The Charlotte News

Tuesday, July 25, 1950

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that American ground forces had abandoned Yongdong, elements of the First Cavalry Division having withdrawn under fierce Communist attacks after withstanding wave after wave of assault along the Taejon-Yongdong highway and along the rail line to Pusan, the supply depot for the U.N. forces. MacArthur headquarters said that further withdrawals might be necessary.

The Communist troops had worn grass and leaves as they moved through the hills surrounding Yongdong, making them difficult to spot. There was evidence that snipers and guerrillas had penetrated American defense lines.

Eight Communist divisions were on the offensive, ranging from west to east and in the far southwest corner of the peninsula. One division was headed toward Pusan.

There had been one minor gain by the U.N. forces, a one-mile advance north of Kanggu on the east coast, three miles south of the fallen port at Yongdok.

American and British carrier-based planes struck the North Korean forces which had penetrated to the south coast of the peninsula.

Thus far in the war, the American Air Force had destroyed 58 main bridges and damaged or knocked out temporarily 31 others. The big bridge across the Han River near Seoul was presenting, however, a formidable challenge, and while the main three bridges were out, a pontoon bridge was still intact. The big concrete bridge, however, had been hit several times, but each time patched by the enemy.

Tom Lambert, with the 25th Division, reports that the Wolfhound Regiment, led by a former aide to General Eisenhower and a battalion commander during the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944, had outmaneuvered the North Koreans and stopped two new attacks, using mortar, artillery and machinegun fire. An estimated 600 enemy troops had taken part in the initial action started in dense fog, then withdrew and returned three hours later with about 800 men led by three tanks, closing pincers on empty positions, resulting in high enemy casualties. One soldier described how he had used his 3.5-inch anti-tank rocket launcher to knock out one tank by hitting it first in the "left eye", then under the big gun, followed by a miss, finally stopping it with a hit in the rear. Another bazooka shot had crippled a second tank's big gun. The previous day, about 700 enemy troops, supported by eight tanks, had attacked the position resulting in loss of six of the tanks, two by U.S. aircraft.

At Eighth Army headquarters in Korea, North Korean prisoners disclosed that 20,000 Korean veterans of the Communist Chinese Army had been recalled in March for the invasion of South Korea, which had been initiated June 25. They also said that Russian advisers were working with North Korean Army units and that Russia had provided in May large quantities of military equipment, including tanks. A companion strike against Formosa had been planned as part of the invasion. One prisoner said that the Chinese Communists had told them that at the same time South Korea would fall, so would Formosa and Hainan—the latter having fallen in late April.

The U.S. called on NATO partners, during a secret meeting of the 12 member nations' permanent high command, to rearm quickly for the sake of assuring world peace, warning that Korea had demonstrated that the Communists would not hesitate to engage in armed aggression. The delegates developed a program under which the four-year planned rearmament would be cut to two years, the four-year target date having been set on the assumption that it could be accomplished without diminishing the standard of living.

Congressman Carl Vinson of Georgia, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said that a global war was a distinct possibility at any time and cautioned that American forces had to be built up to meet that contingency. A House vote later in the day was expected on his proposal that a year be added to the term of service of currently enlisted men. The measure had already passed the Senate. The House was also set to vote on the measure to lift the ceiling on the size of the armed forces. The vote on the President's sought additional 10.5 billion dollars for defense was expected to occur as early as the following week. Mr. Vinson said that he questioned whether the planned expansion, however, was enough, as Russia outnumbered the U.S. seven to one in tanks, more than seventeen to one in manpower, and had nearly 300 submarines and a vast air force.

Senator Walter George said that the President would ask Congress for immediate legislation to raise taxes by five billion dollars.

The Federal Reserve Board sent a message to the Senate and House Banking Committees that the Korean crisis had precipitated a buying spree during a time of already extant inflation and that strong controls on installment buying and home mortgages were therefore needed, as purchase of automobiles and homes had risen to near record levels during the summer, exceeded only by a short period in summer, 1948.

According to a source, Britain, following a Cabinet meeting, had decided to offer a small ground force to the U.N. forces in Korea and undertake several changes in its defense policy. It was likely to be announced during a session of Commons the following day. The size of the contemplated unit was not yet known. It was decided that such a force would help morale of the fighting forces and have a positive effect on U.S. public opinion.

In Fayetteville, N.C., the Fayetteville unit of Army reservists was called to extended active duty.

We have to go man the guns again to shoot out the lights on the radio towers.

Senator Joseph McCarthy said that he had proof that an unnamed important State Department official who had been born in Moscow was a Communist and that the proof was in the Department's loyalty file, as disclosed to the Senator by an undercover FBI agent who had joined the Communist Party in 1937 at the suggestion of the Bureau. He said that the loyalty file in question was one of the 81 released by the President for examination by the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee which had looked at the Senator's charges and issued a report that they were a "fraud and a hoax", a report then approved unanimously by the full Committee and then by the full Senate. The Senator said that he had submitted the loyalty file to the Senate and would make it public, with the name of the individual blacked out.

The code name was "Heinz 57 out of 81".

On the editorial page, "Discovery … and Decision" assesses the Korean war after five weeks, finds that the North Korean forces were more numerous and better armed than previously thought, that the South Korean defenders were less well equipped than believed, that U.S. forces in the Far East were not adequate to defend the situation, that military strength at home was deficient, and that a desperate situation would arise should Russia attack West Germany, Yugoslavia, Iran, Scandinavia, or elsewhere.

While some had sought scapegoats for the problem, most Americans had chosen to unite in the war effort and bear the burden, even though it meant higher taxes and sacrifices by everyone. Americans had realized that Communism was as dangerous as Fascism or Nazism and had to be stopped from waging aggressive war.

While the prospects of a long arms race and preparedness program was not pleasant, if it prevented a major war with Russia, the cost would be cheap, and if a major war did come, the country would be better prepared for it.

"Saturday's Bond Election—I" tells of the vote the following Saturday on 5.75 million dollars worth of public improvement bonds and the newspaper's endorsement of all four, starting with the plan to improve the water supply at a cost of 1.75 million dollars, necessary for the city and payable without hikes in taxes or water rates, as there would be ample earnings from the increased supply of water to pay for it.

"In Defense of the B-36" tells of the "armchair" experts who had leaned toward the Navy during the previous year's unification argument between the Navy and Air Force as to the proper delivery service for the atom bomb, having been crowing of late about the absent need for the B-36 long-range bomber in Korea.

Military inadequacies had been revealed in all branches by the war, especially in air capability and tank and anti-tank capability. James Reston of the New York Times had said that existing military plans were not cut out to deal with a limited war such as Korea, but rather had been prepared for big war requiring use of long-range bombers, guided missiles and perhaps atom bombs.

But the piece urges that had it not been for the presence of the B-36 and a stockpile of atomic weapons, the Soviets might have launched an attack on Western Europe and so it was wrong to blame the problem in Korea on too much stress of these two components of defense. They had served their purpose if they had done nothing more than deter Russia from such aggression using its own forces.

A piece from the New York Times, titled "Crows", finds that crows awoke too early in the morning with too much noise rather than song, prefers robins as beetle, bug, and worm-catchers. Moreover, crows ate corn, beans, fruit, little birds, small chickens, and eggs, in addition to its beneficial cuisine.

It concludes that it was at least a good thing that nature had seen to it that crows could not cross-breed with owls or whippoorwills, else no one would get any sleep.

Get a rock and throw it out the window at the tree. The noise of the garbage trucks is a lot worse and you know it.

Joseph Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor discusses the effort in Washington to find a scapegoat for the unpreparedness for the Korean war. The President, Secretary of State Acheson and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson presented handy targets, along with the Congress in general or the Republican opposition in particular. But the truth was that no one person or group in Washington was solely responsible for the situation. He posits that few in the country could escape blame.

While the President, Secretaries Acheson and Johnson, and the Congress all bore a measure of the blame for various reasons he suggests, the public had demanded lower taxes and a lower Government budget, resulting in the defense cuts.

He says that he had never raised a voice for greater defense spending, had not foreseen Korea, and so shouldered his share of the blame as well. Columnist Walter Lippmann and the Alsops had favored more defense spending and deserved credit for the foresight, but the Alsops, he suggests, had focused too much on Secretary Johnson as the culprit.

He predicts that the official record would likely show that the State Department and Joint Chiefs chairman General Omar Bradley had demonstrated the most official prescience on the matter, but there was blame enough to go around for everyone.

Drew Pearson tells of Secretary of Defense Johnson having recently held a meeting with Congressman Carl Vinson of Georgia, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, regarding the Secretary's mea culpa on his economy measures, admitting that he had been wrong and outlining a program of expansion for which Mr. Vinson had argued since the end of the war.

Senators Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Bourke Hickenlooper were particularly exercised about language in the recent Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee report which had condemned Senator Joseph McCarthy's charges of Communists in the State Department as "a fraud and a hoax", for criticizing the two Senators for absenteeism during the hearings on the matter. Chairman of the subcommittee, Senator Millard Tydings, responding impatiently to the complaint, had said that he would take the paragraph out, reminding that Senator Lodge, however, had admitted reading only 19 of the 81 loyalty files in question reviewed by the subcommittee. The Senator replied that the files were inconclusive, to which Senator Theodore Green of Rhode Island said that if so, then it proved Senator McCarthy's error in the first instance, as there was insufficient evidence to support his claims.

Mr. Pearson notes that the Senate could spend months on the sins of others, but rarely investigated like conduct of their own membership, as exampled by the fact of the reopened Amerasia investigation where illegal wiretapping by the FBI was employed, while ignoring the wiretapping of Howard Hughes during the TWA war-contract hearings of 1947, wiretapping undertaken at the behest of Senator Owen Brewster.

A day after Senator Taft had sent a warm thank you note to his old friend Dean Acheson for having sent flowers to Senator Taft's wife while in the hospital, the Senator had demanded that his old friend resign as Secretary of State.

Some observers were surprised that Southern conservatives as Senators Harry F. Byrd of Virginia and Walter George of Georgia had voted with the Democrats in condemning Senator McCarthy. The reason was that a succession of Southerners who had run the State Department since 1933, including Cordell Hull from Tennessee, through late 1944, Edward Stettinius of Virginia, through mid-1945, and James Byrnes of South Carolina, through early 1947, did not believe that Communists were in the Department. (He leaves out General George Marshall, who had also testified of no knowledge of Communists in the Department, and, while not strictly speaking a Southerner, had graduated from VMI and, since the conclusion of his service as Secretary of State in early 1949, had resided in Southern Pines, N.C.) Moreover, most of the top executives in the Department continued to be from the South, including Undersecretary James Webb of North Carolina, Deputy Undersecretary John Peurifoy of South Carolina, and Assistant Secretary Dean Rusk of Georgia, among others. In earlier times, during Republican Administrations, State Department heads tended to be from New York and were Harvard graduates. Now, there were only three such persons near the top, including Assistant Secretary Willard Thorp, Ambassador-at-Large Philip Jessup, and special adviser to Secretary Acheson, John Foster Dulles.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss again the adverse effect on defense preparedness resulting from the economy program of Secretary of Defense Johnson, bringing the country, in Korea, to "another Pearl Harbor". The U.S. was producing in June, prior to the Korean invasion, 215 aircraft per month, whereas prior to Pearl Harbor, output was at 2,429 per month.

But when Mr. Johnson's predecessor, James Forrestal, had left the post in March, 1949, airframe production was up from a postwar low to 34 million pounds annually, with plans to increase gradually to 45 million pounds, established by the Air Policy Board as the absolute minimum for peacetime defense. Secretary Johnson then reversed the policy and reduced airframe production to 21 million pounds, condemning the Air Force to progressive obsolescence without sufficient replenishment.

The Air Force had been reduced in the meantime from 12,500 operational aircraft to 8,600, of which only 3,300 were first-line combat planes. Naval and Marine aircraft had also been substantially reduced in number, by 38 percent, with only 2,575 combat planes. Meanwhile, Russia had 15,000 first-line combat planes.

In Korea, the combat troops needed close air support and there were not enough planes yet available to cover them. The tactical units had suffered the most cuts under the economy program.

Had the 70-group Air Force been adopted, the tactical strength would have been reasonable. But with 42 groups disguised as 48, as the Air Force was, it was woefully inadequate in tactical forces, for the need for adequate high-altitude fighter strength and minimum strategic air power. With an adequate tactical air strength, the North Koreans could have probably been stopped by interdiction of supply lines. Instead, the B-29's and fighters had been given the task, for which they were ill-suited.

They conclude that the country, in consequence, was in greater danger than at any time since Pearl Harbor.

Robert C. Ruark discusses the termination by ground commander Lt. General Walton Walker of the front-line press credentials of Marguerite Higgins the previous week. He gave as his reason that it was "not the kind of war where women ought to be running around the front line". Mr. Ruark wonders what kind of war would be suitable for women at the front lines.

After Ms. Higgins had complained to General MacArthur, her credential was restored. He had also restored the credentials of Peter Kalischer and Tom Lambert to return to the front, after their privilege had been revoked for a short time based on supposed giving of "aid and comfort" to the enemy through their reports. The General had said he would leave censorship, henceforth, to reporters and editors.

But Mr. Ruark finds that while such a policy sounded good, it rarely worked. For if the reporter's work was subject to censorship before being wired for publication, the journalist had a filter which would provide a good argument thereafter against revocation of a press credential, whereas if they did not know precisely where the line of security was, they could inadvertently breach it.

He relates that he knew firsthand of censorship and the difficulties in catching everything which was sensitive, as he had been a press censor for the Navy during the war. One story published during the war, for instance, had told of cracking the Japanese code, tipping the enemy therefore to change it.

He finds that the incidents involving these three reporters would shape the relationship between the Army and the press, which would determine in large part what the public would read of the war.

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