The Charlotte News
Wednesday, July 26, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that, according to MacArthur headquarters in Tokyo, outnumbered American and South Korean troops clung to defense positions, including the Yongdong front, in the face of heavy pressure along all fronts. The enemy had poured wave after wave of tank-led infantry against the lines, seeking flanking maneuvers to the west and east, without success. Another enemy force was reported to be within 25 miles of the port at Pohang, where units of the U.S. First Cavalry Division had landed a week earlier. Communist troops were streaming through mountainous passes at Yongsan, Chongsan and Ponghwang mountains, within eight to 23 air miles north and east of Yongdong. Namwon, rail and highway junction 60 miles south of Taejon, had also been retaken by South Korean Marines and national police forces.
An unconfirmed field report indicated that Hadong, 70 air miles west of the key supply port of Pusan, may have been recaptured by the defenders after U.S. airstrikes had left the city ablaze.
The four-day battle of the enemy to win Yongdong earlier in the week had been the largest battle thus far of the war. A spokesman at MacArthur headquarters said the battle lines around Yongdong had stabilized considerably. He also said that new Army and Marine strength coming from the U.S. would assure that the Korean beachhead could be held. As a map on the page shows, the American and South Korean forces had now withdrawn to a tight, relatively small perimeter around Pohang and Pusan, to protect these crucial supply depots with more easily defensible lines.
Don Whitehead, reporting on the battle from an advance command post, says that a U.S. officer had stated that North Koreans had herded several hundred Korean men, women and children before them in an early morning attack around Yongdong, using them as human shields for four tanks crossing a bridge. The Americans withheld fire and the tanks got into positions for attack.
The casualties at Yongdong had not
been heavy during an orderly withdrawal. Planes had knocked out six
of eight enemy tanks after the attack began Monday. Then the
commanding general reassembled the U.S. forces the previous night a
few hundred yards east of the line to afford the defenders better
positions. The enemy then struck the right flank again late in the
afternoon and fought until after dark, in the first night attack of
the war. The infantry then swarmed through the mountains around the
flanks. At 1:30 a.m., the North Koreans attacked the American left
flank as it drew back, with the four tanks crossing the bridge, led
by the non-combatant
A North Korean newspaper claimed that 1,500 American troops had died and over 200 had been captured in the battle of Yongdong.
Fresh American troops were thought in action this date on the southwestern front, in an effort to halt the enemy drive before it reached the crucial supply port of Pusan.
But A.P. correspondent Leif Erickson said that the rosy American optimism of the previous week had been sorely misplaced and the U.N. forces were running out of space in which to hold ground while they awaited reinforcements.
Hal Boyle, at an advance airbase, tells of a corporal reporting that North Koreans had forced him and two other bound American prisoners to lie face down under a tree and then machinegunned them, killing the other two. The corporal, wounded three times and with infected wrists from the binding wire, had managed to escape when an attack by U.S. fighter planes frightened the enemy soldiers away. The incident occurred after five American light tanks had run into a force of 800 guerrillas north of Yongdok on Monday, when the three were captured after a shell hit the gas tank of their vehicle. One other crewman had been killed and another had disappeared.
The President, in his mid-year message to Congress, asked the nation for some level of sacrifice of civilians and declared that he was ready for "complete economic mobilization" if the defense effort should require it. He said that if the Congress approved a five billion dollar tax increase and gave him limited control powers, as requested the previous week, the country could avoid price ceilings, rationing and shortage. He did not mention steel among the industries needing expansion, but it headed his list of materials in scarcity despite capacity production since the prior April. He urged again against hoarding.
The President signed the foreign military aid bill of 1.222 billion dollars.
Bernard Baruch, who had advised the Administrations on mobilization in both world wars, testified before the Senate Banking Committee, calling for complete economic mobilization of the country, with a quick freeze on prices, wages, and rents, including, while going far beyond, the President's limited request for authorization to impose allocation controls on scarce materials, control credit, limit civilian production, requisition goods, curb commodity speculation and help finance industry's expansion for war production. He framed the choice as being between "peace or butter".
The Navy, according Congressman Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, proposed to commission 48 new warships, including three large and six light carriers, two cruisers, 32 destroyers and five submarines, as well as expand manpower for both the Navy and Marines. The Navy was seeking 2.6 billion of the 10.5 billion dollar increased defense budget requested by the President, over a fifty percent increase from its current 4.75 billion dollar budget for the fiscal year.
Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, in a prepared text for the press apparently intended to respond to his critics, said that the overall fighting strength of the country was greater than at any time since the end of World War II, that manpower of the Army's striking force had increased 165 percent between March, 1948 and June, 1950, and that the mobilization base was sounder than at any time in the country's history. (It is possible that the time frame he referenced was from March, 1949, coinciding with the start of his tenure as Secretary of Defense, but is stated in the report as 1948.) He spoke in closed session this date to a Senate Appropriations subcommittee considering the President's requested 10.5 billion dollar defense budget increase.
As expected this date, Britain announced that it had decided to send ground troops and support to Korea. British Commonwealth nations Australia and New Zealand had made similar announcements, following the lead of Turkey and Thailand.
Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical this date, titled "With Greatest Sorrow", reminding the world that war brought only ruin, death, and other misery, exhorted peoples and leaders alike to strive for peace, and appealed for social justice for the needy.
In Columbia, S.C., lightning struck and killed a man the previous day on the eve of his 40th birthday. His 15-year old daughter had been killed by lightning eighteen months earlier in Polkton, N.C.
In Salamanca, N.Y., a sign in a grocery store warned hoarders that the price of 25-pound and 100-pound bags of sugar was 16 cents per pound, against a much lower price for regular customers purchasing five-pound bags.
On the editorial page, "Paring Non-Defense Expenditures" says that under normal circumstances it did not approve of five or ten percent across-the-board spending cuts as such made no distinction between pork-barrel spending and necessary spending. But if Congress could not agree on item by item spending cuts from the 34 billion dollar budget to make room for the ten billion dollars or more in additional defense spending, then the "meat axe" approach of Senators Harry F. Byrd and Styles Bridges, proposing 600 million dollars of spending cuts in non-defense spending, appeared necessary.
Without spending cuts or a substantial tax increase, the war would add huge amounts to the national debt, as the ten billion was only a first installment, along with another five billion in additional foreign military aid. The safety and security of the nation, it posits, were at stake.
"Saturday's Bond Election—II" provides the reasons for favoring another of the four bond issues to be voted on the coming Saturday, this one regarding sewage improvements.
"Douglas Loses Again" tells of Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois having proposed several cost-cutting measures on domestic spending despite being a Fair Dealer. But he had lost each one. He nevertheless was being honored across the land for his efforts, designed to pinpoint spending cuts rather than taking the approach of fiscal conservatives as Senator Byrd, who employed the shotgun approach to spending cuts across the board.
"Atlanta Water Resource Conference" tells of various water resource conferences taking place around the country, including one for the Southeastern states in Atlanta. It presented an opportunity for progressive citizens of the Carolinas to make themselves heard on the need for an ample supply of clean water.
A piece from the Salisbury Post, titled "People You Know", tells of reading a story about a graduate of Harvard, unable to find a job befitting his education paying more than $35 per week, having gone to work in a steel mill for $65 per week on the seamy side of town and liked it. Before long, he was making $200 per week and still liked the seamy side. But, it posits that ten years hence, he would probably be making $3,000 per week on the country club side of town, delivering commencement addresses about the value of education.
It concludes that while education was highly regarded in politics, success still boiled down to the people one knew rather than the money one had.
Drew Pearson tells of the only woman diplomat in Washington, Madame Pandit Nehru, sister of India's Prime Minister, having gone to Secretary of State Acheson recently with a note from her brother urging peace between the U.S. and Russia. The Secretary had responded that while he sympathized with the view, the U.S. could not become "appeasers". To that, Madame Nehru took some offense, saying that the leaders of India had spent years in jail contesting British rule and that they were anything but appeasers. Secretary Acheson said that she did not understand, however, the Russians, to which she replied that she had served as Ambassador to Russia and that India shared a border with Russia and another with Communist China. She urged that unless the U.S. led the way to peace, it would lose India. Secretary Acheson expressed his desire for that not to happen and he promised sympathetic study of the problem.
Because of Russian propaganda poured into Northern Indo-China, China, and other parts of the Orient, it needed to be countered by sending Philippine General Carlos Romulo, president of the U.N. General Assembly, to Korea to show Asiatic support for the U.S. There was hesitancy by the U.S. to assent to the U.N. proposal, however, out of concern of interfering with General MacArthur's command. The cutting of the budget for the Voice of America by Senators Harry F. Byrd, Walter George, and others, he adds, had thus proved short-sighted.
A French and a Swedish journalist were initially barred from a press briefing at the Pentagon, though both had entree to the White House and the U.N. The ban was subsequently lifted.
Senator Clyde Hoey, chairman of the Senate subcommittee investigating homosexuals and sex perversion in the Government, had been conducting hearings on a fair basis thus far. The subcommittee had found that about twenty percent of the Army and about thirty percent of the Navy were homosexuals.
White House assistants John Steelman and Matt Connelly, who never liked former White House aide Clark Clifford, had made sure that his client, TWA, lost out in the Pan Am and American Overseas Airlines merger.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the temptation of the Soviets to order armed aggression elsewhere while the West was still disarmed and the U.S. forces were preoccupied in Korea. U.S. defense experts were busy trying to guess when and where such a strike might occur.
There were five basic areas of danger. One was a possible attack by the Communist Chinese in Indo-China, Burma, Formosa, or Korea, itself, utilizing in the latter theater Chinese Communist troops to supplement the North Koreans. The Chinese Communists, however, would not achieve the advantages which the Russians would if their major antagonists, the U.S., Britain, and France, were all tied up in Asia.
Another possibility was aggression in Iran, utilizing Soviet troops for the absence of a nearby satellite, another in Greece by satellite forces, another in Yugoslavia, also by satellite forces, or creation of a new blockade on West Berlin, this time employing the Soviet-sponsored East German army after ostensible withdrawal of Russian occupation troops, with radar-jamming utilized to prevent a new airlift which had broken the 1948-49 blockade.
The latter was considered the greatest danger as since the war, obtaining control of Berlin, Germany and Western Europe had been the Soviet objective. Western rearmament would not be complete for another two years and so the Soviets would be tempted during that time to conduct strikes. The experts were convinced that such a catastrophe could be avoided if the West were mobilized as rapidly as possible, making the Soviets realize that they would pay a terrible price for any new aggression.
Marquis Childs hopes that the McCarthy campaign of charges against the State Department had ended with its consignment to the "garbage heap of history" where it belonged. Yet, with Republicans in varying degrees lending continued support to the effort, it was unlikely to happen, as some Republicans could campaign in the fall on the issue of "whitewash" by the Democrats of the charges.
The "debate" surrounding McCarthyism had eventuated in a most perilous state for the nation, with a real danger of Communist sabotage to the Strategic Air Command as a result—that which, in a sense, though not threatening sabotage but rather direct elimination, was the most troubling result 12 years later in the Cuban Missile Crisis of the establishment by the Russians of the offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba, directly threatening the crucial SAC bases in Florida and throughout the Southeast.
The report of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, adopted by the full Senate, had been a masterpiece of thoroughness and documentation, methodically showing that the McCarthy charges had been without basis. Even Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., in his minority report, had conceded that Owen Lattimore, the keystone of the claims as stated by Senator McCarthy, himself, had not been borne out. Senator Lodge merely complained that he believed the investigation had been incomplete and favored creation of a commission to complete the task.
Potential sabotage, Mr. Childs concludes, could not be stopped by Congressional hearings on the McCarthy charges but only by counter-intelligence of the Army, Navy, CIA, and FBI, the attention of which had been diverted by these useless hearings.
A letter writer encloses a letter he had mailed to Mayor Victor Shaw of Charlotte, complaining of the mess into which the city was getting in regard to provision of services, that there was a critical need for a footbridge over a busy highway near the Park Road School before the start of school.
A letter writer wonders what had become of earlier bond issues for improvement of sewage services, as the voters were now being asked to approve more bond issues to clean up Sugaw and Erwin Creeks with further sewage improvements.
A lot of stuff is going down, man.
A letter writer from Pittsboro comments on the editorial of July 18, "How Much Mobilization?" concurring in the conclusion that the citizens would accept the burden, no matter how heavy, imposed by the war as the security of the nation was at stake. But he feels that the country should not be "lulled or soft-soaped" into complacence by leaving defense decisions to the politically-minded leaders. He believes that Congress ought to approve of waging war, per the Constitution. The people were without a check on expenditure of revenues for foreign aid, including the Point 4 program for technical assistance to underdeveloped nations. He favors cutting all or most of the "indiscriminate welfare nonsense" and limiting spending to normal government functions and defense. Otherwise, he agrees with the editorial.
What happened within your purview to the power of the Congress to provide for the "general welfare" of the people, phrased right alongside the duty and power to provide for the common defense? Maybe you skipped over or misunderstood the import of that part while skimming the document. Try again. We know you probably memorized that sucker by heart back in school and know more about it than the jackals and blockers on the back of a tackle truck. But school was a long time ago.
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