The Charlotte News
Friday, August 11, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the North Korean troops the previous night had seized the port of Pohang in the northeastern part of the U.N. defense arc, 65 air miles north of Pusan. The city was in flames, according to Eighth Army headquarters. A small contingent of U.S. forces sought in the early morning to hold the airfield six miles southeast of Pohang. Hal Boyle reports that the troops were fighting for their lives at that location and enemy troops were fighting only 1.5 miles from the end of the runway. A reinforcing column of American tanks and South Korean troops, however, was reported about to join the fight.
MacArthur headquarters said that all bridgeheads save a large one across the Naktong River, 29 miles southwest of Taegu, had been erased. At that location, however, 6,000 enemy troops were seeking to cross the river, supported by artillery fire, and if they were to make it, they would cut off Taegu from Pusan.
On the southern front, about a thousand enemy troops sought to break out of a trap in the coastal hills southwest of Chinju. Marines completed the capture of Kosong on the south coast, 20 miles southeast of Chinju.
The Army announced that it would call to 21 months of active duty 7,862 reserve captains and lieutenants who were not assigned to the Organized Reserve Corps.
The President, according to press secretary Charles G. Ross, would not press Congress for passage of universal military service, though remaining strongly in favor of it. Opposition in Congress had formed immediately after planning for such a measure was announced the previous day by a representative of the Defense Department.
The House decided by voice vote to impose contempt of Congress citations on 54 witnesses who refused to answer questions of HUAC regarding whether they had ever been Communists. Two other citations had been issued the previous day. The alleged contemnors would be referred to the Justice Department. Four were wartime scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project. Several were members of the United Electrical Workers union. Thirty-nine had been witnesses the previous April, when HUAC had been investigating Communism in Hawaii. Only Congressman Vito Marcantonio of New York voted against the citations.
The Senate Finance Committee approved three billion dollars worth of personal income tax increases, with up to twenty percent increase for some brackets.
In Strasbourg, France, Winston Churchill urged immediate creation of a unified European army, to act in cooperation with the U.S., Canada and the U.N. Security Council, to defend the West against the Soviet Union, introducing a motion on the floor of the European Consultative Assembly to that effect. He called the five-nation Brussels treaty "completely ineffective", saying that only one American bomber base in Britain had been established since its ratification.
In Brussels, Prince Baudouin, son of formerly exiled King Leopold III, to whom the King had ceded power, became the Prince Royal of Belgium and hence royal ruler. The Parliament overwhelmingly approved. Some Communist demonstrations took place in protest of the action.
Robert S. Bird and Ogden R. Reid of the New York Herald Tribune, in the fifth in their series of ten articles on the nation's defense, discuss demobilization after World War II having depleted military capability to such bare bones that the country was not prepared adequately for a conventional war, the "'one-alarm fire'" in Korea. They find that blame for this condition was not just the province of the nation's leaders but also resided with the people, who had clamoured for economy in Government spending and lowered taxes after the war and then allowed themselves to be deluded by such voices of reassurance as that of Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson—not to mention the Hoover Commission. They then proceed to provide a synopsis of the country's extant defenses. (The series is no longer on the front page of The News, but this installment may be read in full here and here.)
On the editorial page,
"Mr.
Hoose's Bus Service Report" discusses the City Traffic
Engineer's recommendations to the City Council on rerouting of the
bus lines
It finds that while some would be inconvenienced by the changes as others would be benefited, Mr. Hoose appeared to be on the right course.
"The Independent General" finds that General MacArthur had disaffected a lot of Americans by his imperious manner and assumption of authority not properly that of a military commander. It was a drawback to his being Supreme Commander of the U.N. forces. The latest example was his visit to Chiang Kai-Shek on Formosa without first consulting fully with the State Department and the President. He may have promised to Chiang political support which the Government was not prepared to extend to the Nationalist regime.
In response, Averell Harriman had, after consultation with the President upon his recent return from Japan and Korea, issued the statement that the country's policy on defense of Formosa remained unchanged, impliedly meaning that while the country would resist a Communist invasion of Formosa, it would not undertake to support the corrupt Chiang regime.
General MacArthur, while a great soldier, lacked diplomatic judgment, and the President, who admired him as a soldier, was correct, it asserts, to reel him in.
The discussed problems with General MacArthur would result in his being called home, of course, the following April by the President for seeking to circumvent a direct order to refrain from crossing the Yalu River and carrying the war into Communist Chinese territory.
"Jap and German U.N. Policemen" tells of a bill before Congress, introduced by Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington, to permit non-citizen Japanese war veterans to enlist in the American armed forces at half-pay and without citizens' benefits, a proposal opposed by General MacArthur. As manpower needs became more pressing, it suggests, the pressure might build to allow such enlistment in the U.N. forces, including West Germans.
Russia would likely do everything it could to prevent the creation of a U.N. police force and many Americans would oppose it on grounds of loss of sovereignty. But it appeared to be the only way to preserve the viability of the U.N. as a peacekeeping organization.
A piece from the Baltimore Sun, titled "Telling the World about the U.S.", reports of the Department of Labor having published The Gift of Freedom, showing the great advantage statistically which the American labor force enjoyed over the rest of the world in efficiency and earnings versus cost of living. The piece differs only with respect to the title, which might give the wrong impression to foreigners that American freedom was a "gift" rather than the result, as it was, of "blood, sweat and tears".
Drew Pearson, on vacation, again has his column written by his staff, this day's entry by Tom McNamara and Jack Anderson—the latter to take over the column when Mr. Pearson would eventually die in 1969. Senators and Congressmen were not earning as much on the lecture circuit since the start of the war. Vice-President Barkley had commanded as much as $1,500 per speech. Senator Hubert Humphrey had been so broke after his 1948 initial campaign for the Senate that he had to borrow to eat, but found financial solace in $6,000 worth of lectures during 1949. Senator Wayne Morse had taken in $10,000 on average each year, after going in debt by $25,000 in his first Senate campaign. Senator Estes Kefauver needed $3,000 to pay off his mortgage and was able to get it in six months on the lecture circuit. The top draw was Congressman Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., who had to pay $12,000 the previous year for office help to keep up with the deluge of mail he received because of his name, earning enough to pay half of it from lecture fees. Even millionaire Senators, such as Robert Kerr, gave some paid lectures.
Most were handled by speakers' bureaus which took 30 percent from the fee for placing the lectures. The column provides some of the one-line promotions for Senators and members of Congress, as issued by those bureaus. Senator Joseph McCarthy's speaking fees, they note, had trebled since his charges of Communism in the State Department, initiated the prior February 9 and denounced in June, just prior to the Korean war, by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate as a whole as being a "fraud and a hoax".
Senator Glen Taylor of Idaho and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, along with others, refused to accept speakers' fees.
Secretary of the Air Force Thomas
Finletter was laying contingency plans for World War III and the
possibility of needing to drop atom bombs on Russia from bases in
Europe and along the Atlantic Coast of the U.S. The principal problem
was passing three radar nets which protected the heart of Russia. But
the frontier was so vast and communications in Russia so poor that
some of the B-36's were bound to get through
It cost more to feed, equip and provide G.I. benefits to one division of infantry than it did for the entire annual budget of the Atomic Energy Commission.
Joint Chiefs chairman General Omar Bradley had assured the President that American troops would not be pushed out of Korea, comparing the arc defense line in Korea to Omaha Beach in June, 1944. He said that soon there would be as many divisions in Korea as at Omaha Beach, while the North Koreans would have about the same numerical strength as the Germans, though neither force would compare to their counterparts on D-Day in terms of training. Furthermore, U.N. forces would have the same or possibly superior air strength to that of the Allied forces on D-Day, and the naval situation was also comparable.
Marquis Childs tells of Republicans
and some Democrats wanting to pass the Mundt-Ferguson (and Nixon
The President had spent many days carefully crafting his proposal for an anti-sabotage bill, distinguishing it from the Mundt-Ferguson bill. Staffers had analyzed the anti-Masonry and Know-Nothing movements directed at Catholics during the mid-Nineteenth Century. The President spoke of the security of national defense installations as being at the heart of his proposal, specifically Strategic Air Command bases.
One concern was that the present counter-espionage setup had too much overlapping and divided authority, diluting responsibility, appearing as one of the reasons for not detecting in advance the coming invasion of South Korea in June.
The Democratic leadership intended to incorporate all of the provisions sought by the President along with some others, while the Republicans might refuse such a compromise and try to prevent its adoption. Mr. Childs regards such a result to be dangerous to the country. Security and economic controls, he ventures, ought not be a matter of divisive rhetoric during a crisis and the ultimate arbiter ought be adherence to the Constitution, going far enough but not too far. Political pressures in an election year should not cancel the action necessary for security.
Robert C. Ruark reflects on the Marines having entered the fight in Korea with good result, when only a few months earlier they appeared doomed to relegation to obsolescence, along with the carriers and most of the Navy, save submarines. The B-36 long-range bomber plus the atom bomb, according to the Air Force prior to the Korean war, would suffice for defense in any short-lived, push-button war of the modern age.
These Marines were the same who had fought on Guadalcanal eight years earlier against the best Japanese troops, who knew how to infiltrate and conduct decoy operations.
The return to conventional warfare disputed conventional military wisdom that such days were past in deference to atom and hydrogen bombs and the long-range airplane and rockets.
The big tanks and big bazookas in numbers necessary for the fight in Korea would take two years to produce. It was a bitter lesson which he hopes the country and military planners would remember when appropriations were next being considered. As long as wars were fought, the conventional foot soldier would be necessary. And the Marines, 50,000 of whom had been called up with another 80,000 to follow, were not merely artifacts to be displayed only in parades.
A letter writer recommends to every motorist who caused damage to a parked car to wait until the return of the owner and admit responsibility for the damage, which could sometimes skyrocket to $20. But all too often the "coward" would simply leave the scene without even so much as a note. She recommends that witnesses leave a note with the license number of the offending vehicle.
A
letter writer from Pittsboro
praises the editorial department and the "People's Platform",
citing specifically the "thought provoking" editorial "Truth and Error",
appearing August 4, (apparently appearing locally in the missing August 5 edition), quoting with approval Assistant Secretary and
future Secretary of State Dean Rusk from a speech he had made to the
farmers and their wives attending the Home & Farm Week
The writer extrapolates further to
suggest that the De
He wants men administering price control, if it became necessary, who would have sound judgment, unlike during the previous war. He had been involved in price control and resigned because he refused to penalize a furniture company for overcharging a customer by 67 cents on a bill of $108. He had also participated in obtaining a judgment against a manufacturer for $30,000 for violating a price structure which had been approved by the OPA district office after the manufacturer's inquiry, because the approval had been in error.
A
letter writer comments on the
Richmond Times-Dispatch piece on the dog owner in Birmingham
having been fined for the mutt's excessive noise, causing the
complainant to suffer the slings and arrows of misfortune in
response, agreeing with the piece that dogs were too pampered
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