MacArthur to Red China

For one day last week, the U.S. dared to hope that there might be a way to end the deadlock in Korea, put an end to the fighting which was costing so much, gaining so little. Douglas MacArthur, flying to the Korean front again, had made a proposition to the enemy.

It was a long statement, in which he first underlined what the Chinese Reds have learned of U.N. military power through the last few months of brutal attrition (see WAR IN ASIA), and told them they could not hope to win.

Fearing a profitless stalemate, he proposed then the only course which seemed logical to him: that the opposing generals meet in the field and arrange a ceasefire. He would put aside such "extraneous matters" as Formosa and Red China's claim to a seat in U.N., leave fundamental "political" questions to the diplomats. "I stand ready at any time to confer in the field with the commander in chief of the enemy forces in an earnest effort [to end] further bloodshed."

He warned the Chinese of what might happen to their homeland if U.N. abandoned "the tolerant effort to contain the war" to South Korea--a warning that was also another meaningful hint directed at U.N.

But hope for a solution in Korea was short-lived; though MacArthur's statement made perfect and obvious military sense, it had not been cleared with Washington. State Department planners, still publicly uncommitted to any plan to bring peace to Korea, conferred with Pentagon planners and finally assembled themselves into an official position. Such matters, it was stated, were even now the subject of delicate negotiations with U.S. allies (negotiations are always said to be delicate). "The political issues," the Washington statement said, "are being dealt with in the United Nations." From Peking came nothing but cold and utter silence. The war went on.

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