Back to War in Korea
In the absence of any Communist reply to General Ridgway's suggestion that the truce talks should be resumed at the village of Songhyon, in the no-man's-land between the two armies, all the news from Korea is war news. Even the visit to the front of the chairman of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Bradley, produced nothing which could be interpreted as a new move for a settlement. While he was there the war went on both in the air, where the scale and fierceness of the fighting are clearly mounting, and on the ground where an unremitting opera- tion, which is referred to as a matter of course as the "autumn offensive," is being carried out by the United Nations forces with the object of denying the Communists any chance to con- centrate without interruption for a new big attack. General Van Fleet, in particular, talks in terms of a big battle, referring to the steady though limited bomber offensive as a factor upset- ting the enemy time-table and giving his estimate of the casualties inflicted through that offensive as 200,000. The very fact that both sides seem to assume that time is on their side points straight to fighting on a larger scale than ever, for with the positions of the opposing forces virtually fixed time can only be used for the building up of forces and supplies. And a situa- tion in which both sides prepare for the biggest battle yet and each side is confident of winning is not one in which armistices in the past have been successfully concluded.
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