresses again flew sorties against Sicily and Sardinia, attacking Marsala, Gerbini, Licata, Sciacco, and Catania on Sicily, and Villacidro on Sardinia. The Allies had shot down during the previous day 42 Axis planes with a loss of twelve of their own. An attack was also launched on Messina on Sicily by 60 American Liberators flying out of the Middle East.

Field Marshal Baron Von Richtofen, German World War I ace, and commander of the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain, had been dispatched to Italy to join with Field Marshal Albert Kesselring in the preparation of air defenses of Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia.

Whether Snoopy was also along, was not indicated.

American and Japanese warships had engaged in Kula Gulf off New Georgia. No details were yet provided.

Americans were reported also to have taken Vangunu Island, southwest of New Georgia.

It was announced that a member of the British Parliament, General J.P. Whiteley, had been killed in the plane crash off Gibraltar which had also taken the life of Wladislaw Sikorsky, Prime Minister of the Polish government-in-exile. The purpose of the trip had been to inspect Polish forces on duty in the Middle East. Prime Minister Churchill mourned the losses in a speech before Commons.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, welcoming his wife back to China after an eight-month absence in the U.S. and Canada as reported the previous day, set, uncannily, a time limit of two years on the war with Japan, that the Japanese could not sustain war any longer than that.

Short by one month, he was precisely correct, but for a wholly different reason in the half-life.

Chiang, in his message to the Chinese on the eve of the sixth anniversary of the beginning of the war with Japan, also stressed the importance of the Allied victory in North Africa, in clearing the supply route through the Mediterranean to the Middle East and to India--from which missions were being flown over the "W" Pass in the Hump of the Himalayas to deliver supplies, primarily gasoline, to China, until such time as the Burma Road could be re-opened to Allied traffic.

All "A" ration book holders, get ready. Your allotment of 1.5 gallons per week and the ban on pleasure driving along the Eastern Seaboard is about to be relaxed on July 15. You may apply for one summer sojourn to a vacation home on the seashore or similar outing.

Have a safe and pleasant journey, enjoy the surf, but keep a wary eye peeled for sharks, as well U-boats.

The Navy, as elucidated in the photograph on the page, had developed the extraordinary ability to write perfectly formed messages within the smoke from their 14-inch guns. The method by which this feat was accomplished was a carefully guarded secret, learned, it was indicated, from various Native American tribes and county fair fireworks technicians.

Whether, however, the Navy could transcribe the messages into Japanese characters was yet to be determined. It required a different offset typeface for the guns.

The practical use of this new method of communication, as opposed to more traditional methods of communication at sea, by Aldis lamp or Morse telegraphy, had also not been fully explicated. Perhaps it was to shock the enemy into surrender.

On the editorial page, in complement to the words of Chiang Kai-shek on the importance of opening the Mediterranean to unimpeded Allied sea and air traffic, Raymond Clapper reports of the vast changes in that regard brought about by the victory in Tunisia. Comparing his perceptions of things to a year earlier when he toured Africa only via the central plain from the west coast, on his way to India and China, he found now that Allied ships were passing in great numbers at will through the Mediterranean and that the elimination of the long southern route around the Cape of Good Hope had increased shipping tonnage to the East by more than a third, and with fewer losses now to submarine attack.

The sum of it spelled Trouble for the Axis, and with a capital "M".

A report prepared by the editors compares the statistics for American casualties out of World War I with those thus far in World War II, finds that the great disparity, even though United States involvement in the wars had been of roughly equal duration, came from the fact that, thus far, American ground troops, outside the Pacific, had been involved only in the North African campaign, in which the piece estimates that no more than 120,000 men saw action. The number of battle casualties from World War I numbered about ten percent of the men who saw action, a similar statistic to the numbers thus far reported in World War II.

It points out that in just 47 days of fighting in the Meuse-Argonne offensive of 1918, fully 120,000 American casualties were reported, but out of 1.2 million Americans involved.

Out of the total of 125,000 American deaths from World War I, nearly half, 57,500 were from disease, 58,000 from battle deaths on land, and 10,000 from the Navy, which saw limited action.

The grim reminder again was that once land operations began, the casualty figures would begin dramatically to rise.

Those operations were now only three days away from beginning.

Samuel Grafton asserts that increasingly the French were siding with De Gaulle and finding Giraud to be too much the kept property of Britain and the United States for the independent spirit of nationalism and trust of the French. He asks rhetorically how America might feel if there were two leaders vying for leadership, one, Smith, though hardly known to Americans at all until eight months before, nevertheless embraced by several foreign powers, the other, Jones or Brown, being a person known and trusted by nearly all Americans. Would the American nod go to Smith or Jones, to take out the trash? The question was not difficult of an answer.

"Inflation" examines the economic landscape of Europe after nearly four years of war and finds it dismal, that the occupied lands were on the verge of collapse economically from inflation running rampant by the floating of unsecured paper by Germany to cover rising deficits. Even so, it indicates, Germany itself had remained relatively stable economically, benefiting from favorable exchange rates established by Germany. In the meantime, however, so depressed were the conquered countries that revolution was fomenting rapidly from within them, just based on economic conditions, not to mention the social conditions and oppression extant in the occupied lands.

It concludes that occupied Europe was falling of its own weight, hastened by the policies, economic and otherwise, of Germany.

A piece by Jay Hayden looks at the prospectus for a Dewey nomination for the presidency in 1944 and finds it, as had George Creel writing in Collier's, probable. That, even though at the recent national governors’ conference in Columbus, Ohio, he had been canny with reporters trying to ferret out whether he would actively seek the nomination or accept it if drafted by the Republican convention a year hence. He refused to provide any hints.

At only 41 years old, Governor Dewey, suggests Mr. Hayden, had his best years ahead of him and, with a lucrative $25,000 per annum salary plus amenities as Governor of New York in combination with the penchant of New Yorkers for electing governors again and again, for a decade at a time, he could serve two and a half comfortable terms, and run in 1952, when, Mr. Hayden says, with considerable perspicacity, "…[T]he Roosevelt political era and global war presumably will have passed into history."

The Governor had promised New Yorkers during the 1942 campaign that he would finish his four-year term. So, the questions were would he, or would he submit to the cajoling of his party to come to its aid in 1944?

He would run, both in 1944, and in 1948. Had he won in 1944, he would have been the youngest president ever elected to office, equaling Theodore Roosevelt's age of 42 when he came to the office after the assassination in 1901 of William McKinley.

Instead, that distinction of youth came to John F. Kennedy, who was 43 when inaugurated in 1961.

Should Governor Dewey have taken the implicit advice of Mr. Hayden and waited ten years for seasoning? He might well have become president in 1953 had he done so. General Eisenhower was a reluctant candidate and had been first recruited by Harry Truman and the Democrats. Mr. Dewey would have stood in stark contrast for his relative youth. Instead, he became one of only five two-time losers who have ever garnered the nomination for the American presidency from a major political party, the others being Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee in both 1952 and 1956, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Federalist nominee in both 1804 and 1808, Henry Clay, the Whig candidate in 1832 and 1844, and William Jennings Bryan, thrice the losing nominee of the Democrats, in 1896, 1900, and 1908.

It is a fair guess that few people today below the age of forty who are not American history buffs or close followers of historical politics have ever much heard of either Dewey or Stevenson, less so Dewey than Stevenson, who went on to have a prominent role as Ambassador to the United Nations during the Kennedy Administration.

Ah, well, history.

"An Old Tune" bristles at FDR's criticism of the press the previous week for stirring up domestic trouble, indicating that he did not blame the columnists for their unfair and incessant carping, as they had to answer to their bosses who mandated editorial policy, the nattering nabobs of negativism. The editorial takes exception, finding the criticism unsubstantiated and unwarranted, that the President himself and his Administration policies had caused much of the recent rancor between the Administration and Congress and, as the column had editorialized on several occasions during the coal crisis, his coddling of Labor for a decade, that debacle, Labor leaders believing that, by the past, they could get away with sabotage of the war effort with impunity to improve their lot and that of their union members.

The piece even suggests that the President would seek to bridle the press through censorship in order to control his own destiny.

Who was right, the editorial writer or the President? Was FDR really seeking to manipulate and control the press? Is there not almost always such a tension between government and a free press at some juncture of an administration? Does a president not have the right publicly to criticize the press in the spirit of a free democracy? even if enemies lists and the use of government agencies to target journalists are obviously practices verboten as abuse of executive power and inimical to a free press.

"Dead Duck" laments again the de-funding of the National Youth Administration by Congress and its loss of a thousand war job-trainees per day being turned out by it, finds that Congress did not give it a fair shake or investigate its ameliorative impact on the war effort.

"Wellsprings" recaps a talk given in Chapel Hill to English teachers the previous week by Greensboro Daily News writer W. T. Polk, whose thesis was that what a nation reads largely determines its destiny in the world and that the fate of the Allies versus that of Germany could be fairly measured by a comparison of the underlying folk tales running generationally through each of the societies.

On the one hand, Germany had based its struggle against reality adduced in Mein Kampf on a "witches' brew" of Nietzsche, Darwin, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, in short, on the brief that human will conquered reason in a world governed by survival of the fittest, and that German Aryans were the Master Race capable of implementing that formula over humanity throughout the globe.

The strain running through the West, by contrast, had stressed the reason of the Greeks, the faith in righteousness of the Judeo-Christian ethic. The works of Joseph Conrad were offered as popular example.

Mr. Polk had found Neville Chamberlain's lack of appreciation of literature apparent in his failure to understand his enemy at Munich, coming away with a worthless piece of paper which almost immediately showed itself as such when Hitler began chewing away at Czech territory in violation of the terms of the Pact.

In contrast, Winston Churchill had evinced an understanding of Dante's Inferno and the villains of Genesis--not to mention probably Faust, Macbeth, and Nosferatu, also.

Concludes the piece: "It is a fascinating theory that nations are what they read. Certainly they are what they believe from their literature, and their destiny is forever tangled with the tales their writers tell."

We quite agree with that premise, however difficult it is to prove empirically. It is of course the heart of the Cash thesis presented in The Mind of the South. In modernity, with far less reading and appreciation for literature than a hundred years ago, before the advent of radio, the widespread use of the Victrola, or the popular consumption of movies, or the invention of television, the media which have replaced books and reading as a pastime, especially television, but including popular music and movies, have become largely the basis for the cultural mindset.

Nevertheless, literary allusion still runs through the thoughtstreams of the culture, even among those who have not read much of it, for its impact on the more educated, and for its having been the primary fodder, passed along generationally, of a generation now largely gone from our midst, but still having its impact on our thoughts through the preservation of history and its record. Read a speech of Martin Luther King, for instance, and you may glean some of his literary underpinning and appreciation.

So, corollary to the rule above might now be that we are a nation not only of that which we read, but also of that to which we listen and which we view in various forms of media, certainly matter beginning to exact their grip in a more than passive manner on the cultural mind of the time of World War II.

Be careful, as we have warned, of that to which you wed yourself in so doing. Check it at the door before leaving the theater by virtue of running mental criticism, rather than letting it slip over you passively, into you, girdling you as a small child incapable of independent thought. Ditto for listening to music. That not only does not inhibit enjoyment of the medium at hand, it enhances it no end. Listen to things you heard as a child and then listen carefully, especially carefully, again as an adult. The contrast can be startling, and startlingly enlightening.

An artistic muse, no matter its apparent lack of precise articulation and sophistication in perception, both of others and self, can nevertheless be quite elucidatory of something very positive in humanity, if viewed in that light. The book, the music, the movie, the tv program does not kill. Only the perceiver who makes a conscious choice to use it as an excuse does that with the art of another, trying, ultimately, to kill the art, maybe sometimes even the artist, not necessarily for detestation of the message or the messenger as much as simply needing an excuse by projection for an already existing mental malady--just as Hitler employed to his use various works, from Wagner to Goethe to Nietzsche, of themselves quite harmless.

A letter writer takes gentle issue with the letter writer of June 23 who had responded caustically to the temperance argument waged by the young Mr. Woolley a few days earlier. She agrees with the June 23 writer that the Old Testament patriarchs of the Bible were all sinners, but interprets the New Testament to stand for the proposition of their forgiveness of sin through faith in Jesus.

Well, that is where you begin to get into trouble, blinded by anti-Semitism. Go back and read the Old Testament first before making grand pronouncements of the type.

And, in any event, we always thought, after 1968, that he was the One.

You know who we mean.

In any event, his followers were pregnant at the time with practically religious zeal for him.

If some unrepentant Nazi, present in the bunker that night, stepped forward and proclaimed that Hitler died with the words, "Jesus, forgive me," on his lips, would his last-second conversion gain him admittance to Heaven?

And, whether, in someone's unconscious or conscious memory, the Dorman Smith of the day gave rise to the daisy ad, promoting the candidacy of President Johnson in 1964 against Senator Goldwater, we don't know. But there it is, replete with plentiful irony for 21 years hence.

Final question of the day: Who was William E. Miller? Don't look it up. Right off the top of your head. Hint: He carried American Express Traveler's Cheques whenever he was on the go.

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