Tuesday, September 28, 1943

The Charlotte News

Tuesday, September 28, 1943

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Reports the front page, the British Eighth Army took a series of key airbases in and around the city of Foggia on the eastern side of the Italian peninsula as the Nazis evacuated the city, claiming to have destroyed all of its key military facilities.

The significance of the capture of Foggia by the Allies, just 150 miles across the Adriatic from the Balkans, was underscored by the immediate capture by the Germans of Corfu off Greece in the Ionian Sea and of Split in Yugoslavia, also just across the sea from the area around Foggia.

Meanwhile, British and American troops above Salerno gained between two and five grudging miles against stiff German resistance.

General MacArthur's land forces on New Guinea began a new drive to open yet another 170 miles of coastline by heading northwest of Lae 68 miles to Madang, site of a key Japanese airbase and harbor facility at Astrolabe Bay.

Herr Doktor Goebbels was now stressing in Germany the concept of "strength through defense" rather than "strength through joy", the old Nazi mantra, as bad news piled on bad news from the Eastern front in Russia. Early fall rains had thus far failed to deter the Russian offensive, pressing the Germans back to the Dneiper River, as the Russians continued to make substantial gains from White Russia, where the Red Army now threatened Gomel, Mogilev, and Vitebsk, to the approaches to Kiev in the Ukraine to the ouster of the last Germans from the Caucasus at Temryuk giving the Nazis only the Kerch Strait onto the Crimean Peninsula as an avenue of escape in that region.

Another RAF raid hit the rubber center of Hannover in Germany, stressing Continental Gummiewerke, the second raid on the city in a week, as well as striking Emden, U-boat sanctuary, complementing the American daylight raid on that city the day before. Thirty-eight bombers and one fighter did not return from the mission.

Two air raid wardens who pled guilty to espionage, one having sent secrets to Germany by way of invisible ink, were given the maximum sentences of 30 years each.

On the editorial page, "No Response" reports that the Third War Bond drive had failed to woo the average citizen to buy bonds. The bonds instead were bought up by the major financial houses and large companies. The piece suggests that perhaps it was for the best.

"A Little Joke" finds that Governor Broughton's "Work or Fight" edict of three months earlier, an anti-loafing program, had gone largely ignored and unenforced. Around Charlotte, only four or five black men had been picked up, for sitting on the post office wall.

"It's VERY provoking...to be called an egg--VERY!"

Concludes the piece, loafers still loafed and, notwithstanding, the war continued to be prosecuted apace and won.

"The Sleepers" bemoans the fact that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Democrat Tom Connally of Texas, had tabled consideration of the Fulbright Resolution which had just passed the House, endorsing U.S. membership in a post-war United Nations organization.

The issue prompting the delay in consideration, claimed Chairman Connally, as fleshed out by Raymond Clapper in his column, was the prospect of senatorial debate on the question of Russia, in advance of an upcoming tripartite conference between FDR, Churchill, and Stalin, and Senator Connally's consequent judgment that such debate might undermine amicable relations among the Allies.

The editorial column sees the move as reprising the ostrich which led to the shelving of Wilson's Fourteen Points after World War I and by it, especially the failure of the Senate to ratify U.S. membership in the League of Nations, eventually led to the Axis nations rearming themselves with impunity and thereby beginning their various campaigns to encroach on the sovereignty of other nations, the Japanese in China, the Italians in Ethiopia, and the Germans in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and ultimately Poland.

Mr. Clapper, however, bows to the experience and putative wisdom of Senator Connally and finds the delay acceptable for the nonce.

Riki-tiki.

"Of Bedfellows" comments on the desire of the Anglo-American fighting forces and officers generally not to form an alliance with Italy whereby Italian soldiers would fight with the Allied troops. Too much had already passed inimically between the forces for such an alliance to be achieved easily. The result of allowing Italians to fight for the Allies seemed to evince the notions that war was a game, that the Allies were soft, and that fighting them and losing had no punitive consequence, only absorption of the losers into the victorious forces as if nothing had happened. The ordinary Allied soldiers thought such an incident of "unconditional surrender" an absurdity. The piece expresses the hope that FDR and Cordell Hull might view it likewise.

Dorothy Thompson opines that the new CBS policy to purvey only straight news and deny its reporters any latitude to express opinions on the stories they reported was not fulfilling the public responsibility of a major radio network. For the responsibility of the Fourth Estate was, says Ms. Thompson, not only to provide the bare news, but also to lead the public in understanding it, as a counterweight to the professional politicians and big businessmen who would otherwise occupy the field in expression of opinion about events of the day.

Drew Pearson provides the details of an average day in the life of Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall. The most important part of each day, reveals Mr. Pearson via the general's wife, was his fifteen-minute lunchtime nap, obligatory even when General Marshall brought home visiting dignitaries for lunch.

"Sit you down, father; rest you."

Incidentally, the link for "happening" on July 7 has now shifted to this location. You can't fool us, Pat. Don't wear those rags for us.

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