Half the Cost

Two thousand eight hundred miles northwest of San Francisco, below the widening jaws of Bering Strait, stands St. Lawrence Island, a forlorn, treeless place of volcanic origin. This is the region where Alaska and the Soviet Union stare face to face at one another across three to 55 miles of icy waters, and it was there one lonely morning last week, just about the hour that Molotov addressed the U.N., that a U.S. Navy P2V-5 Neptune patrol plane flew on its routine radar patrol.

"It's Firing on Us." "The plane was Hying 180 knots at 8,000 feet," the commander, Lieut. Richard Fischer, said a few hours later, "when ordnance [i.e., his aviation ordnanceman] reported a Russian plane. 'I have an aircraft! It's firing on us!' I took immediate evasive action. A hail of machine-gun bullets hit the fuselage and port wing, and injured three or four men. We had no opportunity to return fire.

We turned and dove under clouds. One wing caught fire from the machine-gun bursts. The plane later crash-landed on St. Lawrence Island. The landing was smooth as a landing like that can be." The eleven crewmen were soon picked up by Eskimos, and were later flown back to their base in Alaska by U.S. rescue planes."There was no panic at any time," Lieut. Fischer concluded. "The men were laughing and joking--except those in pain from burns."

This was not the kind of keepsake calculated to fit in with the harmony at San Francisco, and the U.S. reacted angrily. The President phoned the Pentagon from New England, got the-details, and declared through his press secretary: "The attack on our plane was inexplicable and unwarranted." Secretary of State Dulles took it up with Molotov in an interview that Dulles' aides called "businesslike and succinct."

"It Was News to Me." But not even this unlooked-for embarrassment of St. Lawrence Island deterred Vyacheslav Molotov from the momentum of his moderation. Molotov joined in the U.N.'s biggest hand for Harry Truman, who said of another unwarranted Communist attack--Korea: "That aggression was met as it had to be met." Molotov next did the extraordinary and un-Russian thing of requesting a press conference, and ably fenced questions and answers for half an hour with 100 U.S. and foreign correspondents. When one U.S. reporter asked him about the incident of St. Lawrence Island, Molotov replied: "It was news to me. As soon as I receive any information, I shall get in touch with Mr. Dulles."

The next un-Russian thing to happen was that Vyacheslav Molotov did exactly that. "The Soviet government expresses regret," said Molotov, after the more familiar slurs against "some representatives of the American command who obviously are not interested in the prevention of this sort of incident." Molotov then told Dulles that Russia would pay half the cost of the damaged plane, claiming that the Neptune was on the Russian side of the border but that "atmospheric conditions made possible an error." Responded John Foster Dulles: "It is gratifying that he expressed regret and at least indicated willingness to make some reparations, but . . . the offer as a whole fell far short of what has been requested." Dulles said that he would take it up with the President in Washington.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.