The Charlotte News

Saturday, September 27, 1941

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Inviting Lie" tells of how the German Aryans had been convinced by propaganda that German-Americans were being forced to wear the swastika, thus providing to them the rationale for forcing Jews to wear the yellow Star of David.

This action of course paled beside what the Nazis were doing to Jews in the concentration camps--and that would pale in turn by what was to come in these places. If it had only been about wearing the Star of David, few would have worried so much, if at all.

In Russia, the campaign for the Crimea was proceeding, considered of critical importance to take quickly to supply oil to the Reich to sustain the winter campaign ahead. For it provided the key to occupation of the Caucasus and to control the Black Sea.

Dorothy Thompson tells us of the Nazi version of justice: selecting at random for any act of sabotage and immediate execution by firing squad, by the tens and by the fifties, depending upon the magnitude of the act at hand attributable to scapegoats.

Death, inhumanity, darkness pervaded the world at this time. All of Europe was being treated by the Nazi as so many stock animals. Yet, the United States stayed on the sidelines, save for escorting aid to Great Britain and now Russia, but only in dribbles, a mere 1% of the 13 billion dollars made available by Congress for aid having been transported thus far to Britain, including that which had been sunk along the way by U-boat.

With labor carping about wages, with Republicans carping about dictatorship in America, things did not bode well for the future of democracy at home or abroad. Hitlerism still looked as though it stood a great chance to become the Wave of the Future, with Charles Lindbergh or Robert Reynolds becoming the next puppet President by 1944, after an election, if the formality of elections were not dispensed with altogether, not dissimilar to the plebiscite held in Austria in March 1938.

Eventually, 256,330 Americans would give their lives to stop it, over half the half million lives at that point taken in all previous wars involving the United States, nearly four-fifths of which, 187,000, had been lost to both sides in the Civil War. It was, however, still a small number compared to the 10.6 million lives lost by the Allies during the entire War, 7.5 million of which were Russian, and 2.2 million, Chinese. Great Britain lost 453,570, Free France, 200,000. And those raw statistics, of course, do not include the crippled and wounded and emotionally scarred survivors of the War who made it home.

And it is always worth remembering that were it not for the supreme sacrifice of so many Russians, America, Great Britain, and France, for all that went on during the Cold War, would likely have never been free to wage a Cold War, but would have been swept under by the Nazi tide--especially at this critical juncture in history, when had Russia fallen quickly in a month or two, almost assuredly by spring, so, too, would have Britain. At very least the war would have demanded far more sacrifice by Britain and the United States than it did in order to win it. Factor in a well-supplied Wehrmacht invading England in spring, 1942, perhaps with the Nazis then asking Japan to wait in its effort in the Pacific, no longer necessary for Axis supply or interference with U.S. aid, and that well-supplied Wehrmacht almost assuredly would have been able to conquer England and take over the British navy. And the results to be imagined from that are catastrophic.

German-Americans indeed might have been wearing swastikas by mid-1943, but as the commanders placed in charge of the rest of the country, not as emblems of disgrace.

It never would have happened, the prideful might boast. Fortunately, there is no way to prove it either way. But the sacrifices by each of the Allies were quite real and deserve perpetual honor, both as to the living survivors and the dead who stayed on the battlefield.