Germ Commando

Last March, the U.N. command in Korea knew that some kind of epidemic was rampant north of the parallel. Medical officers feared it might be bubonic plague, but could not be sure. Brigadier General Crawford Sams, of Atherton, Calif., U.N. Army Chief of Public Health & Welfare, volunteered to find out.

With three other officers, Physician Sams was taken in a Navy whaleboat one night to a point off the North Korean coast. The four paddled through the surf in a rubber raft, made their way across a mine-planted beach to a village, where General Sams learned from "contacts" that the Reds were suffering instead from an epidemic of hemorrhagic smallpox. (If he had brought back positive evidence of the plague, all U.N. troops would have been vaccinated.) Last week, for his "extraordinary heroism," General Sams received the D.S.C.

The Reds learned of the mission, broadcast the fantastic story that the U.S. had deliberately planted germs in North Korea, thereby causing the epidemic.

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