The Cold War (25 page)

The bare-knuckled infighting for political supremacy continued behind the walls and closed doors of the Kremlin. Almost unnoticed, the rise of Nikita Khrushchev began. Lavrenti Beria, the man who had engineered Stalin's Great Terror and who had later presided over the successful creation of a Soviet atomic bomb, was himself arrested and accused of having been a British spy for thirty years. He confessed, of course, and was executed before the year was out.

Stalin's death and the leadership turmoil in Moscow did release the peace process from the frigid grasp of the old dictator. He had viewed Korea as a learning experience for the Chinese, and, as he cabled Mao, the war “shakes up the Truman regime in America and harms the military prestige of the Anglo-American troops.” As for the North Koreans, they “have lost nothing, except for casualties….” His successors wereeager to achieve better relations with the West, at least in the short term, and there seemed no better place to start than Korea. They pressed their new determination on the Chinese and North Koreans, both of whom were, by this time, more than willing to make a deal. Their combined casualties were appalling, probably more than 1.5 million, three times what the U.N. had suffered. The Communist side also feared that Eisenhower might authorize the use of atomic weapons. The possibility was discussed in Washington, and rejected, though the U.S. Air Force apparently did drop dummy atomic bombs over North Korea. The Soviets took our nuclear arsenal seriously. “They must be scared as hell,” Eisenhower once remarked about the new Soviet leaders.

That was the background of the armistice that was eventually agreed upon at Panmunjom. Did that armistice, as so many claimed at the time, mark the end of the first war that the U.S. lost? The following essay takes an entirely different view.

ROBERT COWLEY is the founding editor of
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History
. He has edited three previous anthologies,
No End Save Victory,
about World War II;
With My Face to the Enemy,
about the Civil War; and, most recently,
The Great War.
He has also edited three volumes of the
What If?
™ series. Cowley lives in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

F
IVE DECADES HAVE PASSED
since July 23, 1953, when the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War was signed at Panmunjom. No wild celebration attended the event, only a hushed and sullen sourness. In the rain the night before, North Korean carpenters had erected a makeshift building for the ceremony. They had deliberately left only a single entrance at the north end, which meant that the United Nations delegation would have had to march a few symbolic yards through Communist territory. The commander of the U.N. forces, General Mark W. Clark—“Wayne” to his close associates—insisted on a second, southern entrance; it was hacked through at the last minute.

Promptly at ten A
.
M., the opposing delegations, two men on each side, entered the room and sat down at tables placed side by side. Two years, seventeen days, and 575 meetings had led up to this moment in the artificial settlement in no-man's-land. The U.N. signers, studiedly casual, wore open shirts; their North Korean opposites, full-dress uniforms buttoned to the neck. Nobody spoke. Documents were exchanged for signing. Then everyone stood up and, without a word, a glance, or a handshake, filed out their respective doors. The whole ceremony had taken exactly twelve minutes. “I cannot find it in me to exult in this hour,” Clark said later, forever bitter that he would be remembered as the first U.S. commander in his country's history to preside over an armistice without victory.

But the significance of Panmunjom had eluded Clark. Korea had been a new kind of war, a war that neither side could afford to lose—or to win. Victory, as Douglas MacArthur had learned to his sorrow, was too dangerous to risk. That went for the Communist side as well. In an effort to unify Korea, they had originally overplayed their hand—a hand that Mao Tse-tung, at Stalin's urging, once more overplayed when he sent in Chinese “volunteers” that first autumn.
The war had to end close to where it had begun on June 25, 1950, on an irregular line that slanted through the 38th Parallel at Panmunjom. As if to provide a parenthetical symmetry, rain had fallen that first morning, too.

I should admit at the outset that I did not fight in the Korean War. I was a freshman in college the spring before it ended, and I managed to preserve my student status—barely—through a test administered all over the country one balmy Saturday morning in May 1953. Every male who received a grade of 77 or better would escape the draft as long as he remained in college; a postcard informed me that I had scored a 78. But unlike Vietnam a decade later, most of us were prepared to serve. I still have acquaintances, a little older than I, who experienced the terror of night patrols in the wide no-man's-land between hillside trench systems, or who flew as observers in Cessna L-19s, calling in targets. (They always flew with a metal plate under their seat cushion, to protect their private parts from ground fire.) One of my closest friends, a former infantryman in the 25th Division, will talk about everything except his wounding in 1952. To them, Korea is hardly a forgotten war.

Byron Hollinshead, with whom I worked for fifteen years, served as a marine. The problem, he says, is less that Korea is forgotten now than that it seemed to be forgotten at the time. “Today in Iraq when guys get killed, it's front-page news. We had big battles, and they made the second section.”

“Overlooked” would probably be a more precise word than “forgotten.” The Korean War does not deserve to be remembered merely as a cliché. Historians explain it away as a conflict lacking myths, as if wars should be ranked by their Olympian attractions. What about the left hook out of nowhere at Inchon—or the Stonewall Jackson–like surprise of the American Eighth Army by the Chinese in November 1950? Or the anabasis of the marines from the Chosin Reservoir, a fighting retreat worthy of Xenophon? Or the stand by the British and Belgians of the 29th Brigade the following April at the Imjin River? Weren't they epic enough?

You can tick off other features of Korea that are worth remembering. It was, to begin with, truly coalition warfare: Twenty-two nations participated in varying degrees in the U.N. “police action” (we could use some of them in Iraq today). Japan, so recently our mortal enemy, experienced an economic renaissance, which owed much to the American need for an untouchable base of operations. President Harry S. Truman integrated our armed forces, a true milestone for the United States. There were notable firsts. The first
war in which massive nuclear retaliation was brandished as an overt threat. The first jet war. The first war in which helicopters played a part. The first war whose outcome hinged on the fate of prisoners of war—remember the phrase “brain-washing”?—a dispute that delayed the armistice by fifteen months and cost the U.N. side an estimated fifty thousand casualties.

From a strictly military point of view, the Korean War was a tactical and operational draw. Clark was right in that sense. But in strategic terms, most of which were not evident at the time, it was ultimately a defeat for the U.S.S.R. and, to a lesser extent, for Communist China. Drawn battles often produce undrawn results. When the French and British fleets broke contact after the Battle of the Capes in 1781, neither victory nor defeat was discernible. But the lack of British initiative left Lord Cornwallis's army trapped at Yorktown, making American victory in the Revolutionary War inevitable. Gettysburg was at once a tie and a huge Confederate defeat. The Germans may have sunk more British ships than they lost at Jutland in 1916, but the High Seas Fleet never again emerged from its home bases.

So, too, had the Cold War stalemated by 1950. The wave of Communism had reached its high-water mark. After the success of the Marshall Plan, the failure of the Berlin blockade and the Greek civil war, and the creation of NATO and an independent West Germany, Stalin sought to turn the momentum of the Cold War once more in his favor. Gambling on the forced reunification of Korea before Japan resumed her place as a Pacific power, he had backed (albeit with misgivings) the invasion of South Korea by his North Korean puppet, Kim Il Sung. Truman's unexpected response not only saved South Korea and strengthened Japan but also blocked a planned Communist assault of Taiwan. The U.S. could then use the not so covert involvement of the U.S.S.R. in the Korean War as a pretext for excluding the Soviets from the peace settlement with Japan—and went on to forge a defensive alliance with its former enemy. (To this day, the Russians have still not signed a peace treaty with Japan; the disposition of four small islands in the Kuriles, taken by the Soviets in 1945, has hindered relations between the two countries for almost sixty years.)

But momentum was not all that Stalin and his heirs lost. The invasion of Korea would have lasting repercussions on the other side of the globe. Both sides repeatedly misread the intentions of the other. Washington viewed the North Korean and Chinese invasions as the prelude to a similar Soviet attack in Europe. America backed what Stalin feared most: the rearmament of West Germany and the creation of a West German army, the Bundeswehr—which automatically strengthened NATO as a force capable of slowing a Soviet advance.
Presumably, American nuclear bombs would do the rest. The Communist bloc (which included China) might have the operational advantage of fighting on interior lines. But meanwhile, the West was gaining the strategic upper hand by fencing it in with an interlocking network of defensive alliances. Moreover, Truman made the decision to station American troops permanently in Europe. Between 1950, when the North Koreans invaded, and 1951, he quadrupled the defense budget and doubled the size of the armed forces to almost three million. It was the beginning of an arms race that did not end until the beginning of the 1990s—a race that, once started, the Soviets could never win. You can make a persuasive argument that as a result of Korea, the Soviets lost the Cold War.

In the twentieth century, there were four turning points in an off-and-on conflict that was, in a sense, a continuous war. The first was 1914 and the beginning of World War I. The second was the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, the end of World War II, and the beginning of the Cold War the next year. The third was the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991 and the end of the Cold War. To those we must add a fourth, the Korean War. It made the Cold War a global phenomenon and led to the militarization of Asia and Europe. (You might almost think of it in historical terms as the “deep” Cold War, in the same sense that we talk of astronomical deep space or geological deep time.) American military might and the huge defense industry that supported it expanded exponentially. The free world (or what passed for it) would not be caught flat-footed by another Communist invasion, as it had been in Korea. To quote the British journalist and historian Martin Walker, “Washington and Moscow alike were learning to operate in a new strategic environment in which the need to prevent a crisis from expanding into full-scale war was more important than any local victory. The Cold War … was becoming an institution.”

Korea brought about the change and set the pattern for the next four decades. That was the ultimate meaning of Panmunjom.

R. CARGILL HALL

It was only after an antiaircraft missile brought down Francis Gary Pow-ers's U-2 photo reconnaissance plane over the Urals on May 1, 1960, and the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev demolished the Paris summit conference two weeks later that the world began to learn about American overflights of the U.S.S.R. As far as most people knew, those overflights had been made only by U-2s, beginning in 1956. But in fact, U-2 aerial reconnaissance was a continuation of a secret effort that had been going on since the early 1950s. Not until the last ten years has the true story begun to surface. As R. Cargill Hall, a noted air force historian, writes, “Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union fragmentary accounts have appeared. Too frequently, however, they have turned on misperceptions and questionable interpretations. Armed with a few interviews and still fewer archival records from the Cold War, authors have provided Oliver Stone–like conspiracies.” When Hall's “The Truth About Overflights” appeared in
MHQ
in 1997, it was the first authoritative discussion of the subject. Hall knew, and was trusted by, many of those who had flown on overflight missions—and who, decades later, were willing to speak out at last.

The initiation of overflights was a direct reaction to the invasion of South Korea and the entrance of Communist China in the war. American political and military leaders viewed the sequence of events as a possible prelude to an attack of Western Europe and even raids on the U.S. by bombers armed with Russia's newly developed atomic weapons. Early in December 1950, Truman noted in his diary, “It looks like World War III is here. I hope not—but we must meet whatever comes—and we will.”
On December 16, he proclaimed a state of national emergency. Shortly after, he authorized selective overflights.

The West had merely the vaguest notion of Soviet strengths and intentions; overflights might give some shape to them. The rigid security of Stalin's Russia made intelligence gathering on the ground all but impossible. “For all the money spent on espionage,” a CIA official later admitted, “nobody knew a helluva lot about what was happening in Moscow.” The Strategic Air Command (SAC) wasn't even sure where prime targets were located. And there was the frightening prospect of Soviet long-range bombers massing on Siberian air bases close to Alaska. Were they actually preparing to strike American targets? A one-way suicide flight could reach Chicago or Detroit. What one B-47B reconnaissance plane discovered, after flying over more than a thousand miles of Siberia, would provide the answer—and would convince Washington that overflights were the quickest and most reliable way to close the intelligence gap.