The Big Question

The question before the house, asked more emphatically than at any time in the past eight weeks, was: Do the Reds really want peace in Korea?

While the Peking and Pyongyang radios reached new heights of invective ("cunning," "deceitful," "arrogant," "blackmail" and "lunacy"), the Communists last week broke off the Kaesong truce talks. It was the first time they had done so, although Matt Ridgway had done it twice.

Before they did, the Reds put on two shows: one, a "people's funeral" without a corpse, the other, a clumsy and ludicrous attempt to make it appear that the Communist billets in Kaesong had been attacked by a night-flying U.N. plane.

Dirge Without Death. The Communists charged that one of their military police platoons had been attacked by U.N. armed forces inside the Kaesong neutral zone. Two men had been wounded and one was finished off by "shots at the forehead." Alan Winnington, Communist correspondent of the London Daily Worker, invited three U.N. reporters and a U.N. officer to attend the dead hero's funeral. There were wreaths and silken banners, speeches and accordion music--but no casket. North Korea's Nam II was there, impassively smoking.

Made wary by the increasing flow of Red accusations, U.N. officers had gone at once to the scene of the alleged murder. They queried the assistant commander of the Chinese platoon, who said frankly that he had seen only one of the assailants clearly--a man in a white shirt and dark trousers, with a sidearm. In a moderate reply to the Red protest, General Ridgway pointed out that no troops under his command wore such a uniform.

The Second Charge. This did not satisfy the Reds. Three days later, half an hour before midnight, they telephoned the U.N. base at Munsan, claiming that an outrageous air attack had occurred, and asked that U.N. investigators be dispatched to Kaesong at once. They went.

The U.N. officers were shown the "evidence." One exhibit was an oil-soaked piece of flush-riveted metal which North Korea's Colonel Chang Chun San said was part of a napalm bomb dropped by the marauding plane. There were a few small scorched areas and holes that looked as if grenades had been buried and detonated. There were two mothball-sized hunks of metal which, Chang solemnly averred, had struck Nam IPs jeep. Could the U.N. officers see the exhibits by daylight? No, said Chang, they had to be removed for "analysis." Reading from written notes, Chang called off the truce talks.

There were holes in the Red trumpery big enough to drive a T-34 tank through. The piece of flush-riveted metal might have been part of a U.N. plane, but it could not have been part of a napalm bomb, since the casings are not made with flush-riveting. The scorched areas were entirely too small to have been caused by a napalm bomb, which burns up thousands of square feet of terrain. The Chinese soldier gave the show away when he said that the attacking plane had its headlights on; no U.N. air unit attacks with lights on at night. After first checking the whereabouts of every U.N. plane that night, Matt Ridgway denounced the affair as a "frame-up" and scorned it as an "amateurishly staged presentation . . ." The Communists, in turn, denounced Ridgway's reply as "savage" and "contemptible," charged further attempts to murder Communist personnel by U.S. and South Korean "plainclothesmen," and accused U.N. air commanders of sending planes over Shanghai and Tsingtao. In one message from Kim II Sung and Peng Teh-huai to Ridgway, they gave away what really seemed to be worrying them: "You have the audacity to regard yourselves as the victors . . ."

A Matter of Face. It is possible that this is indeed what distresses the Reds--that their fake incidents are simply to regain face. That is Washington's interpretation. If anything else is in prospect, General James Van Fleet is calmly ready for the enemy. "He can't bring into this battle line and support enough troops to defeat the Eighth Army," he said. "We would consider it a great opportunity if they were to attack. If [the G.I.s] have to start fighting again, they will have a new hatred for the enemy. They will be an eager army." As the waiting went on, two great armies sat within deadly proximity to each other, in a precarious, portentous calm.

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