The Charlotte News
Monday, August 7, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in the U.N. forces' first offensive of the war, about 9,000 American troops of the 25th Division and a Marine brigade, plus South Korean commando units, had moved from Kogan, 35 miles west of Pusan, forward an estimated four miles against two North Korean divisions totaling 15,000 men on the southern front, in the vicinity of Chinju on Monday. According to Eighth Army field headquarters, heavy casualties were inflicted on the enemy, probably the heaviest of the war.
North of the main battle line, 24th Division troops tried without success to clear out the remaining 150 of the 800-man enemy force which had crossed the Naktong River on Sunday, southwest of Changnyong, 20 miles north of Kogan.
South Korean forces were engaged in heavy fighting on the northern front south of Yechion, where a new enemy attack had been launched, with heavy fighting reported in the vicinity of Andong and Yongdok during the weekend.
B-29's bombed Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, and again hit Wonsan, industrial center, with 540 tons of bombs, the largest bombing run yet of the war.
Many new American reinforcements were arriving at the front.
Averell Harriman, special foreign affairs adviser to the President, had visited the front this date and found optimism running high among American military leaders and South Korean officials.
The Army announced that Korean war casualties through August 6 totaled 2,616, including 153 killed, 1,590 wounded, and 873 missing. It said the list was constantly being updated and the Army was not trying to hide anything but rather seeking to treat the subject with dignity until relatives had been notified. This date, Drew Pearson, however, published figures which he said came from the Surgeon General, showing considerably higher numbers in each category. The Army spokesman said that those numbers did not agree with the lists he had seen.
Elton C. Fay reports that lack of manpower and the limited number of transportation craft available appeared to observers to preclude an amphibious landing behind enemy positions in the near future in Korea. But small groups might land from ships for demolition and scouting purposes along the Korean coastlines. The air cover and naval support needed for such a massive landing, however, was present. The presence of two airborne divisions, the 82nd and the Eleventh, had led to speculation that an airborne invasion might be forthcoming but it took a fleet of about 800 "flying boxcars" to move an airborne division of 12,000 to 16,000 men.
The information in this report may have been provided as a deliberate ruse to distract the enemy, as General MacArthur would land a force of Marines and Army troops at Inchon, opposite Seoul, on September 15, 39 days hence, a major turning point in the war.
At the U.N., Secretary-General Trygve Lie said that while the rules required normally 14 days of notice to call a General Assembly meeting, he could call one for an emergency at any time. Some delegates had suggested that the Assembly meet in special session should Russia veto the new Korean resolution being considered by the Security Council.
The Philippines offered to send to Korea a fully-trained and equipped force of 5,000 combat infantry.
France pledged itself to a three-year, 5.7 billion dollar rearmament program to resist Communist aggression, and called on Britain and the U.S. to station a sufficient number of divisions in Europe for the purpose. The program would take about two percent of French national income. France was the fourth of the NATO nations to reply to President Truman's request for increased military commitments. The others were Britain, which committed to a three-year, 9.5 billion dollar program, Denmark, and Norway.
The President received his usual daily briefing on the war, but with a more thorough analysis than usual, including all of the Joint Chiefs rather than the usual briefing only by Joint Chiefs chairman General Omar Bradley.
In the first in a series of ten articles
on the state of American defense, Robert S. Bird and Ogden R. Reid of
the New York Herald Tribune examine the intelligence services, as continued here—for we have boots
They report that experienced intelligence officers recommended unification of the intelligence services, G-2, ONI, Air Force A-2, State Department intelligence, the Joint Intelligence Group of the Joint Chiefs, and the CIA, with the latter able to coordinate analysis and reporting of the information gathered. Weaknesses began in the field, as Army and State Department agents were usually the first to leave a country when trouble started, just as intelligence was becoming ripe. In addition, agents trained in science were lacking to interpret the significance of intelligence in such crucial areas as progress in atomic science, discernible from aerial photographs. Complaints also arose over duplication of work, such as redundant interrogations, often occuring with defectors from East Germany to the West. Analysis of the same intelligence often occurred multiple times, undertaken by each agency. The worst problem was in intelligence evaluation and coordination, as well as reporting of the raw and finished intelligence to the interested agencies. The CIA was not properly coordinating and evaluating intelligence on national security. The Hoover Commission had recommended a five-man board at the top of the CIA but nothing yet had been done to implement it.
In March, 1948, for instance, General Lucius Clay in Germany told the Defense Department of receipt of intelligence indicating the likelihood of a Russian invasion of Western Europe. But after Secretary of Defense James Forrestal called all of the intelligence chiefs together and forced their combined analysis, they concluded after two days that it was a buildup for the blockade of Berlin rather than an invasion, a correct analysis.
The Joint Intelligence Group withheld all of their documents from the CIA and representatives of that Agency had been allowed into the situation room of the Joint Chiefs, where the current information re American and enemy operations was posted, only during the previous three weeks. The State Department also did not admit the CIA to its top policy councils. As a result, the Cabinet and the military chieftains had little confidence in intelligence generally, relying instead on their own departmental or military branch services. Even the President did not always use the CIA reports or joint services briefings.
Experienced intelligence officers had recommended that the National Security Council should provide the CIA with the power to coordinate the intelligence and delineate clear lines of intelligence responsibility among the services. In addition to having a top-level civilian officer as head of CIA and a five-man board to coordinate information, the Agency needed to weed out much of its second-rate personnel acquired during its expansion. Departments within its five offices should be reduced to avoid duplication and it should receive ample funding to provide realistic cover for its agents in the field, including purchase of foreign businesses as necessary, per the British model. Military civilian intelligence personnel, rather than Civil Service personnel, should be hired on the basis of their experience and qualifications. Finally, the military services needed to provide more attention to establishing career branches covering cryptography and military attaches.
The Senate Banking Committee expected to complete work on a mobilization bill by nightfall, giving the President discretion to impose standby wage-price controls and rationing.
In Chattahoochee, Fla., two of eight fugitives from the ward for the criminally insane at the State Hospital were recaptured without resistance this date. One had been caught shortly after the escape, leaving five at large. All wore pajamas.
In Newark, N.J., safecrackers worked
for hours to open a safe in the Woolworth's store the previous night,
only to find it empty. The other safe, which they ignored, had $3,000
inside. Inside safe number three were a white rabbit
On the editorial page,
"Russian
Shell Game" agrees with U.S. chief delegate to the U.N. Warren
Austin when he had described the previous week the actions of Russian
chief delegate Jakob Malik as a shell game
The next day, the Security Council was set to take up this resolution condemning North Korea and calling for members to help localize the conflict to prevent a larger war. Russia would then likely veto that resolution.
It favors treating Mr. Malik with the lack of respect which his actions deserved. If he walked out, then it would be no worse than his staying and vetoing the resolution. It suggests that if the U.N. could not function with the Communist nations, then it should be reorganized to include only those nations upholding the principles of the Charter.
"Administration of the War Program" agrees with Arthur Krock of the New York Times that the administration of war mobilization would be more efficient under the umbrella of one agency rather than being left primarily to the department heads as favored by many Administration officials. That latter system, resemblant to the War Production Board of World War II, would have the drawback of having no central administrator who could hire and fire personnel to promote efficiency, allowing red tape and bureaucracy inevitably to stultify operations. The piece suggests that the job be given to the National Security Resources Board, headed by the efficient Stuart Symington.
"Keeping the Enemy Informed" favors establishment of a new voluntary code of censorship among the press at home and military censorship abroad, to curb the release of information which appeared helpful to the enemy. For instance, an A.P. story had been published in The News the previous week reporting that six new American jets had arrived in Formosa along with a U.S. tanker carrying aviation fuel. While the story might deter a Communist Chinese attack on Formosa, it also appeared to give away vital military information.
A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled, "Plugging for Real Economy", applauds the effort of Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois to achieve economy in Government spending but also tempers the applause with the realization that he was not getting anywhere. His failed effort to trim pork from the harbors, rivers, and navigation bill was the most recent example. Among those who refused to go along were those members of Congress plumping most loudly for economy, such as Senator Kenneth Wherry.
Drew Pearson, as stated on the front page, tells of having seen the "secret list" of Korean war casualties as compiled by the Surgeon General and that it revealed 600 Army dead in combat through August 1, compared to the Army's announced figure of 111 killed through that date. Similarly, official Army figures showed 587 wounded, whereas the Surgeon General's report showed 2,975. And the Army claimed 915 missing, whereas the Surgeon General said that 3,000 were in that category. The Air Force had 14 killed, 33 missing, and six wounded and the Navy had two killed. He urges the Army to provide the true facts to the American people on the vital subject. The Army spokesman, as reported on the front page, said that he had not seen any such "secret report" of the Surgeon General or any other list with such numbers.
Allied diplomats found the Senate approval of the 100 million dollar loan to Franco in Spain more problematic than Korea as it had provoked backlash in such places as France, where longshoremen refused to unload American planes from ships. The Senate had rejected the aid bill in April and then passed it the previous week, based in the interim on backstage wire-pulling by two lobbyists for Spain, the son-in-law of Vice-President Alben Barkley and an aide to Senator Owen Brewster, as well as by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada. Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson also had aided the effort. The President was unhappy about the approval but could not veto it without also vetoing the entire appropriations bill, to which it was attached as an amendment.
Senator Wayne Morse had been the most eloquent opponent of the loan, saying that he hated not just Communism but also Fascism and could not therefore support a bribe to Franco to obtain U.S. military bases while Franco denied civil liberties in Spain. He feared that the benefits of the loan would be outweighed by Russian propaganda spread as its result. He added that after the amendment passed he felt like resigning from the Senate.
Marquis Childs discusses commodities speculation since the start of the war, sending up the prices of soybeans, lard, wheat and other such commodities. The Department of Agriculture reported that a speculator who put up the minimum 15 to 20 percent margin at the start of the crisis could have cashed in five weeks later at a 450 percent profit on lard, 300 percent on cottonseed oil, 300 percent on soybeans, 150 percent on cotton or wool tops and 100 percent on wheat futures.
Secretary of Agriculture Charles Brannan, in consequence, had recommended that the margin requirement be raised to 50 percent to squelch investing by speculators, constituting, for instance, about 85 to 90 percent of the soybean market during July.
After the Senate Banking and Currency Committee heard directors of commodity exchanges testify that they opposed raising the minimum margin, the Committee voted to eliminate such a proposal from the controls bill. When the bill finally passed the Senate, it might, however, have such a provision, to stop the gambling on commodities, as urged by Senator Burnet Maybank of South Carolina.
Robert C. Ruark tells of having gone
to a viewing of the 1930 film, "All Quiet on the Western
Front", having a revival since the start of the war and
especially popular among young people. He was amazed to find that a
particular scene
The reaction by a standing-room-only audience flew in the face of what was supposed to be the response to war. There was no show of patriotism or rush to volunteer. The film had decried war and all its aspects.
He concludes that the Korean war was going to be hard to sell to young people. Most people appeared to react to the war as a necessary evil of which they wanted no great part.
It should be noted again that American participation in Korea was like that of no other previous war in the country's history. Foreign wars before had always been ongoing, larger world conflicts, World Wars I and II, by the time of American involvement, in 1917 and 1941, respectively. Never before had there been a war involving U.S. participation in a foreign land, regarding incursion of one foreign country's boundary. That was the reason for the tough sell. It was a new type of war in a new type of world, in which the goal was to prevent smaller war from erupting into major world war with the attendant risk of nuclear confrontation, the idea of drawing an early line against Communist aggression to prevent further incursions elsewhere. The war in Korea was a strategic war motivated by the U.N. commitment to the ideal of self-government and independence for Korea as a whole, overridden by the Soviet-backed Government established in North Korea, which did not recognize the duly elected Government in the South, the only Government recognized by the U.N. The proximity to Japan, only 80 miles from Pusan, and, to a lesser and perhaps only incidental extent, the Communist Chinese threat to Formosa made the need to defend South Korea crucial to protect the entire region from being overrun by Communism, leading, potentially and probably, to another world war less than ten years after the conclusion of the last one—that serving as the lesson primer to induce, where practicable, a pattern of early response and interdiction to aggression, keeping firmly ensconced in memory the recurring questions of the Forties as to whether early response to the 1931 Manchurian incursion by the Japanese or at least to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, to the retaking of the Rhineland by the Germans in 1936, and to the attack by the Italians on Ethiopia in 1935 would have sufficiently inhibited further aggressive attempts by the three bellicose totalitarian states to have avoided the subsequent wars in Europe and the Pacific.
The problem attendant with the
average American not understanding readily the reason for American
participation in the Korean war, of course, carried over to an even greater
extent to Vietnam, though the larger protests over participation in
that latter war did not begin at home until 1967, with the country
and Congress, for the most part, going along with it in 1965 and
1966
The anti-war theme of "All Quiet on the Western Front" would again enjoy a rebirth. And that is as it should be. The day the country becomes inured to war, any war, accepts it in blind obeisance to the will of the country's leaders, is the day we can say goodbye to our democratic ideals, the preservation of which all wars in which the nation fights ought strictly concern.
A letter writer whose property adjoined the old quarry in Charlotte writes urging that something finally be done about it, such as the City sending a road scraper once a week to fill in dirt over the garbage being dumped there, such that eventually the hole would be filled.
Get a shovel and do it yourself. It's not the City's job.
A letter from the father of one of the two young men involved in the theft of some tacks and nails from a construction site to build a shack on the Catawba River and then eluding police when caught red-handed, responds to an editorial of August 1 laudatory of the fines imposed. He says that many who had been critical of the conduct had called him, after reading the editorial, to express condemnation of the editorial for "hitting below the belt". He says that his son was on crutches at the time of the incident but the fact did not relieve him of responsibility and they accepted the court's determination.
Why bring it up, then?
The editors note that the newspaper refrained from commenting until two days after the trial because it did not wish to prejudge the matter during the eight-day interim between its occurrence and trial.
A letter writer from Pittsboro finds interesting the article of the previous week by Federal Court of Appeals Judge John J. Parker of the Fourth Circuit, says that he had always approved of the Judge though he often appeared to change his orientation from Democratic to Republican and back to Democratic under the New Deal. He nevertheless always had respected the way he was able to justify his positions and wishes that he had a subscription to the Federal Reporter so that he could read his decisions. Now, you can.
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