The Charlotte News
Saturday, March 17, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that General MacArthur had visited the front in Korea and found everything going well, reaching by jeep within 2,000 yards of the battle line, where 200,000 Chinese were massed below Chunchon. The General returned to Tokyo Saturday night.
Correspondent William C. Barnard reported that American forces northwest of Hongchon Saturday had thrown back a company-sized attack by the Chinese near the area General MacArthur had visited.
During a dogfight between three F-80 Shooting Stars and three Russian-built MIGs, an F-80 had collided in the air with a MIG on Saturday and plunged to the ground, with both pilots presumed dead.
Fifth Air Force fighters flew 733 sorties by dusk, attacking Communist troops and transports.
It was reported that there was virtually no contact between the allies and enemy forces on the east-central front. Censorship withheld further reports from the three sectors.
A U.N. intelligence officer said that there were signs that the Communist troops might soon have to retreat north of the 38th parallel.
More than 170,000 enemy troops had been killed or wounded since the start of the allied offensive on January 25. The Eighth Army claimed 950 casualties had been inflicted the previous day. A Navy announcement said that 8,000 enemy troops had been killed or wounded on Thursday by warship bombardment of barracks near Wonsan on the northeast coast.
Correspondent Russell Brines reports from Tokyo that U.N. commanders generally felt that allied diplomats now had their best chance since November to win an acceptable peace in Korea. The current offensive had killed or wounded some of the best troops the Chinese had. General MacArthur had emphasized, however, that the enemy had suffered no decisive defeat thus far. The military commanders believed that this opportunity would decrease in the coming weeks as allied forces were now operating about as far north as they could with present strength and still maintain supply of tanks and artillery, that the Chinese were apt to be more reasonable during a period of such high losses, and because the Korean winter, when frostbite and exposure had resulted in high enemy losses, was about to come to a close.
In Charlottesville, Va., Congressman Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania called on the President to ask the U.N. to demand that all Communist forces withdraw immediately from Korea to a point well behind the Manchurian border. He said that in the likely event that they would refuse such a demand, it would place the allies in a much better moral and spiritual position to press for strong U.N. sanctions against the aggression, as it would place the onus on Chinese leaders to stop the slaughter of their own troops. He said that President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points had weakened the German will to fight in World War I and thought that such a demand, well-promulgated across the Far East, would have a like effect on Chinese morale.
In Frankfurt, Germany, U.S. officials were investigating sales of U.S. Army surplus equipment which had been originally supplied as U.S. aid. The sales had reportedly resulted in large profits for European operators and some of the equipment was believed to have gone to Russian satellite countries. The West German Government had frozen all property under the control of Steg, the German state corporation set up to dispose of Army surplus. A raid by police the previous day had seized the records of one Frankfurt company which dealt with Steg. A U.S. Congressional committee had reported "preliminary evidence" that a British businessman had made a hundred million dollars from these sales.
In New York, gambling kingpin Frank Costello, claiming he was too hoarse, again refused to testify before the Kefauver organized crime investigating committee and a late bulletin said that the committee had asked the Senate to cite him for contempt of Congress, along with gamblers Frank Erickson and Joe Adonis. The committee denied that it intended to call Governor Dewey to testify regarding a reported police investigation of gambling in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
Sources reported that more Federal tax prosecutions against organized crime figures were in store from a three-year investigation, following the announcement the previous day of the charges against Ralph Capone, brother of the deceased Chicago gangster.
In Calhoun, La., five men and possibly six had been killed when a twin-engine Navy plane crashed and burned during a training flight from Pensacola, Fla., to Dallas, Tex.
In San Francisco, a lovesick Air Force corporal tried to rob a Bank of America branch, creating a comedy of errors. He was arrested on suspicion of robbery and kidnapping. The job went wrong when a clerk saw his revolver and told the manager who called the police. The robber then took his money, exited the door and ran to his car, giving up his hostage in the process. He could not get his car door open, however, and then jumped into another car and ordered the driver to drive away. But that car was on blocks having its axle repaired and could not move. Another car came by and he jumped into that one, right beside a police officer answering the radio call for the robbery. When arrested after a brief struggle with the officer, he had $2.61, 50 revolver cartridges and $2,100 which he obtained from the bank. He said that he needed the money so that he could get married but refused to tell who the lucky bride-to-be was.
Bob Sain of The News tells of Senator Taft's speech the previous evening at the Hotel Charlotte, in which he had said before a receptive crowd of 250 who had paid $7.50 each to attend the dinner, that the election of 1950 which had returned him to the Senate had been a tribute to the working man, showing that he was an American first and a labor union member second. He referenced the efforts of organized labor to defeat him in 1950 because of his co-sponsorship of the Taft-Hartley law passed over the President's veto in 1947.
The Miami Herald reported of an ad in the newspaper for an auction to sell off unmarried men as husbands for wealthy women tourists. The organization sponsoring the auction would receive ten percent of the money and the groom would keep the rest. The organization had received 127 applications since the ad had appeared in the Herald on Thursday.
In New York City, the traffic stripe on Fifth Avenue, usually white, was painted green for St. Patrick's Day. Pranksters, however, smeared red paint over it, but City workmen had repainted it green.
On the editorial page, "Proof for the Orient" tells of the retreat by the Communists in Korea having ended about twenty miles south of the 38th parallel. Perhaps the parallel would be crossed again by the U.N. forces or perhaps it would not, the object now being, according to General Matthew Ridgway, the destruction of the enemy rather taking of real estate. The latest drive had shown the people of the Orient that the U.S. and the U.N. had the will to resist Communist expansion.
While China's vast manpower and geographical extent would resist occupation and control, the allied purpose in Korea had never been occupation of China, but rather only to convince the people of the Far East that the resources of the U.N. were available to fight Communism if they wanted them.
The piece refuses to join the pessimists, as Senator Taft, who said that the action was useless and should never have been undertaken. The action had proved to the South Koreans, the Indo-Chinese, and the people of India and Indonesia that Communism did not have a free hand in that part of the world and that the Communist Chinese were not invincible when fought. While the Communist soldiers had fought fiercely, they were also lacking in support, supplies and food.
It recognizes that there would be more fighting in Korea, possibly a spring offensive by the Communists, and perhaps partial Russian intervention with planes and pilots plus submarine warfare. But the meeting of the challenge had been important in bolstering morale, especially in Indo-China, encouraging others in the region to stand up against Communist aggression.
"The Axe for State Bonus Bill" tells of a bill introduced before the Legislature which had provided for bonuses for veterans from the state, to be paid from State taxes on liquor, wine and beer. There was no great sentiment among veterans for such a bonus and so the killing of the bill, it advises, would be a good thing. The Federal Government took adequate care of veterans, and state and local services supplemented that effort. The nation owed the full measure of gratitude to its veterans, but there was no need for the bonus, only leading to an increase in taxes.
"A Basic Flaw in Democracy" finds that the RFC, while being the focus of the current Senate Banking subcommittee investigation, was not the only Government agency which had been subjected to influence peddling, that any agency which dispensed money or property was likewise the object of such besought favoritism. It was the result of a weakness in human character rather than so much the fault of the system.
It posits that when and if the whole system were bared, it would show that members of Congress were just as guilty as the Administration in encouraging such favoritism. Such shortcomings existed at the state and local levels of government as well. It suggests that trying to cure them by eliminating one agency was "like trying to cure the gout by lopping off the little toe."
A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "Ignis Virginibus"—not about Virginia's ignominious ouster, while chasing the ignis fatuus, from the NCAA Tournament in 2018—tells of the mysterious ghost light of Turlington Road in Suffolk, Va. A Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch editorial had regarded it as an ignorant prank by a corpulent man, the ignis fatuus. (Continuing the figure which is not, that would imply, we suppose, a fat man in Baltimore, perhaps the ghost of H. L. Mencken?)
The piece has its own theories, that it was the only light which someone was trying to hide under a bushel, or a light never on land or sea, or "the light that lies/ in woman's eyes", or even Jeanie with the light brown hair, or someone tripping the light fantastic—which would inevitably be that trippy-hippie guy at Duke, wouldn't it?
It was possibly the source of the expression to which editors, unable to understand a subject, resorted to resolve the matter by pointing out that more heat than light surrounded an issue, or conceivably, it ventures further, the light that failed, "the ghost light of things past, some aeons ago when Virginia did not have to invent tourist gags to compete with the honest-Injun attractions of North Carolina."
Well, maybe it was about basketball
Whatever it was, it did not shine
for the Spartans today, either the ones from Pulpit Hill or the ones
from further north. But, insofar as the former, here's to the seniors
who took the program to two straight championship games, to within a
quarter second of overtime in one of them and to a win last year.
That was not a bad accomplishment. And this year, getting a number 2
seed and finishing tenth in the A.P. polling with the toughest
schedule in the country, though not looking great last November
against the Spartans, or today for thirty minutes against the Aggies,
was nevertheless pretty good. We shall miss Messrs. Pinson and Berry
but look forward to next year. It was a fairly short March this time,
but not half so as that of the Cavaliers. But next year, take Wofford
or their functional equivalent seriously, please. Always remember "Ignis Virginibus
And here's to old Woody. Thanks for the memories
Drew Pearson, in Frankfort, Germany, tells of the top mystery in Europe being the disappearance of four Americans in the Noel Field case after Mr. Field had been named by Whittaker Chambers as being a member of the Communist cell within the State Department. The disappearance was being linked to the death of Laurence Duggan who had ostensibly jumped, fell or was pushed from his 16th floor office window in New York in December, 1948—four months before former Defense Secretary James Forrestal had fallen to his death from the 16th floor of Bethesda Naval Hospital, labeled a suicide. Mr. Duggan had been named in the State Department investigation, though cleared by the Justice Department—his name having been released by HUAC just after his death, as then-Congressman Karl Mundt of HUAC had callously said that the names would be released as they jumped out of windows.
Mr. Pearson indicates that seven persons had died mysteriously after being named in connection with the Alger Hiss case. Mr. Field had disappeared in Czechoslovakia on May 10, 1949 and his brother, Herman, had vanished on August 22 of that year while traveling by plane from Warsaw to Prague. Mr. Field's wife then disappeared a few days later while trying to locate her husband in Prague. A year later, Erica Wallachs, a friend of the Fields, had entered the Russian zone of Berlin and never returned.
At the same time, Harry Dexter White, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, named by Elizabeth Bentley as being a member of the Communist cell within the Government, had died ostensibly of a heart attack on August 16, 1948, shortly after his HUAC testimony. It had been later reported that the actual cause of his death was an overdose of digitalis. Walter Marvin Smith, a Justice Department attorney, was found at the base of a Department staircase where he had fallen or jumped on October 20, 1948, shortly after his questioning by HUAC regarding his notarization of a certificate of title on a Model A Ford transferred from Mr. Hiss to William Rosen, described as a Communist organizer, and, according to Mr. Chambers, subsequently turned over to Mr. Chambers. Mr. Smith had been the only witness to the transfer. Mr. Duggan, shortly before his death, had been questioned regarding spies in the State Department. His wife was paid by the insurance company a non-suicide benefit because the company did not think it was reasonable that a man had fallen through a window while putting on his overshoes, as the official report of his death had concluded.
Mr. Duggan and Mr. Field had served in the State Department at the same time and had shared a house together in Washington for a period. Mr. Duggan told his superiors at the State Department that he had attended a Communist meeting once during his early days at State but had never joined the party or felt sympathy for its aims. After the war, he remained in Europe to write a book on Czechoslovakia and Poland, with which he had become familiar while serving in the League of Nations secretariat and as European director of the Unitarian Service Committee during the war. A year and a half after his disappearance, six East German Communists were charged in fall, 1950 with dealing with "the American spy, Noel Field." Czech refugees had reported that Mr. Field would testify in the trial of Czech Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis, though nothing had surfaced to substantiate the claim.
In February, 1950, the editor of the Czech Communist newspaper was denounced for having betrayed State secrets to a Western espionage agent identified as Herman Field, Mr. Field's brother who had disappeared on the plane flight to Prague from Warsaw in August, 1949.
The disappearances in the Field case had been variously explained by his supposedly having been working with the Communists such that when Congressional investigations had become too hot, he desired protective custody, or that he had become too dangerous to the Communists because of his knowledge of their secrets, or that he was needed as a key witness by the Communists against traitors based on his work with refugees during and after the war, as well as his work with the OSS in Czechoslovakia and Hungary in an effort to unseat the Nazi puppet governments there.
Marquis Childs tells of a new phenomenon in American politics, a public relations man, who had testified before a Senate investigating committee that he had put over John Marshall Butler like Bromo-Seltzer in advertising jingles on the radio, successfully using the technique to enable Mr. Butler to beat incumbent Maryland Senator Millard Tydings the prior fall. They used sounds of machine gun fire and other weaponry to represent the Korean war, "bowie", he said. The office dictated each day what Mr. Butler would say as he hustled about the state during the campaign, based on what other politicians, fraternal and business groups wanted to hear.
It was a far cry from the men of principle who had once populated the Senate, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay or John C. Calhoun, or their more contemporary equivalents, George Norris, William Borah, the elder Bob LaFollette, Thaddeus Carraway or Carter Glass.
He concludes by suggesting that the $1,250 which the p-r man said he was paid was not nearly enough, given his results achieved.
He does not discuss the fact that they brought in also Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy to stump the state against Senator Tydings and line him up with Communists for having been the chairman of the Senate committee which had castigated Senator McCarthy and branded his claims of Communists in the State Department a "fraud and a hoax".
Joseph Alsop, in Berlin, tells of the existing occupation troops of the U.S., Britain, and France in Germany being transformed from occupation to fighting troops so that they could, if necessary, be prepared to fight by the coming summer. The primary deterrent, however, to Communist aggression remained the strategic air force.
There were in East Germany six Soviet armies comprising at least thirty divisions, including eight armored and eleven heavy mechanized divisions, supported also by a powerful air force with 500 first-class jet fighters and another 500 attack fighters and light bombers. Communist-controlled Poland then had another six divisions plus support air groups, and those divisions were capable of being quickly transformed into nine divisions. These divisions were ready to go, with gradual accumulation of reserves and stocks of weapons on hand.
He concludes that, based on the lesson of Korea, the capabilities of these forces meant that it would be criminal for the American and Western defense build-up to slacken.
Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly Capital Roundup, tells of the appointment of former Senator Frank Graham as Manpower Administrator going a long way, as expressed by the Washington Post, toward placating labor, upset over recently imposed wage controls. Mr. Graham had consulted with Mobilization director Charles E. Wilson before accepting the position, as he did not want it if he was going to be merely an errand boy, but was assured that he would be the head of the Labor Department's Manpower Policy Committee and in that capacity, immediately below Secretary of Labor Maurice Tobin.
Senator Clyde Hoey's investigating committee had resumed its investigation of five-percenter influence-peddling in obtaining Government contracts. The investigation would move to Mississippi to investigate charges by that state's Senators that Federal jobs had been bartered and sold.
Senator Willis Smith, on the Judiciary Committee, would be involved in a new investigation into Communist activities. The Senator had said that it would be exhaustive and not seek headlines and kleig lights.
North Carolina Congressman Herbert Bonner revealed that an investigation into the selling of Government surplus military equipment to foreign nations as part of foreign aid was ongoing. The source of the investigation was the General Accounting Office, headed by Lindsay Graham of North Carolina, having called attention to an ad in the New York Times for 6,000 U.S. surplus trucks for sale "as is" in Germany, originally turned over to the West German Government for German rehabilitation.
A pome appears from the Atlanta Journal, "Contributed by J. Q. Maxwell, The Author, In Which A Word Of Cheer Is Said For The Current Year:
"Plenty can be done
If we try in '51."
Or it may be just crying time again,
Such that for peace we must Sue in '52.
And maybe from the Rump-Trump
We can get clean,
Come the midterm elections of Twenty-eighteen.
You know that he is into Rackets,
As he does not even fill out a Bracket.
Framed Edition
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