Stunner for the British

For three weeks, Joe McCarthy, the State Department and the British government have been engaged in a tortuous, three-cornered wrangle over the number of British ships engaged in trade with Red China. The trouble really began when a witness before McCarthy's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations testified that 100 British ships had called at Communist Chinese ports during the first three months of 1953. The fact was, replied the British Information Service indignantly, that British ships had made only 97 trips to China during the period in question, and 16 of the 97 were made by one ship sailing in ballast out of Hong Kong.

Last week, acting as subcommittee chairman in the absence of McCarthy, South Dakota's Senator Karl Mundt sprang a stunner on the British. Information "confirmed by the Defense Department," he announced, showed that between Dec. 29, 1952 and April 20, 1953 exactly 100 British vessels made 177 trips to Red China. To prove his point, Mundt produced the names of 96 of the British ships as well as those of 62 additional ships which had put into Chinese ports flying the flags of twelve other non-Communist nations.* Said Mundt: "We have a right to expect from our friends and allies press statements which are completely accurate."

* Greece, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, France, Italy, Japan, Holland, Pakistan, Panama, India.

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