The Charlotte News
Friday, July 7, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President and Defense Department, with concurrence of the Joint Chiefs, had authorized the draft law to be used to bring military forces to proper strength for the Korean war, removing budget ceilings on the three branches which had restricted expansion. Voluntary enlistments would also be accepted in addition to the draft. The Armed Forces presently had 1.37 million men, with the Army at 583,000, the Navy and Marines at 427,000, and Air Force at 350,000. The Army had eleven divisions, four of which were in the Far East under the command of General MacArthur. The overall strength in the Far East was 123,500 men.
In Korea, four Communist divisions thrust further southward this date, in apparent preparation for a major assault of fifteen enemy divisions, with an estimated 75,000 to 90,000 men, against the Kum River line, defended by out-numbered American and South Korean troops, with the city of Taejon, the temporary South Korean capital 90 miles south of Seoul, appearing as the objective. The Communist forces claimed to have captured Ansong, a village ten miles east of Pyongtaek, en route to Chungju. The four enemy divisions, each with a force of 5,000 to 6,000 men, were spearheading the drive south from Ansong and Kumyangjang toward the Kum.
Tom Lambert of the Associated Press reports from the Korean front accompanying an American patrol which had been instructed on Friday morning to make contact with the enemy and attempt to regain the ground lost the previous day, to that end having moved through several quiet villages and crossed three bridges, advancing about ten miles north against meager opposition by mid-afternoon. The patrol, led by a major from Flushing, N.Y., was to take the town and the high ground and, according to the major, would be supported by "heavy stuff". The men wanted to know how much "heavy stuff".
A late bulletin from MacArthur headquarters reported that American tanks had arrived in the theater and would soon go into action in South Korea, but were not yet engaged.
American B-26 light bombers and fighters, according to General MacArthur's headquarters, struck at North Korean Russian-made tanks this date, and B-29 heavy bombers, at northern supply lines, knocking out as many as sixteen tanks south of Seoul, between Pyongtaek and Osan, though exact damage was unknown. The Rising Sun Oil Co. refinery at Wonsan near the 38th parallel was hit by the B-29's with good results . Railway switch yards and bridges near Communist-held Seoul were also hit. The Communists responded only with anti-aircraft fire and sent no planes aloft. Two B-26's were lost and two crew members wounded while returning to their planes. Two crew members parachuted to safety. Three F-51 Mustangs were missing. F-80 jets claimed to have bagged six tanks, two half-tracks, and seven or more trucks. Railway yards and bridges at Kojo, 30 miles southeast of Wonsan, were also hit with good results.
The President asked Congress to approve an additional 260 million dollars in appropriations to speed development of the hydrogen bomb and increase production of regular fission bombs, as a means of deterrence to help bring about peace, and speed the development also of the atomic energy program for peaceful uses.
Thomas A. Reedy of the Associated Press reports that, according to informants, the Russians had stepped up normal summer army maneuvers in East Germany. An American military officer said that the Americans were not too concerned about the activity, that it was probably designed to give them the jitters in light of the Korean incursion.
U.P. reporter Peter Kalischer, claimed by the North Korean radio to have been taken prisoner, had surfaced unharmed, having only gotten separated from the U.S. Air Force for two and a half days.
The Senate rejected the President's reorganization plan to bring the independent RFC under the control of the Commerce Department, but approved moving the Federal National Mortgage Association to the Housing and Home Finance Agency.
The nation's top rubber executives, visiting Presidential aide John R. Steelman at Blair House, asked the Government to increase synthetic rubber production in the interest of military security and economic stability—probably especially of concern now, given the assault on the Kum River line.
In Brussels, Belgium, a newspaper reported that King Leopold's wife, with him in exile in Switzerland, was expecting a child. The King could be recalled to the throne later in the month by the parliament following the favorable plebiscite in March.
In Charlotte, the chairman of the Mecklenburg County chapter of the American Red Cross sent out an urgent call for blood contributions, seeking especially Type A, RH Negative, and Type O, as holiday weekend traffic accidents had depleted supplies.
It's okay
In Troon, Scotland, Bobby Locke
On the editorial page, "Air Force Lesson" tells of the Air Force having discovered that jets alone could not adequately provide ground cover in Korea, that the slower propeller-driven F-51's and F-47's were necessary to supplement the F-80's and F-86's. The jets were too fast to bomb the tanks, roads, bridges and other such specific targets and then land on the tiny airstrips available in South Korea, thus requiring problematic takeoff and landing in Japan. The jets had their best fuel economy at high altitudes, where it was more difficult to hit the ground targets, and when they came down to lower altitudes, the fuel consumption made the roundtrip from and back to Japan difficult. So the older planes, Mustangs and Thunderbolts, were ordered from the U.S., in use by the Air National Guard units.
It concludes that the money expended organizing and maintaining the Air Guard had therefore been wisely spent.
"Strange Bedfellows" tells of the Washington Post finding that the Korean situation had caused a "general exchange of bedfellows all over the place", citing the simpatico stances existing in its wake between the isolationist Chicago Tribune and the Communist Pravda and Daily Worker. All three organs had claimed that the action was illegal, the Tribune contending that Congress should have been consulted before the President unilaterally ordered American forces into action, while the Communist publications claimed that the U.N. resolution to end the fighting was illegal for the voluntary absence from the Security Council of Russia. All three asserted that Americans would not support the action.
The Post had pointed out that the three had also aligned in August, 1939, just before Hitler's invasion of Poland on September 1, when Russia had signed a mutual non-aggression pact with Germany, which continued until the invasion of Russia by Germany on June 22, 1941. It concluded, however, that it would be sad and unjust should people, as a result, start referring to the Tribune as "the prairie edition of Pravda."
"Incompetent Drivers
Eliminated" tells of seventeen percent, or about 7,000 of the
36,500 drivers who had applied for driver's licenses anew under the
new re-examination law in the state, having failed their tests
Drew Pearson tells of U.S. observers having become aware, prior to the invasion of South Korea, that the Cominform had worked out an overall plan of attack and revolt by the satellite countries but that such an attack had not been expected in Korea. Even the Communist Government in China had not been informed of the invasion plans and Mao Tse-Tung, in consequence, had protested to Moscow for being kept in the dark. The Chinese Communist general staff had been alerted twice in mid-June, however, of a possible Communist invasion of Formosa, warnings probably leaked intentionally to U.S. intelligence for diversionary purposes. That was likely why General MacArthur had lectured so much about Formosa, to the exclusion of Korea, when General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson had visited him in Japan shortly before the invasion.
Likewise, Russian feints had occurred, with maneuvers of amassed troops observed along the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border areas, in Iran, with a revolt of the pro-Communist Tudeh Party being planned or purposely leaked, and in East Germany, where the East German army had gone on maneuvers in East Germany and Poland.
The fact that the U.S. had reacted so quickly in Korea may have caused Moscow to rethink its plans in these other areas, assuming that they were more than mere diversionary tactics. He allows, however, for the possibility that the Cominform, to save face, might yet seek to pull off these other operations.
Congressman Frank Buchanan of Pennsylvania might have to retire as chairman of the committee investigating lobbies as the big corporation lobbies had poured big money into the election campaign to defeat him.
Increasing numbers of Republicans were betting on Governors Earl Warren of California and Frank Duff of Pennsylvania to be the major contenders for the presidential nomination in 1952, as they stood the best chance to attract Democratic votes.
U.S. Ambassador to Russia Alan Kirk had cabled the State Department that Russian ships were leaving for the South Pole to stake a claim for Russia, with the intention to locate uranium deposits. The State Department, Mr. Pearson points out, had never acted in 1930 on the proposal by Senator Millard Tydings that the U.S. claim Antarctica on the basis of the voyage of Admiral Richard Byrd.
Senator Harry F. Byrd's Committee on Nonessential Expenditures was investigating mail pay rates, notwithstanding the recent completion of an investigation of the same rates by the Post Office Committee and that the purpose of Senator Byrd's Committee was to avoid duplicated services and waste. He quips that perhaps the latter Committee ought investigate itself.
Many were blaming President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill for having fixed the 38th parallel as the dividing line between North and South Korea, on the belief that it was determined at Yalta. But actually it had been a military decision in August, 1945 made by General MacArthur under circumstances not subject to his control. The Communists had swept into Korea on August 12 when the closest U.S. troops were 600 miles away at Okinawa and could not arrive before September 8. So the Army adopted, for the sake of expediency, the 38th parallel to induce the Russians to agree to the plan. (It should be noted that, according to historical accounts, Col. Dean Rusk, by 1950 an Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs and to become Secretary of State under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, was one of two Army officers assigned to make the decision on the appropriate boundary, drawn hurriedly in the course of a day for the sake of expediency, and approved expeditiously by General MacArthur, the State Department and President Truman, throwing attempts by conservatives, bent on discrediting the New Deal and Fair Deal, to place blame on FDR, as Mr. Pearson points out, into a cocked hat.)
By the time U.S. troops arrived in September, the Russian troops had moved south of the parallel and so the decision proved wise. Later, the U.S., and then, in early 1948, the U.N., attempted to get Russia to agree to a united Korea, but the Soviet occupiers would not hear of it or even admit to the Northern occupation zone the special commission of the U.N. sent to observe and report.
He notes that the U.N. commission prepared for elections in South Korea where, despite being denied the right to vote for a long time, Koreans registered at the rate of 75 percent and voted at the rate of 95 percent of those registered, despite a Communist terror campaign to deter voting and registration—not unlike in the Deep South during the 1950's through the mid-1960's.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of the invasion of Korea having undermined the American assumptions about the military readiness of Russia to fight a war, thought to have been three to four years away. In consequence, American policy was being reassessed. NATO had yet to agree on any plan for defense because of the fact that at the Hague conference in the spring, the nations had devised an ungainly plan based on total requirements and when the cost of that proposed program had been assessed at the subsequent Brussels meeting, the European finance ministers demurred, stalling further defense planning.
Meanwhile, the Joint Chiefs had been asked to determine how much the U.S. could contribute to the defense of Europe, albeit foolishly without close consultation with the Europeans. And the Joint Chiefs had not even agreed to a long-range plan for the U.S.
Thus, the effort to create a new policy would be without many guideposts. The first step would be to effect a real defense strategy for Western Europe, while Far Eastern defenses were also strengthened. But that would require something like three to four times the current billion dollars in foreign military aid to accomplish, and abandonment of the economy program initiated by Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson. More appropriations for defense would be needed, to approach the 18 billion dollar annual budget envisioned by deceased former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal.
The attack on Korea ought convey at least where the country stood, but the overt military action would also strengthen the argument of isolationists in the Congress who had advocated paying more attention to the Far East and less to Europe. Some of the same sentiment was to be found also in the Pentagon.
But, the Alsops posit, Secretary Johnson would not be ready to admit publicly that his economizing effort had been wrong-headed. The Secretary and Joint Chiefs were responsible for formulating the new policy and Secretary Johnson was the boss of the Joint Chiefs.
James Marlow explains the operations and composition of the National Security Resources Board, chaired by Stuart Symington, and comprised additionally of seven members of the Cabinet, with a staff of about 280 people, mainly specialists in industry, economics and other fields, designed to plan coordination, in the event of war, of manpower, material, and plants. The Board was comprised of eight offices, each with a separate function, which he describes, devoted, in seriatim, to manpower, production, materials, energy and utilities, economic management, foreign activities, civilian mobilization, and transportation.
A letter writer finds that seventeen property owners near Latta Park in Charlotte were seeking to dictate to the community where a recreation center proposed for the area could be located, complaining of resultant noise and traffic should it be near their homes. It would be presented in court on Saturday and he trusts that the judge would be able to see through the stubborn campaign of self-interest waged by the homeowners.
A letter writer tells of the critical remarks on the North Carolina electorate by New York Times and Herald-Tribune editorials, as reprinted in The News on June 29, congratulates the North Carolinians who elected Willis Smith for making RNC chairman Guy Gabrielson happy. He notes that the News in its editorial, "Saturday's Election", had partially apologized for the racist and Red-baiting campaign run on behalf of Mr. Smith, by saying that the candidate was better than that rhetoric. The writer finds it too bad that Mr. Smith had not conducted himself as a "Southern gentleman" as had Senator Graham.
Framed Edition
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