Fuel on the Fire

For the first time since the change in command in Tokyo, a top U.S. military figure sided with General Douglas MacArthur this week in the great dispute.

Witness No. 8 in the MacArthur hearing on Capitol Hill was tall, silver-haired Lieut. General Albert Wedemeyer, 53, former U.S. commander in China, onetime planning chief for the Army, author of the much-discussed Wedemeyer Report. He had already put in for retirement, and he was in a position to talk freely. He did. Wedemeyer tossed a cord of fresh logs on to the dying bonfire of the MacArthur controversy, bluntly criticized not only Dean Acheson but also his own old friend, George Catlett Marshall. And he had a startling plan for dealing with world Communism: abandon the Korean campaign and come to an open break with the U.S.S.R.

"In my judgment we ought to get out of Korea . . . We are losing our finest manhood there. We have a stalemate that worries me no end, and what are we accomplishing there?" Pulling out of Korea, he conceded, is "tantamount to a defeat, in my judgment, but you must take counter-steps in other fields.

"I would break off diplomatic relations with [Russia and its satellites]. I would go into full mobilization ... I would go to the real perpetrator of all this, because it is not the Koreans--the crux of this thing is in the Kremlin."

This bluntly stated proposition left his Senate questioners a little breathless. Wedemeyer had been against putting U.S. ground troops into Korea in the first place. But once there, he went on, General MacArthur should have been allowed to do what he wanted, because "a commander in the field should be given no restrictions whatsoever."

If it carries on the war in Korea, he added, the U.S. should bomb beyond the Yalu, even though that means risking war with Russia. If the U.S. means to win victory in Korea, it should also apply a naval blockade even if it has to do so without allies. He would put U.S. air and ground troops into Formosa to help defend it, but he did not think that Chiang Kai-shek is in any shape to "conduct a significant operation against the mainland."

Other points made by Wedemeyer:

>A truce at the 38th parallel would be a "defeat for us psychologically." It would mean that "our first team was unable to defeat successfully the third team of the Soviet."

>"I [never] agreed with the State Department's pessimistic views concerning the future of Formosa."

>He asked to be relieved as deputy Army chief of staff in 1949 because "I felt frustrated . . . The policies, the plans for American action in the West and in the East I did not agree with."

>Chiang Kai-shek's failure in China was attributable chiefly to Communist propaganda, which exploited corruption and maladministration "to such a degree that Chiang was repudiated . . . the troops were dispirited and they didn't fight."

>General Marshall, on his mission to China, radioed the President in 1946, urging that Wedemeyer be made ambassador to China. But later in Washington, Acheson, then Under Secretary of State, showed Wedemeyer a telegram saying that the news had leaked out in China and the "Communists are protesting violently." "Acheson said, 'I'm sorry about this, Wedemeyer,' and I told the Secretary, 'Well, I'm not--[but] I don't think that the Communists should determine who should be appointed by our Government.' " He had already bought an "ambassadorial trousseau to the tune of about $800 or $900." State paid the bill.

By the time he stepped down from his first day on the stand, General Wedemeyer had the bonfire popping and blazing once more.

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