CORAL SEA WEEK

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28270, 7 May 1957, Page 14

CORAL SEA WEEK

U.S. Ships At Melbourne (Rec. 10 p.m.) MELBOURNE, May 6. Five United States warships, the cruiser Columbus and escorting destroyers. Braine. Ammen. Cogswell and Ingersoll, arrived tcday to take part in Coral Sea Week celebrations. Five hundred persons, including many young girls, were in the crowd at Prince’s pier to welcome the Columbus and there were more crowds at South wharf on the edge of the city to see the destroyers come alongside. On board the warships are more than 2000 sailors. They have an estimated 50.000 dollars to spend but they have orders against hasty marriages with Melbourne girls. As the units of the Pacific Fleet came through the heads they exchanged a 21-gun salute with the shore battery. At a civic reception in Sydney today Admiral Felix Stump said he would like to see American and Australian forces holding combined exercises in Australia. Admiral Stump, who is United States Pacific Forces Commander in Chief, said that no definite plans had so far been made to carry out the exercises. “I will do everything I can to arrange it.” he said “United States naval men were keen to visit Australia, and recently 87 members of a cruiser crew re-enlisted because it was the only way they could get to Australia,” he said. “Trips to Australia would be one way of helping re-enlistment.’*

He rejected charges that the United Nations had one standard for the compliant or weak, such as Britain, France and Israel, and another set for the intractable or the strong, such as the Soviet Union and India and Egypt. Mr Lodge said the United Nations had a single moral standard for all nations, although it had varied abilities to enforce that standard. -‘The United Nations can never compel either the United States or the Soviet Union to do anything,” he said, ‘‘and the United Nations will never vote sanctions on either.

“Of course, to do that would mean war, and the .United Nations exists to prevent war.” Mr Lodge said that while the United Nations did not have enough influence to make the Russians get out of Hungary during last year’s uprisings, it “did have enough influence so that the British, the French and the Israelis withdrew from Egypt.”