The Charlotte News

Monday, April 28, 1941

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: All of the pieces of this day's page were uploaded in 1998.

It seems the editorial stand of the paper on Blue Laws and Robert Rice Reynolds's unfitness for chairman of the Military Affairs Committee became as much or more controversial topics than just about any raised during Cash's tenure as associate editor. One thus supposes that to the sensitive there are two things held sacrosanct above all else: Sundays and Senators.

Fortunately for us, the Nazis, Fascists and Japanese warlords were of stranger and more self-defeating turns than some of our own. For soon would come the perplexing but fateful move by the bartering Hitler away from the bombing of Britain and into Russia, presumably because he believed, perhaps putting too much stock in his own propaganda and that of the likes of Colonel Lindbergh, that the British were adequately in check, indeed were essentially licked, that the greater effort must therefore be exerted toward obtaining oil with which to continue fighting--through invading Russia, winning the continued alliance with Japan, Russia being Japan's most feared competitor for China, concomitantly to eliminate the prospect of support for Turkey as threatened by Stalin should Hitler invade it on his way to the oilfields of Iran and Mesopotamia, and not merely incidentally to obtain the oil reserves of the Ukraine; all the while in the bargain, with Japan's recent mutual neutrality pact with Russia in play, and presumably Russia's hands then full thwarting the Nazi, leaving Japan free of Russian threat to play now the compleat angler in the Pacific, crippling in the process and thereafter preoccupying the United States Navy, the more freeing Hitler in his efforts against Russia to liberate his army's and navy's thrust into the Middle East, as the Japanese committed their drive south into the Dutch East Indies and Malaysia for their rubber, tin, and oil to continue to drive and sustain the war machines of the Axis, finally leaving the besieged Great Britain all alone against Germania to surrender and accept peace terms dictated by Hitler, all with the imprimatur of a divided and quivering United States, punch drunk after Pearl. --That appears to have been the grand scheme anyway for 1941.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the treaty table. It snowed early in Russia, the Panzer division treads stuck in the mud, the stalwart citizens of Stalingrad dug in with their shoulder rifles for the long winter siege in defense of their homes, and the previous division of American opinion largely abated, after the desperate and finally futile attack of December 7.

Thereafter, with the war seemingly won for the Axis, with ground hastily gained in the South Pacific in early 1942 by Japan, the rest of the war would nevertheless become a slow death struggle to regain grudgingly the areas stolen and inveigled away by both the Nazi and the Japanese warlords.