The Charlotte News

Saturday, July 1, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that according to General MacArthur's headquarters, a North Korean column had been repulsed at Suwon by South Korean defenders and that the North Koreans had never actually taken the town or its key airstrip, as reported the previous day, the only major airstrip available north of Pusan. The North Korean forces were concentrated ten miles north of Suwon and had thrown three makeshift bridges across the Han River, 23 miles north of the town. There were no North Korean tanks south of that point. U.S. B-29's had bombed the bridges and railroad yards, as well as anti-aircraft batteries inside Communist-held Seoul. Because of rain and clouds, the B-29's were reliant on radar to find targets. Twelve planes had been lost since the beginning of air operations on Tuesday.

Bad weather, including torrential rains, this time of year in Korea was causing air support for ground troops to be tenuous. It would be especially important in coming days as the four available divisions of U.S. ground troops sought to gain a foothold to stop the push of Communist troops southward. American troops were being moved by rail to the front at Suwon, 235 miles north from the embarkation point by land at Pusan, but none had yet completed the journey.

Some British units had joined the naval forces in the Philippine area and in Korean waters. The American light cruiser Juneau was bombarding the Communist-occupied east coast of South Korea.

The Communist Chinese were reported to have moved up 200,000 troops to the North Korean border with China in Manchuria. The movement, it was reported, was the result of direct orders from Moscow.

General MacArthur's representatives were discussing with Nationalist China the prospect of sending Nationalist Chinese troops into Korea.

The U.S.-British naval blockade of Korea was expected to aid land operations against the Communists but not to impede their receipt of supplies from Russia. The Japanese, during the war, had constructed railroads which still remained between Manchuria and the Trans-Siberian Railway to enable supply routes from Siberia into North Korea. The blockade would, however, prevent the North Koreans from making more landings on the Southern coast and maintain open sea lanes for movement of U.S. troops and supplies from Japan. U.S. authorities said that the blockade would respect the three-mile international limit.

A C-54 transport plane crashed at Pusan the previous day, killing all 23 aboard. None were ground troops, the transport of whom had thus far occurred without mishap.

Wartime unity had returned to Congress, as GOP Senators Knowland, Millikin, and Flanders called for sending American ground troops into North Korea as well as into South Korea. Senator Taft said that he doubted Russia would accept peacefully such troops north of the 38th parallel but that it would be difficult to respect the border during warfare.

Senators Kilgore and Bridges joined to sponsor a bill to establish a voluntary training program during the summer months for youths between ages 17 and 21.

Senator Warren Magnuson sponsored a bill to provide the President authority, without first declaring an emergency, to regulate movement of foreign ships in American waters.

Throughout Eastern Europe, Communist newspapers reassured nervous readers that Russia had no intention of becoming involved in the Korean conflict.

The U.N. Security Council discussed setting up a high-level authority to coordinate U.N. action to stop the attack on South Korea, an action supported thus far by more than half of the 59 members of the organization.

The President was resting for the weekend aboard his yacht Williamsburg on the Potomac. He appeared tense and tired after a grueling week.

Near Taza, in French Morocco, a bus crashed into a truck and burst into flames, killing at least twenty Arab passengers, plus the truck driver.

Pictured on the front page is the 20-year old man who had confessed in Ohio to responsibility for the Hartford, Conn., Ringling Brothers Circus fire of July 6, 1944 which resulted in 168 people being killed, along with admission of setting more than twenty other fires and committing four separate homicides between the time he was 9 and 19 years old. He was indicted for two small fires in Circleville, O., for which he would ultimately be convicted and sentenced to four to forty years in prison, of which he would serve eight years before his parole in 1958. He would subsequently recant the confession of setting the Hartford fire, for which he was never charged by Connecticut authorities, maintaining his innocence until his death in 1997, following a reopening of the investigation between 1991 and 1993. He asserted that the confessions came from prolonged interrogation during which he was deprived of sleep and harangued with brainwashing by the Ohio authorities and psychiatrists. He also denied in 1993 that he had set the Circleville fires, which involved no loss of life or injury.

Also pictured is a drawing he had made for psychiatrists of an Indian horseman. He claimed in 1950 that before setting the fires he had visions of a flaming red Indian horseman, would black out and then regain awareness after the fires had started. In 1993, he asserted that these visions were in relation to his position as an Indian shaman and that he was targeted by authorities in 1950 for being different, that his problems stemmed from being caught between two cultures, that of traditional American society and Native American culture.

The big tent of the circus which caught fire had been water-proofed with a volatile mixture of gasoline and wax, accounting for the fast-moving inferno and resultant loss of life. Authorities at the time of the fire concluded that it was probably the result of accident, albeit involving criminal negligence on the part of the circus directors for not taking proper precautions against a known risk of fire.

It should be noted that subsequent discarding of the 1944 Fire Marshal's conclusion that the fire probably started from a carelessly tossed cigarette or burning match below the bleachers by a patron rested only on the notion that tests during the reinvestigation in the early Nineties showed that a smoldering cigarette probably would not have ignited dried grass. Those tests, however, did not take into account either the lit match theory or the presence of wood shavings strewn on the floor of the major tents the day before and the day of the fire, as stated at page 8 of the Fire Marshal's original report, it not being clear whether the wood shavings were spread over the area where the fire erupted. Moreover, the fire experts' revisit failed to consider the report by a police officer that one patron spontaneously stated as he fled the fire that a man, described exclamatorily as a "dirty son of a bitch", had just tossed a cigarette butt in the very area where the fire erupted, as related at page 11 of the report. The inherent reliability of such spontaneous declarations or excited utterances is why such statements are admissible in evidence under the law as exceptions to the hearsay rule.

On the editorial page, "Another Fateful Decision" finds that the decision of the President to send American ground troops into action in Korea reflected the seriousness of the crisis. The nations joining in the effort were, day by day, getting more deeply involved in the situation, as borne out by the simultaneous order of the President to have planes bomb selected targets north of the 38th parallel, following the initial order to have bombing confined only to South Korean targets taken by the Communists, the new effort being designed to disrupt supply lines.