The Korean War (71 page)

For those who had merely served on the line in Korea, rather than faced the enemy at brutally close quarters in confinement, passions ran less deep. Captain Peter Sibbald of the Commonwealth Division expressed the archetypal view of the British professional soldier. ‘In all my service career, I encountered hatred on
the battlefield only in Northern Ireland. There was no hatred for the Chinese in Korea.’ But if a career officer could adopt so relaxed a view, many rankers found their homecomings a sad anticlimax. ‘There was absolutely no interest in Korea,’ said Private James Cardinal of the US First Cavalry Division. ‘I went into a depression – the sort the Vietnam veterans complain of today. People were bored with the war, as far as they were concerned we had been defeated in Korea. We weren’t the glorious heroes of World War II. Civilians were quite unaware that this was the most difficult war the US had ever had to fight.’

It is a source of widespread bitterness among Korean veterans in the United States that their memories and sacrifices seem so much less worthy of attention than those of Vietnam veterans. It was their misfortune to endure a war that aroused less public emotion, because in those early days of television, it was infinitely less vividly projected, less impressed upon the consciousness of Americans. Even at the height of the Korean War, that Asian peninsula seemed a very remote place, far less real than Vietnam became, beamed nightly for years into the nation’s sitting rooms. Rather than acknowledging that too little attention has been lavished upon the victims of Korea, it may be more just to suggest that too much has been heaped upon the veterans of Vietnam. It is an absurd conceit to suppose that, in Indochina, combatants suffered in a fashion unknown to others in other conflicts. Almost all men are marked in some way by the experience of taking part in any war. Those who fought in Korea are no more and no less deserving of respect – and of a memorial – than those who fought in Vietnam, World War II, World War I. Subsequent historical debate about the merits of a national cause should never be allowed to detract from the honour of those who risked their lives for it on the battlefield.

In the years that followed the Korean War, as the immediate sense of frustration and stagnation that attended the armistice faded,
soldiers and politicians became disposed to think more favourably of its value as a demonstration of the West’s commitment to the arrest of communism. If the United Nations failed to achieve the reunification of Korea, they had prevented the North from imposing its will by force upon the South.

Yet it was also self-evident that for the United Nations, the Korean commitment was an experience that would never be repeated. UN forces might be granted an international mandate to carry out policing and peace-keeping tasks around the world. But never again was it conceivable that such a mandate would be granted for a military commitment, in pursuit of ideological and political objectives. Even in the summer of 1950, it was only the accident of the Soviet boycott that made the UN vote possible, sending troops into Korea. The relatively small number of countries which then possessed UN membership, most of them sympathetic towards the United States, accepted American leadership in going to war for Korea. But only sixteen members provided any measure of military support, none of whom could properly be called non-aligned. The Korean War was fought by the United States, with token support from her allies in the capitalist world. Within months of the outbreak, these allies were displaying their dismay at the economic and military cost, and uncertainty about the merits of the regime they were committed to defend. The Allied contingents in Korea, the Commonwealth Division most notable among them, were maintained in the field by their respective governments until 1953 only because it was plain that their withdrawal would inflict deep damage upon Allied solidarity in confronting communism. It is a measure of the desperate economic plight of Britain, in contrast to booming post-World-War-II America, that the Korean War and the rearmament programme that it provoked drove the country to the brink of financial crisis.

Once the Korean War was ended, the old powers preoccupied with the abandonment of their overseas empires showed no stomach for fighting abroad alongside the Americans against communism. More than a decade after Korea, when President Johnson
pleaded with British Prime Minister Harold Wilson for even a token British contingent in Vietnam, he received no comfort. The United States was compelled to look to its Pacific and Asian allies for such military support as it could muster. As for the United Nations, it was now a larger body than the nucleus of nations which made up its membership in 1950. Many newly-created nation members were chronically sceptical of American foreign policy.

Yet however great the misgivings of America’s allies in 1950 about going to war for Korea, it remains a tribute to the respect the United States could call upon in 1950 that an international force was committed at all. For a brief historical moment, the combination of foreign gratitude for America’s military role in World War II and economic assistance in its aftermath, together with real fear of imminent conflict with the Soviet Union, enabled Washington to mobilise Allied troops for an Asian war few Europeans believed in.

Only America’s absolute dominance of the Korean campaign enabled it to be fought to a tolerable conclusion. Yet this very dominance also contributed greatly to Allied unhappiness about the course of the war. Beneath a thin veneer of respect for the authority of the United Nations, Americans conducted the war as they saw it. Many American soldiers and politicians were exasperated by the prevarication and scruples of allies who were making so small a material contribution to the conflict. ‘It was a legacy of World War II that the United States was expected to accept the brunt of commitment and sacrifice,’ acknowledged the British diplomat Roger Makins. Yet this created the conundrum of alliance, that the manner in which the war was commanded and conducted by one dominant nation made the presence of the United Nations flag seem to many foreigners a charade. ‘Though we called ourselves the UN, there were so few of us,’ said the British Group-Captain ‘Johnnie’ Johnson. ‘I felt very much an observer of an American show.’ The British, not excluding their Prime Minister, deluded themselves in supposing in 1950–53 that
they could exert a decisive influence even upon American nuclear policy. Other nations were even less likely to rally to the UN banner again, because of the widespread view that this was employed in Korea in the foreign policy interest of the United States, whether or not this was also the cause of natural justice.

Much academic research has been devoted to exploring the shifting currents within the US military establishment, both in attitudes to embarking upon the Korean War, and professional debate about its conduct. ‘Much of the analysis of military opinion,’ wrote Dr Rosemary Foot, one of the most recent students of the period, ‘has confirmed the conclusion of other students of American foreign policy, that once a decision is made to use force, the generals want to use it more quickly and decisively than do their civilian counterparts . . . the navy and air force are likely to advocate more hawkish courses than the army.’
²
Field commanders in Korea, as later in Vietnam, were consistently more bellicose in the strategies they advocated than the politicians, or even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Washington. The doctrine of Limited War will always find more favour among those responsible for national policy than with those charged with implementing it upon the battlefield.

As to the military conduct of the war, a senior American veteran of both Korea and Vietnam remarked: ‘We went into Korea with a very poor army, and came out with a pretty good one. We went into Vietnam with a pretty good army, and came out with a terrible one.’ The performance of most elements of the US Army in the first year of fighting in Korea ranged between moderate and deplorable. Five years of fatal neglect between 1945 and 1950 produced a rundown of men, training, leadership and equipment that almost, but not quite, enabled the Chinese to inflict a wholesale disaster upon American arms in the winter campaign. But, having saved themselves narrowly from that disaster, in the two years that followed the Americans in Korea made themselves a far more effective, and above all self-confident fighting force. Matthew Ridgway deserves a great measure of credit for turning around a
beaten army, and directing it in such a fashion that it inflicted a series of shattering defeats upon the communist invaders.

There are many important respects in which Korea was a rehearsal for Vietnam a generation later. It may be argued that the United States learned wrong lessons from the experience of the 1950–53 war, where a huge commitment of resources enabled her army to halt the communists at tolerable cost in casualties. The fact that Syngman Rhee was the unpopular leader of a thoroughly corrupt regime whose army was incapable of effective self-defence on the battlefield did not prove a fatal disadvantage to sustaining the South Korean cause. Nor was it only Americans who allowed themselves to be little concerned about the nature of the regime the UN presence was supposedly supporting. ‘Of course we knew that Syngman Rhee was a pretty monstrous figure,’ said Brigadier William Pike of the Commonwealth Division. ‘But weren’t they all out there?’ Many Americans, inside and outside the Defense Department, concluded that with sufficient military and economic support, almost any anti-communist regime abroad could be kept afloat, regardless of its intrinsic viability. The government of President Thieu of Vietnam was certainly no worse, indeed almost certainly less oppressive, than that of President Rhee. But more sophisticated communist techniques of subversion and infinitely more sceptical world media attention undermined it. Thieu’s regime was finally exposed to a military test of a severity which that of Rhee escaped. Had the ROK army ever been left alone to combat a full-scale communist offensive, its fate would most likely have resembled that of the ARVN more than twenty years later.

The American army emerged from Korea convinced that its vastly superior firepower and equipment could always defeat a poorly equipped Asian army, if it was provided with the opportunity to deploy them. Shrewd commanders were well aware of historic weaknesses in American infantry, dating back to World War II and before, in small unit leadership and tactics, fieldcraft
and battle discipline. But most senior officers continued to believe that the historic American military virtues, centring upon the massive concentration of scientific and technical resources, could more than compensate for these deficiencies. They might have reflected, had they chosen, upon the unusual convenience of the Korean battlefield, where the mountains restricted movement by either side, and the narrow peninsula made it possible to fortify and defend a relatively short front. In Vietnam, there could be no such fixed line. The very tactics of lightly armed hit-and-run, in which the communists proved so formidable in the mobile winter campaign of 1950, could be employed daily in Indochina for years on end. ‘It was amazing that so many of the mistakes we made in Korea, we repeated in Vietnam,’ said Colonel Al Bowser of the US Marines. ‘Why? I wish I could answer that. Something seemed to come over people who went over there. During Vietnam, I used to say to a colleague of mine, Lew Walt, “Lew, what in the name of God are you doing with all those tanks in a rice paddy?” I never got a good answer.’ Colonel John Michaelis of the 27th Infantry argued that the US Army failed to learn the lessons of Korea because it became an unpopular war, and those who returned preferred to forget it, inside as well as outside the service: ‘I don’t think that, as an army or a nation, we ever learn from our mistakes, from history. We didn’t learn from the Civil War, we didn’t learn from World War I. The US Army has still not accepted the simple fact that its performance in Korea was lousy.’

It may be argued that the communists profited more than the United Nations from the painful military lessons they learned in Korea. Mao Tse Tung’s conviction that any conflict could be conducted upon the principles, and with the organisation, of guerrilla war, was proved fallacious. Large-scale guerrilla tactics proved very effective in the first winter campaign of 1950, where rapid cross-country movement and surprise broke open MacArthur’s army. But thereafter, even the infinite willingness of the communists to accept casualties went for naught when confronted with the air power and firepower of a Western army in prepared positions. To
the end of the conflict, Mao Tse Tung retained a strong personal commitment to the massed ‘human wave’ assaults characteristic of his army since its inception. His generals had discovered their limitations by painful experience in Korea. In the positional war, the Chinese displayed remarkable skill and professionalism with their scanty resources. But they were unable to achieve a breakthrough, and paid a vast price for their attempts.

The survivors [General Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley has written] no longer believed that, armed with the philosophy of the Party, they could beat anybody however superior their technology. They knew it was not true. So, too, did their senior commanders. Peng Te Huai eventually succeeded in convincing his Central Committee comrades that they must upgrade the basis of the army from that of a body armed with what it could capture to one enjoying standard equipment tables, not least a comprehensive communications system. For a time, he persuaded enough of his colleagues that they must initiate a rational system of recruitment based on conscription; and that a properly selected and trained professional officer corps was essential to the future of the armed forces.
³

Yet Mao alone remained unconvinced of these lessons, and above all disputed Peng’s downgrading of the importance of political officers, who in the early stages of the Korean War constituted 10 per cent of every formation’s leadership down to sub-unit level. If the PLA was to be armed and organised like any other army, then it must depend upon Soviet weapons and equipment to an extent Mao found intolerable. When he purged Peng Te Huai and other senior PLA officers, he reversed their policies and preserved the PLA in much the mould in which it was forged in the civil war. Yet in the words of Farrar-Hockley, the Korean War had ‘raised doubts in the PLA concerning the wisdom and competence of the Party leadership’
⁴
which would not go away.