The Charlotte News

Monday, June 23, 1941

FIVE EDITORIALS

Hugh Johnson's column takes the opposite position: wait and see. Let the two warring forces exhaust each other. Or, should prevailing military wisdom after Finland regarding the weakness of the Russian military prove accurate and the war with Russia were to be won by Hitler in short order, then what would be the true harm, asks Johnson, in allowing Hitler to have the Ukraine, even the oilfields of Iraq? Would it not appease him? Would it not, in any event, afford America more time in which to build up its own fighting force? Was not FDR the supreme poker player?

Raymond Clapper sees the invasion as another postulate to the theorem that you couldn't do business with Hitler, that the non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler of August, 1939, enabling Hitler to invade Poland the following week, was now, having been burned to ash by the fresh blasts of Panzers, signal of the final proof.

But for what? Wheat or wheat changed, by mercurial Magic, worthy of an alchemist, to grains of Orient pearl?

The Turks, says Clapper, (and Herblock), have agreed, in order to mollify Hitler, to mute their press criticism of Nazism.

Thus, as always, ripening them for the kill, my littles, once Russia be out of the equation.

"Hitler's Folly" expresses consternation as to why Hitler proceeded against Russia. All the military experts, even so recent as Friday, even the Russian diplomats, had diminished the likelihood of any war between Russia and Germany, that Stalin stood ready to appease Hitler with acquiescence to any demand to avoid war. The piece concludes that Hitler wanted war with Russia, even if it meant breaking his promise to the German people never to fight on two fronts at once. But why?

Was it, as the piece suggests, connected with the Hess odyssey to Britain in May? Did Hess, out of his hatred and fear of Communism, deliberately plot, at the behest of the Reich or on his own, to leak information of the planned invasion to the British in order that the British might then in turn leak the information to Stalin and stir him to sufficient pride to provide casus belli or, one and the same, at least to refuse Hitler's demands--all to insure war between the two in the hope that the Nazis would destroy the great bastion of Communism?

But if so, why would the British be so stupid as to participate in such a plan which might assure their own final destruction? To get Hitler off their backs?

What of the prospect, as all the military experts at the time predicted, that Hitler would enjoy quick victory, inevitably then possessing a far better supplied force for invasion of Iraq, and the acquisition then from it of oil enough to fuel a massive land invasion across the Channel? What of the depletion further of the British forces trying to resist such an invasion of Iraq, with the expulsion and defeat in Greece still fresh in their minds? And compounded by things not going well for the British in recent days in north Africa and Syria?

Was it so simple as any of these hypotheses posed--for Hitler to undertake the irrational division of his forces, just as it appeared Britain might fall, when there were publicized rumblings in Parliament of replacing Churchill with another of the appeasers?

As we have suggested, was he not shoring up his positions by not only the practical quest, the wheat of the Ukraine, the oil of the Ukraine, the elimination of Stalin as a defender to Turkey, thus supplying the direct route to Iraq with a well-supplied, well-fed army with adequate supply lines in place to vanquish the British there in a triumphant blitzkrieg, securing north Africa, forcing the British from the Mediterranean, perhaps inducing surrender? If not, then having a fit fighting machine to go forward with the massive air, land, and sea invasion necessary to have any hope of conquering Britain?

But all, of course ignored the possibility that Britain would not surrender, that Russia would not surrender, that the bombing raids over Germany by the RAF would only increase against a divided front, that an invasion of Britain, amid the ever vigilant RAF and the resourcefulness of the British, was far easier contemplated than done.

Meanwhile, from Mexico, Mary Cash would later report that Cash was hopeful at the turn of events, believed it might at last bring America into the war, at least would sufficiently relieve the British for the time necessary not only to rebuild nerve and defense, but also to enable use of the new aid from America to do what Cash had predicted long before would happen if the Nazis bombed Britain, the retributive bombing of Berlin and Hamburg and the potential consequent stirring of the German people to revolt against the Nazi high command.

Perhaps, within this vignette lies the nugget to explain much about Hitler's motives in invading Russia: that he was looking for the same sort of opportunity ultimately as with the strike-breaking ten years earlier to please the ship owners, this time to please the isolationists and America Firsters of America, the Bolshiephobes of Britain, his old friends within the Cliveden Set who had set Chamberlain in position to orchestrate Munich, all to impress his avowal to defeat Communism, to gain the confidence of the West as being not such a two-faced little swine after all, all to the cause then of stimulating peace talks, peace talks of the type which had led to Munich, which had led to the Soviet-German non-aggression pact.

Ah, my littles, shall we be trotting home?

But answer came there none.

Yet, Popeye, taking the advice of Neptune passing the Line alone, looking at heart a barnacled irenic rishi-mystic mocker, is irrepressibly after the capture of the inimitable Davy Jones, and the bounty-secret hidden within his saliniformic locker.

As we have suggested before also: ABC; It's so very elementary.

South-south-southern.

Pardon us while we clear our throat.

Cough-cough. Kuku cushew.

White cliffs of Dover?