The Charlotte News
Wednesday, September 3, 1958
ONE EDITORIAL
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Taipei, Formosa, that the top U.S. commander on Formosa had said this date that U.S. "help is coming" to meet the Communist threat to the Chinese Nationalist offshore islands. Vice-Admiral Roland Smoot had told a press conference that it would take the combined efforts of the Nationalists "and the United States which is coming to overcome this immediate situation" created by the Communist bombardments of the islands and efforts to blockade them. Admiral Smoot declined to state the type of help, saying that it would be foolish to provide the Communists with military information. He had also refused to say whether it meant that U.S. forces would help defend the offshore islands, a commitment which American officials from the President down had refused thus far to make publicly. The Admiral was commander of the U.S. Taiwan Defense Command, which was committed to protecting Formosa and the nearby Pescadores Islands. Congress had authorized the President in 1955 also to defend any other Nationalist territory he considered essential to the defense of Formosa. The Nationalists said that they still were getting soldiers and supplies through to Quemoy despite the Communist attempts to cut it off from Formosa. Admiral Smoot said: "There are many ways to break a blockade attempt. As far as the enemy blockade of Quemoy is concerned, I can tell you the Chinese [Nationalist] forces have not yet begun to fight." More ships were on the way from the Mediterranean and from the U.S. to join the Seventh Fleet patrolling the Formosa Strait to prevent any Communist strike on Formosa. About 1,000 U.S. Marines were coming from Okinawa for maneuvers on Formosa during the upcoming weekend. Additional jet fighters had been sent from the U.S. to Far Eastern bases.
In Reykjavik, Iceland, Icelandic anger had been reflected in the nation's press this date against British naval action in Iceland's fishing dispute with Britain. A brickbat and smoke bomb demonstration outside the British Ambassador's residence the previous night had been followed during the current morning with charges of armed aggression and demands that Britain call its gunboats and trawlers home. The Communist newspaper in Iceland had demanded that Iceland break relations with Britain, its NATO ally. It counseled not negotiating with pirates and severing diplomatic relations immediately. Iceland's Minister of Fisheries was a Communist in the coalition Government. Other newspapers in the capital had headlines about the previous day's clashes between British sailors and Icelandic Coast Guardsmen. Another newspaper had said: "Sooner or later the British will be forced to follow the example of the other nations in this matter. If they don't, this might become a very serious dispute, threatening to assume international significance and do great damage to the cooperation of Western nations—particularly NATO." A third newspaper, of the Foreign Minister's party, said that it was armed aggression. The Coast Guard reported that there had been no overnight incidents in Iceland's coastal waters, where British trawlers, backed up by Navy frigates, had begun fishing for the third day inside Iceland's new 12-mile legal limit. The British said that the limit was illegal and its fishermen had an international right to trawl in the zone. Iceland had expanded its original four-mile legal limit to 12 within the previous few days. A British Embassy spokesman said that he had understood this date would be the final day during which the trawlers would defy the Icelanders. All trawlers and frigates were scheduled to depart by the following day. The dispute regarded Iceland's self-imposed ban on fishing 12 miles from its coast. The demonstration at the Ambassador's home apparently had been in retaliation for the British victories in two hand-to-hand battles the previous day between trawler crews and Icelandic Coast Guardsmen. The state radio in the capital said that trawlermen had used axes, spikes and streams of water to prevent Coast Guardsmen from boarding one vessel to arrest its captain for violating the 12-mile limit. The British Admiralty made no mention of the incident. In the second clash, nine armed Coast Guardsmen boarded a trawler and were trying to head it into port when a British Navy frigate sent aboard sailors.
In Cairo, it was reported that U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold had resumed his Middle East peace mission this date, arriving to confer with Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser of the United Arab Republic.
Before the Senate Select Committee investigating union and management misconduct, Harold Gibbons, a leader in the Teamsters Union, faced more questions this date regarding beatings and bombings, after having described himself as an opponent of violence in labor disputes.
In Norfolk, Va., a U.S. District Court judge this date denied the Norfolk School Board's motion to delay desegregation of schools until 1959. He said that he reserved the right to reconsider the matter after the Supreme Court would rule on September 11 regarding the integration delay at Little Rock, Ark., as ordered by a District Court judge in Arkansas, reversed in August by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, in reliance on the Brown v. Board of Education 1955 implementing decision. The judge in Norfolk said that if the Court granted the 2 1/2 year delay in Little Rock or granted review of the case, he would entertain a motion to retransfer 17 black children which the School Board had said it would assign to white schools. The Norfolk Board had asked for the delay on the ground that Norfolk was unprepared for integrated schools at present. Elsewhere, possible flareups in the desegregation conflict between state and Federal authorities had been avoided temporarily by the postponement of school opening dates. There had been one or two minor incidents, but on the whole, the students seemed to get along better than their elders, busy with legal maneuvers, charges and delaying tactics. In Little Rock, where Central High School's opening day had been delayed until September 15 to give the Court time to hear oral arguments on the case, Governor Orval Faubus said that U.S. marshals were being mustered for duty in the event that the Court-ordered integration would be resumed. The Governor did not say where he obtained the information and the Justice Department would neither confirm nor deny the report. In Kentucky, it had been just another school day for 20 black students and 161 white students attending classes together for the first time at Fulton High School, desegregated by court order. Three other schools had also held their first integrated classes in Nelson County, without trouble. Sturgis High School, where the National Guard had been called out in 1956, had also opened quietly with 25 black students attending. In the west Arkansas town of Van Buren, however, 13 black pupils, reporting for classes at integrated Van Buren High School, had been confronted by crudely painted signs saying, "This Is a White School" and "Nigger, Go Home".
Julian Scheer of The News
reports that children from North Carolina counties with integrated
schools had returned to classes this date and those from Charlotte
and Mecklenburg County numbered 55,000, including a black brother and
sister who had re-entered previously all-white City schools. The two
siblings entered quietly and there was no show of emotion on the part
of their fellow students. The male, a senior at Central High School,
had walked through a side door of the school in the morning, while
his sister, a ninth grader at Piedmont Junior High, had entered the
front door of that school. Both schools had been under surveillance
by the Charlotte police and the State Highway Patrol. Reporters and
photographers had greeted the youngsters on the first day of school.
The male, who had encountered some heckling at Central the previous
year, had been the subject of little curiosity when he entered this
date. He walked through the side door, up the stairs to the second
floor, down the hall to the center of the building, turned left and
walked to his homeroom. He was greeted by a coach, his homeroom
teacher. A few students nodded or spoke to him as he walked
unhesitatingly to his classroom. Central met for less than an hour,
as it was only registration day. His sister, 13, reported to the
school auditorium with other students for a briefing before going to
her homeroom. White students sat next to her on her right during a
talk by the principal. From the assembly, she walked to the third
floor to the homeroom where she took a rear seat. The previous year,
her brother had been accompanied by his father, while the sister was
escorted by her mother, whereas each had attended school alone this
date. Their admittance this date marked the beginning of the second
year of limited integration in City schools. County schools had
denied requests of black parents for admission of their children, and
15 black parents had appealed their requests for admittance to white
schools before the City School Board this date. A year earlier, the
City Board had allowed five requests for transfers from black schools
to previously all-white schools, and one child had moved to another
school district while four had entered the white schools. In
Greensboro, five of seven black students assigned to Gillespie Park
School had experienced some heckling by a handful of demonstrators
who carried a Klan banner and a Confederate flag, while the two
others did not report early to school. In Winston-Salem, schools
would not open until the following day. We trow that they will be
carrying hula
In Chicago, the final count of the nation's traffic accidents during the 78-hour Labor Day weekend had been 420 deaths, the exact number which had been predicted by the National Safety Council. In addition, the accident death toll generally had shown 114 drownings and 87 deaths from miscellaneous causes.
In Hollywood, it was reported that actress Pier Angeli and her husband, singer Vic Damone, had separated. She had told a reporter that they had a misunderstanding and was not sure what would happen. Mr. Damone had not been available for comment. It was the second time the couple had separated in their four years of marriage. Mark it well as you never know what will happen in these exciting episodes of the young and the restless on the edge of night.
On the editorial page, Drew Pearson has his assistant, Jack Anderson, on a news-gathering trip through the Far East, substituting for him, writing from Taipei, that contrary to "scare stories" from the Far East, the Chinese Communists had not massed an invasion force powerful enough to seize Quemoy and Matsu from Chiang Kai-shek's entrenched defenders. It would take more than 128,000 Communist troops presently concentrated along the rocky coast of the mainland opposite Formosa to dislodge the four crack Nationalist divisions from their offshore strongholds, and except for a few Communist gunboats, no invasion fleet had been assembled large enough to assault the two target islands.
U.S. military observers expected that it was more likely that there would be a gunboat-led invasion of a lesser island among the 15 held by the Nationalists within shooting distance of the mainland. Such an island, in turn, could be used as a base of operations to harass the supply line between Formosa and Quemoy and Matsu. U.S. experts acknowledged, however, that the Communists could airlift over 800,000 reinforcements into the critical area within less than a week and that over 400,000 paratroopers could be flown into Fukien Province within a single day from Harbin, Manchuria, Kaifeng in central China, and Hangchow, south of Shanghai. Another 400,000 combat troops could be rushed from North Korea in an estimated three days. It would take only 12 days to transport 300,000 additional troops by train from northern Hopeh Province to the Amoy area. Another 400,000 soldiers could be rounded up from the Chinese hinterlands within three weeks. All of those would add up to a Communist force of more than 1.6 million men, and with the 1,500 jet fighters and bombers concentrated within striking distance of Quemoy and Matsu, the Communists could easily overwhelm the offshore islands.
Yet, to invade Quemoy and Matsu, according to the experts, would take an amphibious force large enough to assault Formosa itself. The Communists could scavenge enough junks in the immediate area to send a colorful invasion fleet against Matsu, the weaker of the two island strongholds. But they had made no move to bring additional landing craft down the coast from northern China.
The Communist Chinese had little stomach for amphibious operations in the treacherous Formosa Strait, where swift tides drained the muddy coastal bottom as far as five miles, then rushed back to the rocky beaches faster than a man could run. Landing craft could also get snagged on the reefs around the offshore islands, casting invading troops into the swirling tide water, an unpleasant prospect for Chinese soldiers who were poor swimmers. The best military estimate was that the Communists would do more shouting than island-seizing for the immediate future.
Mr. Anderson recounts that during World War II, he had spent several weeks wandering over the broad, burdened back of central China with a band of Chinese guerrillas, with their largest battle having been with rival Communist guerrillas for the right to harass the Japanese along the Hankow-Peking railroad. Their guerrilla chief had been a hard, unsmiling Nationalist officer, a newly converted Christian who without provocation would burst into hymns which he sang with revival-meeting gusto. When Mr. Anderson had left the guerrillas after the Japanese surrender, they had been engaged in pitched battle with the Communists for control of the rail line, the last he had heard of them. In Formosa, 13 years later, he had sought to learn what had happened to them and passed around some faded photos which he had kept. He finally found a Chinese official who recognized one of the guerrillas and informed that the band had broken up, with some having defected to the Communists while others had scattered to their homes. The last he had heard, the remnants were still battling the Communists.
He reports that praise had been heaped so fulsomely on retiring Congressmen the previous week at the adjournment of the session that the Congressional Record had to be edited. Democratic Congressman Barrett O'Hara of Chicago, paying tribute to retiring Congressman Thomas Gordon, also of Chicago, had been quoted in the Record as saying: "There is great ability in Tom Gordon." What he had actually said, before editing, had been: "Tom Gordon had more ability than many people suspected."
Joseph Alsop finds that thus far, the U.S. Government had sought to treat the Chinese Communist threat to Quemoy and Matsu as a minor matter, with the President's departure for a golfing vacation at Newport only one example of the prevailing attitude of indifference. But in fact the threat to the offshore islands in the Formosa Strait was quite serious, with Far Eastern echoes of the crucial Berlin blockade of 1948-49, the difference being that Berlin had been then and still was a key position in and of itself while the importance of Quemoy and the Matsus could be described as hand-made in Washington. He regards the story as to how that status had originated as being necessary to understand before the problem could be understood.
The first gesture of the Administration's "dynamic new foreign policy" had been the so-called unleashing of Chiang Kai-shek. When that happened, Quemoy, the Matsus and the other offshore islands had been in Chinese Nationalist hands, but with almost no regular troops then stationed there. At that time, the little islands were regarded as indefensible and therefore expendable by the Nationalist Government.
Apparently, however, the U.S. policymakers had desired to give some reality to the unleashing of Chiang and thus severe pressure was placed on him to occupy the offshore islands with a serious force. Chiang had bitterly resisted the pressure, pointing out that the islands were extremely vulnerable, as Quemoy, for instance, lay in Amoy Harbor almost in the way that Staten Island was in New York Harbor. He had further pointed out that his authority in Formosa could be undermined if he staked his prestige on holding those islands and then failed to do so.
In the end, Chiang's resistance was overcome by determined U.S. arm-twisting, and Quemoy, the Matsus and the Tachen islands, the latter more remote from Formosa and further to the north, were all occupied by regular units of the Chinese Nationalist Army. The lack of wisdom of that move soon became apparent as almost immediately after the "phony peace" in Korea had been concluded in mid-1953, a threat to the Tachen Islands developed on a pattern similar to the present threat to Quemoy and the Matsus. The U.S. Government, which had twisted Chiang's arm to get him to occupy those islands, then began a new campaign of arm-twisting to secure the evacuation of the Tachens. At the last moment, after the most exposed island of that group had already fallen under Chinese Communist attack, Chiang gave way and evacuated the Tachens.
The Formosa resolution of 1955, authorizing the President to use U.S. forces for the defense of Formosa, had been a by-product of that first offshore island crisis centering on the Tachens. During that crisis, Secretary of State Dulles had promised former Chinese Nationalist Foreign Minister George Yeh that if the Tachens were evacuated, the U.S. would give a public and unequivocal promise to defend Quemoy and the Matsus under the Formosa resolution. But the President had overridden that promise and thus the policy of "keeping [the Chinese Communists] guessing" about Quemoy and the Matsus had been adopted, contrary to the previous Dulles prescriptions that a clear line be drawn which the enemy would know they could not cross.
Following the warning of the Tachens, certain feeble efforts had been made to persuade Chiang to abandon the Matsus and Quemoy. But he had then insisted that his own Government on Formosa would not survive such a further blow to his prestige and instead continued to strengthen his positions on those islands, using U.S. military aid for the purpose.
That had been the previous history, meaning that, first, the future of Formosa itself might depend, based on the assessment of Chiang, on the future of the Matsus and Quemoy. His view on that point was supported by people in high places in the State Department and the Pentagon, who had initially advocated defending the offshore islands at all costs. Also, U.S. prestige in Asia had been staked on the offshore islands just as much as was Chiang's prestige on Formosa. According to official State Department forecasts, Communist capture of those islands would cause a catastrophic shock in every non-Communist country of Asia and thus there was no cheap escape from the corner into which the U.S. had strangely painted itself, unless the Communist Chinese Government would guess that the President's departure for Newport meant that U.S. intentions were martial, and chose to run the risk of a fight for the islands with U.S. forces engaged.
As we have fallen behind, there will be no further notes regarding the front page or editorial page this date, as the notes will be sporadic until we catch up.
Framed Edition
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