The Charlotte News
Friday, November 23, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Robert B. Tuckman, that ceasefire negotiators in Korea had reached agreement on the wording for establishment of a buffer zone, with the only thing left being for liaison officers to agree on a map of the zone, itself, based on current battle lines, probably to be completed by the following day. The agreement, which provided that the buffer zone would be 2.5 miles wide, opened the way for the potential of a final ceasefire by Christmas, as for the buffer zone agreement to remain operable, all other conditions had to be worked out within 30 days. If no agreement could be reached by then, a new line would be drawn just prior to the final agreement based on any interim changes in the battle line from military action. In the meantime, fighting would continue until all points were settled. The full five-man committees would probably meet Sunday to approve the work of the subcommittees.
In the ground war, the Communists seized one of the highest hills west of Yonchon in hand-to-hand fighting, following a heavy enemy artillery barrage, with the result of slight penetration to the allied lines.
In the air war, jets engaged in battle for the first time in five days, with two enemy MIG-15s damaged in a battle between 30 enemy jets and 30 American F-84 Thunderjets, all of which returned safely. During the night, twelve B-29s made the first bombing strike against the enemy jet base at Uiju, two miles from the Manchurian border, with all of the Superfortresses returning safely.
The Army estimated that total enemy casualties in Korea through November 14 had reached 1,467,407, an increase of 9,941 over the previous week's estimate. The total included 1,068,644 battle casualties, 246,394 non-battle losses and 152,369 prisoners of war.
At Panmunjom, a leaky 16-foot balloon filled with explosive hydrogen nearly broke up the ceasefire negotiations, as it bounced off a hot stove pipe on the roof of the main conference tent and then hit a telephone pole. Staff officers of both negotiating teams ran for safety. The balloon was one of several anchored over the neutral conference site to warn planes to stay clear of the area and its tethering cable had become disconnected from its anchor.
In Paris, at the U.N. General Assembly meeting, the Soviet Union filed a formal complaint charging that the U.S., pursuant to its Mutual Security Act, was financing armed groups in Soviet territory, with the goal of overthrowing the Stalin Government. The State Department dismissed the protest as "groundless propaganda".
In Strasbourg, France, members of the U.S. Congress framed a joint statement of desire for swift action on construction of a European federation in return for American aid. The statement was to be presented at a conference of the European Consultative Assembly. The move was spearheaded by Senators Brien McMahon of Connecticut and Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, on the notion that the U.S. would not finance a divided Europe indefinitely.
Search planes combed the Dolomite Mountains in northeast Italy and over Yugoslavia for signs of a U.S. Air Force plane which had been missing since Monday. A traveler arriving in Vienna reported, without confirmation, that the plane had been shot down by Rumanian Army border guards as it made a slight incursion of the border during its flight from Germany to Belgrade. A U.S. legation spokesman in Vienna said the report was "very doubtful", as it was based on a call from an unidentified Rumanian woman the previous day, who claimed to have seen the plane crash in Rumanian territory near the Yugoslav border. Clouds and fog had previously hampered the search but had cleared this date.
Russia protested on November 7 to the U.S. that an American plane had violated the Siberian border in the area of Vladivostok and had been fired upon by a Soviet fighter plane. There was no official American comment yet in response.
Gordon Gray, temporary director of the Psychological Strategy Board since the prior June, said that he expected to leave the post at around the first of the year to resume his full-time duties as president of UNC. Dr. Raymond Allen, president of the University of Washington, indicated the previous day that he had accepted appointment as Mr. Gray's successor, but no official announcement had yet been made. Mr. Gray, former Secretary of the Army, had anticipated resigning at the first of the year from the outset of his acceptance of the job. The purpose of the Board was to submit plans for waging the Cold War.
The House Ways & Means subcommittee investigating the tax scandals was still seeking the Justice Department files on tax fraud investigations informally promised by the President but not yet ordered. Hearings were set to begin the following Monday, when former Assistant Attorney General Lamar Caudle, previously head of the tax division, would testify publicly before the subcommittee. White House press secretary Joseph Short said that the request was still under consideration by the President.
The subcommittee had found that its chairman, Representative Cecil King of California, had not intervened improperly in three Southern California tax cases, as previously charged in a newspaper report.
In Paris, Princess Margaret, 21, kept General Eisenhower waiting twenty minutes for their scheduled tea, causing the General visible impatience. The delay was blamed on the chauffeur of the Princess, for taking a wrong turn in traffic.
Such Royal impudence to our General will not be long tolerated, young lady. You are due for a whipping. Or, we shall provide you the option of going to America and there being compelled to listen to at least ten Senate floor speeches by Senator Joseph McCarthy, with the caveat that you may find yourself a captive audience of one in the Senate chamber.
In Prairie Village, a suburb of Kansas City, two men robbed a bank of an estimated $62,000 this date. The robbers had knocked at the door just before opening time and asked to be allowed into the bank, and when the only employee present refused their admittance, pulled a gun and forced the employee to open the door. While one of the gunmen watched the employees, the other forced the cashier to open the vault. The two men then fled in a late model yellow convertible.
They may have watched the last episode of "Boston Blackie" and taken it a little too seriously. Wonder if they left the top down as they fled, and whether one of the gunmen went up on the roof of the bank just so he could jump into the back of the fleeing automobile, so as to make it all like the real thing on tv.
In Detroit, a 28-year old man, who had been given up for dead during a six-year period while he was missing, was celebrating Thanksgiving with his family. On December 26, 1945, he had headed out alone into the Gulf of Mexico off Florida in a boat he and his brother had used for commercial sponge fishing, and two days later, the abandoned craft was found anchored 15 miles from shore, following which, the Coast Guard found the boat's dory floating in the open sea, causing the man to be given up as lost. He had phoned his brother from New Orleans the previous week in suburban Grosse Pointe Woods and told him he had blanked, but had begun recovering his memory about a month earlier after suffering a partially paralytic stroke while working as an orderly in a New Orleans hospital. He said that he was thankful to be reunited with his home, his wife and child on Thanksgiving.
Sounds fishy. He has probably become
a hitman
In Cortland, N.Y., a 15-year old boy who wanted to have Thanksgiving dinner with his mother biked 80 miles from North Bay on Oneida Lake to Cortland. He had been staying with his grandparents, who had planned to drive him to the home of his mother, but could not after his grandmother became ill, and so he took to the road alone, departing at 6 a.m. and arriving at 1 p.m., just in time for dinner.
Query what was his speed from his
grandmother's house he went in the North Woods over the river
Successful answers to both questions will result in receipt of a free turkey next Thanksgiving. Decisions of the judges as to correct answers are final.
In the sports section, sports editor Bob Quincy predicts that UNC would defeat Duke in football the following day, while sportswriter Sandy Grady predicted that the Blue Devils would win, the latter being decisively correct, 19-7, leaving the Tar Heels with a woeful 2-8 season, the penultimate season for head coach Carl Snavely, whose team would have a 2-6 season the following year, cut short two games by an outbreak of polio.
On the editorial page, "Rule Britannia, O'er the Channel" tells of Britain and the U.S. having been haggling for some time over command of the Atlantic, whether a British or American admiral would assume the command. Originally the previous summer, U.S. Admiral William Fechteler had been appointed chief of NATO's Atlantic Fleet, but following the objection of Winston Churchill, then head of the opposition in Parliament, who wanted a Briton appointed to the position, the appointment was withdrawn and meanwhile Admiral Fechteler had replaced the late Admiral Forrest Sherman as U.S. chief of Naval operations.
But now, Britain had agreed to the appointment of an American commander for the Atlantic Fleet, having been mollified by the agreement to establish a new English Channel command, over which a Briton would be appointed commander.
The piece thinks that such nationalistic self-interest, delaying NATO progress, spelled trouble for the organization and that all 12 nations ought get together and do what was best for their mutual defense rather than squabble over which country provided individual commanders. It suggests that NATO needed more of the spirit of General Eisenhower who, when he took command of NATO, had said he was now "1/12th British, 1/12th French, and 1/12th American".
"The Long Range Danger" finds the worst aspect of the revelations in the income tax collections scandals being that they might encourage the American people, facing high individual and corporate taxes, to evade their taxes. It urges restoration of public confidence in the tax collections system lest the country become as many European countries, where taxes were high but revenues low because no one bothered to pay taxes.
It places the onus on the President promptly and decisively to clean house, by ordering the Attorney General to open up Justice Department files to Congressional investigators—something the President had already assured he was going to do but, as the front page clarifies, had not yet ordered. It also urges him to appoint a special commission to review the powers of the IRB and its strict secrecy rules regarding tax fraud investigations, and to fire any official at the IRB or Justice Department who had violated the law or permitted taxpayers to violate the law.
"Atrocities" tells of confusion surrounding the details of the enemy murder of U.S. prisoners in Korea, that U.N. supreme commander General Matthew Ridgway had confirmed the murder of 365 Americans who were prisoners of war, and found "considerable evidence" that about 6,000 Americans had been murdered. The General made it clear, however, that these deaths had not increased the overall number of known dead, that all American deaths had been reported to relatives and that there was no need for concern that previously undisclosed dead would be added to existing totals.
The piece finds it therefore doubly unfortunate that the colonel in the Judge Advocate General's Corps had released the information, as it had left the impression with many that the 6,600 U.N. prisoners, among whom 5,500 had been Americans, who reportedly had been so murdered by the enemy, had not been previously disclosed. The resulting anger among Americans was still compounded by confusion over the true facts, leading to calls for use of the atomic bomb in North Korea.
The President had said that the report, if true, was the most uncivilized thing which had happened in the previous century, a remark which the piece finds to be hyperbole in light of the millions of European Jews and thousands of Polish officers killed by the Nazis during the war, plus the tens of thousands of women and children killed by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki or burned alive by firebombs in Germany and Japan during the war.
It remarks that early during World War II, the U.S. had made much of its ability to engage in "pinpoint" bombing, but that such attempted bombing had never lived up to its name and soon gave way to saturation bombing and firebombing, the latter particularly effective on Japanese paper homes.
It indicates that war was an "atrocious business" and that some Americans apparently believed it was less atrocious to kill women and children with bombs than to bludgeon to death a captured soldier. It imagines that the victim, in either case, saw little difference. It says that it was not trying to minimize the enormity of the Communist atrocities and was glad that Americans were able to show outrage and anger over such flouting of the traditional rules of war governing treatment of prisoners. It finds that the Communists would play every game by their own set of rules and that full realization of that fact had been driven home by this report of atrocities, a report which would better equip the nation for the "hard months and years ahead".
This editorial appears all over the place on this particular issue, grappling with how to treat it and winding up not treating it very effectively, appearing to equate Allied saturation bombing and use of the atomic bomb, which accelerated the end of World War II in Europe and the Pacific, thereby saving the lives of untold thousands upon thousands of Allied and enemy troops, as well as thousands upon thousands of civilians in both Europe and Japan, with the deliberate killing of bound, unarmed prisoners of war. It succumbs to the considerable myopia which had come to color much of its opinion of the Truman Administration, of which the newspaper clearly was not fond. It is very easy, with 20-20 hindsight, to try to equate atrocities of this type, the brutal slaying of prisoners of war, with strategic bombing of civilian population centers to bring a determined enemy to unconditional surrender. The Japanese high command had vowed to fight to the last person to defend Japan against invasion, an invasion which could have dragged on for quite some time without resolution, inevitably resulting in loss of life far in excess of that at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So it was also with the bombing of Dresden.
Thus, it is rather absurd to compare these acts of warfare with vicious atrocities, for which there was no reason other than expedience so that the enemy would not have to feed and house prisoners of war while feeding its own ruthless sense of primitive barbarity toward the "Western imperialists", the propaganda which the Communist soldiers were regularly fed by their imperial masters.
The editorial needed some deeper reflection before putting its words to print, heeding the advice of its own editorial the previous day, criticizing Senators and Congressmen for being overly verbose.
A piece from Business Action, titled "One Down, One to Go", tells of the Federal Security Agency having determined that there was no longer a threat from parrots of parrot fever and so had relaxed the inspection quarantine and shipping rules for parrots, having determined that parrots were not the principal carriers of the disease in any event.
It congratulates the Agency for voluntarily ending a restriction, but carps sarcastically that FSA planned to continue its study of why Navajo Indians customarily chewed more peyote at parties than while home alone.
Drew Pearson tells of Congressman George Bender of Ohio having visited General Eisenhower in Paris, along with two other Congressmen, and asking the General whether he was going to run for the presidency, receiving a noncommittal answer. Mr. Bender had asked the General whether the story by Arthur Krock of the New York Times had been accurate, that he and the President had discussed politics while the General visited Washington, causing perturbation of the General, who irritatedly responded that he could not understand why a reputable newsman would fall for such a "phony" story, that there was no truth at all to it. Mr. Pearson notes that the President had also recently stated the same thing.
The reason the President had brushed aside French President Vincent Auriol's suggestion for a Big Four meeting was that Secretary of State Acheson had told the President that the proposal had been made without the approval of the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman or the French Cabinet. U.S. Ambassador Philip Jessup had pleaded with President Auriol to eliminate the proposal from his U.N. speech, but he had gone on with it anyway, another reason Secretary Acheson advised the President to reject the entire proposal.
The previous month, the Army had refused to accept a single medium tank from its own Detroit arsenal among 100 which had been produced, because the turrets failed to swing onto a target within six seconds and hold that target automatically as the tank continued to move in any direction. The rejected tanks could conduct the maneuver but it took nine or ten seconds for the turret to move onto the target.
Price administrator Mike DiSalle would soon announce higher ceiling prices on practically all clothing.
Newsmen had nicknamed Arval Erickson, new head of the Office of Price Stabilization ,"meat head".
The previous January, the Government had been forced to pay out $17,000 for new plaster and broken glass because of damage caused in Las Vegas by the detonations of atomic bombs at the Nevada test site. The new series of tests, smaller and some underground, had done less damage, to cost the Government less than $10,000 in damages.
Stewart Alsop, in Tel Aviv, tells of Israel being flat broke and becoming worse economically, with five times more imports than exports, reliant on U.S. Jewish community aid, which was providing 70 million dollars per year, as well as U.S. Government aid, likely to be a hundred million dollars per year for many years to come. Meanwhile, the Arab nations of the Middle East were hoping for the economic collapse of Israel. But the continuing U.S. aid plus the resolve of the Israelis made that prospect unlikely.
Israel was having to absorb 10,000 immigrants per month after doubling its Jewish population during the previous four years in an area the size of Sicily, but with a much smaller portion of arable land.
Were Israel to collapse economically, total chaos would result in the Middle East, resulting in either a violent expansion of Israel in an expression of economic desperation or a renewed Arab attack on the weakened state, with either alternative being fatal to Western interests. It was thus essential for the U.S. to ensure that Israel would survive.
Nevertheless, American policy, he posits, had been influenced by two illusions, one being that Arab hostility to Israel was wholly irrational and without depth, and the other being that Israel precisely balanced in strategic importance the whole of the Arab and Moslem worlds. Mr. Alsop concludes that it was necessary to be rid of illusions for there to be a rational policy.
Robert C. Ruark tells of it seeming to him that he was sicker than he once had been, notwithstanding the fact that he took all kinds of pills and shots. He thinks generally the populace of 1951 had become too dependent on vitamins and pills, without which the nation had gotten along fine for many years. Aspirin and a few other such light remedies had been in common usage, but not so many pills in such heavy dosages.
He finds that the medical community now was suggesting that the wonder drugs were losing their punch, as the bacteria they were fighting had become increasingly immune to the vaccines. Mr. Ruark believes it true based on his experience, as he had germs which would have "slaughtered" his grandfather, as did all the other people possessed of hypochondria. He concludes that all the pills and injections had only weakened people and encouraged the viruses.
A letter from Congressman Charles Deane of Rockingham expresses regret for not having been able to accept the invitation to hear Senator Guy Gillette deliver his message in Charlotte regarding the Atlantic Union concept, that is a federation for the NATO nations. He asserts his belief in the concept, that it would do much to eliminate friction and establish the goal of peace.
A letter from a Private First Class stationed in North Korea tells of being unable to obtain Christmas cards and so sends home greetings, tells of it being wet and cold, but that such conditions had not caused the GI's to stop thinking of home and the ones they loved.
A letter from Havana, Cuba, asserts that the ideas expressed by statesmen, columnists, radio commentators and other people who influenced public opinion had, for many generations, prevented America from making the required military preparations necessary to avoid the two world wars and the present conflict with Communism. He posits that if the people in the Western Hemisphere continued to hold such beliefs, their countries would eventually suffer invasion and conquest by foreign enemies.
A letter from P. C. Burkholder, former failed Congressional candidate on both the Republican and Democratic tickets on more than one occasion, finds the President's firing of people from his Administration to have been only in response to their getting caught committing wrongful conduct, not because they had done the wrong.
P. C. needs some country buttermilk again.
Framed Edition
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