The Charlotte News
Thursday, July 20, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Korea, front line dispatches told of the 24th Division being withdrawn from Taejon and that the whereabouts of field commander Maj. General William Dean were unknown after last having been seen in the thick of battle. North Korean infantry led by tanks had driven into the city, which was ablaze, after the Americans had withstood the attack for several hours, utilizing new 3.5-inch anti-tank rocket launchers to knock out eight of the first ten enemy tanks. The Air Force claimed to have destroyed five other tanks. It was not known how many tanks had crossed the Kum River by this point, but at least four more had rolled toward Taejon.
A South Korean Army spokesman said that the enemy entered Yechon on the central front this date, but that it was later driven out with 400 casualties.
An Eighth Army spokesman said that North Korean forces of unknown strength were in Chongju early Thursday in a drive down the western side of the peninsula. U.S. planes had attacked Chongju and Kumje, the latter also falling into Communist hands, about 40 miles southwest of Taejon.
Tom Lambert reports of the Army burying a sergeant and corporal, both killed on Tuesday in a clash with guerrillas, the first casualties of the 25th Division, which had arrived in Korea just a few days earlier.
The Marine Corps alerted its ground reserve units to be prepared to return to active duty on ten days notice. No units had yet been activated. It was the first of the branches to alert reservists, following the announcement the previous day by the President that he had authorized Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson to activate both National Guard units and military reservists.
Congressional leaders indicated that both the Senate and House Armed Services Committees would consider legislation to carry out the objectives set forth by the President in his message the previous day, including removing limits on the size of each branch of the military and providing the President authority to freeze enlisted personnel in the services for up to a year beyond the period they had agreed to serve. An informal poll of the Senate Committee by a journalist found overwhelming support for both moves. Congressional leaders next expected to propose a bill to raise the age limit on the draft from 26 to 35.
State and Defense Department officials estimated that to bolster further the military aid program to NATO, as outlined by the President in his message, might cost an additional five billion dollars in addition to the added ten billion the President had estimated would be necessary for American defense.
Diplomatic officials said that the idea of rearming West Germany as a bulwark against Soviet aggression, as favored by many Western European leaders, was not acceptable to the U.S., Britain, or France. But rearming Western Europe as a defense mechanism for all, including West Germany, continued to be the plan.
Hal Boyle reports, en route by commercial airline to Korea, that a young private was on his way with him to the fight and, like many others, had not even yet cast his first vote, being only 21. Sitting next to Mr. Boyle during the flight, he imparted that he had been in the Army since age 18, had already spent eleven months in Korea during the occupation and seventeen months in Japan, had been home on leave when the fighting began. He was part of the 24th Division, in the heart of the fight. Some of his buddies had been lost in the fighting. He despaired that the people in his hometown of Superior, Wisc., did not understand the hardship abroad as they had their needs met. He liked the Army and intended to make a career of it. Upon retirement, he hoped to open a restaurant. He did not regret that he had to go to the battle front upon his return as he found himself to be no better than the next guy.
At journey's end, Mr. Boyle told him to be careful, to which the private grinned and responded, "Well, if you get in a tight spot, yourself, pray to God—you'll feel a lot better."
The Senate voted along party lines, 45 to 37, to accept for filing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee unanimous approval of the five-Senator subcommittee report denouncing Senator McCarthy's charges of Communists in the State Department as a "fraud and a hoax" and "perhaps the most nefarious campaign of half-truths in the nation's history". Several Republicans had complained that the report was a "whitewash" of the charges and a disservice to Senator McCarthy. The subcommittee had held hearings for several weeks on the matter and called numerous witnesses before issuing its conclusion by a 3 to 2 vote along partisan lines.
Them Commies comin' 'crossed there in Korea, they're from the State Department. Ever'body knows that. The State Department smells like sulphur.
Senator Guy Gillette said that a subcommittee investigation of the sharp rise in cost of food of the previous few weeks would commence soon to find out its cause, as there was plenty of food in the country.
In Brussels, the Belgian Parliament voted to restore King Leopold III to the throne, from which he had been exiled since the war in Switzerland because of his perceived collaboration with the Nazis in 1940 at the fall of Belgium and his marriage in 1945 to a Flemish commoner. A plebiscite earlier in the year had favored his return. Of the 387 members, 198 voted in the affirmative. Opposition Communists, Socialists, and Liberals abstained from the vote and walked out of the assembly before the vote occurred. Strikes in opposition to the move and resulting strife had taken place in the country during the previous year.
In Taipei, Formosa, an exploding army munitions truck killed 16 persons after it collided with another vehicle the previous day.
In Buffalo, N.Y., when a police lieutenant had stepped from his patrol car, a man stepped into it, turned on the ignition and pressed the button on the dashboard, thinking it to be the starter button. It turned out to be the siren, and the man was convicted of vagrancy and received a 90-day sentence.
He may have been related to Senator McCarthy.
On the editorial page, "Minimum Preparedness Program" praises the message to Congress by the President regarding mobilization of manpower and industry for the Korean war. It urges that the people needed to heed the President's warnings against consumer hoarding to avoid the necessity of rationing and price controls as during World War II.
It finds that Americans were ready to accept the new burdens outlined by the President the prior day, including service in the military, as the country had come to realize, as it did not in 1939-40, that appeasement only bred more aggression by the enemy.
This time, the aggression was interdicted at its start and the job was now to build a collective force against it as quickly and efficiently as possible.
"The McCarthy Episode Ends" praises the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee for voting to rebuke Senator Joseph McCarthy and reject as groundless his charges of Communists in the Government, primarily in the State Department, calling the charges "a hoax and a fraud".
The two Republicans of the five-person subcommittee, Senators Bourke Hickenlooper and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., had nothing to say in his defense, with Senator Lodge indicating that there might have been more investigation into the possibility of fellow-travelers and Soviet sympathizers in the Government.
It finds that some "apparently good men", such as Owen Lattimore and Philip Jessup, had suffered smears at the hands of Senator McCarthy without his having produced a shred of evidence to back it up. Some gullible people in the country would go on believing that these persons were Communists as long as they lived.
It finds that while there were some Communists probably in the Government who ought be removed, there was no room for the type of tactics used by Senator McCarthy, publicly denouncing people as Communists and disloyal without supporting evidence beyond hearsay rumors.
It suggests that the Senator would probably be spared official punishment but that he would forever bear the stigma of having his name forever associated with "the most vicious sort of political slullduggery".
Of course, Senator McCarthy was not done, would continue to hit the steak sauce and launch yet more charges, against Communists being in higher echelons of the Army, prompting counter-charges by the Army regarding the Senator's staff, resulting in more hearings, this time televised, in 1954, finally culminating in his official censure by his fellow Senators late that year. He would die a broken man in 1957.
It is noteworthy that it all started apparently by happenstance, for the Senator having been assigned randomly by the Republican Senate campaign committee a topic for Lincoln Day speeches on February 9.
"Good Day's Work" congratulates the City Council for passing the industrial waste ordinance to clean up Sugaw and Erwin Creeks of their industrial pollutants. It explains the program authorized by the ordinance, including the necessity of the voters to approve a 1.2 million dollar bond issue, after which new facilities would need be constructed for the purpose of diverting the waste into the City sewage system.
"A Good Neighbor" tells of the 220-page "Progress Edition" of the Kannapolis Independent, celebrating the growth since 1906 of the town, locus of Cannon Mills. It had become the ninth largest town in the state, with more than 30,000 residents, having grown from a small railway station named Glass at the turn of the century. It offers congratulations for its growth and prosperity.
Bill Sharpe, in his weekly "Turpentine Drippings", snippets from newspapers around the state, provides one from the Camden Chronicle describing an employer chastising an employee for being an hour late to work. The employee responded that he would not have been any use to the employer an hour earlier as he was sound asleep.
The Moore County News tells of Union County people having told once upon a time of Stanly being so far behind the times in the Thirties that they had arrested a Western Union telegraph boy for suspicion of being a Yankee soldier.
The Rocky Mount Telegram seeks to assess inflation by comparing the salary of Babe Ruth to that of Ted Williams, finding that not only was the Yankee slugger's salary higher, at $68,000 compared to $62,000, but adjusted for inflation, the latter's salary would need be $327,500 to match that of the Bambino.
And so forth, so, so, and so.
Drew Pearson tells of General MacArthur having imposed virtual censorship on the press for some time during the occupation of Japan, causing it to be no surprise when he banned three reporters recently from covering news in Korea—although shortly thereafter restoring the privilege to two of them, Tom Lambert and Peter Kalischer. Mr. Lambert, had, prior to issuance of his one-day ban, signed a long protest to the American Society of Newspaper Editors complaining about the General's censorship. Representatives of NBC, The New York Times, Time and Life had also signed the protest. They complained that one reporter had his house raided by Army CID agents, whereupon he was subjected to interrogation and threats. They also pointed out that although the Government section of the occupation forces had encouraged reporters to tell of misappropriations of Japanese military supplies, G-1 and G-2, Army intelligence, complained that the resulting stories had tapped into classified information on the topic and took steps against at least one correspondent. Stories on the purge, it said, included facts supplied by G-2, causing their authors to be branded by General MacArthur as the "most dangerous men in Japan".
Observers now wondered whether the censorship had caused both the American people and General MacArthur to get the wrong idea regarding the danger in Korea, which he had reported days before the attack to Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Omar Bradley to be of no threat, that the most critical problem then lay in the prospect of attack by the Communists on Formosa. Even after the invasion by the North Koreans, when the General told the President that he could guarantee success in military operations, he was not fully familiar with the facts.
The President, because of the war, had canceled a planned fall tour of the Western U.S. to help Democrats in the midterm elections.
Senators Taft and Bridges had found that the President still had the war power to allocate scarce raw materials, such as rubber and steel. The Republicans planned to assess the President's powers carefully and would give him more powers, but only after considerable debate.
Russia had a larger navy than expected before the war, as it had hidden its surface ships in the Black Sea and submarines in the South Pacific and Baltic. The military experts in Washington worried that Russia's subs might attack an American troop ship bound for Korea, placing great political pressure on starting a world war.
Senator Lester Hunt of Wyoming had helped draft 56 emergency laws to be put on hold and rushed through Congress in the event of atomic war. But nothing had been done about them, despite the advocacy for them by Bernard Baruch. They included legislation for economic controls and for provision of appointment of Congressmen pending special elections, the only existing provisions being those in the states for appointment of Senators to open seats. The chairman of the National Security Resources Board, Stuart Symington, was one of the few vigorous proponents of the legislation.
Robert C. Ruark hopes that the Korean war will be less dosed with sentiment than had been World War II for the returning G.I.'s. "The composite soldier, for quite a spell, came out as a mama's boy who wept for his dog; who was inspired to do battle for a pin-up shot of Betty Grable; who fought for his right to boo the Dodgers and come home to a new refrigerator."
Men and women alike had wept over him and advertising had run amok with new commodities for which he was fighting, presented in full-page ads.
He was not presented as a cold killer, but rather a mere adjunct to his war machine, be it a plane, ship or tank. But, he corrects, crybabies did not win wars. A good soldier never gave the enemy an even break, was a highly skilled assassin whose profession was killing. Sensitivity wore off quickly after a few months of being "cold, dirty, lousy, hungry and scared".
He recommends, for a realistic view
of war, reading To Hell and Back, by Audie Murphy
Most soldiers did not ask, "What
are we fighting for?
Mr. Ruark had recently read of
nurses in Korea wearing fresh lipstick to boost morale of the
wounded. He finds that the only thing the wounded wanted was a shot
of dope to still their pain, that when hurting, "lipstick
morale"
"War essentially is not nice. It is hard to cute it up for non-warriors. I would like to see us gush less about this one, be it of long or short duration."
Marquis Childs tells of the Communist world having spent a lot of time promoting the so-called Stockholm peace petition, signed by millions of people across the world, which promoted atomic disarmament as a means to peace.
In Winston-Salem, N.C., when the document showed up being circulated among the tobacco workers, the editor of the Winston-Salem Journal, Wallace Carroll, who had been head of the London branch of the Office of War Information during the war, took a positive stance, setting forth in the newspaper an "appeal for true peace". It was based on the notion that the Korean war could be stopped simply by the North Koreans obeying the resolution of the U.N. and returning to their starting point, behind the 38th parallel. Mr. Childs sets forth the brief text of the appeal and asserts that it should be read and reprinted far and wide.
The country did not have a propaganda apparatus as did the Communist Party but if a peace initiative came from the U.S., he believes, almost every country would support it. The tragedy was that the initiative had not been coming from the U.S. Rather, the country was always on the defensive, allowing the Communists to use and pervert the words "peace" and "democracy" for their own ends.
A few tired, prejudiced old men in Congress appeared bent on blocking all efforts to wage peace, by blocking expansion of the information dissemination program, ignoring thereby the ruthless and practical efforts of Communism.
Mr. Carroll, incidentally, sometimes wrote little poems, usually humorous, which were published in the Journal and elsewhere and elsewhere.
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