The Korean War (72 page)

Senior Chinese soldiers – if not their leader – emerged from Korea having absorbed the central, critical lesson for future Asian
conflicts: that they must never face a Western army on its own terms. They must seek to fight when Western resources and technology counted for least. They could exploit the West’s greatest single weakness: the impatience of democracies. It proved difficult for the United States and her allies to maintain public tolerance and support for the Korean War for three years. Apathy and exasperation with a national effort which was yielding no evident result became apparent in the American electorate long before the armistice. The decisive reason why it was possible for Western statesmen to sustain their people’s tolerance of the war was the memory of that devastating, indisputable act of communist aggression which began it all in June 1950. Even the least sophisticated, most xenophobic Iowa farmer or Bradford bank clerk could comprehend the nature of the North Korean invasion. Without that simple
casus belli
, it seems highly doubtful that the Korean War could have been fought to an acceptable finish. This message the communists surely absorbed: never again should they provide the West with so unclouded and comprehensible a reason to resist; and time must always be against the democracies in arms.

Thirty years later, Oliver Franks, the former British Ambassador in Washington, had no doubts about the merit of Truman’s Korean commitment: ‘The United States Administration acted in Korea – the United Nations involvement was merely a fig-leaf for executive action. It was a
bellum justum
– the use of force to put down a wrongful action, not a case of counter-aggression.’

‘Worthwhile? It was more worthwhile than Vietnam,’ said Major Ed Simmons of the US Marine Corps. ‘In 1950, the individual GI couldn’t see much to admire in the average Korean. But looking back on it, the war revitalised NATO. It caused us to drop the tradition of demobilising at the end of a war. It hastened the schism between China and the Soviets. It saved Formosa. It contributed greatly to Japanese recovery: they got rich out of Korea, and
fabulously rich out of Vietnam. It probably saved the Philippines for a time. Yes, it was worthwhile.’

A less grammatical but almost more eloquently confused view, probably shared by thousands of American rankers who fought in Korea, came from Ecton Plaisance, a Louisianan, whom 1950 found as a private soldier in 7th Cavalry:

A lot of us feel that Truman made a big mistake by not letting MacArthur bomb the bridges on the Yalu river, also not letting him bomb the Chinese that were massing in China. Another big mistake was in 1951, the Chinese made their last big offensive against us and we stopped them cold, right after that we could have gone north and set up a good line 20 miles north of Pyongyang . . . My family did not understand the war, except that they knew that the communists wanted South Korea. They supported our government in the war. The war set the Chinese back 10 to 20 years where in the United States the big companies got richer. Don’t get me wrong, I am not sorry I went and fought, it was an honour to fight the communists because it had to be done, however I would not do it again for a million dollars.

PFC Bill Shirk, an Ohian who spent more than two years in captivity, thought of the war as ‘a hell of a waste. I saw no reason for it when I went over, less when I went back. When Vietnam started, I just thought: “Here we go again, the same damn nonsense.” Who gives a shit if they’re North Korean or South Korean? You can’t take a person living like an animal and expect him to act like a human being. They don’t place the value on human life that we do. Lots of men felt the same as I did.’

Many American career officers were deeply dismayed by the precedent Korea established: the United States had failed to fight a war to a victorious conclusion. Lieutenant-General Arthur Trudeau, commanding the US 7th Division, spoke of ‘that odious armistice . . . when we let the Russians and the Chinese off the hook in Korea, we opened the door for their victory over the French in
Vietnam. We should have let MacArthur go to the Yalu and bomb the piss out of them on the other side.’ ‘I still feel very badly about Korea,’ said Colonel Paul Freeman.

I thought there had been a lot of unnecessary bloodletting for a stalemate. To have had this thing drag on and on, fighting for every bloody little hill over there, was all wrong. We should have knocked the Chinese out of there, whatever it took. But some of the European nations were scared that we were going to start something . . . the absurdity of trying to destroy those Yalu bridges without bombing the other side, that isn’t the way to fight a war.

Freeman’s, of course, is the voice of a generation of post-World-War-II American professional soldiers, infinitely frustrated by the inability of their nation effectively to deploy its vast military power in limited conflict. MacArthur was the foremost protagonist of their argument. For a brief window of time in the early fifties, the United States possessed the unmatched atomic capability to take on and defeat the communist powers. Sooner or later, they believed, it was the destiny of the United States, as the greatest capitalist power on earth, to fight the communists. Better now, surely, when the nation possessed the means to achieve victory at minimal risk to the American continent, than a generation hence, at a time and place of the communists’ choosing.

Much that has taken place in the world since 1950 reinforces the conviction of supporters of the MacArthur doctrine. Soviet nuclear power is now such that the United States could never hope to fight the Russians without suffering intolerable casualties. Asian communism has inflicted a crippling humiliation upon the United States in Vietnam, achieving victory in a war that was fought on communist terms. The political limitations imposed upon the deployment of American force in Korea were matched by the restrictions in Indochina, that caused the United States to fight ‘with a hand tied behind its back’, as so many Americans saw it.

Yet few uncommitted observers, looking back thirty-five years to Truman’s dismissal of MacArthur, can doubt that the President was perfectly justified. If the old general’s faculties remained undiminished, there is little question that his judgement had become fatally unstable. The shock of initial defeat in Korea, followed by the almost mystical triumph of Inchon against all odds, followed in turn by new humiliation at the hands of the Chinese, might have distorted the thinking of a much younger, more conventional mind than that of MacArthur. The general believed that he was facing the great historic issue of his time, from which Washington flinched. Yet his own preoccupation with the balance of world power, and the military means of changing this, blinded him to the huge, critical moral issue surrounding the use of the atomic bomb. Most of our post-Hiroshima generation are convinced that it is not acceptable to regard nuclear weapons, as did MacArthur and some of his contemporaries, as merely quantitative increments to the arsenal of war. A real political, military and moral chasm exists, most of us believe, between the employment of conventional and nuclear weapons. What would have been the moral standing of the United States in the world today, had she employed nuclear weapons in Asia in 1950–51, not in self-defence, but in pursuit of foreign policy objectives related to the defeat of communism? In the answer each of us makes to that question, must lie our own attitudes to MacArthur and the controversy surrounding his dismissal by Truman.

The Korean War occupies a unique place in history, as the first superpower essay of the nuclear age in the employment of limited force to achieve limited objectives. The United States might have come away from Panmunjom in a more satisfied frame of mind, had this perspective been clearly discernible at the time. Instead, however, many Americans were merely frustrated by discovering the post-World-War-II political limits of military power. A generation later, had America been able to do for South Vietnam what
she had earlier done for South Korea, the achievement would have been a cause for national self-congratulation.

The war was a landmark in the post-1945 foreign policy of the United States. Before the North Korean invasion, though America mourned the ‘loss’ of China, she did not regard Asia as the principal battlefront against communism. This lay in Europe. But events in Korea focused the attention of Americans upon the Far East. As the political frontiers in Europe stabilised, and the prospects of further communist takeovers there by political or diplomatic means receded, Americans became increasingly preoccupied with Asia. They had always enjoyed a romantic fascination with the continent. Now, they saw within it a host of precariously governed small nations, highly vulnerable to communist intervention. The military and foreign policy energies of the United States became more and more dedicated to frustrating this turn of events.

Yet if this objective was not ignoble, it was founded upon one profound misjudgement: it greatly underestimated the influence of nationalist, as distinct from ideological, forces, among the nations it sought to protect. Among all the thousands of reports and assessments of Korea in the archives of the United States and her allies, depressingly few pay even lip-service to the needs or interests of the Korean people. Korea merely chanced to be the battlefield upon which the struggle against the international communist conspiracy was being waged. In Korea, Americans revealed all the arrogance, the paternalism, the insensitivity in handling of local people – and the local army – which later revealed themselves in Vietnam. South Korea did not gain the immense national pride it possesses today from its part in the war. Indeed most South Koreans emerged from the 1950–53 experience conditioned either to a cynical pursuit of personal survival, or burdened by self-disgust. South Korea gained its self-respect from what it achieved by its own astonishing industrial efforts in the generation that followed the war. If the UN army had abandoned the South Koreans before an armistice was signed, and left Rhee’s regime to fend for itself, it would have collapsed as ignominiously as that of
Saigon twenty years later, with or without Chinese military support for Pyongyang. South Korea escaped the fate of South Vietnam chiefly because the accident of geography made it infinitely easier to defend; and because the West, in 1950–53, still possessed a sufficient reservoir of crusading zeal to sustain an overseas campaign against communism. This reservoir was all but drained by the 1970s.

In determining the justice of what was done in Korea in the name of the United Nations, it is necessary to pull away a great tangle of subsidiary issues that confused contemporary observers as much as they have complicated the judgements of history. American occupation policy in South Korea from 1945 to 1949 was clumsy and insensitive. A political structure was created whose chief merit was that it was professedly hostile to communism. Yet it is too easy for historians to argue that Americans misread the signals from North Korea, that the Soviets had no initial intention of creating a satellite state in the Korean peninsula. If American reaction to Soviet behaviour was at times alarmist, nothing alters the fundamental truth that in Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1950, the Russians were engaged upon the ruthless construction of an empire. They were determined to build a military buffer zone around their own frontiers, without the slightest regard for the liberty or interests of millions of people whose misfortune it was to live within it. Given the scanty intelligence available from North Korea, it was asking a great deal of the Washington Administration to divine and acknowledge the Soviets’ non-imperialistic intentions in Korea – if such indeed they were. If the Americans behaved clumsily in South Korea, their conduct was understandable in the worldwide context of the period. It remains debatable whether, even if a broader-based government had been created in South Korea, this would have been immune from North Korean aggression.

By 1950, if the regime of Syngman Rhee in the South was dictatorial, it was no more oppressive than that of Kim Il Sung. And the Southerners had been deliberately denied by the Americans
the means, even if they possessed the will, to carry out aggressive acts beyond their own frontier. By any reasonable measure, Kim Il Sung’s invasion of June 1950 was an unprovoked act of raw aggression, which the South lacked the means to resist. If the Soviets did not directly encourage the invasion, it could not have been carried out without their consent. From Moscow’s perspective, the invasion of South Korea can be regarded – as it was interpreted in Washington at the time – as an experiment. If the Americans merely abandoned their puppets, so much the better. Even if they did not, it is unlikely that the Russians anticipated an American reaction on the scale that in reality took place. The Soviet view was characteristically cynical, and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Russian expressions of alarm in the weeks that followed, as it became apparent that the United States was determined to repel the North Koreans with whatever resources were required.

The Soviets seemed persistently unhappy about the war thereafter. They supplied the North Koreans and Chinese, and provided the pilots of an air corps. But if the Chinese had not chosen to intervene in the winter of 1950, it seems doubtful whether the Russians would have done so, even with Americans camped on the Yalu. Moscow had miscalculated the strength of American reaction at the outset. In the winter of 1950, fear of provoking American nuclear retaliation would almost certainly have dissuaded Stalin from going to war with the United States on the borders of Korea. The strongest evidence of Moscow’s lack of enthusiasm for the Korean War lies in the sluggishness with which Stalin supplied
matériel
to Mao. Only in the autumn of 1951 did Soviet military supplies begin to move in quantity to China, and to the bitter resentment of the Chinese, every ton had to be paid for. Korea precipitated the deep mutual mistrust between Soviet and Chinese communists, which has been evident ever since.