The Charlotte News

Friday, August 27, 1943

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page announces that the day before the United States and Great Britain had disclosed an agreement reached at the recently ended Quebec Conference to recognize the French Committee of National Liberation led jointly by General Giraud and General De Gaulle. The Soviets had also provided their recognition of the Committee, going a step further than the Western Allies, to recognize the Committee as representative of the state interests of France.

In Denmark, the demonstrations and sabotage continued as German troops sent it to quell the disturbances had been thus far unable to do so. Sending more troops was problematic for the necessity to maintain them in other locations preparatory to potential Allied attack. Danes complained of Nazi indiscriminate firing and hurling of grenades into crowds of demonstrators.

The Fifth Air Force attacked Hansa Bay on New Guinea, 200 miles north of Salamaua, a key supply depot for the airdrome at Salamaua. Australian and American infantry troops continued their movement toward the airfield, now within less than a mile of advance positions.

A new serialized book begins this date, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, by a participant in the Doolittle Raid of April 18, 1942, Ted W. Lawson, in collaboration with columnist and correspondent Bob Considine. Lieutenant Lawson lost a leg in the mission after it was severely injured during the crash landing of his B-25 in the China Sea. The Preface and Chapter 1 are continued on the inside page.

British Minister of Information Brendan Bracken labeled "unconscious Fifth Columnists" those who spread rumors that Russia's failure to send a representative to the Quebec Conference was indicative of a possibility that Russia might make a separate peace with Germany.

And, just above the piece on the recognition of the French Committee of National Liberation appears a photograph of motorcycle troops in training at Camp Carson, Colorado. The only thing missing was a baseball and glove.

On the editorial page, "A New Attack" celebrates the appointment of Lord Mountbatten to the position of Commander in the Southeast Asian theater of operations, signaling a new offensive imminent in that area, centering on the retaking of Burma to reopen the land supply lines to China along the Burma Road and to afford a line of attack against the western flank of the Japanese to complement the operations in New Guinea and the Solomons and the completed operations in the Aleutians to the north. That he was British indicated that Great Britain was committed to a long engagement against Japan, regardless of when the war ended in Europe.

"No U-Turn" continues to support the Smith-Connally anti-strike legislation as a necessary emergency act to end such hostage-holding of the country as was the case during the coal strike and threatened coal strike from March through May. That was so, despite the American Federation of Teachers having declared the Act hostile generally to union organizing. The editorial disagrees, believes that after the war, unions would be as strong as ever.

"The Victories" finds the large numbers of losses of planes to German fighters and anti-aircraft batteries during Monday's RAF raid on Berlin, while high, likely to be reduced over time as the effects of the bombing would diminish German defense capability. The switch by Germany from an offensive to a defensive war, however, for the nonce, was evident in these relatively large numbers of losses by the Allies.

Raymond Clapper finds the Quebec Conference to have missed an opportunity to rally Britain and America to a renewed war effort at a time when the zest for the war was fast fading among each country's civilian populations. In Both Britain and America, talk was more of resumption of peace and a return to normalcy. Rather than the jejune language of the statement out of the Conference, Mr. Clapper favored a determination of the Italian situation in support of the forces favoring democracy, extending such a policy pronouncement then to all other countries to be liberated.

Mr. Clapper wrote the piece before the announcement of Allied recognition provided the French Committee of National Liberation, as he mentions the failure to so recognize the Committee as another lost opportunity out of the Conference.

Carl Carmer, author of Stars Fell on Alabama, obliquely referenced on the editorial page of June 30, tells of the heroic rescue in Australia by three black soldiers of a white pilot of a fighter plane which hit a log on takeoff and fell into a river, aflame. The three rescuers were badly burned in the process.

Mr. Carmer offers the vignette in contrast to the recent racial disturbances in Detroit and Harlem.

Samuel Grafton, continuing his visit to Wendell Willkie’s hometown of Rushville, Indiana, finds two fixed stars in Mr. Willkie’s galaxy of ideals, a concern for preservation of civil liberties and a dedication to international collaboration, for the preservation of both of which he was prepared, believes Mr. Grafton, to pay the price, if necessary, of political oblivion.

He was also a man who preferred to strip matters down to their base simplicities, not complicate them. As example, he saw the similarities inherent in farming, no matter the surrounding society in which the task was being performed or on what model, whether in China, Russia, or the United States.

Drew Pearson examines the ousting of Sumner Welles from the State Department, finds it to have been stimulated by Cordell Hull's wife, upset about the attentive ear of the President held by Mr. Welles, capable of succinctly setting forth international problems and solutions, often to the exclusion of her husband, the Secretary, given to prolix statements too burdensome for the busy President to digest.

Also irritating the situation over time, says Mr. Pearson, was the fact that Welles, author of the Good Neighbor Policy, was the person to whom Latin American representatives came for advice on issues, not Mr. Hull, who had previously been in favor of continued interventionist policy in Latin America.

As another example, when Sumner Welles had sought visas for 651 mostly Jewish professors, churchmen, and ex-government officials in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, Cordell Hull's coterie of men in the State Department blocked them. At the same time, in contrast, Mr. Hull authorized the admission to the United States of 500 Bata shoe workers from Czechoslovakia, despite the fact that the manufacturer had been placed on a British blacklist, presumably for collaboration with the Nazis. It was not until after their entry that Bata entered the American blacklist, precipitating the expulsion of the workers.

Thus, with his wife urging a campaign to dump Welles, with his close advisors in the Department counseling the same, Hull had given the ultimatum to the President: either he would resign as Secretary of State or Welles would be forced to resign as Undersecretary.

As to the Dorman Smith, the Green Bird of the Singing Apples and the Walrus seek to figure out the motives behind Premier Stalin's withdrawal of Ambassador Litvinoff from the United States. He said "goodbye" just as Churchill and Roosevelt wished to say "hello". What lay behind this bit of mysterious sorcery? Who ate all the ousters?