Tanks Trump Card So Far : Air Power May Turn Tide

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23298, 6 July 1950, Page 5

Tanks Trump Card So Far : Air Power May Turn Tide

(10 a.m.) LONDON, July 5. The Daily Telegraph’s correspondent says the North Korean forces have be- ~ tween 100 and 105 tanks, which have been handled with marked skill throughout the operations. There is no reasonable doubt that the Russians have trained their crews and worked out their battle tactics. Soviet air participation is also suspected. So far, continues the correspondent, tanks have proved the trump card, in spite of the unsuitable country. In many places the roads are carried * along the tops of embankments between ricefields, and tanks passing along these are silhouetted as easy targets for practised anti-tank gunners. Unless the Communists can recover the impetus of their original surprise aggression within the next few days they will be in a bad way, and only large-scale intervention by the Russians or the Chinese Communists will save them. Improvement In Situation The correspondent adds that opinion at General MacArthur’s headquarters is hardening in favour of carrying the war ‘ beyond the 38th parallel if the Communists prove recalcitrant. The balance- of air strength is decisively with the Americans, who are already carrying the air war vigorously into Northern Korea and giving the Communists a taste of the disadvantages of aggression. While Allied forces are by no means out of the wood on the military, let f, alone the diplomatic plane, the situation does appear vastly better than it was last Friday, which was the nadir of the campaign. The military correspondent of the Glasgow Herald says, the Americans should use their naval superiority at once to control the seas and so permit landings. With the air and sea secured the vital thing is to finish the war ~ quickly. The significance of the coming battle should not be overlooked, for it marks the end of illusions that this is a local war between two minor Asiatic Gov- ' ernments, the correspondent adds. Militarily it Is a battle between Russiantrained troops with Russian equipment 1 and American troops with American equipment—a small-scale test in regions far away from the capitals of the United States and Russia, yet perhaps *t a rehearsal for greater events.