Helping the Hopeless

Once again the exhausted, rag-clad mobs of refugees fled south, silently watching their babies and their aged die by the roadside. By their own fatalistic tradition and by the standards of the Chinese Communists who drove them southward, they were hopeless chattels of war. By U.S. standards and by the declared standards of the U.N., they were pitiable war casualties who must be helped.

In the middle of a precarious military situation, U.N. commanders and civilian relief agencies were trying to cope with 3,000,000 refugees. Last week U.N. officials planned to send 600,000 civilians to . the islands of Cheju and Koje, off Korea's southern coast. More may possibly be sent to the Japanese island of Tsushima. U.N. military roadblocks had been set up to direct refugees from the old Pusan perimeter to the less populated southwest portion of the country.

In a rough & ready fashion, U.N. officers have tried to set up some special form of shelter for the thousands of homeless Korean children. Before U.N. troops evacuated the city, the Fifth Air Force flew 1,000 Seoul orphans to safety on Cheju Island. Last week the U.S. Army set aside an old dyeing plant at Pusan to house some of the hungry, half-frozen children picked up on the streets there.

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