Word: pentagonal
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...Army duty officer at the Pentagon routed General Lightnin' Joe Collins out of bed at 5:30 one morning last week to read him the first pink secret dispatch about the Chinese counteroffensive. Collins rubbed his eyes and dialed General Omar Bradley, asleep in House No. 1 at Fort Myer, Va. All that day the Pentagon's brass-level was gloomy with misgivings. Next morning the whole thing exploded when Douglas MacArthur defined "the entirely...
Partly the trouble was that the Pentagon (although it had been surveying the problem for more than a year) couldn't decide what it needed. The armed forces were burdened with an outsize crop of curbstone economists and amateur publicists who liked to talk about "what the economy will stand" and "what public opinion will approve," without knowing any of the answers. In doing so, they had been diverted from their prime function of telling the country what it needed to survive. Right after Korea, pound-foolish Louis Johnson had repentantly told the Joint Chiefs to shoot the works...
...Dean Acheson's State Department was standing fast against a deal with the Chinese Reds. The U.S. (despite some timid souls in high places, including the Pentagon) was still pledged to destroy all Communist forces in Korea and drive all the way to the Manchurian frontier...
...much they succeeded in extorting depended largely on how serious U.S. commanders considered the Chinese threat. In the Pentagon there was a great deal of unmilitary handwringing, accompanied by woebegone predictions that the Chinese intended to barrel right on south to Seoul and perhaps to Pusan. In Korea, however, the view was changing somewhat. The serious U.N. supply difficulties looked less serious when Chinese prisoners reported that their food and ammunition had run low a few days after they had crossed the border...
...families of soldiers were horrified by reports that some units were still fighting and shivering in summer clothes. A few angry Congressmen threatened to demand an investigation. Needled by the uproar, the Pentagon cabled General MacArthur for information. The general answered that all troops fighting in the northernmost (and coldest) areas were winterized; that although some pilfering of winter clothing (by Koreans from Army warehouses) had occurred, the losses had not affected frontline supply...