Editorial Note
On November 4, General MacArthur, in response to a message from the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the previous day, provided an interim appreciation of the situation in Korea in the light of what appeared to be overt intervention by Chinese Communist forces. He indicated that it was impossible at that time to appraise authoritatively the actualities of Chinese intervention but indicated that full scale intervention appeared unlikely. In the last sentence of his telegram, he recommended against hasty, premature conclusions and added that a final appraisal should await a more complete accumulation of military facts. (The text of General MacArthur’s message, telegram C–68285, is printed in Truman, Years of Trial and Hope, page 373; see also Appleman, South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu, page 762.)