The Right Track

After hitting the North Korean power sites in June, and the North Korean officer-candidate school last fortnight, General Mark Clark's headquarters in Tokyo, looking around for more assault points, decided on the ripening military targets in and around Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. These included warehouses crammed with ammunition and other war gear, telephone, rubber and ammunition factories, railroad repair shops and marshaling yards, a motor pool, a Chinese communications center, a troop replacement area. Three weeks ago allied reconnaissance planes began dropping leaflets warning the people of Pyongyang to stay away from military installations. "United Nations forces cannot be responsible for your death," the leaflets said, "if you ignore this warning."

One day last week U.N. fighter-bombers flew 850 sorties against the Pyongyang targets. The planes were flown by U.S., British, South African, Australian and South Korean pilots; some were from carriers, including Britain's Ocean. They dropped 700 tons of bombs, thousands of gallons of napalm, left their targets blasted and burning. More than 100 U.S. Sabre and Australian Meteor jets flew top cover, drove off the few MIGs that tried to interfere. Only one plane--a Thunderjet--was lost to Pyongyang's formidable flak.

Night brought no respite to the enemy capital. Fifty-four 6-29 bombers from Japan and Okinawa went over and took care of targets specially reserved for them in the city's northwest corner--more repair shops, a troop center, a headquarters for several Communist armies. Flak was feeble; all the big bombers returned safely.

The Communist enemy responded to the U.S.'s pressure program with a counterattack--not a military counterattack, which might have been costly, but a psychological one. The enemy repeated the fiction (very useful to him in the past) that U.N. pressure is a "provocation" which is "imperiling" the truce talks (in secret session last week and reported to be going fairly well). The Peking radio shrilled that the Pyongyang raids were "directed at Paris, London, New York and Moscow--at a new world war." Red China's Foreign Minister Chou En-lai charged that U.N. planes had crossed the Yalu and attacked the great Manchurian air base at Antung (a possible real target in the future).

All this was a cheap psychological smokescreen. The U.S. and the U.N. have at long last awakened to the fact that the military struggle and the struggle under the truce tents are two interlocking phases of the same battle, and have got on the strategically right track.

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