On the Griddle

The crushing Chinese counteroffensive in Korea had put General MacArthur on the griddle at home and in Europe. In Washington, carefully anonymous military officials who love to chuck harpoons at MacArthur leaked reports that he had defied Administration suggestions that he halt his troops well short of the Korean-Manchurian border. Nervous European politicians charged bitterly that MacArthur wanted to plunge the U.S. and her allies into a major Asiatic war which would leave Europe undefended. MacArthur promptly struck back at his critics through the press. In a statement solicited by the New York Times's Arthur Krock, MacArthur denied that he had received suggestions from "any authoritative source" to halt his troops south of the Manchurian border. In answer to questions from Hugh Baillie, president of the United Press, the general accused European leaders of "shortsighted" preoccupation with the safety of Europe alone.

Even more strongly, MacArthur disputed charges that his "end-the-war" offensive had been ill-advised strategically. The U.N. assaults, he maintained, had not motivated the all-out intervention of the Chinese Communist army. He made the obvious point that intervention on such a scale required elaborate preparation, and consequently must have been decreed by Mao Tse-tung's government long ago.

The effectiveness of the U.N. air force had been severely limited by the fact that, like U.N. ground and naval forces, it was forbidden to strike at the enemy's main Manchurian bases--"an enormous handicap unprecedented in military history." But the real reason for the U.N.'s reverses, said MacArthur, was sheer weight of numbers. "As far as I can see," said MacArthur, "no strategical or tactical mistakes were made of any basic proportion."

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