The Charlotte News
Thursday, January 18, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that a tank-led allied patrol battled two companies of Chinese troops this night in a brief but fierce 90-minute local clash in the western sector of Korea at Kumyangjang, before the patrol then smashed out of the threatened envelopment. It was the heaviest action reported by allied patrols probing the sector for enemy strength, penetrating as far as abandoned Wonju, where one patrol spent the night and then withdrew to safe territory.
An ominous quiet prevailed in most sectors, but allied commanders warned that they expected an all-out Communist offensive to develop at any time from massing troop concentrations below Seoul, expected to traverse along the Seoul-Taejon highway when supplies had been sufficiently accumulated.
At the U.N., the U.S. was prepared to call for a declaration against Communist China as an aggressor nation in Korea, and the President said at a press conference that the American delegation would exert as much pressure as it could to see that it was brought to a prompt vote and passed. Other countries, however, India and the Soviet bloc, were thought ready to press for delay for a day or two to consider further the Chinese response the previous day rejecting the five-point ceasefire proposal, passed 50 to 7 by the political committee of the General Assembly. The Chinese rejection was coupled with a counter-proposal. U.S. chief delegate Warren Austin was preparing a speech rejecting the counter-proposal. Secretary of State Acheson said that he regarded the Chinese response as an outright rejection of the ceasefire proposal and that the U.S. could not accept its counter, a statement which the President endorsed.
The Department of Defense released the latest casualty figures for the Korean war showing 45,137 through January 12, including 2,424 more than the previous week, of whom 6,509 had been killed, 29,951 wounded, and 8,677 missing in action. The Army accounted for 36,956 of the casualties, including 5,202 of the killed, 23,544 of the wounded, and 8,204 of the missing. All casualty counts were behind actual figures to date, pending notification of next of kin.
Correspondent D. Harold Oliver reports that the President said at a press conference that he would appreciate it if Congress approved sending more troops to Europe but said that he would do whatever was necessary to meet the world situation. The President accused the press of not reporting his statements accurately at times, especially when he had said a few weeks earlier that use of the atomic bomb was always under consideration but that he did not want to use it in Korea. When reporters asked how his statement had been garbled, he recommended reading an article in the New York Times Magazine by John Hersey, who, he said, had given a good transcript of what he actually had stated. He also claimed that no newspapers had carried his remark the previous week that he believed he had authority to send troops to Western Europe, notwithstanding Congressional objections, and would do so to the extent he saw fit as commander-in-chief. Several reporters present challenged the claim that their newspapers had not carried the statement.
They need to give him one of them
picture tests with the elephant and rhino and giraffe to determine
whether he's gone off hunting. Or was that a hippo? It's been awhile,
doc, since we done seen "Hatari"
The President declined to say firmly whether he would run again in 1952 but said, in response to a question, that an article in Look by Edward T. Folliard of the Washington Post was a "good story". Mr. Folliard had said that the President hoped he would not have to run again, and the story carried a headline saying that he did not choose to run. The President said that the title had been culled from the words of President Coolidge.
The President also said that the Government would bring wages and prices under control as rapidly as possible, but he refused to pin down a date by which a freeze would be ordered. Charles E. Wilson, director of the Office of Defense Mobilization, told the Senate Small Business Committee that he hated controls but that they were necessary in this instance, albeit not in the near future, though within the "shadow … no bigger than a man's hand".
Whose hand? Surely not that of small-hands people.
Selective Service director Maj. General Lewis Hershey sought from the Senate Armed Services Preparedness subcommittee, chaired by Senator Lyndon Johnson, an indefinite extension of the draft and authority to draft men 18 to 25, lowering the minimum draft age from 19, and for extension of the draft induction from 21 to 27 months, per the Administration's request.
The Air Force announced that it would immediately call up "a major portion" of the Air Reserve and Air National Guard, plus large numbers from the Volunteer Air Reserves, a total of about 150,000 men, designed to increase its manpower to 971,000 as soon as possible. Some Air Reserve and Air National Guard units had already been called to duty.
Why they doin' all that? We done took a vacation and thought the war was done over with back 'ere in early December, late November.
In Italy and Sicily, one person was killed and a hundred injured during demonstrations against the visit to Rome by NATO supreme commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower, during his tour of Western European capitals. Other Communist-led demonstrations were ignored by Rome workers or were met with little success. In Turin, a 20-hour strike brought all the workers to the demonstration.
Sources reported that John L. Lewis and the UMW would sign a voluntary agreement with a major part of the coal industry, except for the Southern Coal Producers Association, for a $1.60 per day increase in wages, which would likely produce a five percent rise in the price of coal.
In Charlotte, A. C. Lineberger, 50, of Belmont, died after a three-day illness for which he was hospitalized. He was president or a principal officer of the several corporations comprising the Lineberger chain of textile manufacturing plants, with its offices in Belmont.
In Raleigh, legislation to repeal the state's 1947 law banning the closed shop and union shop was introduced in the General Assembly. Another bill proposed that the Governor be allowed to succeed himself for one term. Another proposed to give a husband the right to sue his wife for personal injuries.
The State House passed a resolution calling for an investigation of the State Fairgrounds coliseum for it being an unnecessary duplication of the William Neal Reynolds Coliseum on the nearby campus of N.C. State. State Agriculture Commissioner L. Y. Ballentine and State Fair manager Dr. J. S. Dorton said that the proposed 1.3 million dollar coliseum was necessary for the state's agriculture and livestock.
Just make sure it has heating and lights, and, in consequence, that the roof don't blow off in a norther.
On the editorial page, "The Great Debate Drones On" tells of the debate on foreign policy serving to confuse the American public, starting with the recommendations of withdrawal from the Far East and Western Europe ventured by former President Hoover and former Ambassador to Britain Joseph P. Kennedy, and then the questioning by Senator Taft of the authority of the President to send troops abroad, including Western Europe and Korea, without Congressional approval. Added to those statements were those of California Senator William Knowland who favored using the Chinese Nationalists in a war against the Chinese Communists. Governor James Byrnes of South Carolina had stated during his inaugural address earlier in the week his belief that without U.N. approval of air attacks on Chinese supply lines and a blockade, the U.S. ought withdraw from Korea and concentrate on its first line of defense against Communist aggression, Western Europe.
General Eisenhower, as supreme commander of NATO forces, was touring the capitals of Western Europe and finding out what each country had and needed, in preparation for a report to the President, the Joint Chiefs, and Congress. The General's prestige would carry great weight with the American public.
The general foreign policy was to bolster Western European defense, encouraging as much participation as possible from the Western European countries, and to hold firm in the Far East against Communist China while granting enough concessions to it to avoid a land war in China.
The debate on foreign policy was slowly being resolved, it finds, and it was a measure of the inherent strength of American democracy that it was being resolved in the correct manner.
"A Pioneer Retires" praises Dr. Hugh H. Bennett, 70, chief of the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, upon his retirement, effective April 15. Originally from Anson County in North Carolina, Dr. Bennett had worked tirelessly since being named to the post in 1933 for the concept that the soil was not inexhaustible and had to be conserved through proper farming methods, such as contour plowing and crop rotation. Such methods had once been laughed at by the big planters, but were now taken for granted and accepted by every tenant farmer.
"Absentee Ballots" finds the State Board of Elections to have made the case well for eliminating absentee ballots in general elections in the state, already having been eliminated some years earlier in the primaries. They were particularly ripe for voter fraud and that prospect was not outweighed by their convenience to those not able to appear personally to vote. It hopes that the General Assembly would follow the recommendation, including the exemption for men in service and disabled war veterans.
"Pat on the Back" commends the League of Women Voters for its devoted service to the community for a long time. It had been brought to mind by their unveiling of a voting machine, gradually replacing the old ballot boxes across the nation but still novel in North Carolina. While the war, it suggests, might render them scarce for a few years, it compliments the League for its initiative and enterprise in making the demonstration.
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Monkey Wins Tug of War", relates of a Hindu legend about a battle between a whale and an elephant which had turned out to the profit of a monkey by the fact of the latter betting both the whale and the elephant that he could outpull each, a bet accepted, whereupon the monkey then gave one end of the rope to the whale in the ocean and the other to the elephant in the jungle, gave the signal to each to pull and when both were exhausted, the monkey called it a draw and took his winnings.
The piece posits that Stalin was the monkey and the whale, the U.S., the elephant, China.
By October, 1962, Fidel Castro and Cuba might be suggested as the elephant
Bill Sharpe, in his "Turpentine Drippings", snippets from newspapers around the state, provides one from Estelle Loomis of the Richmond County Journal, who imparted of a man who was riding his horse with his little dog running alongside, when the horse suddenly pulled up and objected to being ridden at such a fast trot, warning the rider either to slow down or get off and walk, prompting the startled man to dismount the horse and run as fast as he could in the other direction, telling his dog that he did not know the horse could talk, to which the dog responded that he did not either.
How did the dog impart that information? Did he wag his tail or stamp his foot?
The Watauga Democrat tells of the weather always supplying an apt topic of conversation whenever the populace tired of settling international and domestic disputes among themselves, that when the weather finally would cease to become vicissitudinous, it wonders what people would then discuss.
Probably the weather and its
constancy, mutatis mutandis
Judging by the first two selections and their juxtaposition, Mr. Sharpe, blessed with the gift of clairvoyance, must have watched the "Alan Young Show" on Tuesday.
What's on the menu for today
John Wesley Clay of the Winston-Salem Journal provides a poem:
"Feel glum? Keep mum.
Don't grumble, be humble.
Trials cling? Just sing.
Don't fear, God's near.
Money goes? He knows.
Honor left, not bereft.
Don't rust. Work, trust."
You say; best pray.
Twenty years of schoolin'...
The Sanford Herald imparts of a man falling overboard from a ship in the Caribbean and a criminal defense attorney diving in after him, then both being escorted by man-eating sharks back to ship, regarding which the man rescued exclaimed that it had to be a miracle, to which the criminal defense lawyer remarked that it was just professional courtesy.
Shouldn't the man being rescued have been a corporate lawyer?
The Morganton Pocketbook tells of Emily Post recommending fresh playing cards for guests as she would no more think of using soiled cards than soiled napkins for her dinner guests, to which it adds that the same logic could be applied to use of cars for a second year, a cigarette for a second puff, or diamonds after they are worn once.
And so forth, so forth
Drew Pearson explains that it was because Washington was loath to investigate military blunders, as the Battle of the Bulge and the inadvertent American machine-gunning of 400 American paratroopers in Sicily during World War II, that he had published paraphrased dispatches between the Pentagon and General MacArthur to establish that the November-December 120-mile retreat in northeastern Korea to Hungnam had only faced 96,000 Chinese troops rather than the "bottomless well of manpower" stated in press accounts based on the public announcements of MacArthur headquarters. He would have been accused, he says, of lying by Senator McCarthy and others, had he not used those dispatches as his source.
The Senator, as it was, had accused him of giving secrets to the enemy or permitting the deciphering of coded messages. The latter was denied by the Secretary of the Army and the former, he asserts, was absurd on its face as the dispatches dealt with enemy strength, of which the Chinese already knew, and was published December 30, after the completion of the Eighth Army's retreat.
The reasons for the defeat, he says, had begun at the meeting between the President and General MacArthur at Wake Island where the General proposed his fast dash to the Manchurian border to get the troops home by Christmas. He predicted to the President that the Chinese might be provoked to attack across the Yalu River but said that they would not do so in force and if they did, his men could handle them. He also said that the North Korean guerrillas would be destroyed by the severe winter and that the South Korean Army could protect its homeland without a large U.N. army, that it would be best to leave Korea in the hands of Koreans.
The President questioned the wisdom of the march to the border and the withdrawal from occupation thereafter but never gave General MacArthur direct orders not to conduct the march. He speculates that FDR probably would have argued the General out of the venture. Admiral Chester Nimitz, during World War II, had successfully convinced General MacArthur not to land at Mindanao, where the Japanese were prepared, and instead opt for the Gulf of Leyte, where the General made his triumphant return to the Philippines in 1944.
But when the Wake Island meeting occurred in October, General MacArthur was fresh from his victory after the Inchon landings and it was hard to argue with him. The final decision on the march north was thus left to him, notwithstanding British and French warnings against it. The State Department, under the cloud of accusation for being pro-Communist, made no concerted effort to thwart the idea. It had sought to implement a British plan to establish a 40-mile zone below the border beyond which the U.N. troops would not go. But again, no direct orders to that effect were provided to General MacArthur.
Meanwhile, Mao Tse-Tung had warned the Indian Ambassador that if the U.N. troops crossed the 38th parallel, Communist Chinese troops would intervene.
The march to the Manchurian border nevertheless had proceeded and was met with disaster and large losses, forcing the retreat and mass evacuation from Hungnam, completed Christmas Day.
Marquis Childs discusses the pressures on inflation and the need for economic controls while their delay was being occasioned by the absence of adequate personnel to enforce them. Mike DiSalle, former Mayor of Toledo, was the director of Price Stabilization. Alan Valentine, former president of the University of Rochester, oversaw price stabilization as administrator of the Economic Stabilization Agency. And Charles E. Wilson, former president of G.E., was director of the Office of Defense Mobilization. Mr. DiSalle had wanted to implement a 30-day temporary price freeze but Mr. Valentine and others had been uncertain it would work. Mr. Wilson asked questions about how many businesses would seek exemptions and someone guessed it might be between 175,000 and 500,000. If the exempted businesses were not reviewed and denied by ESA within a designated time period, the exemption would automatically become effective. But since ESA had only a rudimentary staff, it lacked adequate personnel for such a venture. Mr. DiSalle then relented on his call for a 30-day price freeze.
Not only was lack of personnel a problem but the legislative exemption of foods from control, if the product were not achieving a parity price for farmers, presented another obstacle to effective price control.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the need for a national coalition Government to assure passage by the Congress of the Administration's foreign policy. During FDR's tenure during the war, he had brought into the Government former Republican Secretary of State Henry Stimson to become Secretary of War and Republican Senator Frank Knox to become Secretary of the Navy, both appointed in 1940. He also brought in Robert Lovett, James Forrestal, and John J. McCloy, all Republicans. He thereby achieved a coalition even when Senator Taft was saying that there would be no attack by Japan. The coalition left Senator Taft on the outside, impotent.
It had been reported that if Secretary of State Acheson were to resign his post, Chief Justice Fred Vinson would be appointed in his stead. But the Chief Justice had told the President that he was not interested in the position, removing thereby an obstacle to appointment of a Republican to the post, such as Governor Thomas Dewey.
Everyone in Washington appeared to favor such a coalition except Senator Taft, who would be frustrated by it, and the President, who would have to develop it. If the trend continued, they predict, the pressure for it would become irresistible.
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