The Soldiers Against MacArthur
Despite Admiral Sherman's support for the idea of a naval blockade of China, it becomes increasingly difficult to see how the Republican' Senators can salvage anything from the wreck which has been made of Genral MacArthur's case by the military witnesses before the combined Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committee. After the Defence Secretary, Mr. Marshall, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Bradley, with their unemphatic but convincing testimony that the MacArthur policy would have increased greatly the risk of a world war, came the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General Collins, and the Air Force Chief of Staff, General Vandenberg, to expose the military weaknesses of that policy and to produce the damning fact that in the critical phase of the advance to the Yalu, General MacArthur deliberately ignored official policy by taking American troops right up to the frontier. After so many weeks of trying to maintain public enthusiasm for a General who wanted to attack China with an American air force which was too small to take the strain of a long war, and at the risk of bringing in the Russians with an air force which, in both numbers and quality of machines, will take a long time to overhaul, the Republican Senators can hardly be said to be flagging. Not having been handicapped by any undue regard for facts or proba- bilities at the outset, they are unlikely to allow such things to embarrass them now. It is more likely that they will turn with added ferocity to what Senator Hickenlooper has called the political side—meaning Mr. Acheson. The fact is, of course, that mbst of the political issues relevant to the Korean war have, been disposed of in the course of the evidence given by Mr, Marshall. What Senator Hickenlooper and his friends are concerned with is another war, in which Washington is the battle- field, the enemy is the President of the United States and the prize is a Republican victory at the 1952 elections.
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