The Charlotte News

Monday, January 15, 1951

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that tank-supported allied forces gained up to twelve miles along a nine-mile front on Monday in a sudden offensive in the western sector of Korea south of Seoul, recapturing Osan, Kumyangjang and Chon. During the morning, the Fifth Air Force had paved the way for the offensive, reporting that it killed about a thousand fleeing Communist troops. Correspondent Stan Swinton reported that morale among the U.N. troops soared when they realized that they were on the offensive again following consistent retreat since late November. The Chinese Communists showed a strange lack of resistance, making their first stands at dusk north of Kumyangjang, opening up with automatic weapons on the U.S. Third Division.

In the eastern sector, there was some improvement of the U.N. position as American troops recaptured Yongwol, a key point in the hills 30 miles southeast of Wonju.

The President directed that all men volunteering for the armed services had to do so through their local draft boards. It was not clear whether the change would allow the individual volunteer to choose his branch of service. Presently, the Navy and Air Force were receiving all the volunteers they could handle. The draft was being used only to acquire Army manpower.

General Eisenhower, as part of his tour of NATO countries, visited Britain this date. He was expected to hear of Britain's planned expansion of its military apparatus and increased production, which was slated for parliamentary action by mid-February.

The President presented to Congress a proposed budget for fiscal year 1951-52, amounting to 71.6 billion dollars, and indicated that sound fiscal policy would require a tax increase of 16.5 billion dollars to balance the budget. More than half of the budget, 41.4 billion dollars was devoted to defense. It proposed 7.4 billion dollars in military and economic aid to allied countries, compared to 4.7 billion spent on aid in the current fiscal year. It also proposed a slight increase in domestic spending, making renewed calls for passage of the civil rights program, the compulsory health insurance plan, Federal aid to education, and the Brannan farm plan, recommending allotting money to each program. In all, military expense, veterans' payments, foreign aid, and interest on the national debt, most of which was from World War II, amounted to 83 cents of every dollar, before the basic operations of government and non-defense related domestic spending.

Most Congressional leaders endorsed the President's pay-as-you-go plan for military spending increases but also criticized the non-defense spending increases included in the budget. Senator Styles Bridges expressed shock at the proposed increases of Fair Deal spending on "non-essential" programs as "socialized medicine", Federal aid to education, and the St. Lawrence Seaway.

That's damn for sure. We need a military nation, not a educated or healthy one. Eat, drink, and be happy, for tomorrow, you may get drafted and have to go get killed by them Commie sons of bitches—because of General MacArthur's bullheadedness in taunting the Chinese at the Yalu River back in November in his "win-the-war", "home-by-Christmas" offensive after the war had been won by pushing the North Korean Communists virtually out of North Korea.

The Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Senator Richard Russell, sent a letter to the Justice Department to seek a determination whether the accusers of Assistant Secretary of Defense Anna Rosenberg, who claimed during her Senate confirmation hearings that she had been a Communist sympathizer fifteen years earlier, could be prosecuted for perjury or subornation of perjury. Ralph De Sola, a former Communist, had been the principal accuser, claiming that he had seen Ms. Rosenberg at the meetings of a Communist organization in the mid-Thirties. His former wife and others disputed the claims.

To conserve materials for the mobilization program, the National Production Authority banned until February 15 the construction of new stores, restaurants, office and other commercial buildings, and required thereafter that each new project would have to be specifically authorized by the NPA. The ban included undertaking and cemetery buildings.

Well, where the hell you gonna bury them, in open pits? They're dying out here by the truck and planeload, one flamer after another.

Northwest of Chicago, a B-26 bomber crashed and all five crewmen, members of the Air National Guard based at O'Hare Field, were killed. The crew had reported heavy icing on the wings as they returned to O'Hare after a training flight the previous night.

In Philadelphia, a stewardess, with only five months on the job, died on Sunday after rescuing ten passengers from the flaming wreckage of a National Airlines DC-4 in which seven died, including four other women and two infants, after the plane skidded off the runway into a ditch as it attempted to land at International Airport amid snowy, rainy conditions. The fire was caused by a ruptured fuel tank in the severed left wing. Eleven passengers, in addition to the ten assisted by the stewardess, escaped serious injury.

In Augsberg, Germany, a German court sentenced Ilsa Koch to life imprisonment for her crimes at Buchenwald concentration camp during the war. She was convicted for inciting the murder of one prisoner, the attempted murder of another and inciting serious injury to five others and lesser injuries to two others. She was acquitted of personally assisting any killings. The most notorious charge against her, that she had tattooed prisoners after their deaths so that she could use their skin as lampshades, was dropped by the prosecution for insufficient proof. She had also been sentenced to life in 1946 by the American military tribunal for crimes against allied personnel, but that sentence was later commuted to four years and she had since been released. During the trial Frau Koch had fits of hysteria both in the courtroom and in her jail cell, which doctors said were feigned for the purpose of suggesting insanity.

Badman Bill Cook, wanted in connection with the slayings of at least eight people, including an Illinois family of five, missing and apparently killed in Oklahoma, had been caught in Mexico.

On the editorial page, "The Teacher Salary Issue" finds that the first obligation of the 1951 General Assembly would be to rectify the error of the 1949 Assembly and make permanent the increased teacher salary ranges of $2,200 to $3,100 per year. The increase granted in 1949 was made contingent on a surplus in the State Treasury at the end of each fiscal year. While sufficient surpluses had occurred in 1949 and 1950 to permit the salary increases, that might not be the case into the future. Other states were paying their teachers more and would thus lure qualified teachers away from North Carolina unless good salaries were available.

The Advisory Budget Commission had recommended return to the salary schedule of 1949, but if that were done, it warns, teachers would depart the state by the thousands.

Don't need no teachers. Just get borned, get a gun and go to war and die. What's to learn?

"Auto Inspection Law Needed" champions restoration of the automobile safety inspection law, which had been abrogated by the 1949 Legislature after a two-year experiment which was met with public disapproval for long lines at the DMV to obtain the inspections. It finds that a law should be passed which would allow for inspections on a staggered basis through the year and enable more inspection stations, to get the rattle-traps off the road.

"Enforcing School Attendance" finds that the State Legislative Council had suggested that the 1951 Legislature provide an effective system of enforcing the law against truancy, currently enforced in only 64 of 172 city and county administrative units. That would include providing financial support from the State for such enforcement. It recommended that a professional functionary with experience as a teacher, rather than the standard truant officer, be given the responsibility for enforcement in each system.

The Council had pointed out that in 1948-49, 42,892 children, five percent of those enrolled, had dropped out before the end of the school term. During the same year, there were 58,814 absences on average each school day.

The piece agrees with the Council's advice.

Just tan their little hides and send them to the draft board for further processing.

A piece from the Winston-Salem Journal, titled "Taft as a Prophet", finds that Senator Taft's statement that the Russians intended no military conquest of the world or war with the U.S. was not the first time he had played prophet. In February, 1940, he declared it to be fantastic that Japan would attack the U.S. In late September, 1941, he said that there was less danger to the country than two years earlier. In February, 1947, he said that the armed forces could cut their budgets by ten percent without impairing defense. And in August, 1948, he had said that the country was reaching a stabilized price level.

The piece was reminded of the late Senator William Borah of Idaho who said in 1939 that he was sure that there would not be a war in Europe.

Drew Pearson tells of secret files of the Senate Armed Services Committee showing that Senator McCarthy had allowed himself, probably unwittingly, to become the mouthpiece for a German Communist agent when he charged U.S. Army investigators with torturing twelve German prisoners to extract confessions to the murders of 80 unarmed American prisoners of war at Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944. The twelve German soldiers had been tried and convicted but never hanged, based on the false claim that their confessions had been coerced. The claim was cooked up by a Communist German agent who passed it on to Frederic Libby of the National Council for the Prevention of War, who then passed it on to Senator McCarthy. The Senate Committee discovered the Communist connection to the source of the charges and his intent to stir up German resentment against the U.S. The plan was to use Senator McCarthy to publicize the charges and then send back the press accounts to Germany. The plan worked, turning thousands of Germans against the country, all while U.S. aid was going to West Germany. The decision was made not to hang the twelve convicted German soldiers, as to do so might cause riots in Germany.

Senator McCarthy lashed out at the subcommittee investigating the matter, charging it with a "whitewash" of the Army officers alleged to have used the coercive tactics, despite the subcommittee being chaired by Republican Senator Ray Baldwin of Connecticut. Senator McCarthy had insisted that the Army officers undergo lie detector tests, which they indicated a willingness to do, but he did not insist on the same for the convicted German war criminals.

Eventually, Senator McCarthy walked out of the hearings. The subcommittee report which ultimately issued on the matter suggested that there were Communist elements, intent on reviving the nationalist spirit in Germany, who had sought to discredit the American occupation forces with this claim, forwarded to the American people courtesy of Senator McCarthy.

Marquis Childs discusses the thrust in the State and Defense Departments for concluding a treaty forthwith with Japan. The Pentagon was nervous over the prospect of twin drives against Japan by Russia from Russia's Sakhalin Island to the north and from the Kuriles from the north and west, in light of the turn of events in Korea, potentially giving, along with Manchuria and Russian Siberia, the Communists a solid wall on the western side of Japan.

John Foster Dulles, a leading proponent of the formation of an immediate treaty, was to be sent, with the blessing of Defense Secretary Marshall, as an Ambassador to Japan for the purpose of concluding the treaty. General MacArthur also favored the move. Mr. Dulles would likely downplay the issue of rearming, as Prime Minister Yoshida believed rearmament would upset Japan's program of economic rehabilitation and cause fears of rebirth of the Japanese warlord mentality. But the Dulles mission would likely try to counter this attitude of neutralism and reassure those in Japan who suspected the motives of the U.S. The problem of building military strength in Japan could then be approached after the settlement and granting of Japanese independence from occupation.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the expectation by Tito that an attack would take place against Yugoslavia from either Russia directly or from its satellites, Rumania, Albania, or Bulgaria, by spring and the consequent prospects then for the rest of Europe, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. If the prediction were accurate, and Yugoslavia's eighty divisions were to fall away from defense of Europe, then so, too, would Greece and its revitalized military, effectively neutralizing Turkey and its eighty divisions by dint of geography. Together, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Greece represented more established military capability than Western Europe could muster any time in the ensuing two years, the critical period of military imbalance during which Soviet aggression might occur. At that point, Western Europe would be paralyzed, causing Iran to fold without a fight and capitulation by the rest of the Middle East. "Neutralist" regimes would then follow in Italy and France, in which Communists would play prominent roles. That would take away from the Western sphere French North Africa and the airfields of Southern Italy, eliminating the whole of the Mediterranean.

The prospects thus would shatter the NATO alliance and make the U.S. position untenable in Europe. Thus, while supplying aid to Yugoslavia cut against the grain of American values, as Tito was a Communist, it was completely within the country's interests strategically to supply such aid.

A letter writer finds that a lot of people had lost confidence in the U.N. as a peacekeeping organization after the apparent loss in Korea. He suggests that Korea would be as Bunker Hill, a military defeat on the road to ultimate victory.

A letter writer from Kings Mountain finds that radio and television critic John Crosby, in assessing why women listened to radio and watched television, had missed the main point, that they believed it was something they should not be doing.

He also takes issue with News writer Tom Fesperman who recently had said that no one could know what women would be like in the year 2000. He says that they would pursue in the open, be the undisputed boss of the family, have big feet, would be taller and uglier, live shorter lives and curse people out in public. He sees trends in 1951 toward these ends 49 years hence.

He concludes that a woman wanted a man to be a slave to her and succeeded at the enterprise.

A letter from perennial Congressional candidate P. C. Burkholder takes issue with the News editorial of January 6, "Short-Sighted Move", which hoped that Representative James Vogler would withdraw his bill to rescind North Carolina's support, stated in 1949 by the Legislature, for the world government concept. He thinks that under world government, the U.S. would become more like Russia and that even at present, the U.N. was dominated by Russia, while the fighting men in Korea were given second consideration, and so agrees with Mr. Vogler.

Never mind the facts.

A letter from the president of the Charlotte Opera Association thanks the News for its support, especially after their performance of "Sunday Costs Five Pesos" and "Blennerhassett".

A letter from the chairman of the Blood Program Committee of the American Red Cross thanks the newspaper for its support in the organization's December blood drive to meet the quota for the men in service overseas. He says that the January goal was 1,820 pints of blood, even higher than the 1,500 pints met in December.

A Pome comes from the Atlanta Journal, "In Which Is Confessed A Concern That Frequently Overwhelms Persons Of Exceptional Heft:

"When my heart goes pitter patter
I fear I've grown a little fatter."

So get up and exercise off that lumpy matter,
Or sit and eat dumplings until your jumpy heart shatters.

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