The Charlotte News
Friday, May 4, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that U.N. tank patrols roamed the no-man's land in Korea this date on killer missions as the enemy regrouped in the hills for a new attempt to overwhelm the allied lines. Allied planes reported hundreds of enemy trucks moving southward for days. During the day, 1,740 of the enemy had been killed or wounded.
The allied air forces flew 1,000 sorties for the fifth successive day on the previous day, killing or wounding an estimated 800 enemy troops.
Lt. General Matthew Ridgway, new supreme commander of the allied forces, while visiting Eighth Army headquarters in Korea, said this date that the enemy would "continue to pay the bloody price they've been paying." He said that he had complete confidence in the ability of the U.N. front-line troops to "handle anything that's thrown at them." He added as to the enemy: "Maybe someday these people who are used as cannon fodder will wake up and listen to reason." He commended the South Korean First Division for defending Seoul and conferred for nearly an hour with President Syngman Rhee of South Korea.
General MacArthur, testifying the previous day before the joint Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees, said, according to an unnamed Senator, that Washington never would let him bomb one major Communist supply base within Korea, 35 miles from the Russian border. The information had been eliminated from the previous day's transcript by censors. Another unnamed Senator confirmed the statement and that Senator William Knowland of California had protested the censoring of the statement along with the General's similar statement regarding certain hydroelectric plants. The General had also said that Lt. General George Stratemeyer and Maj. General Rosie O'Donnell, heads of the Far Eastern Air Forces, had insisted that the supply center be destroyed.
General MacArthur had also testified that his split forces between the Tenth Corps and the Eighth Army in the November offensive toward the Manchurian border had been approved by the Joint Chiefs. He said that his getting the boys "home by Christmas" statement had been a hope.
In response to committee member Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut, apparently referring to the General's letter to House Republican Leader Joe Martin, the General said that he believed it was the responsibility of the commander of the allied forces to register his views with persons in political life as he saw fit regarding his differing opinions with Administration policy, as long as they were honest views and not in contradiction to implementing directives he may have received. He said that the American way was for full airing of diverse opinions on controversial issues, antithetical to the Soviet method. The General, in an exchange with the Senator, said that he believed the principal enemy was Communism all over the world, not just in Russia.
British Government intelligence reported that it had revised its estimate of Soviet Army strength to 200 divisions, from its March estimate of 175 divisions and 2.8 million men. Better intelligence was cited as the probable reason rather than actual increase in Soviet manpower. The British had also estimated in March the additional Communist satellite armies at a million men and Communist Chinese strength at 2.5 million men, with the combined Communist forces totaling therefore 6.5 million men.
General MacArthur the previous day
had provided the Senate committees his guess on Communist armed
strength but the figures
Republicans, led by Senator Kenneth Wherry, lost, by a vote of 41 to 37, a bid to hold open hearings with General MacArthur. Democrats argued that executive session hearings were necessary to protect vital military information useful to the enemy. Only Democratic Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada voted with the Republicans in an otherwise party-line vote.
In Vienna, an American M.P. was shot to death by two Russian soldiers this date and U.S. authorities demanded that the Soviets join in an investigation of the incident. A soldier on duty with the M.P. said that the Russian soldiers stood between ten and twenty feet from the M.P. and opened fire with about twenty rounds after being challenged by the Americans in central Vienna in the Western occupation sector outside a nightclub. The Russians then fled into the Soviet sector. The Russian provost marshal in Vienna was said to have expressed regrets to his American counterpart. The U.S. was in control of the Western sector in May, with the policing duties rotating monthly between the Western occupying powers.
The Government ordered another five percent cut in the use of steel for passenger cars and station wagons, reducing usage to 75 percent of that in the first half of 1950 before the Korean war.
The June draft call was set by the Army at 20,000 men, the smallest number since the draft had been resumed the prior September. Since then, 550,000 men had been drafted or placed on call by the Army. The May quota had been 40,000 men. The cutbacks were because of greater numbers of volunteers than anticipated and lower than expected casualties.
Israel and Syria agreed to a ceasefire after brief fighting on their frontiers. The ceasefire was effected by a U.N. armistice commission. The U.N. estimated that 42 Syrians had been killed and 33 wounded in the previous day's fighting and said that it was not possible to estimate Israel's losses. A dispute had arisen over the demilitarized zone between the two countries.
In Oak Ridge, Tenn., striking AFL construction workers returned to work at the atomic energy plant after a four-day walkout over the contractor's refusal to pay a negotiated wage increase as being in excess of the ten percent permitted by the Wage Stabilization Board.
Talks between Duke Power Co. and the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen regarding the bus drivers of Charlotte and several other North Carolina cities for a new working contract had been recessed for being deadlocked.
On the editorial page, "The Wedemeyer Report" discusses the revelations of the report falling short of the rumors surrounding its being maintained in secret since its issuance to the President by General Albert C. Wedemeyer in 1947. As Secretary of State Acheson said, the policies recommended for Korea had been followed, with the exception of creation of a South Korean scout force sufficient in strength to cope with the North. The General had regarded such a force as necessary to prevent establishment of a Communist government after the U.S. and Russia had withdrawn their occupation forces.
But General Wedemeyer had not, as rumored, predicted an invasion by the North.
Moreover, the Republicans had been responsible for the defeat of the proposed aid to Korea in the months leading up to the invasion. The piece therefore questions how their knowing of the General's recommendation of a five-year rehabilitation program, at a cost of more than the tentatively approved 137 million dollars annually but later reduced to 92.7 million, could have changed their basic stance against aid to South Korea.
The GOP had been responsible for most of the opposition to the Marshall Plan and the Point Four program for technical assistance to underdeveloped nations and so it finds it doubtful that they would have approved the program proposed by General Wedemeyer.
"Highway Commission Change" finds former State House Speaker Kerr Craige Ramsey of Rowan County to have made a good suggestion before the Charlotte Kiwanis Club when he proposed that the State Highway & Public Works Commission members be chosen for staggered terms, to reduce the power of the Governor over them, rather than the current system by which the Governor hired them for four-year terms and could fire them at will. Mr. Ramsey had not made the proposal in the 1951 Legislature as he likely considered it would be perceived as an attack on Governor Kerr Scott, but he likely would in 1953.
We shall be looking forward to that.
"Senator Dick Russell" finds it appropriate that Senator Russell
A piece from the Washington Post, titled "Van Fleet's Inspiration", finds inspirational courage, faith and humility in the message of recently appointed ground commander General James Van Fleet to the men fighting in Korea. He had said that they were fighting to stop aggression and maintain peace and freedom against the Communists who did not cherish or believe in freedom for their people.
Drew Pearson tells of General MacArthur relating to North Carolina Congressman Charles Deane in September, 1949 that the Chinese Communists could be "easily defeated in any major conflict" and that the "Soviets were powerless to conduct a full-scale war on the Chinese mainland". The General had also said that he considered Chiang Kai-Shek to be an intelligent leader but knew nothing of the art of war and was surrounded by corrupt officials and generals, with ineffective and poorly equipped troops. He had also told Mr. Deane that he did not believe that the North Koreans would overrun South Korea but that the U.S. would have to support the latter in the event of trouble, that Russia had nothing to gain by taking over South Korea, as it was most interested in establishing a warm water port on the Indian Ocean, supplanting the previous goal of establishing a Mediterranean warm water port. Congressman Deane had reported these views to the President after visiting with the General in Tokyo during the early fall before the North Korean invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950.
The President had been set to answer General MacArthur's insubordination at a press conference following the firing with a note in his pocket, quoting the General from 1932, that he believed that it would be an abdication of responsibility for the commander in chief to delegate to the generals the determination of general means and methods of war and the development of the broad policies relating to the prosecution of war. But the President had relented in reading the statement to the press.
General MacArthur would likely win the present debate on military strategy in Korea, suggests Mr. Pearson, because there were only three realistic alternatives now for concluding the war, to withdraw, to reach a stalemate, or to bomb the Chinese bases, in each such case, vindicating the claims of the General that the bombing was the only way to win the war.
R. F. Beasley of the Monroe Journal discusses the decline in statesmanlike demeanor of Senator Robert Taft as he attacked the President and the Joint Chiefs regarding foreign policy, rendering him unfit for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination. He was breaking up the bipartisan foreign policy which recently deceased Senator Arthur Vandenberg had worked himself to death trying to effect.
Senator Taft had vilified the Joint
Chiefs, especially General Omar Bradley, while trying to defend
General MacArthur regarding Far Eastern policy. He wanted to
investigate foreign policy all the way back to the Yalta Conference
Should Senator Taft, General MacArthur and others of the persuasion lead the country into war with China or Russia, the country would wake up to the folly of such men and they would go down the "political drain". If the President succeeded in limiting the war to Korea and ultimately peace would come, then Senator Taft would be left on the outside.
He concludes that while the President might not run again in 1952, Senator Taft appeared finished as a serious candidate for the GOP nomination, as a real statesman would not lead the hue and cry in time of trouble but rather would seek to settle matters reasonably, taking all things into account. There had not been a day since World War I when the Republicans had proved worthy of the White House and damning FDR and Truman was not the way to prove their worth, endangering the country in the process.
Robert C. Ruark defends himself and
others against a newspaper publisher's assault on the syndicated
columnist as being involved in "one of the biggest rackets ever
put over on editors … [producing] a perfect reproduction of
the yakety-yak that fills the room after the third or fourth dry
Martini
He says that such an indictment hurt, as such columnists knew these facts but hated to have them spread around, that as one of the racketeers who had started from scratch and suddenly was earning a million dollars a month, he had to defend other racketeers in the syndicate, as the late Ernie Pyle who had reported from the fronts in Europe, Africa, and Sicily during the war, only to lose his life to an enemy sniper shortly after arriving in the Pacific. Fred Othman in Washington covered Congress thoroughly. Leonard Lyons invested "ten hours a night, dead cold sober, among the bores of the saloon set." Peter Edsen reported for the NEA service in Washington and routinely got the scoop ahead of regular reporters.
He concludes, however, that realizing the basic shame of his estate, too old to be a copy boy or even a city editor, who executives desired to have their own hair, and realizing that everyone had to make a living, he did not wish to quarrel with the newspaper publisher regarding the criticism. He still told his mother that he was running numbers for Murder, Inc.
A letter writer from Bladenboro says that as a veteran of World War II and having served in the Pacific under General MacArthur, he feels he should add his two-cents worth to the Truman-MacArthur dispute. He believes that the President's "punch-you-in-the-nose attitude" could not win the war and that the General advocated the policy which the White House wanted but was afraid to bring into the open. "Let a jackass know that you are afraid of him and you'll get kicked." He thinks that was what the Truman Administration was portraying for the consumption of Stalin. He thinks that rather than appeasement, the enemy needed a dose of war to convince them that America meant what it said. While the General could not run the White House and the war, the President could not run the Government and the battlefield.
He finds the General's speech to Congress to have been the greatest in history.
A letter writer from Pineville says that he read daily the column of Erich Brandeis and found his statement that North Carolina was a dry state to be misleading, as some 30 of the 100 counties had adopted ABC-controlled sale of liquor. Mr. Brandeis had said that he observed drunks and broken liquor bottles in Asheville and Wilmington while visiting the state, and the writer does not doubt it as he had seen the same thing in Charlotte on York Road.
He thinks prohibition would have worked had their been enforcement, but that part of the enforcement mechanism was not in sympathy with the law, instead went into the racket to get from it what it could.
A letter writer corrects the April
26 editorial, "Scratch One Bottleneck", by stating that a
century earlier, there were no railroads in Charlotte. The piece had
said that for more than a century talk had existed anent the railroad
crossings
He also corrects an April 24 report in the newspaper which said that City minutes from the closing days of the Confederacy had been found by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, finding it an incomplete statement, omitting that the Board of Commissioners of the City had shut up the city a month before the surrender at Bennett Place in Durham County on April 26, 1865 of General Joseph E. Johnston to General William Sherman—the last major surrender of the Civil War, occurring 12 days after the assassination of President Lincoln and 17 days after the surrender of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia to General Grant at Appomattox Court House.
Parenthetically, Charlotte had been the locale of the last official Cabinet meeting of the Confederacy—though there are disputants for the prize, such as Fort Mill, S.C.—, as Jefferson Davis and his Rebel Gov'ment skedaddled southward.
Gov'ment's gov'ment. Enuff
Framed Edition
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