Second Front

Look magazine has not been among the admirers of General Douglas MacArthur. In an article two years ago, his occupation regime was ticked off as "highhanded and inept." Last week, as might be expected, a Look article said that MacArthur should be removed from command because of the reverses in Korea. As might also be expected, the writer of the article was the New York Herald Tribune's Correspondent Homer Bigart, who has been harshly critical of MacArthur's conduct of the war from the beginning.

In Look, battle-worn Correspondent Bigart flatly blamed MacArthur for the "unsound deployment of the United Nations forces and a momentous blunder." He shed an editorial tear for the "great tragedy that a man who served his country so nobly should be hounded and disparaged in the final hours of his career. But that," Bigart added, "is one of the occupational hazards of being a general. MacArthur grossly miscalculated . . . the forces against him. And no nation in the spot we are now in can string along with a leader whose ill-considered decision to launch the offensive of November 24 precipitated and magnified the swift disaster."

Look's editors had cabled Bigart for "a report on the situation in Korea," after he had made much the same charges early in December in a dispatch to the Herald Tribune from Seoul. MacArthur had ignored the Trib story. But this time, prompted by Radio Commentator Robert Montgomery, MacArthur fired off a scorching reply to Bigart's article.

"Throughout the Korean campaign," said MacArthur, "this same writer has repeatedly written off the Army as lost, and by his biased and inaccurate reporting held up to universal contempt the courage and fighting qualities of the gallant American soldier and the leadership of his officers . . . The identical attack of which you speak was carried in another periodical six weeks ago [the New York Herald Tribune], and was used by the Soviet as a weapon against the United States in the forum of the United Nations and was widely carried in the Soviet press."

MacArthur identified Bigart's charges as "a phase of the irresponsible propaganda campaign against the command." He added: "I know of no professional soldier who will fail to recognize that the tactics of which [Bigart] complains and which he understands so little probably saved the Eighth Army from destruction and certainly from much heavier losses."

Look's editors were planning no reply to MacArthur. Said Look piously: "We won't get into any feud with the general."

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