Way Out

The Communists had found a way to beat General Ridgway's "killer" offensive: they pulled back out of range, faster than Ridgway cared to follow, and Chinese casualties due to ground action fell off sharply.

In his own good time, Ridgway was following, however, and there was some political uproar last week over whether he should or should not cross the 38th parallel. The uproar was largely meaningless, because: 1) the U.N. had already authorized MacArthur to operate anywhere in Korea, and the authorization remained valid until withdrawn; 2) for military rather than political reasons, the Joint Chiefs of Staff begrudged every mile of northward advance. With every mile Ridgway moved northward, the Communist supply lines from their Manchurian "sanctuary" grew shorter (therefore less vulnerable to air attack), and the U.N. lines grew longer.

There was a bright as well as a dark side to MacArthur's stalemate. The Chinese, as well as the allied forces, seemed to be pinned down in Korea. Since they intervened, their program of aggression and expansion in Asia had gained nothing. They failed to follow up their feint in Tibet; they stood idly by while Ho Chi Minh's Communists in Indo-China and the Communist-led Huks in the Philippines got their ears pinned back; Burma, Siam, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Formosa and Japan are as intact as they were last November.

To that extent, a stalemate in Korea had its advantages for the anti-Communist side. But neither Washington nor U.N. could look forward with complacency to an indefinitely divided Korea, and a danger that tied down 150,000 U.S. troops in that small peninsula.

Last week the U.S. State Department began to wake up to a question: How do we settle this thing, anyway? As it looked around for an answer, its eyes were bound (unless it blinkered them) to fall on the Chinese mainland, where opportunity was growing to punish the Communist aggressors at relatively little cost to the free world (see below).

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