Foreign News: The Communists Complain

U.S. Air Force officers estimated that 5,000 to 6,000 hand grenades were being turned out every day at a Communist small-arms plant at Nakwon, just south of the Yalu in northwestern Korea. Early last week U.S. planes dropped leaflets warning the people of Nakwon that an air raid was coming. Next day 14 B-29s lumbered over, through heavy flak and passes by enemy interceptors, and blasted the grenade factory to bits.

During the next few days U.N. planes attacked a cement factory (whose output was being used for Red fortifications) at Osu, about 35 miles north of the 38th parallel in western Korea, and supply targets on both coasts and in Pyongyang, the already battered North Korean capital. The Reds complained with almost unprecedented shrillness. Radio Pyongyang called the U.N. air campaign “a new international crime worse than the atrocities committed by Hitler.” The Communists also protested the U.N. use of napalm firebombs as an act of “barbarism,” a charge long made by European Communists and fellow travelers.

For the moment, the enemy in Korea seemed to have no counter-strategy except to scream at the top of his voice.