The Charlotte News
Friday, August 18, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that allied troops, tanks, artillery and aerial bombing had turned away two North Korean thrusts of 42,000 men from Taegu. In a bloody battle south of Taegu, at Changnyong, an enemy division was thwarted by U.S. Marines and 24th Division infantry while the enemy sought to cross the Naktong River, causing many enemy troops to retreat back across the river, and ending, according to the commanding U.S. general in the sector, that enemy division's fighting ability for some time to come. A force of 30,000 enemy troops was stopped and stalled north of Taegu by South Korean troops, who then counterattacked with the aid of a regiment of U.S. troops, regaining all of the ground lost Thursday, about 1.5 to three miles. Meanwhile, more than half a million civilian refugees were leaving Taegu, along with the provisional South Korean capital established there.
Hal Boyle reports from Taegu of the mass exodus of refugees, producing chaos for several hours as the civilian populace was swept by hysteria after enemy artillery had begun to penetrate the city. By mid-morning, an official order had issued that all non-essential civilians should leave the city, a safety measure to avoid a last-minute crush of refugees, as during the fall of Seoul. He provides an example of one household, as the enemy approached to within twelve miles of the city, possessed of more native Communists than any other in South Korea. Rumors had spread that these Communists had secretly been armed and were ready to rise up in riot whenever the enemy reached the outskirts. A prisoner of war had boasted that Taegu would fall by "liberation day", the fifth anniversary of V-J Day, occurring the prior Tuesday. Two weeks earlier, the father of the family had dug a hole into which he put the family belongings.
American warplanes flew around the clock in support of the ground war, flying 720 sorties, including carrier-based bombing raids 60 miles from the Siberian border, at Chongjin, utilizing one-ton and half-ton bombs, the biggest so far of the war. Australian pilots flew Mustangs in raids on the Uisong area, where the enemy was massed for an assault 35 miles north of Taegu.
Elton C. Fay reports that an enemy force probably could make an aerial Pearl Harbor-type strike in the U.S. and get some of its bombs to target. The likely initial targets would be bases for U.S. long-range bombers in the continental U.S. and Alaska. Any enemy bombers making it through the radar screen would head for these bases first. Next in importance would be the great industrial areas and Washington. Air Force officials said that the radar net was insufficient, based as it was on World War II technology and installed on government-owned sites, thus too limited in number. While appropriations for improvements in the system, including more jet interceptors, had been made by Congress, it would take awhile for the money to produce results. And even after these improvements were implemented, there was no guarantee of the screen being resistant completely to enemy aircraft. Even if only one enemy plane managed to penetrate the screen, the damage to U.S. cities and military installations could be enormous.
In Laredo, Tex., Morton Sobell, who had once worked for the Navy at the G.E. plant in Schenectady, N.Y., from 1942 through 1947, was arrested for espionage as the eighth person in a ring, which included Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, charged with providing defense and atomic secrets to Russia, following his deportation from Mexico. Mr. Sobell had fled to Mexico in June to avoid apprehension, a few days after the arrest of David Greenglass, Mrs. Rosenberg's brother, on June 16. The latter was charged with obtaining atomic bomb secrets from the Manhattan Project while stationed with the Army at Los Alamos.
Democratic Senate leaders balked at allowing Republicans to determine which of several anti-Communist measures would be called up for initial action, as Senator Karl Mundt insisted the GOP would do so by attempting to attach the Mundt-Ferguson (and Nixon) bill as an amendment to the home front mobilization bill, proceeding to vote on Monday regarding standby wage-price and rationing control measures, plus allocation, prioritization, and credit controls. The registration bill was opposed by the President as dangerous to civil liberties and for its tendency to drive Communists underground, and he had indicated his intent to veto any such measure. Nine Democratic Senators introduced an Administration-favored bill regarding tightening of security. But later in the day, the Senate Judiciary Committee left that bill on the shelf and approved, by a 9 to 3 vote, an anti-Communist bill sponsored by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, patterned after the Mundt-Ferguson bill, with additional security strictures proposed by the Administration. Senator Mundt claimed that his nose count gave his side a likely win on the measure in the floor vote.
Because of the war, the Government ordered a freeze on sale of surplus property.
Republican Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin, a member of the Kefauver Committee investigating organized crime, said that Senate crime investigators were planning to look at reports of connections between national politicians, including members of Congress, and gangsters. He said he wanted to know more about the purchase by convicted gambler Frank Erickson of $2,500 worth of tickets to a Democratic fund-raiser.
A five-day old steel strike in Alabama was settled, but planned rail strikes scheduled to start Monday and Tuesday remained unresolved. Some 5,000 UMW miners, however, had quit work on Tuesday in five captive coal mines in Alabama. Other strikes and threatened strikes are listed.
A steamship caught fire while battling gale force winds and harsh seas off Miami, resulting from the hurricane skirting Florida, and nine ships rushed to its rescue. Florida was given the all-clear signal from the storm, which had packed 140 mph winds as it approached Miami from the Atlantic, after it turned northward the previous night. The area of North Carolina around Cape Hatteras, where the storm was expected to pass on Saturday, was placed on alert.
On the editorial page, "Playgrounds and Politics—I" tells of the City Council considering a zoning ordinance the following Wednesday which would take away from the Park & Recreation Commission the decision-making ability re building of structures on park land and give it to the City Council. The aim of the ordinance was to defeat the decision to locate the recreation center in Latta Park, opposed by many residents as a nuisance likely to attract noise and traffic. Recently, a judge had allowed the project to go forward, lifting a temporary restraining order because he found no nuisance and that the Commission had acted within its authority in establishing the center.
The piece hopes the City Council would not pass the ordinance as it was spite legislation designed to benefit a few at the expense of the many and repay political debts owed by a few of the Council members to the residents of neighborhoods nearby the proposed recreation center.
"The Endless War" tells of the 30,000-troop North Korean offensive ongoing in the hills around Taegu, while at Pohang, 10,000 North Korean guerrillas and regulars were seeking to consolidate their gains, and south of Taegu, in the Changnyong area, near Masan, approximately 15,000 enemy troops were concentrating their fire on American Marines and soldiers. If the North Koreans were to take Pusan, the crucial supply port, a bloody evacuation would be forced, leaving recapture of the South Korean peninsula to an allied saturation bombing campaign which would inevitably cost the lives of many South Korean allies, before a reasonable effort could be made to establish a beachhead anew.
It was a "black picture" in an endless war, which, it posits, could be won only if Americans were aware of the sacrifice necessary to win it, not through singing of patriotic songs or flag-waving or boasts of American superior strength, but through clear thinking, hard work and sacrifice.
"Mr. McMullan's Ruling" praises the ruling by State Attorney General Harold McMullan that the increase in teacher's salary, tied by the 1949 General Assembly to an available surplus in the general fund, would apply for two years if the surplus carried over to 1951. The law had not been clear on whether the teachers could obtain a salary increase for 1950 if the first fiscal year showed such a surplus, as it had, because the law was passed for two years, until the 1951 Legislature met.
The piece thinks that in the future, the Legislature, to provide clarity, ought not tie such increases to any contingency.
Drew Pearson's column is again written by Fred Blumenthal and Jack Anderson, who discuss the ability of underworld figures to thumb their noses at authorities with the help of their political pals. In New Orleans, for example, Silvestro Carolla, a bigshot in the underworld convicted of narcotics violations in 1936, had been sought by the Government for deportation to Italy, until Congressman Jimmy Morrison had intervened with a succession of bills to delay the deportation action for a decade until it was finally carried out. But then within six months, Mr. Carolla was ordered to Mexico by Lucky Luciano and wound up there, arriving in Tijuana, then slipped over the border and returned to New Orleans. He was then arrested again and the deportation process had started anew.
They note that another racketeer whose deportation had been delayed was Orlando Portale of Detroit, whose political pull came from Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan, who had introduced a bill to keep Mr. Portale in the country.
Manufacturers of surgical goods had boosted prices 30 percent to take advantage of the demand presented by the war in Korea, placing them as "me-firsters" among profiteers. The columnists repeat the appeal to every community of the land to stop hoarders and profiteers through local committees.
Worried mothers could not stop their 17-year old sons from joining the National Guard, as no parental permission was required, exposing them to action in Korea.
Republican Senator Forrest Donnell, while Governor of Missouri, had granted a pardon to Charles Gargotta, underworld figure gunned down with political boss Charles Binaggio earlier in the year. Now, Senator Donnell was campaigning against crime and corruption in Kansas City.
Senator Lister Hill of Alabama had not accepted a speaking fee since coming to the Senate.
The State Department refused to provide 60 million bushels of surplus wheat to starving India, prompting Hindu newspapers to run negative cartoons depicting Americans as greedy.
The President had told his staff
that he would veto the Mundt-Nixon bill, requiring registration of
Communists and front organizations, even if it cost him a million
votes, as he considered it dangerous to civil liberties
The deans of the top medical schools voted to write a letter to Stuart Symington, head of the National Security Resources Board, urging passage of a medical education bill to increase the number of doctors available for civilian and military needs. The AMA had opposed such a measure sponsored by Congressman Andrew Biemiller of Wisconsin, prompting the dean of the University of Syracuse Medical School to charge the AMA with a terrible mistake in doing so.
The columnists note that the President and Secretary of Defense Johnson supported the Biemiller bill.
Marquis Childs discusses the need to win and hold allies as a sine qua non for winning the struggle against Communism, as exampled by the winning of support of Prime Minister Nehru of India in the Korean war, without whose support in Asia the struggle would be greatly more difficult.
Colonel Unni Nayar of India had been sent as an observer in Korea and then killed when the jeep he was driving toward the front, in the company of two British correspondents and a South Korean officer, struck a mine. Col. Nayar had fought bravely on the side of the Allies in World War II and had shuttled back and forth to the front lines in Korea during the previous month. Such qualities were urgently needed to effect better relations between the U.S. and India.
Many felt that Secretary of State Acheson had prematurely closed off the possibility of further negotiations with the Soviets for peace by rejecting the proposal of Prime Minister Nehru to mediate such bilateral negotiations with the object of ending the Korean war. The proprosal had included the unacceptable premise that the U.S. approve the seating of Communist China at the U.N., but not allowing any negotiations to proceed gave the Soviets a propaganda tool, that they wanted peace while America resisted it.
Robert Trumbull, correspondent of the New York Times assigned to India, reported that anti-American feeling had never run higher in India because of reports of bombing raids in Korea by the Far Eastern Air Forces. Such airstrikes were a reality of modern warfare and India had underwritten the U.N. effort, and so the negative reaction suggested an anti-Western bias based on the perception that Americans and Europeans were colonialist powers killing Asians, fueling in turn the perception that Westerners placed little value on the lives of Asians.
Thus, the use of the atomic bomb in Korea was out, as it would lend credence further to this perception, given its only use thus far having been in Japan in 1945.
He concludes that America had to do everything it could to build on the understanding which already existed in Asia through such friends as the late Col. Nayar.
Robert C. Ruark provides a piece of mail received from a man in Denver who informed of his prewar experience in Korea, including his impressions of the less savory aspects of the country, explaining that it was impossible to tell a North Korean from a South Korean and that Koreans generally thought of Americans as barbarians. Koreans were generally intelligent, given to long argumentative discussions which rarely ended in fisticuffs. The language, with only 26 characters in the alphabet, was not so difficult as either Japanese or Chinese, and many Koreans were able to learn to speak English or another foreign language with greater facility than the average Japanese. The correspondent said that he had gotten along swell with the people of Korea and he hoped that the U.S. would be wise enough to push all the way to the Manchurian border in the fight for Korea, thus to unite the country which had been arbitrarily divided by the Communists. Yet, he doubted that a democratic regime could be established for long as the people of the country had too little experience with that form of government. But, he concluded, they could be allowed to govern or misgovern their own land.
Joseph C. Harsch, writing in the Christian of Science Monitor, discusses the concept of preventive war through use of the atomic bomb and the advocacy of it by some, though, after analysis in light of the June 25 invasion of Korea, rejection of it as untenable based on moral as well as practical considerations.
The preventive war argument ran as follows: Moscow was pulling the strings in Korea. By 1952, the Russians would likely have a stockpile of atomic bombs which, in strategic value, would equal that of the U.S. Thus, after 1951, there would likely be no strategic advantage to the U.S. in an atomic war. If the country continued to defend only against the puppets and not touch the puppet-master in Russia, the risk would be run that by 1952, there would be war with Russia, with the U.S., in consequence of fighting the smaller wars, depleted in strength.
But to initiate an atomic war would result in isolation of the U.S. from the rest of the world, even, in the end, likely alienating Canada and Britain. It would end America's recognized leadership of the coalition of nations. In such a war, Western Europe would either wind up neutral toward America or overrun by Communism. And such a war could mean the end of Western civilization.
Thus, Mr. Harsch concludes, policy planners, soldiers and diplomats, had determined that it was sensible to do things the hard way and build Western European defenses during the ensuing two years, reducing the chances of isolation of America while building the coalition, though it would mean loss of atomic superiority.
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