The Charlotte News

Saturday, June 21, 1941

FIVE EDITORIALS

Not a word from anyone appears regarding the situation on the Russian front, where now were standing 121 divisions of Nazi troops, and 3,000 Stukas, spread along the 2,000 mile border from Archangel to Leningrad to the Ukraine, ready to pounce in the early pre-dawn hours of Sunday, June 22. The Russians, Hitler knew, would have about 120 divisions arrayed against him.

That it was initiated on a Sunday, that it was the 126th anniversary of the second abdication by Napoleon after defeat at Waterloo--the decisive turning point of which had been the joinder with Wellington's force of 93,000 the 120,000 Prussians under the command of Blücher, having been pursued but lost across the French countryside by Grouchy--, was perhaps indicative of Hitler's mindset at the time, that and the naming of the campaign Barbarossa.

As we have suggested, the failure of the blitzkrieg tactic in this instance, the first time such insurgency had not within a few short weeks resulted in surrender of the opposing forces, proved ultimately to be the turning point in the war; for in taking the heat off Britain, with the further desperate move by the Axis at Pearl, bringing America finally into the war in December, it effectively ended Hitler's hopes of world domination, which appeared within his imminent grasp just thirty days earlier--though it would take yet another bloody four years to prove the fact to this madman and his mad henchmen of the ages.

But, as we have also suggested, to have continued to bomb Britain with little or no apparent effect on British morale, especially with a dearth of food to feed his armies, with oil supplies dwindling, the precious booty offered by the Ukraine, wheat--but as we have also said, not red wheat, but grains of Orient pearl--to be offered up from this sweet land Hitler no doubt viewed as his beautiful lost peasant girl, Dulcinea, appeared as equally foolhardy as what he was now about to undertake. But the ultimate mistake in fact had already occurred, long before, in 1923, with his ill-advised curiosity in trying to foist his foolish mountebankery on the rest of the world, first through a parroted book, then through a party organization comprised largely of disgruntled thugs and workers, finally through armies comprised of same. Had he followed his own impulse to produce art instead of glorious rodomontading up the fisted hill of battle to vindicate his lost dignity in the Great War, perhaps things might have been different.

Little did he know, as the first planes roared over the border and the troops and Panzers moved into action, gaining ground at 40 miles a day, as the Russian armies retreated deeper and deeper into the heartland, leading the Nazi deeper and deeper into the trap along with them, that it would indeed prove his Waterloo.

Or, maybe he did. Maybe the man was, at the end of the day, along with his party henchmen, simply nuts.

And, parenthetically, you recall the Pioneer Fund, a source for eugenics experiments in the United States, etc.--and the fire hoses and German police dogs of Bull Connor in Birmingham in the hot summer of 1963.

Meanwhile, still in the dark, Boots and her Buddies seek to break into the farmhouse, or castle as 'twere.

The Mermaid--whether from Murmansk we don't know--takes to listening to Peggy Sue while Olive gets all upset all over again, so much so that she bursts her Mermaid-skin right off.

And Red Ryder gets hauled aboard Li Sing's ship by Barbary Pete's boys, shuttling him off, with his delivered cattle, to China.

The suspense mounts.

The question of the day, though, becomes: were, besides the normal readership, Nazi agents now reading The News by this point in 1941? Perhaps, communicating in an instant, via ham radios with Hamburg? And we ask the questions quite seriously.

Something, shall we say, wasn't quite cricket.