The Charlotte News

Thursday, March 5, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

It also bears a photograph of Cornelia Fort of Nashville, the flight instructor who, while giving a lesson on Sunday morning, December 7, a few minutes before 8:00, looked up over the northern approaches to Oahu to see several bright orange balls on the wings and fuselages of the aircraft suddenly flying astride her position. As she was depicted here casually sipping her coffee in San Francisco, she appeared no worse the wear for her near fatal brush. The Japanese airmen had been given instructions to shoot down anything encountered on the approach to the target; apparently the two begoggled ladies gaping aghast from the bi-plane did not appear sufficiently menacing or likely of air reconnaissance duty to prompt strict obedience to orders. Most honorable restraint was practiced.

Leon Henderson announced that passenger car tires may be needed for defense, while Harold Ickes suggested that gas rationing may become necessary, even if driving was considerably reduced from the absence of tires. It is, we must suggest, getting to be a rather tiresome topic.

On, Rosinante! To the wheat.

Paul Mallon sets the record straight on the successful landings on Java by the Japanese having come amid apparently conflicting reports of the Allies chasing a 40-transport group north. He reconciles the accounts as consistent, that there were actually four separate groups, involving a total of 120 transports, three having landed on the west coast of Java, coming from Sumatra, and the other being the one chased away.

Ray Clapper suggests a general staff command structure in between the President and each branch of the military service, one to coordinate and provide oversight to the whole operation of total war at once, to enable relief from the shoulders of the President of the ordinary daily decisions of running the war, one, Mr. Clapper counsels, which ought be modeled on the German plan--one not dissimilar to the post-war structure set up under the Department of Defense at the Pentagon, with the Joint Chiefs.

Constitutionally, however, it must always be borne in mind that there is a reason for having one Commander-in-Chief who is a civilian. And as soon as that reason is forgotten, our democracy perishes. The Pentagon must never become, in other words, a fourth branch of government working autonomously from the careful balance set forth in the document between Executive and Legislative direction. That was quite good enough in 1789. It is no less authoritative in 2009.

Dorothy Thompson writes of a novel plan for community mobilization and self-help toward the end of organizing to get the most out of limited resources at hand, in the instanced case, that of Mount Gilead, Ohio, car-pooling workers to and fro the defense jobs at the factory. It sounds pedestrian today, but apparently not so in 1942 when theretofore in the automobile age, it was every man a king.

No more individual flying lessons over Pearl Harbor would be had for awhile.

Nevertheless, individualism must never give way to community organization, lest the very foundation pins of the country come loose at the axles. There was a reason in 1789 for an individual civilian Commander-in-Chief and a bicameral Congress, working as a community, who authorizes the expenditures to outfit and arm the military forces which the individual Commander directs into or out of action. The same thinking works down the line to state government and local organization, with no less assiduity required to insure that gyroscopy's consistent implementation.

As to "Lord Halifax and the Constabulary", the Yank patrolman might have added, after admitting to the Ambassador that he had just shot Churchill, that he was then off to the Kilimanjaros, or at least Ole Kinderhook, to do some wild game hunting inside a teacup into which had been emptied the entire complement of the King's tea for the day poured out the Royal Teapot such that the whole effect was as orpiment used to address sheets of wind. Right.

Sorry, by the way, if the column appears a bit fuzzy today. We are able to read it just fine. But we are not going to tell you what it says.