(1) Prospects at Panmunjom
The independent Democratic Cleveland Plain Dealer (March 10) stated that eight months ought to be enough time in which to reach agreement on the terms of an armistice if both sides wanted one, and that from the demands the Communists have made, it appeared that they just wanted a breathing spell.
"We knew," the paper said, "that it was a favorite trick of the Chinese Communists, in their long war with the Nationalists, to propose a truce when they were being hard pressed. We even helped them pull this stunt in 1946 when Chiang Kai-shek had them badly whipped and General Marshall was sent to China to bring about an armistice as the first step toward forming a coalition government.
"As a result of the help they got from the Russians during that armistice and the temporary withdrawal of American aid from the Nationalists, the Communists were able to gather enough strength to take over all of China when the fighting resumed.
"What happened in China may now be the Communists' objective in Korea..."
"As long as the talks at Panmunjom continue", the independent Washington Evening Star (March 10) observed, "there is presumably some hope of a negotiated settlement. It is slim hope, however, and it seems to be getting slimmer everyday. Certainly the Chinese and their North Korean associates have given little indication that they really want an armistice."
After having quoted the recent statement by Mr. Allison, the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, that if the Chinese Communists 'want to widen the conflict and engulf the world in a terrible war, then they must be the ones to do it', the paper observed that "it is a policy which leads to a dead end in Korea. We cannot win the war there. Neither can we withdraw. The truce negotiations are getting nowhere and we are not willing even to try to coerce the enemy into accepting a reasonable settlement. And the Communists have been officially notified that if the talks break down we do not propose to do anything about it."
In answering the question 'What are we to do if no truce agreement is obtainable in Korea?', the New York Herald Tribune (March 5) opined: "One possible course is concession. By agreeing to herd all our Communist prisoners back to the tender mercies of their masters, abandoning any idea of limiting North Korean airfield development or policing the truce terms on the ground, we could probably recover our own men and get a signature on a truce. But that would be to pay Mao Tse-tung so colossal a price in prestige as to make it highly unlikely that the truce would last, or that the anti-communist position around the whole eastern and southern rim of Asia could be long sustained. Even our British friends cannot quite bring themselves to advocate that, and few Americans are likely to do so."
"Barring some decision in Washington, which is unlikely" the independent Democratic New Orleans Times Picayune (March4) stated, "it looks as though General Ridgway's negotiators are in for continuance of the meaningless and already excessively prolonged armistice discussions with the North Korean and Chinese Reds. The closest observers of the Reds at the Panmunjom meetings now say that there will be an armistice when the Reds are ready for it and not before. There is no way of telling when they will want it."
While the independent New York Post (March 12) thought "the current stalemate is a supreme test of American patience, wisdom and maturity", the New York Times (March 14) observed that "it is hardly surprising that nerves should have become raw and tempers thin over the course of the so-called 'negotiation' in Korea. It has been apparent for a long time that there has not been, and perhaps never was, any real meeting of minds. It is not established, to this day, that the Soviet Union and its puppets ever did have any desire for an honorable peace. The U. N. has conducted for months on end a formal process that may well have had no basis in reality."
In another editorial on March 16 entitled 'Falsehood and Fantasy' the same paper commented: "Jacob A. Malik, the Soviet Union's Deputy Foreign Minister, has managed to reach a new low in falsehood and fantasy even for him.
In a committee of the United Nations he has now associated his country with formal charges that the United States is using germ warfare in Korea and China. The Peiping radio, with a mendacity that would be comic if it were not so tragic, had paved the way for him with a fairy tale about how a United States plane had dropped germ-infested vermin over Tsingtao on March 6".
The paper went on to say that "there is no reason to suspect for one moment that Mr. Malik is possessed of any conviction as to the truth of his assertions. On the contrary, it may reasonably be assumed that the Soviet representative is only too well aware of how false and preposterous are the charges that he has made. The conspicuous Communist opposition to proper inspection is eloquent testimony to the fact that the Communists dare not expose their manufactured nightmare to the daylight of honest observation.
"The gravity in such a situation arises from the fact that the United Nations itself is being abused. This abuse, of course, is no novelty to the Communists, nor indeed to Mr. Malik himself. It is, however, continuingly shameful and increasingly exasperating that an organization designed to promote world peace and world understanding should be still further subjected to the use of its public position for purposes of cheap and malicious propaganda."
(2) The Question of Naval Blockade
The Republican Los Angeles Times (March 1) stated: "Speculation is increasing over the prospect of a naval blockade of Red China's coasts if, or when, the Korea truce talks fail. The blockade idea is attractive because it is a half measure which our U. N. partners might he persuaded to approve and because we are so clearly superior to the Chinese Communists in naval power.
"A naval blockade, however, is a good deal more than a sea-going picket line. It is a game conducted according to a lot of complicated rules which is effective, and sometimes decisive, in conjunction with other offensive military operation".
In quoting Admiral Radford's opinion that the Russian Pacific submarine force is capable of making serious trouble for the American navy, the paper warned: "Thus the decision to invoke a naval blockade against Communist China must be taken, if it is, in full realization of the risk involved. It is no greater, perhaps, but also no less, than the risk involved in carrying out General MacArthur's original design for punishing Chinese (Communist) aggression".
"By attempting to tie our fleets to the dock through a clause in the truce," the independent Republican San Francisco Chronicle (March 10) reasoned, the Chinese Communists "would hope to produce a guarantee of security from interruption in any adventures they might undertake in the future. They would hope, for example, to avoid U. N. interference with southward moves into Indo-China, and to escape from the pressure of the U. N. embargo now plaguing their economy. Guaranteed freedom from the application of U. N. pressure 'outside of Korea', they might hope to sail their junks to Formosa for a showdown with the Nationalists there. The overwhelming naval power of the U. N. in the far Pacific is a threat in being to the incomplete Chinese Communist consolidation of power in China itself; nothing would better suit their aim of completing the communization of China than a clause shielding them from the potentiality of this force".
The independent Democratic Baltimore Sun (March 9) interpreted the Communist attempt to insert into the proposed truce agreement a paragraph which would have bound U. N. naval forces not to blockade the Chinese coast as their apprehension over the supply, and especially of supply from Russia. "The news that the Soviet Union is strengthening its railway system in Siberia and Central Asia," the paper said," serves to point up the fact that the net of rails in that part of the world is still not a strong one. Overland transportation of materials across Asia and down toward the appendage of the Korean peninsula is a slow and difficult business.
"If the sea could be opened during a truce, however, the supply problem of the Chinese (Communists) and the North Koreans might be greatly eased".
"In this connection," the Republican New York Herald Tribune (March 15) stated, "the action of the U. S. Defense Department in splitting the Philippines-Formosa region away from General Ridgway's command and placing it under Admiral Radford may be important. There are many administrative and strategic reasons why this area should be under naval, rather than Army command. But the move also has the effect of emphasizing the American stand that the Panmunjom negotiations should deal exclusively with Korea.
"Whether this will expedite the Korean conferences depends on the real purposes of the Communist negotiators. They have often been informed, without equivocation, that any attempt to bring extraneous Far Eastern questions into the talks will be rejected by the U. N. If they are willing to accept on such conditions, it is up to them to prove it by demonstrating that they really want a fair and reasonable agreement".
B. British Views
(1) Churchill's Revelation
The British press reacted very much along party lines to Mr. Churchill's dramatic revelation on March 26 of the former Labor Government's pledge to associate itself with action 'not confined to Korea' in the event of heavy air attacks from bases in China. While the Labor left-wing weekly, the New Statesman and Nation, the liberal Manchester Guardian and liberal News Chronicle all laid emphasis on the fact that Mr. Churchill entered no new engagements when in Washington, the Tory papers and some of the independent papers and weeklies were more critical of the former Socialist ministers.
The Conservative Daily Mail (Feb. 27) thought that "it is disgraceful for the Socialists to try to pin on to Mr. Churchill something which he has not done, but which they themselves did while they were in office". The paper asked: "What can the country think of them? What can it think of Mr. Morrison, who made the promise and yet who said last night: 'Peace was safer with the last Prime Minister than it is with the present one'?"
The Conservative Daily Telegraph (Feb. 27) went farther: "The chatter about 'subserviency' started yesterday by Mr. Morrison and developed by Mr. Bevan was only a faint echo of the wholehearted anti-Americanism of many Socialist backbenchers. Whereas Mr. Churchill, by experience and temperament, rejoices in every prospect of Anglo-American co-operation, Mr. Attlee and his Cabinet colleagues gave every appearance of regarding the same prospect as a necessary evil, to be accepted grudgingly and only unwillingly revealed."
The independent Glasgow Herald, after having raised the questions: "Can it be that the Labor Party want the Government to declare now that they will not associate themselves in any retaliatory measures against fresh aggression? Is that really the best way to persuade the Chinese Communists to settle on the truce terms?", argued that "in any case it is entirely unrealistic to discuss this matter as though it were a question of Korea alone. If there is a further attack by (Communist) China, it is as likely, perhaps more likely, to occur somewhere else in Southeast Asia, in Indo-China or in Burma. It would be as unwise to say openly now that we would limit the field of our resistance as it would be to state publicly in advance that resistance would take the form of total war against (Communist) China."
The independent weekly, the Economist (March 1) observed: "The party that has been accusing Mr. Churchill of promising British support for American action against (Communist) China has now shown itself to have been responsible, when Mr. Morrison was Foreign Secretary, for a definite undertaking to the Americans. It was, in Mr. Churchill's words, that 'in the event of heavy air attacks from bases in China upon United Nations forces in Korea they (the British Government) would associate themselves with action not confined to Korea.'
"There can be no criticism whatever of this statement. It is what any British Government would have said and would have meant. But the existence of this definite commitment, nine months old, makes it simply silly to attack Mr. Churchill for saying that Britain would respond resolutely to fresh Communist attacks in the Far East. The insinuations about more specific undertakings were entirely unsubstantiated.
"It is understandable that while he was in office, Mr. Morrison did not tell his party about his own undertaking. But it is quite inexcusable that he and Mr. Attlee should have agreed to take up in opposition an attitude entirely in conflict with their own policies in office".
Commenting that Mr. Morrison ruined his case by oversimplification, over-emphasis, and over-generalization, the independent London Times (Feb. 27) observed that "it is wrong to forget that the British part can be usefully played only in the climate of friendly association which Mr. Churchill went especially to Washington to foster. It is both wrong and stupid to talk as if Mr. Truman and Mr. Acheson agreed with the wilder statements made in the United States, mainly by their political opponents, and it makes the American Administration's task in steering a sound course that much more difficult. It is no less wrong to assume that relations with Communist China depend only on good will on the western side".
(2) Anxiety over Hongkong
The independent weekly Economist (February 9) wrote: "There are signs that the heat is to be turned on seriously against Britain for the first time since the Amethyst affair. All expression of opinion in (Communist) China is today integrated under a fully totalitarian central control, so that the new tone about Britain appears to indicate that the Chinese Communist leadership is reconsidering its hope of a decisive separation between British and American policies in the Far East. Whether the new agitation on Hongkong will develop into real menaces against the British position there remains to be seen, but the period of virtual immunity from officially sponsored hostile agitation in China that Hongkong has so far enjoyed now appears to be over."
The journal went on to say that the (Communist) "Chinese press editorials declared that Mr. Churchill's speech had shown him both as the representative of British imperialism, 'the enemy of the Chinese and Asian peoples', and as the subservient auxiliary of American imperialism striving to curry favor with his American bosses".
While the liberal Manchester Guardian (March 4) asked: "Is Peking bent on working up a major quarrel and trying to take over Hongkong in the future? Or is it reminding Britain that Hongkong is a virtual hostage in its hands which will suffer if Britain cooperates too closely with America?", the Conservative weekly, the Spectator (March 8) wrote: "The incident, which seems to have been largely spontaneous, is a reminder (and perhaps a salutary one) of the extent to which Hongkong is and must always be a hostage to fortune, not easily defensible against aggression from without and chronically vulnerable to internal disturbances among its swollen population. It does not look like a signal that the Chinese Communists are preparing to turn the heat on what they regard as a provocative outpost of Imperialism; but it warns us not to forget that, sooner or later, such a contingency is almost bound to arise".
The Times (March 13) recalled that "until the People's Republic intervened in Korea and was branded as an aggressor by the United Nations, the Chinese Communists were careful to keep on good terms with Hongkong, which was useful as a link with the west, as the nodal point of two-way trade, and as a shop window for Chinese, as well as for British, staple goods. All this changed when Hongkong fell under the general embargo imposed on the export of strategic materials to China. Peking then accused the "imperialist" Government of Hongkong of oppressing its subjects and uttered vague threats of vengeance whenever Communist agitators who disturbed the peace of the Colony were shepherded over the border. These threats are not taken too seriously in Hongkong, if only because no one there believes that Peking would risk touching off a major war by open attack; it is thought that they are intended to serve as reminder that Britain has a heavy stake in maintaining an unprovocative policy towards (Communist) China".
The independent Observer (March 2) commented that "America would probably risk full-scale war rather than allow (Communist) China to conquer South Korea, Japan, or Formosa. But it is most doubtful whether she would go to war with (Communist) China - and risk world war - for Hongkong, Burma, or Indo-China. It is for us to make up our minds whether we are prepared to yield Hongkong or Southeast Asia to possible (Communist) Chinese aggression; or, if not, how we intend to defend them; and how hope to associate America, Australia, New Zealand, and possibly India with such action."