The Korean War (11 page)

Most international disputes are shrouded in such a fog of claim and counter-claim, outrage and reprisal, that it is difficult to
subject them to any absolute moral judgement. In less dangerous times, the questionable legitimacy and obvious unpleasantness of Syngman Rhee’s regime in Seoul would have made many nations reluctant to come to his aid. There were few illusions about this in informed circles in the United States. ‘The unpopularity of the Syngman Rhee government and the questionable political and military reliability of the army and police force’, wrote Hanson Baldwin in the
New York Times
on 27 June, ‘are the greatest weakness of the defending forces.’ But it was not only the United States, in the summer of 1950, which saw in Korea an extraordinary opportunity to draw the line against communist aggression. In Europe, in Asia, in the Middle East, in Latin America, the advance of communism – nourished if not directed by the agents of Stalin – was seen not as an abstract problem, but an immediate physical menace. The spectacle of Eastern Europe, the heart of such gaiety and culture for centuries, disappearing into the dark fog of totalitarianism, had not only dismayed, but frightened a host of citizens of free nations. Not merely Greece, but France and Italy, seemed close to falling under communist rule. The vision of Russian armies storming across the post-war occupation lines to assault Western Europe appeared perfectly plausible. It was a British socialist Member of Parliament of that period who said, thirty-five years later: ‘People have forgotten just how indescribably bloody the Russians were at that time. Because the Soviets have now become more reasonable, less frightening, we should not lose sight of how ruthless and immediate a threat they then seemed.’
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The miscalculation of Kim Il Sung was to launch so blatant an act of aggression that even the least bellicose spectators around the world found it difficult to take refuge in equivocation. The most cynical Stalinist takeovers in Eastern Europe had been protected by a cloak of legitimacy, however threadbare. The most successful communist acts of expansionism around the world, both before and after Korea, were achieved in a fog of moral and political confusion. Yet not even the tatters of a pretext had been erected along the 38th Parallel. Kim Il Sung set himself simply to
seize South Korea by the exercise of naked military force. Even viewed from a communist perspective, it was a huge act of folly. A former senior South Korean officer remarked many years later: ‘If Kim really wanted to get the South, by far his best course would have been to do nothing. His biggest mistake was to attack us.’ The speaker meant, of course, that by 1950 Syngman Rhee’s regime was in deep internal political trouble. A few more years of discreet subversion might well have ensured its collapse from within. But by precipitating his invasion, Kim gave Rhee what the South Korean President could never have gained on his own: a just cause and a banner of moral legitimacy. To these, the United Nations rallied on 25 June 1950.

Dean Acheson met President Truman at Washington airport on Sunday evening with news of the UN vote. Truman returned from his troubled weekend at home in Independence, Missouri, to host a dinner at Blair House attended by all his most senior defence and foreign policy advisers. For twenty-four hours, Acheson and his officials had been examining every aspect of the Korean thunderbolt. It continued to surprise and confuse them. For months, it had been thought likely that the Soviets would launch an operation to test the West’s will. Korea had been listed as a possible, but not a probable, battlefield. Berlin, Greece, Turkey, Iran all appeared far more vulnerable. Korea was geographically easy for America to reinforce, difficult for the Soviets. Yet now the communists had gone to war for it. Acheson later wrote:

Plainly this attack did not amount to a
casus belli
against the Soviet Union. Equally plainly, it was an open, undisguised challenge to our internationally accepted position as the protector of South Korea, an area of great importance to the security of American-occupied Japan. To back away from this challenge, in view of our capacity for meeting it, would be highly destructive of the power and prestige of the United States.
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If the first and last of these assertions were unchallenged by most of the President’s advisers, Acheson’s intermediate remarks were to be bitterly contested by his contemporaries, and by history. The Secretary of State was held largely to blame for sending the misleading signals to Pyongyang and Moscow, which made the communists believe they could attack with impunity. His statement to the Washington National Press Club in January 1950, when he so carelessly excluded South Korea from the defined perimeter of American vital interests in the Far East, has been fixed as a critical landmark on the road to war. Today, there remains no shred of evidence from either Russia or North Korea to indicate what influence, if any, Acheson’s remarks had upon Stalin and Kim Il Sung. But Ambassador Muccio had warned for months from Seoul of the dangers of appearing to exclude South Korea from the declared interests of the United States. The withdrawal of American forces from South Korea, the visible lack of enthusiasm within the United States for Syngman Rhee’s regime, the opposition of right-wing Republicans to financial aid of any kind for his country, combined with such public statements as that of Acheson to create an overwhelming impression of American indifference to Rhee’s fate.

And beyond the misjudgements made in the past, there now also existed the utmost uncertainty among the military men assembled at Blair House concerning Acheson’s easy assurance about ‘our capacity for meeting’ the North Korean threat. By the summer of 1950, the American armed forces were at the lowest point of the great post-war run-down undertaken by the Administration. Their numbers had shrunk from 12 million men in 1945 to 1.6 million. Spending was down from $82 billion to $13 billion, just 5 per cent of the GNP. Nearly every unit in the army was under-strength, under-trained, and under-equipped. Almost every regiment in the four divisions of MacArthur’s occupation army in Japan had been stripped of a battalion or a battery, every company of a platoon, and so on. Their training and readiness for war – for whose shortcomings MacArthur would later seek to blame everyone but himself, their Supreme Commander – were
lamentable. Admiral Forrest Sherman, Chief of Naval Operations, declared later: ‘I was fully aware of the hazards involved in fighting Asiatics on the Asiatic mainland, which is something that, as a naval officer, I have grown up to believe should be avoided if possible.’
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Yet from the outset, Truman’s Administration was determined to resist the North Korean aggression. ‘The symbolic significance of its [South Korea’s] preservation is tremendous, especially in Japan,’ George Kennan told the British Ambassador in Washington, Sir Oliver Franks. The President and his advisers were convinced that, even if the communist invasion did not signal Moscow’s readiness to risk all-out war with the United States, it represented a challenge to the will of the non-communist world that had to be met. ‘The invasion of the Republic of Korea by the North Korean army was undoubtedly undertaken at Soviet direction,’ declared a CIA report of 28 June, ‘and Soviet material support is unquestionably being provided. The Soviet objective is the elimination of the last remaining anti-communist bridgehead on the mainland of northern Asia; thereby undermining the position of the United States and the Western Powers throughout the Far East.’
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At that first Blair House meeting, Truman made three immediate decisions. First, MacArthur would be told to evacuate the two thousand Americans in Korea, covering the operation with fighter aircraft from his command. Second, the Supreme Commander Allied Powers (SCAP) would be ordered to provide the South Koreans with every available item of equipment and round of ammunition that could be dispatched from Japan. Third, his area of command would be extended to include Formosa. The Seventh Fleet would deploy immediately between the island and the Chinese mainland, to ‘quarantine’ the Korean struggle, and discourage either Mao Tse Tung or Chiang Kai Shek from embarking upon a dangerous escalation of Asian hostilities. Throughout those first days of the crisis, Washington’s thinking was profoundly influenced by fears that the communist powers were now embarking upon an orchestrated offensive, which might be scheduled to
extend at any moment to other flashpoints around the globe. Seldom has mutual ignorance between the superpowers seemed so dangerous, or the absence of solid political intelligence posed a greater threat.

At noon on 26 June, the Korean mission in Washington received yet another call from Syngman Rhee, this time audibly shaken. ‘Things are not going well militarily,’ he said. ‘Please see President Truman and ask him for immediate supplies of arms, for help of any kind.’ That afternoon at 3 p.m., distraught and weeping, the Koreans were shown into the Oval Office at the White House to meet President Truman and his Secretary of State. Han was impressed by Truman. Like some Americans and many foreigners, he had formed a picture of a somewhat homespun president, a hick from the sticks. Instead, now, in the flesh he saw a smiling, self-assured statesman. ‘We admire your people and their struggle in adversity,’ Truman told the visitors. ‘Your soldiers are fighting bravely. Please convey my appreciation of this to President Rhee. I tell you two things: many years ago, when Americans were fighting for their independence, at Valley Forge, our soldiers lacked food, medicine, clothing. Then some friends came and helped.’ The Koreans, with a somewhat sketchy grasp of American history, were bemused by this. The President continued: ‘In 1917, Western Europe was about to fall to pieces, Europeans were in despair, but some friends went over and helped them.’ The meeting lasted thirty minutes, during which Acheson said nothing. But as Han and his Ambassador left, the Secretary of State handed them a statement, promising full United States support for the United Nations resolution. This the Ambassador read to the great throng of reporters on the White House lawn. But the Koreans went away confused and unhappy about the President’s failure to give them an unequivocal assurance of American military support.

Early the next day, 27 June, the Korean Ambassador and his First Secretary were at Washington airport, preparing to take a commercial flight to La Guardia for another meeting at the United Nations, when they were paged to the telephone. They heard that President Truman had promised immediate United States air and naval support for the Korean armed forces. Then the Koreans wept once more. Douglas MacArthur later wrote:

I could not help being amazed at the manner in which this great decision was being made. With no submission to Congress, whose duty it is to declare war, and without even consulting the field commander involved, the members of the executive branch . . . agreed to enter the Korean War . . . All the risks inherent in this decision – including the possibility of Chinese and Russian involvement – applied then just as much as they applied later.
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All this was perfectly true. The bewilderment caused in Moscow and Peking by the American intervention, which after all the signals the Administration had sent in the past two years suggested such a different attitude, was remarkable. The British Ambassador in Peking cabled to London a few days later: ‘The strength and extent of American reaction has been a shocking surprise, and will prove a grave embarrassment to the People’s Government.’

Of all the decisions taken by the White House in those days, it was the declaration of interest in Formosa – which caused little heart-searching for the President and his advisers – that was to have the most profound long-term consequences. At a stroke, it bound the United States more closely than ever before to Chiang and his Nationalists; and it signalled that commitment with dismaying clarity to Peking. The movement of the Seventh Fleet, and the extension of MacArthur’s theatre to include Formosa, alarmed and angered Mao Tse Tung’s government far more than the other early American decision, to provide air and naval support for the South Koreans.

At 10.45 p.m. on Tuesday 27 June, a resolution sponsored by
the US Ambassador, Warren Austin, was passed by the United Nations Security Council, calling upon member nations to ‘render such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security to the area’. It was carried by a vote of seven to one, with Yugoslavia abstaining. At a press conference in the aftermath, Truman agreed with a reporter who asked: ‘Would it be correct to call it a police action under the United Nations?’ This was a phrase that would later haunt Truman. Thousands of young Americans fighting and dying in Korea through the years that followed, and their families and friends at home, would laugh bitterly at the suggestion that they were conducting a ‘police action’ against the massed waves of communist infantry. But the immediate consequence of the United Nations vote on 27 June was that the President prepared himself to provide whatever military resources proved necessary to stem the communist invasion. Truman had been accused of weakness in his stand against communism by his Republican opponents. Suddenly, his beleaguered Administration had been provided with the opportunity to demonstrate, once and for all, the strength of its will. Truman seized upon this. The State Department also began a hasty round of calls to its principal allies. The British were contacted for the first time since the North Korean invasion, with apologies from Acheson that there had been no time to talk to them sooner. Would the British government consider, as a matter of urgency, what forces it might commit to the support of the United Nations? The earliest possible gesture would be welcomed. In similar vein, Acheson’s officials talked to the Canadians, the French, the Australians and every other non-communist power with the resources to make even a token commitment to a great armed demonstration in the cause of Freedom.