The Cold War (22 page)

The raids were flown by a mixed bag of piston-engined planes and secondline jets. A few F-51s continued on operations as late as January 1953, but F-80s and F-84s carried most of the air force's load. Piston-engined B-26 light bombers were usually restricted to night missions and survived to the end of the war, less for acceptance of their intrinsic value than because the air force lacked an effective jet counterpart. The marines' Corsairs were supplemented by increasing numbers of F9F Panther jets, used as attack planes. Since the war's first days, the navy had been mounting what amounted to interdiction raids into North Korea from its
Essex
-class carriers, combining Corsairs and Skyraiders with Panthers and F2H Banshee jets in strikes against ground targets. While the air force might have been ready to abandon piston-engined combat aircraft, the navy continued to see a place for propellers in modern war. In particular, the AD Skyraider achieved a formidable reputation for accuracy, carrying capacity, and survivability. Its four-ton payload was four times that of an F-80 or an F-84. Over a decade later, ADs were a standard part of carrier air wings.

Whatever the nature of the aircraft involved, their effect was limited. Certainly the interdiction campaign affected the Chinese and North Korean ability to mount and support anything more than local offensives. On the other hand, gasoline, rations, and ammunition continued to get through to the front as troops and civilians worked nonstop to keep open the routes south. General Matthew Ridgway put it best when he said there was “no such thing as choking off supply lines in a country as wild as Korea.” Camouflage, discipline, and an increasingly effective antiaircraft umbrella were as important as terrain. Contemporary U.S. reports stressed the enemy's use of human and animal transport. In fact, most supplies were moved at night by trains and trucks that remained hidden by day and defied the best efforts of jets and propeller planes alike to stop them.

Instead, aircraft losses mounted. Some 350 planes were destroyed and another 300 damaged, almost all by ground fire, in an operation that provided
neither the glamour of jousts over MiG Alley nor the gratification of directly assisting beleaguered ground troops. In that context, rescuing downed pilots became as important for morale as for honor. Extraordinary efforts were made to bring out anyone still alive. A typical incident occurred in June 1952, when marine colonel Robert Gaither went down over North Korea. While he, in his own words, “played hide and seek for the next four or five hours,” Corsairs and Skyraiders harassed his pursuers with strafing runs. When their fuel was spent, according to Gaither, “everyone who was heading south, including Air Force and I believe some South Africans, swung by to expend any available ammunition.” A navy helicopter crew located Gaither at dusk, lifted him in a sling, and headed for the coast. With marine Corsairs clearing the way, the helicopter brought Gaither to safety, despite taking hits that almost brought it down as well.

Not all the stories were heroic. Korean women and children played a significant role in moving supplies and working on repair gangs. How did pilots react to strafing these noncombatants? A series of interviews conducted in late 1950 and early 1951 suggested that no more than 10 percent of the pilots involved believed the air force should avoid such targets. Over 60 percent felt that “we don't like it, but we do it because we have to.” Regulars and volunteer reservists, officers with no World War II experience, and those who wanted the air force as a career took the lead in willingness to strafe civilians when ordered to do so.

These side effects of interdiction may have contributed to the decision to modify and then abandon the relatively indiscriminate approach of Operation Strangle. Instead, beginning in the summer of 1952, the air campaign emphasized mass attacks against specific targets such as command and communications centers, warehouse complexes, dams, and power plants. These objectives were selected with a view to damaging civilian morale, too: Warning leaflets were frequently dropped in advance of raids, in an effort to minimize noncombatant casualties while disrupting public order.

This dual approach reflected political and military concerns. The refocused bombing campaign was designed to encourage China and North Korea to conclude an armistice and to convince the Soviet Union to put pressure on its clients. The strikes did major material damage. Pyongyang was gutted. In one two-day operation, over 90 percent of North Korea's electric-power capacity was reported knocked out. Chinese and Soviet technicians were brought in to repair the damage, which affected northeast China as well as Korea. The political consequences of the raids were less favorable. World headlines attacked
American “terror bombing.” As much to the point, by the end of 1952 reconnaissance reports showed nothing much left to bomb except for political purposes. But the Communists' eventual decision to conclude the armistice on July 27, 1953, was, like the initial invasion three years earlier, a political decision whose parameters ultimately lay outside U.S. control.

The historian D. Clayton James has described Korea as the refighting of World War II on a reduced scale. Yet its air operations prefigured the spectrum of technological, doctrinal, and operational issues that in practice have governed the uses of airpower ever since. Without question, the spectacular duels over MiG Alley established the jet mythology in public opinion, and within the air force. U.S. pilots claimed kills at an eight-to-one ratio, a level of achievement found nowhere else in a war that was at best a standoff. The fighting over the Yalu also seemed to confirm the exponential superiority of Western pilots over their Communist counterparts—a qualitative edge vital to subsequent military planning, given the inability of NATO and the United States to match their principal adversaries in sheer numbers of ground troops.

Korean War legacies were so strong that in the early stages of the air war over North Vietnam, when U.S. kill ratios in air-to-air combat stabilized at lower levels (about two and a half to one), concern over a presumed decline in American effectiveness led to a drastic overhauling of training, tactics, and design. Such programs as Red Flag and Top Gun, and such aircraft as the F-15, owe a good deal to images established during the MiG–Sabre war of the early 1950s. It is ironic that recently released information from the former Soviet Union reduces the number of MiG kills to something under 400, as opposed to the 792 originally claimed; admitted Sabre losses are slightly over 100, resulting in an actual kill ratio of only about three and a half to one, when victories scored by other aircraft are factored in. In other words, the efficiency of today's U.S. fighter force is based in part on response to a legend.

The general focus on jet technology and jet tactics fostered by the Korean experience contributed to a misunderstanding of the actual, as opposed to the theoretical, nature of war over the next half century. U.S. doctrine and planning focused on nuclear Armageddon at one end, insurgency and counterinsurgency at the other. Korea, an intermediate, conventional war, seemed either an anomaly or an anachronism. Instead, America's major military commitments since 1950 have involved adversaries with no meaningful economic targets. Their hardware has been imported, not manufactured—and usually
imported from third parties politically immune to military action. Their infrastructures have not been sensitive to air attack at levels or within time spans acceptable to U.S. policy makers and U.S. public opinion.

The doctrines for fighting such wars have lagged significantly behind the technologies involved. Not until Operation Desert Storm were air superiority, interdiction, and close air support integrated in a comprehensive campaign, which left a devastated Iraq wide open to General Norman Schwarzkopf 's hun-dred-hour ground offensive. In that sense, perhaps, the legacy of Korea has finally been established: the first in a long series of politically structured, midintensity conventional conflicts that have decisively shaped international relations in the second half of the twentieth century.

LAWRENCE MALKIN

Once the Korean War settled down to what Lawrence Malkin aptly characterizes here as an “enervating military stalemate,” no issue caused the U.N. truce negotiators at Panmunjom more glacial torment than the prisoner-of-war question. The dispute over the fate of the 130,000 captives in U.N. prison stockades, as well as that of the 13,000 Western POWs in camps along the Yalu, not only postponed an armistice for fifteen months but came close to torpedoing one altogether. Should POWs have a choice about whether they should be repatriated? Too many American and British veterans of World War II had unsettling memories of the forcible repatriation of Soviet prisoners in Germany, when former captives faced with the prospect of Stalin's gulags or his executioners jumped to their deaths from the boxcars carrying them into the Soviet zone.

Both sides, of course, were pursuing ideological ends, and both treated POWs as pawns in an ideological struggle. As MacArthur put it in September 1950, when total victory seemed in sight: “Treatment of P.O.W.s shall be directed toward their exploitation for psychological warfare purposes.” He actually established a pilot program, patterned on successful postwar reeducation schemes in Germany and Japan, in which five hundred North Korean prisoners were to be instructed in the values of democracy and prepared for citizenship in a nation that was about to be reunified. Meanwhile, the Communists, mindful of how many U.N.-held prisoners would probably choose to remain in South Korea or, if they were Chinese, defect to Taiwan, refused to compromise. Voluntary repatriation was a propaganda defeat in the making. They determined to transform the POW issue into a propaganda setback for the U.N. comparable
to the first retreats of 1950 or the disintegration of the Eighth Army. It did not hurt that the Americans inadvertently created the conditions that handed the Communists the triumph for which they had schemed. The generals in charge of operations in this strangest of wars failed to grasp that, as the historian Stanley Sandler has written, “Communist POWs were simply soldiers on a different battlefront.”

Malkin tells the story of Koje-do, an ordinarily obscure island off the southwest coast of Korea that briefly contended for the attention of the world. The evacuation of seventy thousand North Korean and Chinese prisoners to Koje-do had originated in the desperate circumstances of the first winter of the war. The U.N. authorities wanted to make sure the prisoners didn't escape and join Communist guerrillas behind the retreating U.N. forces. Lacking the manpower to run the island camps effectively—there was one MP for every 188 prisoners instead of the optimum one to twenty—the Eighth Army simply allowed the POWs to run their own affairs. The North Koreans began to smuggle intelligence officers into batches of new captives. They took charge of the compounds and were apparently in direct contact with Panmunjom. “Behind the wire,” the historian Callum A. MacDonald tells us, “camp life was shaped not by military discipline but by political struggle.”

In May 1952, Koje-do erupted, an explosion that was carefully orchestrated and designed to humiliate those in charge of the camps. In a war that nobody won, the prisoner dispute would disprove MacArthur's maxim that there was no substitute for victory.

LAWRENCE MALKIN, himself a frontline veteran of Korea, was a prizewinning correspondent for the Associated Press,
Time,
and the
International Herald Tribune
. He is the author of
The National Debt
and has collaborated with Paul Volcker and Anatoly Dobrynin on their memoirs. Malkin is currently writing a book on history's greatest counterfeit: 130 million fake British pounds printed under Nazi orders by Jewish concentration-camp prisoners during World War II. He divides his time between New York City and Majorca.

F
OR FORTY YEARS OF THE COLD WAR
, whenever the American military actually fought a hot war of any importance, it was bedeviled by the dilemma of how to deal with prisoners of war. The truce ending the Korean War was delayed for well over a year by political posturing about the fate of tens of thousands of Chinese and Korean prisoners who refused to return to Communism in their homelands. The Communists adroitly turned this conundrum into a second front by harassing their captors at the Koje Island prison camp off the peninsula's southern coast. American generalship was utterly confounded by a sharp political engagement in the midst of an enervating military stalemate. The allied truce negotiators judged the additional fifty thousand casualties that their side suffered during the protracted talks to be wildly disproportionate to what they regarded as a dubious principle of free choice, which, after all, was being accorded to soldiers who only recently had been trying to kill their own troops. The negotiators' political masters, whatever the righteousness of their original motives, seem to have insisted on continuing to fight for the principle in order to salvage some moral victory from the humiliating battlefield stalemate inflicted on them by what they contemptuously regarded as an uncivilized Asian horde.

The Nixon administration also converted the U.S. prisoners in Vietnam into a domestic political issue, enabling it to display some token of victory through a class of heroes who could be celebrated upon their return. It never seemed odd that their heroism was based on suffering and not conquest, and this may have eased the pain of the only major defeat the United States ever suffered against foreign arms. But it also helped delay for years the solution of our most domestically divisive war by extending and politicizing the insoluble problem of the missing in Vietnam. This envenomed the tragedy, and it still poisons our political
debate; even as late as the 1992 political campaign, it became an issue through the history of H. Ross Perot's personal attempts to redeem missing Americans by a variety of methods, including outright ransom.

Although the decline of Communism removes for the time being the threat of ideological empires that cannot bear the sting of mass defection, the problem will not go away. The use of human captives as political pawns has merely reemerged in an age-old form—hostage-taking. It has been turned into a heartbreaking game of cat and mouse by cruel appeals through the international media. Politicians can no more disable this tactic than could the stalwart World War II generals in Korea, many of whom were endlessly befuddled by what one 1952 intelligence summary described as “a new area of total war.”