The Charlotte News

Friday, December 1, 1950

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that General MacArthur's top Army intelligence officer in Tokyo, Maj. General Charles Willoughby, told a news conference that the situation of the U.N. in Korea was not desperate and that the atomic bomb would not be needed to stop the Communist Chinese advance, that the line in the northwest sector was being stabilized as the U.S. Eighth Army had retreated to a shortened line inland from the Yellow Sea, 30 miles north of Pyongyang. General Willoughby speculated that the Chinese were trying to drive the allies south of the 38th parallel, 100 miles below the currently established line.

Eighth Army sources expected new Chinese attacks on that front on Friday and Saturday, as enemy strength was building south of the Chongchon River.

Repeated waves of Fifth Air Force fighter bombers attacked the Chinese buildup in that sector.

In the northeast, U.N. forces were making a fighting retreat southward on both sides of the Changjin reservoir, with the American Seventh Infantry Division on the east and the American First Marines on the west, both trying to break through to the road junction at Hagaru, seven miles south of the reservoir, after the Marines had been cut off on Thursday. Air observers predicted that the Marines would be able to reach their destination.

General MacArthur, in response to a written question, affirmed to U.S. News and World Report that the situation in Korea was serious but not hopeless. He said it would be inappropriate for him to comment on potential use of the atomic bomb. He also said that there was no indication that Russian forces were being mobilized on the Siberian border. He had expected his winter offensive, begun October 20, to be a "decisive action", that it had to be done then as waiting until spring would have allowed the Chinese to mass their forces for a concerted attack at an earlier time, which they would have launched as soon as they had amassed enough troops. He stressed that all of his operations had been approved by Washington and the U.N., confirmed the previous day by the President.

The president of the U.N. General Assembly indicated that it might consider the Korean case because the Security Council had failed to reach a decision, after Russia, the previous night, had vetoed the six-power Security Council resolution demanding that the Chinese Communists withdraw from Korea and condemning the intervention as aggression, promising to safeguard the Chinese frontier in Manchuria and their shared hydroelectric plants in Korea. The Council also rejected the Communist Chinese charge that the U.S. was an aggressor in China and Korea, as only Russia had voted for the resolution. Meanwhile, the Communist Chinese asserted that they could defeat the U.N. troops, whom they described as "imperialist aggressors", appearing to close the door on negotiated settlement of the Korean conflict. The Russian chief delegate, Jakob Malik, also blamed the "American imperialists" for the war.

The possibility of a parley between Britain's Prime Minister Clement Attlee, President Truman and French Premier Rene Plevin, regarding the situation in Asia, became a real possibility, as Prime Minister Attlee made preparations to fly to Washington on Sunday to meet with the President, with intentions to remain a week. In Paris, a Foreign Office spokesman said that the French Premier might join them, depending on whether the National Assembly in Paris gave him a sufficient vote of confidence this night for him to remain in office. It was anticipated that Prime Minister Attlee would stress his Government's opposition to use of the atom bomb in Korea without prior approval of the U.N. forces fighting there, and would attempt to resolve differences between the U.S. and British approaches to settlement with Communist China and resolution of the Far Eastern problems generally.

Informed sources in Washington said that a meeting of NATO military leaders had been arranged to seek agreement on creation of the combined defense of Western Europe, a formal announcement of which was expected within a day. A deadlock had developed in October between the U.S. and French proposals for rearming West Germany, and appointment of a supreme commander, expected to be General Eisenhower, was postponed until a detailed agreement could be reached. Substantial progress toward making such an agreement was reported since October. One such solution was to form German regimental combat units of 4,000 to 5,000 men each, apparently satisfactory to the French, whereas the U.S. had proposed units of 18,000 to 20,000 men.

The President asked Congressional leaders to approve 17.85 billion dollars to speed up mobilization of the armed forces, a million of which would be for expansion of the atomic energy program. This amount would be in addition to the prospective 45 to 50 billion dollars during the current fiscal year and 60 billion or more for the 1951-52 fiscal year. Many on Capitol Hill, including leading Republicans, predicted approval, as the amount was aimed at bringing the armed forces to between 2.7 and three million men.

The President's appointment of a price administrator, Mayor Michael DiSalle of Toledo, O., touched off predictions in Congress, including by Senators Burnet Maybank, Joe O'Mahoney, Irving Ives, Robert Taft, and Kenneth Wherry, that wage-price controls, which the President had authority to implement, would soon follow. The previous day, mobilization director Stuart Symington said that the mobilization effort was shifting from "light gray" to "dark gray".

Earl Browder, formerly the top American Communist, was jailed after failing to post a $1,500 bond on a contempt charge for refusing to answer questions regarding whether he had ever been a Communist before the Senate investigating committee chaired by Senator Millard Tydings, looking into the charges of Senator McCarthy that there were Communists in the State Department. The judge turned down his request for release on his own recognizance. Mr. Browder appeared without an attorney and said that he had no money with which to hire one, but declined an appointed attorney. Mr. Browder was indicted along with Philip Jaffe, former editor of the defunct Amerasia, and Frederick Vanderbilt Field.

An Air Force C-45 transport plane based at Kirtland Air Force Base near Albuquerque was overdue on a flight to Hill Field near Ogden, Ut.

In Cleveland, the Right Reverend Henry Knox Sherrill of Greenwich, Conn., was elected the first president of the newly formed National Council of Churches of Christ in America. He had been presiding bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church since 1947.

Sales Management predicted that holiday buying would swell retail sales to new records for December and the entirety of 1950, with predicted sales up eleven percent over December, 1949.

Nineteen shopping days are left until Christmas.

On the editorial page, "Shall We Use the A-Bomb?" wonders whether the U.N. forces should use the atomic bomb against the Chinese, finds no moral distinction between the bomb and other forms of mass destruction, the A-bomb being merely more destructive. But a moral question had inevitably arisen in negotiations to control it and in Russian propaganda, and use of the bomb had to be evaluated on the basis of its consequences to the Far East and all of the world.

It finds that the time had not yet arrived for use of the bomb in Korea, as the available targets were relatively few in number, with the prime targets subject to conventional bombing with as great effect. It would, it posits, be most unwise to jeopardize the solidarity of the anti-Communist nations by a unilateral decision of the U.S. to use the bomb. Moreover, military experts and scientists had warned that reliance on the bomb as a kind of Maginot Line was unwise, that it could only act as supplement to an effective military machine.

"A Measure of Our Sanity" examines criticism of the American foreign policy in the Far East by the press of Western Europe, suggesting General MacArthur be relieved of his command and objecting to bombing of Manchuria to avoid general war with China. It would be easy to chafe at such criticism, but such would accomplish nothing. The Western European fears were justified and understandable in light of the fact that to have a general war in the Far East would occupy all of the U.S. manpower needed in Western Europe, leaving it wide open to Russian aggression.

The U.S. had not done enough to prepare militarily prior to the war in Korea and so had to shoulder some of the responsibility for lack of preparedness in Western Europe. Plus, at home, there were continued assaults on the Marshall Plan in Congress as well as against NATO and the military aid program, causing Western Europeans to question America's willingness to stand by its commitments. Senator McCarthy's efforts at undermining the State Department and the foreign policy generally in the U.S. had contributed markedly to this perception of unreliability.

Americans had criticized Western Europe since the end of the war for not doing enough on its own to rebuild its defenses and so it was only to be expected that there would be some counter-protest from Europe. The important thing was to learn from the criticism on both sides.

"Faulty Intelligence in Korea" wonders why 110,000 U.N. troops had been sent into the mouth of 200,000 Chinese troops in the northwest sector of Korea in General MacArthur's "end-of-the-war" offensive launched a week earlier. Hal Boyle had suggested that questions about this matter might force a revision in the American technique of waging ground warfare.

The piece wonders whether it was the technique which caused the debacle or faulty intelligence and evaluation of same, causing General MacArthur to believe that his troops could end the war. It questions whether the Tokyo command was aware of 200,000 troops and if not, finds it incredible. It finds that the appearance in Korea of considerable numbers of Chinese troops in late October, with substantially more known to have been concentrated in Manchuria across the Yalu River, should have revealed the General's earlier misjudgment that the Chinese were bluffing and would not fight, as he had communicated in October to the President during their meeting on Wake Island.

The fact that the General had said the prior Friday that the boys would be home by Christmas had added to the impact of the news that the Communist troops had delivered a crushing blow to the allies on the prior Monday and Tuesday along the northwest front. The Pentagon's statement that the U.N. forces had sufficient men and materiel to cope with the Chinese only served to confuse the matter further.

While for reasons of military security it was not possible to get a full accounting of the recent strategy, it suggests that such an explanation would have to come in time to resolve the confusion of the American people and of the other allied nations regarding this latest negative turn of events.

A piece from the Des Moines Register, titled "Disdain Made Difficult", tells of a House of Commons tradition whereunder "front benchers", the party leaders who sat on the front benches, could slump in their seats and put their feet on the table while opponents were speaking. The new House had been rebuilt to the specifications of Winston Churchill, the most prominent of the present cadre of front benchers. But the Labour Party had moved the bench back enough from the table to cause it to be out of reach of the feet of Mr. Churchill, a short man. When he tried to put his feet up at the opening session in the new House, he found that they would not reach.

They had taken away his cigar.

Drew Pearson tells of the British and French skepticism over General MacArthur and his risking all-out war with China, having focused attention on some of the friction between Washington and the Tokyo U.N. command, a primary reason for the President having gone to Wake Island to meet with the General in October. The President had never admitted publicly of any problem with the General and, save one or two occasions, the General had behaved in a subservient manner with respect to Washington. He proceeds to delineate the points of disagreement between the General and Washington.

On October 12, he had sent back a curt cable in response to instructions not to bomb bases on Chinese soil, asking what he was then supposed to do about the bombing and strafing of U.N. troops by planes coming from across the Yalu River from Manchuria. The difference of opinion represented the dilemma regarding how to win the war without causing general war with China, a major concern also of the British and French.

The U.S. Ambassador to India had been advised by Prime Minister Nehru that if the U.N. forces crossed the 38th parallel into North Korea, China would enter the war, a warning ignored by the U.S., based on the State Department belief that the Indian Ambassador to China who relayed the information was a stooge for the Chinese Communists. The result was that the U.S. Ambassador was instructed to find out what the true intentions of China were through the Indian Government, and that had taken time, delaying General MacArthur's advance into North Korea. As a compromise, on October 1, the Pentagon and the President authorized the General to send South Korean troops to the North, and then on October 4, the U.N. passed a resolution allowing all U.N. troops to go into the North.

To avoid conflict with the Manchurian border and the power plants along the Yalu, the State Department ordered a forty-mile neutral zone south of the Yalu, one of the things agreed upon during the President's visit to Wake Island. General MacArthur then told the President that he believed the Chinese were only bluffing and would not cross the Yalu. A day after the Wake meeting ended, however, small Chinese units did cross into North Korea, though General MacArthur at first discounted the reports and assumed these men were merely replacement troops for depleted North Korean units. For the ensuing ten days, General MacArthur insisted that there was no real Chinese intervention, leading to confusion in Washington.

Then General MacArthur asked for permission to send South Korean troops into the forty-mile neutral zone south of the Yalu, to serve a policing function. When those troops got into trouble facing the outnumbering Chinese, the General asked for permission to send American troops to rescue them. The result was that light U.S. columns struck north toward the Manchurian border on October 25, with the plan being to reach the border quickly and announce that the war was over.

Chinese resistance crossing the Yalu and coming out of the hills, however, cut these light units to pieces. On October 30, General MacArthur admitted for the first time the existence of Chinese troops in heavy strength, actually present for the previous ten days. The General's statement that three Chinese divisions had suddenly invaded with heavy Russian-made equipment had been merely propaganda to cover his bad prior decision-making, as these troops did not have heavy Soviet equipment.

Then, the State Department instructed General MacArthur to issue a statement saying that the U.N. forces did not intend to take the big power dams shared by North Korea and China on the Yalu. But the General sent back a curt negative reply to the instruction, which had been issued personally by General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

On November 5, General MacArthur sent a message to the U.N. asking that China be branded an aggressor, a message used by the Republicans in the two days prior to the midterm elections to brand the Truman foreign policy a disaster. The President was livid, believed that the statement had lost the Democrats a million votes. He was also angry the prior week when General MacArthur declared that Chinese opposition had evaporated and the troops would be home for Christmas, when the available information at the Pentagon said that such was not even remotely possible by the constraints of ship transportation if not the fighting.

Marquis Childs tells of the aluminum industry being one of the first to feel the impact of Government controls, with civilian use cut by 35 percent, deemed essential by National Security Resources Board chairman Stuart Symington.

Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer wanted to purchase additional aluminum from Alcan of Canada, but Mr. Symington opposed that purchase, favoring expansion of American production instead, dividing it between the three companies already making aluminum and two smaller companies which could become producers. Mr. Sawyer countered that production from Canada would be quicker, but after independent study of the issue, it was determined that a good portion of the production would be in British Columbia, on the Russia flight path from Siberia. That fact plus concentration of production in one company, with Alcoa in America, swung the decision to Mr. Symington. Reynolds Aluminum and Kaiser Aluminum were the other two extant American producers placed under contract. With the other two smaller producers, there would be at least some competition to prevent a uniform price for the highly prized metal, necessary for airplane production.

Robert C. Ruark, in Miami, again examines the local effort to clean up the gambling syndicate, with a special grand jury indicting 54 persons and seven corporations. The trial was getting underway, expected to last several months. The grand jury found that a special investigator for the Governor had been used to enable the syndicate to muscle in on the local S and G gambling operation.

Former FBI agent Dan Sullivan, acting as investigator for the Miami Crime Commission, a private group ferreting out the operations, had provided the Kefauver Crime Investigating Committee of the Senate almost all of its information on the Miami syndicate operations, from Mr. Sullivan's scrapbook of 150 dossiers on the leading figures in the operation.

Not much punishment would likely result from the trials, but the city had been cleaned up, the law had been shaken up, and the behind the scenes operators had been dragged into the public eye in an unfavorable light. More importantly, the local racket had been tied to the national syndicate.

The situation proved that a group of honest, local men could bind together to effect a changed environment for the better in a community, creating a lot of trouble for the crooks.

A letter from former News columnist Dorothy Knox tells of the North Carolina Cerebral Palsy Hospital, just getting started in Durham, owing a debt of gratitude to the News for its unfailing support of the effort through the years. Everyone benefited from making the child suffering from the crippling disease a functioning member of the community, enabling the person to be a self-supporting citizen and freeing families from the financial, physical, and emotional strain of support, to enable them to continue providing for themselves. Doctors trained to treat the disease had also been able to use the knowledge in the treatment of soldiers with brain injuries suffered in combat.

The Congress had passed and the President had signed a law which provided for training of doctors and therapists in proper methods of treatment of the disease. But the necessary funds for a new building for the Children's Rehabilitation Institute in Maryland, where nearly every such doctor and therapist had been trained, had not yet been authorized by Congress and the letter urges writing letters to Congressmen to urge the appropriation. She provides names and addresses for the North Carolina Congressional delegation.

A letter writer objects to alcoholic beverage control in Mecklenburg and quotes Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Johnson, Horace Greeley, and Canon Wilberforce to the effect that government should not sponsor or promote vice.

A letter from the chairman of the Mecklenburg County Democratic Committee thanks the newspaper for its fair coverage before and after the recent midterm elections.

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