The Charlotte News
Thursday, January 25, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that an allied patrol sent out this date to make contact with the enemy had entered snowy Hoengsong, 33 miles south of the 38th parallel, for the second consecutive day but found no enemy presence, prompting speculation that the Communist troops, primarily North Korean in this instance, had quietly withdrawn from the central and western fronts, possibly to await diplomatic developments at the U.N. The only enemy contact Wednesday night was a minor engagement at Yoju, 40 miles southeast of Seoul. Some 3,000 Chinese and North Korean troops were observed, however, eleven miles to the northwest of Yoju, digging in for apparent preparation for a fight.
Allied war planes continued to pound enemy positions throughout North Korea, wrecking the town of Chunchon. Yak night fighters attacked American B-26 bombers on Wednesday night, one of the few appearances by Yaks during the war, but caused no damage. F-80 fighters had joined the mission, which produced many fires in Chunchon.
Officials at the Pentagon saw the lull in fighting as the calm before the storm, as the Chinese and North Koreans were believed to be building up their forces for a renewed offensive. They said that the U.N. forces would be prepared to inflict heavier losses on the enemy than previously, in furtherance of the aim of punishing aggression. Part of the strategy was to pin down the enemy so as to upset Communist plans to attack elsewhere, such as against Indo-China or Hong Kong.
Correspondent Preston Groves, who had accompanied General Eisenhower on his two-week tour of NATO capitals, reports of the General's visit to Reykjavik, Iceland, one of the twelve NATO nations, with the intent to prevent the island from falling to the Soviets in case of war. Iceland had no military to lend to the common defense of Western Europe, indeed had few guns, but had some value as an allied air and naval base in the event of war. The main effort, however, would be to keep it out of Russian hands as it could be used as an enemy air and naval base from which to launch attacks against the U.S. mainland and Atlantic shipping. The next stop for the General would be Ottawa, Canada, and then home to Washington. A radio speech to the nation regarding his findings on his two-week tour of the NATO capitals might follow on February 2.
Will the groundhog see his shadow?
At the U.N., twelve Asian and Arab nations were pressing before the General Assembly's political committee a new formula for peace in Korea, apparently with the blessing of the Communist Chinese. The new plan called for immediate creation of a seven-power committee on the Far East, without mention of a ceasefire, a plan resembling the previous demands of the Chinese. Western diplomats, however, foredoomed the effort as futile. The U.S. had opposed such a move since the Chinese had first proposed it. The plan, according to the Indian chief delegate, would take precedence over the U.S.-sponsored U.N. resolution to brand China an aggressor and invoking of any consequent sanctions. In response to a statement by Prime Minister Nehru of India that Communist China should long ago have been made a member of the U.N., chief U.S. delegate to the U.N., Warren Austin, said, "You can't shoot your way into the United Nations."
Assistant Secretary of Defense Anna Rosenberg told the House Armed Services Committee that the Defense Department was going to lower its physical and mental standards for military service as far as security would permit, enabling about 150,000 men to be accepted who had been previously rejected for service. She told the press later that the 799,000 men who had been rejected for physical or mental unfitness would be reappraised.
State Department adviser on the Far East, John Foster Dulles, bearing the title of Ambassador, arrived in Japan to begin talks with General MacArthur and top Japanese leaders re settlement of a treaty with Japan.
Marriner Eccles, member and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, testifying before the joint Senate-House Economic Committee, urged a 44-hour work week without overtime pay as a means of increasing production during the national emergency.
Meanwhile, the Government was preparing its wage and price control orders, to be issued probably in the ensuing 24 hours. The Office of Price Stabilization rolled back the price of hides to the highest levels of the previous November, the second price control order of the emergency, the first having been on automobiles a month earlier.
What would be the price for not
hiding? For with all of this new-fangled surveillance, where're you
gonna hide?
Former Mayor of Charlotte, Ben Douglas, was appointed to be a "temporary consultant" to the Office of Price Stabilization in Region Four at Richmond, Va.
In Raleigh, a bill was introduced in the State Senate to change the law regulating campaign spending in the State primaries. It would eliminate existing limits on spending but would make disclosures of spending more truthful and would allow the Assembly to implement spending limits if it chose to do so. Present limits were $12,000 for primary candidates in races for Governor and Senator, and $6,000 for the candidates in runoff primaries, but those had been criticized for being too low. Another bill would permit confinement of mentally ill persons to private hospitals, county hospitals, or jails pending placement in a State hospital.
If this up and down, back and forth war continues over yonder, you may have half the state in there before it's over.
John Daly of The News tells of Congressman Hamilton Jones informing that Charlotte was being considered as the site for a Naval supply depot which would employ between 5,000 and 7,000 persons. The decision would be deferred for several weeks while a study of the various prospective locations for the depot was proceeding.
According to the "Our Weather" box, of this date, St. Paul's Day, the old proverb said: "If the day be bright and clear, it betides a happy year; if blustering winds do blow aloft, then wars shall trouble the realm full oft."
And if it be a flurry of blood that which, in the snow, you coughed, you're in trouble, mate; take rest on something furry and soft.
On the editorial page, "Our Long Range Objective" favors the U.S.-sponsored U.N. resolution to brand Communist China an aggressor in Korea. To do less, it suggests, would compromise the honor of the troops who had fought or died in the Korean war, as well would compromise the strength and integrity of the U.N. and weaken the purpose of its original resolution the prior June condemning North Korea for its incursion of the 38th parallel.
But it also believes that while the condemnation was a matter of preservation of honor, to act precipitously with regard to consequent sanctions for the incursion would be to sacrifice potentially the Western alliance while taking on a fight probably too tough to make at present against the outnumbering Chinese. It might be that an effective sea and air war could offset the disparity in land forces, but that was beyond the expertise of the public and the press to determine.
Having sufficient time to build up forces in the Far East was the central ingredient to success, and so impetuous action could prove disastrous. It counsels therefore against acting out of emotion and potentially plunging the world thereby into another general war before the U.N. forces were ready to meet it, the goal of U.S. and U.N. defense efforts being to avoid a third world war, not to create one.
"Let's Get a Ruling" urges getting an official ruling from the National Production Authority on whether the proposed State Fairgrounds coliseum was within the guidelines of the Federal agency. Raleigh officials had apparently been able to bypass the regulations by convincing NPA that the proposed coliseum was an "educational" structure. But on January 13, the NPA issued a ban on construction of all commercial buildings. An NPA official was quoted in the Raleigh News & Observer the previous day as saying that such a project could not have acquired approval at the present time.
Whether the State should be expending money for a structure to display pigs and cows for one week out of the year was a separate issue. The 1949 Legislature had appropriated the money for the project as an incentive to 4-H Clubs across the state to display their livestock. But now it was a question of whether the State was going to evade NPA regulations for such an inessential structure in time of national crisis. It favors getting an official NPA ruling before proceeding with further debate on the project.
"Irregular Truck Speeds" tells of the Legislature considering a regulation to require trucks of certain weights to have motors strong enough to maintain reasonable speeds while going uphill. Another possibility was to equip trucks with an auxiliary motor, as designed by a Charlotte engineer, to operate on the uphill climb. It would enable the trucks to operate on schedule without violation of speed laws to make up for lost time. It favors such legislation as improving safety on the roads.
A piece from the Monroe Journal, titled "Nobody Doing Anything", finds that with the emphasis on building and improving roads and making automobiles run faster and faster, there should be some emphasis given to supply of resting places for the motorist to stop for awhile by the side of the road during the relentless drive. It favors having whole farms and every other square block in cities turned into parking lots and all roads doubled or trebled in width. Then, it posits, when cars were built which could not exceed 40 mph, the slaughter rate might decrease.
Bill Sharpe, in his "Turpentine Drippings", snippets from newspapers around the state, provides one from the Greensboro Daily News which refrains from wishing a Happy New Year to any resident of Guilford County who believed that the country owed him or her a living, plus a new automobile and a friend to go with it.
The Sanford Herald tells of a woman who asked a body repairman whether he could fix the fender on her car so that her husband would not know it had been bent, to which he had replied that he probably couldn't but could fix it sufficiently that she could ask her husband in a few days how he had bent it.
She was getting a spray job.
The Waynesville Mountaineer tells of it never being too cold to snow, as commonly believed, that snowfall had been recorded in Alaska at 56 degrees below zero. It also snowed on average as much as it had in the past, according to the National Weather Bureau, fuzzy memories to the contrary notwithstanding.
The Robesonian of Lumberton tells of a teacher instructing her class, when asked whether the country was in a war, that it was still at war with Japan. It suggests that it was no more difficult to understand than what the President meant when he said that the U.S. was not in a war with China, that school children would still be wondering when they grew older what he had in mind as the definition of a war. It suggests it to be a "sorry joke" for men in Korea to be killed by Chinese Communists against whom the country was not at war. Meanwhile, the official state of war still transpiring with Japan meant nothing except that the U.S. could still maintain occupation troops there.
The cynical piece neglects the President's logic, in deference to the U.N., to avoid statements of war against an enemy greatly outnumbering the U.S. in a remote location, while also neglecting the fact that the only reason the treaty with Japan had not been concluded, the same which caused the delay in the treaty with Germany, was the refusal of the Soviets to cooperate in reaching terms. Both the U.S. and Japan wanted the occupation ended.
Teach the children better and then
you won't raise idiots like those uninformed morons on the radio out
of Texas, favoring "America First" and "nationalism",
as if that was something the country had never tried without
disastrous results. Of course, someone who believes that D-Day occurred in 1943 and the fall of France in 1941, as was stated a few months ago by the Omniscient One, could not be relied upon too much to be too swift
regarding U.S. and world history
Mrs. Theo Davis of the Zebulon Record finds that she had probably not missed much by never having been on a real sleigh ride when growing up, after reading the account of John Gould of Maine in the Christian Science Monitor, in which he had said that the experience was similar to sitting on the porch in a hammock at ten degrees facing into a stiff gale with both feet in ice water while someone threw snowballs in your face and jingled bells to the side. He said that he did not regret that the experience was no longer an integral part of his life.
The Camden Chronicle tells of one of the best ways to protect a wedding ring being to soak it in dishwater three times per day.
What if it drops down the drain and the plumber comes to fix the pipes and, in the process, promises a dishwasher to the wife?
Drew Pearson describes the revenue disclosed by Virginia Hill, in whose home Bugsy Siegel had been shot and killed in 1947, revealing mysterious sources. In 1947, she declared $16,000 in income from "wagers on various sporting events". She was able to reduce her tax burden, however, to $4,270 by claiming as dependents her mother and her brother. He finds it remarkable, given the number of trips she had taken throughout the U.S. and to Europe and her extravagant lifestyle otherwise. The previous year, she had received about $24,000 from the same source. In 1942, she had attributed $18,000 to "winnings from bets on races". He proceeds to detail some of her extravagance and ties to the underworld through her acquaintance with Joe Adonis and Frank Costello, through whom she had met Mr. Siegel. For instance, she had incurred a hotel bill of over $11,000 in Sun Valley, Idaho, during a two month period in early 1950 and paid for it in $100 bills.
Little effort was done by the Treasury to check the tax returns of Ms. Hill and other underworld figures because the transactions were in cash and hard to track. But he suggests that someone with such a short-term hotel bill obviously had to earn considerably more than $16,000 to $20,000 per year.
Not if she lived in the park the rest of the year. Winter's tough, especially in Idaho.
General MacArthur had cabled Washington of reported Russian troop movements on Sakhalin, the island with direct access to northern Japan. It was initially feared that such reports, if true, indicated a plan to invade Japan. But the reports could not be verified by the CIA or British intelligence, as the Japanese prisoners who had made the reports admitted that they had only heard second-hand of the supposed Russian troop movements. He suggests that the information may have been deliberately conveyed as a scare tactic by the Russians in its war of nerves. Yet, it was a fact that there were heavy Russian troop concentrations on Sakhalin, probably as many as 750,000, supported by probably 4,500 planes, plus airborne divisions and about a hundred submarines.
On the other hand, U.S. strategists believed that the American forces in Japan were strong enough to block any Russian attack, with a strong Naval presence and the largest contingent of jet fighters in the world at their disposal, plus the atom bomb, supplying an effective deterrent to Russian aggression.
The Australian Government had proposed an alliance with the U.S., which could bring it closer to the U.S. than to Britain, as had been the case for the most part during World War II. Australia was urging that the U.S. keep a close eye on China while Britain wanted the U.S. to pull back from the Far East and concentrate on Europe.
Marquis Childs discusses General Eisenhower's tour of the Western European capitals to assess their readiness and ability to contribute to the NATO alliance and the positive impact on their confidence from the General's mere presence as supreme commander of NATO. The tour had reduced the level of dispute in the Senate on the subject of sending troops to Western Europe, as Senator Taft had backed away from his earlier view that no troops should be sent, to a position that there should only be limits on the number.
General Eisenhower would need to convince Congress that the common defense of Europe was practicable while making it plain that no assurances could be provided. While the idea of a shared defense of Western Europe was a gamble militarily, it was less so than the course favored by former President Hoover and others, to withdraw and fall back to the two oceans for reliance on defense.
General Eisenhower would likely provide an address to the American people and would recommend to Congress supplying, by the spring of 1952, four divisions for Europe to add to the two American divisions already present.
The biggest question mark was whether Russia would make an aggressive move during the current year, before the NATO defenses were in place. The signs were readable either way. Russia had stepped up its propaganda in Britain and France, to try to erode confidence in the NATO plan, suggesting that cooperation with it would result in war. The visit by General Eisenhower and the recognition by the Russians that he was rebuilding confidence in Europe constituted the reason for the Communist demonstrations of late in Rome and Paris.
Robert C. Ruark again addresses the subject of draft dodging, as in his previous piece on the subject, in which he recommended application of the death penalty rather than a mere five years in prison. This time, he offers another alternative, consigning the draft dodger to menial jobs in military service in non-critical areas, such as KP duty, sweeping the streets or cleaning the cattle barns, while being properly supervised.
He reminds that in prisons work was done by inmates and with reasonable competence and so there was no reason to assume that it would not occur likewise with draft resistors in the military.
"So in the new trouble we do not really have to shoot the dissident. You just put 'em to work, unpleasantly. Over-all it's no worse than dying the hard way, as a hero."
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