"Who Is Fooling Whom?"

The Washington Post paused to consider a phenomenon that was causing more & more dismay among newsmen and their readers: the confusing and sometimes contradictory character of General MacArthur's official bulletins.

"Exactly what is happening in or about Korea," said the Post last week, "ir impossible to report because of 1) the censorship in the field and the secrecy in Washington, and 2) the propaganda-like quality of the commentaries emanating from General MacArthur's headquarters." Asked the Post: "Who is fooling whom?"

What the Post was referring to was the persistent habit of MacArthur's communique writers in jazzing up their bulletins with bumptious prose. Some sampie phrases from last week's communiques: carrier-based planes made attacks that were "slashing" and "in close support of embattled ground troops"; they "swarmed over the entire breadth of Korea." The Navy's shelling was "pinpoint bombardment."

Alice in Wonderland. The Post's charges were duplicated in London's more flamboyant papers, always alert for a sensation. In a front-page article, the tabloid Daily Mirror (circ. 4,500,000) flatly charged that "the world is not getting the truth" about the war. The reason, wrote Mirror Correspondent Davis Walker, a veteran World War II reporter, was due to the "dreadfully distorted" news coming from "Alice-in-Wonderland information handed out at high level."

"Air Force communiques," wrote Walker, "have become a total farce . . . Handouts [state] that 314 enemy were killed. In another instance, it was ninetynine. But a . . . ten-year-old boy . . . knows . . . no air force can possibly know exactly how many people it has killed."

The Sunday Express' Columnist Ephraim Hardcastle, like the Mirror, went after Air Force exaggerations. Hardcastle also charged that General MacArthur's intelligence chief, Major General Charles A. Willoughby, had done even more fantastic work with statistics. "If his communiques are to be believed," wrote Hardcastle, Willoughby's intelligence system "is nothing short of miraculous . . . On Dec. 26 he . . . said the Communists had 444,406 troops actually in Korea, of which 277,173 were Chinese and 167,233 North Koreans. I have never seen a wartime report of enemy strength . . . meticulous to the nearest digit."

Optimism of the Air. There was a reasonable explanation, if not a justification, for the Air Force's bumbling number work. It had compiled the individual claims of "kills" by pilots and spotters, and issued them, in many cases without rounding off the numbers which would have made them more believable. The errors were compounded by the well-known fact that airmen, optimistic by nature, are prone to make all their reports on the rosy side.

Nevertheless, in Tokyo last week the Air Force stoutly-stood by its claims. Brigadier General William Nuckols, chief P.I.O. of the Far East Air Forces, said he was well aware that World War II's experience had proved that the communique claims of kills almost always overshot the facts. But he said that the Air Force had been making allowance for that. Proudly, Nuckols pointed out that for the two previous days, the Air Force had claimed enemy casualties of only 884, while the ground forces, in observing the results of the strikes, had estimated the same casualties at 1,650.

In any case, the actual figures were less of a point of irritation than the overall tone describing vast destruction meted out to the enemy. Summed up one correspondent in Korea: "If you read only Air Force communiques you would think Russia was bugging out of existence."

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