The Charlotte News
Saturday, December 30, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the biggest air battle yet of the war had been fought over Korea between 15 American F-86 Sabre jets and 40 Russian-built MIG-15 jets, near the Manchurian border. Two MIGs were damaged and no American planes were hit. In an earlier, smaller dogfight, American Sabres shot down a single MIG and damaged another, near Sinuiju.
In ground action, two enemy forces penetrated 12 to 13 miles deep into South Korean territory on the eastern flank of the Eighth Army's front. U.N. forces were said to be in "contact" with an enemy force of 5,000 troops, operating in the hills 32 miles inland from the east coast, with a smaller force of 2,000, 10 miles from the east coast. But no statement indicated that fighting had begun. Allied troops were reported by headquarters to have made minor gains in the Chogyo-Oron east-central sector.
Correspondent Hal Boyle reported that Seoul had become a ghost town. In a four-hour clash 27 miles north of Seoul, an allied patrol crossed the frozen Imjin River and encountered an enemy force which drove them back, but only after 21 Chinese had been killed and 15 wounded.
Correspondent William Barnard reported that there was evidence of Communist infiltration of allied troops and cutting of U.N. supply routes in the eastern sector.
U.N. forces gained from a 1,000 to 1,500 yards in a light engagement 20 miles northeast of Chunchon.
General MacArthur was predicting that the major invasion by the Communists would begin between January 1 and 10.
In Harrisburg, Pa., funds were being raised by the American Legion for Pfc. Robert L. Smith, who had lost parts of four limbs in Korea.
Favorable conditions in European recovery enabled curtailment of Marshall Plan aid by forty percent during the first eleven months of 1950. The U.K. received 436.9 million dollars of aid, the most of any single nation. France was next with 372 million, followed by Italy with 275.3 million and West Germany, with 222.3 million.
Alabama Senator John Sparkman, to become the vice-presidential candidate with Governor Adlai Stevenson on the Democratic presidential ticket in 1952, proposed a full-scale Senate debate on foreign policy to help settle the rising controversy in Congress regarding defense plans. Senator Sparkman, a member of the American delegation to the U.N., said that he agreed with John Foster Dulles, adviser to the State Department, that the U.S. could not make its defenses impregnable by abandoning Europe but believed differences between the approach of Secretary of State Acheson and that favored recently by former President Herbert Hoover, advocating a return to isolationism, ought be aired in the Senate.
Senator Taft, speaking in Cincinnati, said that he had no confidence in the judgment of many of the top military people at the Pentagon. Senator Kenneth Wherry said that he believed the U.S. should not fritter away its resources with patchwork defenses around the globe and instead favored an "impregnable ring of air bases around Russia" set up by the U.S. and its allies.
The National Production Authority prohibited non-essential use of copper in more than 300 civilian products, including pots and pans, building hardware, furniture, electrical appliances, jewelry, toys, automotive applications, plumbing fixtures, cocktail shakers and paper clips, starting March 1.
What about moonshining equipment?
Housing Expediter Tighe Woods announced that landlords were approved for a million rent increases in 1950, averaging 18.2 percent, and rent controls were lifted on four million dwelling units, with controls still extant on 7.5 million units. More than 85 percent of landlords who sought increases had been approved.
The nation's railroad engineers, following a two-day discussion, asked for improvements to the three-year pact between the railroads and trainmen, tentatively settled the prior week with the help of the Government.
In Akron, O., a World War II veteran went berserk and killed his parents, and a niece and nephew, both infants, beating up his parents and then setting fire to the house. He admitted the conduct after police found him running around naked in the snow.
The National Safety Council predicted that 330 persons would die in traffic fatalities during the 78-hour holiday weekend beginning at 6:00 p.m. Friday and lasting until midnight Monday. It reported that 31,230 had died in traffic accidents during the first eleven months of 1950, 270 less than during all of 1949, but 1,029 less than during 1948. The record was established in 1941 at 39,969, and more than 35,000 deaths had occurred in each of the years, 1934 through 1937. During the Christmas holiday period, 545 persons had died in traffic accidents, one of the highest totals on record for an extended holiday.
In Charlotte, David Ovens was named Man of the Year for his community service in heading the drive to build a new auditorium-coliseum complex at a site on Independence Boulevard and his beneficent gift to Queens College, among other examples of lengthy service to Charlotte, including having brought Enrico Caruso to town toward the end of the Metropolitan Opera star's career and having been one of the founders of the Charlotte Community Concert Association.
The National Council of Churches of Christ had set New Year's Eve as a day of prayer to welcome in 1951. Catholics would, per the usual practice, attend mass on both Sunday and Monday.
Times Square would be jammed with revelers on Sunday night. Some saloons in New York were charging up to $50 per couple for an evening of entertainment.
Exactly how do you mean?
Sports fans would worship at the trough of such fare as the Rose Bowl, where 90,000 fans would see the annual game and preceding Rose Parade through Pasadena.
News sports editor Bob Quincy
looks at preparation by Clemson's football team for the Orange Bowl
in Miami, against the University of Miami, on pages 2B and 3B
We wish the Tigers success on
Monday, notwithstanding that lousy call two years ago by the referees
in the A.C.C. Championship game with UNC, when the plainly recovered
onside kick was called back for an alleged offside penalty, which had
not happened. It was not Clemson's fault that the referees were
blind
In Bath, England, a 40-year old farm worker was sentenced to a month in jail for drunk driving on his bicycle.
On the editorial page, "1950 Lynching Record" finds that, based on Tuskegee Institute's annual survey of lynching, two lynchings had occurred in 1950 with seven attempted, compared to three in 1949. It analogizes the news to hearing that a friend's fever had fallen from 103 to 101. It provides a synopsis of the two lynching cases.
The first was Charlie Hurst, in Pell City, Alabama, who, on the night of February 22, had been fatally wounded, along with injury to his son when he had sought to free his father from a group of unmasked men, who had sought to force Mr. Hurst from his home into their car.
The second was Jack Walker, a 40-year old laborer from Meriwether County, Ga., whose body was discovered by fishermen in a creek near the Flint River on August 18, apparently killed for having learned too much about illegal whiskey traffic.
It finds that neither case fit the classic pattern of black men being taken from their homes in the dead of night by a mob of masked white men, suggesting that some might find therefore that neither case deserved to be called a lynching. But it refuses to quibble with the definition of "lynching", as the patient, the South, was still very much ill. It finds it a remarkable record, however, given that the South's temper was still short regarding matters of race, as evidenced by the Horry County, S.C., case wherein a group of Klansmen, including a Conway police officer, caused a melee at a black dance hall in Myrtle Beach, resulting in one of the Klansmen being killed, and yet the Grand Jury had refused indictment of the Klansmen responsible for the fracas.
It finds that the more important statistics would be those to measure the enlightenment of Southerners and that those "would be not half so comfortable to look upon as the lynch record."
"Man of the Year" congratulates David Ovens for being named Man of the Year in Charlotte, again, as in an editorial of December 19, lauding him for his public service and private charity. It also lists the prior winners of the award since 1944 and concludes that Mr. Ovens belonged in their company.
"Here's a Way You Can Help" tells of Senator Harry F. Byrd having written to the President a letter showing in detail how the Government could save seven billion dollars without impairing defense, commensurate with the President's directive to Budget Director Frederick Lawton. It was unlikely that the President would pay much attention to Senator Byrd's advice as the two did not get along. But Mr. Lawton might heed the advice to pare 3.6 billion from domestic programs, plus 500 million in civilian pay rolls on defense programs, in addition to the four billion already cut.
It proposes that the public write their advice to members of Congress for reducing non-defense expenditures.
"'Eve' and 'The Boulevard'" tells of the New York film critics having the previous week awarded
to the motion picture "All About Eve"
The piece says that while it liked Betty Grable in technicolor, it did not want her or her facsimile every week. Hollywood was growing up.
Don't bet on it too hard. A few exceptions to the rule do not a new rule make.
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "Educated Drivers", tells of more than 30 percent of drivers involved in fatal traffic accidents in 1948 having been under age 25, with the percentage having reduced to 28 in 1949, a change in the previous upward trend, attributable to increasing driver education in the nation's high schools, about a third of which offered such courses in 1950, an increase of 23 percent over 1949, with participation of 550,000 pupils.
A panel of six young drivers had recently appeared before the AAA, counseling that both parents and students should discourage show-off driving and that adults' lack of courtesy on the roads was the most common cause of accidents—failure to yield the right-of-way to the always correct young driver, even if on the wrong side of the road barreling for your front bumper.
The piece counsels a new corollary
to an old motto: "Drive and let live
But would not that, for the sake of poetic consistency, really require either an incorrect pronunciation of "drive" as "give" or that "live" be pronounced as "alive"? leading to a bit of a conundrum arising in discussions at the high school lunch tables.
So wouldn't it be better to have a slogan, such as, "Drive moderately in the right lane, or derive a potter's writ bedight in pain"?
Or, more succinctly, "It's no drivel: drive on the level Or, "It's no jive: When you drive
Drew Pearson tells of General
MacArthur being urged by the Pentagon to get rid of his Army G-2
intelligence chief, Maj. General Charles Willoughby, because of the
poor intelligence gathered leading to the debacle at the Manchurian
border, causing the retreat in the northeast sector and need for
evacuation at Hungnam from the Communist Chinese trap. General
MacArthur had said on December 2 that there were 500,000 Chinese
troops in Korea, only six days after General Willoughby had
reported that there were insufficient numbers of Chinese to impede
the mission to have the American troops "home by Christmas",
in the offensive drive to the Manchurian border begun in the west and
east on November 24. Then, two days later, General MacArthur reported
more than a million enemy troops either in Korea or on the Manchurian
border and ready to enter the fight.
Yet, on December 6, General
Willoughby had cabled to the Joint Chiefs that there were six Chinese
armies identified, which would be no more than 96,000 men, and that
number only in the unlikely event that these armies were at full
strength. Yet, the U.S. Eighth Army had more than 100,000 men to
combat those forces and still had to retreat.
Mr. Pearson concludes that the
hordes of Chinese claimed by General MacArthur were not actually
present. He makes room for the possibility that General Willoughby
was wrong, leading to confusion in the Pentagon. While he had revised
his estimate of enemy troop strength to be at 285,000 Chinese and
150,000 North Koreans previously facing the Tenth Corps in the
Hungnam sector, the total U.N. forces still outnumbered such a
contingent.
Military wisdom stated that a
three-to-one advantage in manpower was necessary for a successful
offensive. Plus, the U.N. forces had complete control of the air,
while the Chinese possessed almost no artillery save that captured
from the allies. Thus, Pentagon officials were puzzled by the
necessity of the 120-mile retreat. The immediate retreat was
explainable in terms of the U.N. troops being spread too thin, but the fact
did not explain the further retreat.
In mid-December, General Willoughby
had calculated that each Chinese soldier had no more than three hand
grenades and a rifle or sub-machine gun, extremely light firepower
for an attacking army. Their only means to transport ammunition was
via ox or mule carts and each man in consequence entered battle with
most of his ammunition on his person.
Another puzzling communique of
General Willoughby in mid-December had been that the enemy had been
forced by outrunning its supply lines to pull up, causing the Eighth
Army's retreat to have lost all contact with the enemy. The Pentagon
interpreted this information to mean that the Eighth Army had failed
to keep contact with the enemy, one of the fundamental rules of
military strategy.
General Willoughby had found the
Chinese to have exhibited lack of elasticity of planning and staff
and command structures, resulting in offensive actions being limited
to "stereotyped campaigns" with "slow succession of
limited objectives". He concluded that the Chinese command was
thus unprepared for its success in the initiative begun November 28,
with the result that it had to regroup its forces for the
continuation of the offensive.
The Pentagon was even more concerned
over the fact that the worst retreat in modern military history had
been made, if General Willoughby's assessments were correct, before
relatively weak, unprepared Chinese armies.
He concludes that either General
Willoughby or General MacArthur, estimating a force of more than 1.35
million Chinese, had been engaged in deception of the American public
through their respective press releases.
Marquis Childs tells of inviting two
of the many convalescing Marines returned from Korea to share
Christmas Day with his family. Both had been involved in the fight to
escape the trap of the Fifth and Seventh Marine Regiments at Changjin
reservoir. One, a private first class, 19, had received a machine-gun
bullet through his upper arm, which had also been frostbitten. The
other, a corporal, 20, had both of his feet become badly frostbitten.
A new type of treatment permitted him to wear shoes without too much
discomfort. Three weeks earlier, both had been in the midst of the
fighting but because of modern medicine and transport, now could
settle down in their living room to Christmas dinner. Outwardly, both
appeared remarkably untouched by their ordeal. The private had his
arm in a cast and sling and the corporal had lost some teeth in the
freezing cold around the reservoir. Otherwise, they appeared as any
two Marines.
Both Marines were strangers to one
another, but became immediately friendly in the manner of most young
Americans.
They eventually related of their
ordeal, escaping the deadly trap through the frozen mountain passes.
One said that upon his return to see the lights of California, he
resolved that a war must never be fought within the United States.
Mr. Childs regards the viewpoint as
originating in common sense, a type putting to shame the "croakers,
the defeatists and the apostles of despair who are saying that
America must pull back inside a walled enclosure to make a last
stand."
The two Marines were men who knew
what it was to fight and had appeared to learn a lot more than those
who had remained at home.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of a
majority of American policy-makers hoping that the beachhead in Korea
would prove untenable, as it would be more preferable to be pushed
out and evacuate with honor than to try to hold ground against the
new Chinese offensive.
One reason for the attitude was that
Japan was stripped of defenses with the troops occupied in Korea.
Europe, with more strategic importance than any part of Asia, was
threatened with Communist aggression in the spring, necessitating the
training of new American divisions, difficult with nearly all
available new manpower going to the war.
The reason for the commitment in
Korea in the first place was that the policy-makers feared outbreak
of a general war unless the Communists were checked, that appeasement
would lead to more Soviet-stimulated aggression. It was deemed
appropriate to try to stem the tide of aggression in Korea,
comparable to stopping Hitler in 1936 when he had re-annexed the
Rhineland.
In the prior July, this approach had
probably been correct, as the Russians probably did not desire
general war at that time. But at some later point, as discerned by
the peculiar timing of the Chinese intervention, occurring well after
it would have been an immediate success in the earlier stages of the
war when the U.N. forces were reduced to defending the 120-mile
perimeter around Pusan, the masters of the Kremlin appeared to have
decided that general war was worth the risk after all, probably upon
figuring out the extent to which the U.S. was unprepared militarily
for war.
Now, the intervention in Korea by
the U.N. had failed in its original purpose to stop a general war.
The Alsops urge therefore that Korea was not the place for the U.S.
to make a stand, with general war an imminent danger and even a
probability. So, the change of strategy by the decision-makers was
reasonable. What was less obvious was why American troops had already
not been withdrawn. If the forces were pushed out, the unnecessary
consequent loss of life would be the least of the results, compared
to loss of American prestige all over the world and the resulting
panic among allies.
They thus counsel admitting the
mistakes in judgment, based on false assumptions about Russian
willingness to provoke general war, and withdrawal while making it
clear that the particular instance was no surrender but rather a
military re-disposition of forces to enable overall victory in the
end.
Tom Schlesinger of The News,
in his weekly "Capital Roundup", tells of the pro
forma sessions of Congress occurring every three days to accord
rules, one lasting 22 seconds in the Senate and one in the House, for
a only a few minutes. The Congress did not want the session to expire
until it could return on January 2 to complete action on the 3.3
billion dollar excess profits tax and the 20 billion dollar arms
appropriations bill.
In the new Congress, to begin
January 3, the Southern Democrats would be the crucial bloc of votes
which would determine action for or against Administration proposals.
Forty of the 47 Senate Republicans would oppose consistently the
Administration except possibly on civil rights legislation, requiring
that at least 42 of the 49 Democrats support it. But 22 Democrats
were from the South and twelve of those were outspoken opponents of
the Fair Deal. Thus, the necessary majority of 49 could not be
reached on those numbers. The Administration therefore would have to
make concessions to the twelve generally opposing Southerners to get their support.
While the House would be more hospitable to the Administration's
polices, without Senate support, legislation would die. One unnamed
member of the Southern bloc said that they would cooperate if they received
concessions on civil rights, the Brannan farm program, national
health insurance, Taft-Hartley revisions and taxes, the heart of the
Fair Deal. The bloc, however, would probably be satisfied if the President
simply refrained from pushing any one of these issues very hard.
Even in the House, a
Republican-Southern coalition could control a majority by a margin of
40 votes. The Democrats had a seventeen-seat majority of the 435
seats, with a hundred Democrats being from the South.
A fight could occur in the Rules
Committee, where rules could be created to bottle up legislation,
designed to weaken the Administration-backed rules which had made it
harder to do so in the 81st Congress, enabling the chairman of any
committee to obtain a floor vote on any measure held by the Rules
Committee for three weeks.
Because Rhode Island had not
ratified the Constitution and North Carolina had not done so until it
ratified the Bill of Rights, there was question by college professors
advising the remodel of the House chamber as to whether eleven or
thirteen stars, one for each original state, should be placed on the
marble mantel behind the dais of the Speaker. There was also an
ongoing debate whether the flag should display eleven or thirteen
stripes.
The Washington Post
editorially congratulated the work of Senator Clyde Hoey's committee
which had investigated homosexuals and perverts in Government
service.
Senator Willis Smith was still
searching for an apartment.
More than two columns of the
Christmas edition of the Post had been devoted to former
Senator Frank Graham's call for an undergirding of the free world and
the principles of the U.N.
According to the Congressional
Quarterly, only Senator Harry F. Byrd voted more times against
the Democratic majority than had Senator Hoey during 1950.
Only three members of the North
Carolina Congressional delegation, Congressmen Graham Barden, Robert
Doughton, and F. Ertel Carlyle, had voted against the aid to
Yugoslavia bill.
Which leads to the question
Sixth
Seventh Framed Edition
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