The Korean War (9 page)

Nor did American manipulation of South Korean politics seem anything like as awful a matter, even in liberal circles, in 1945 as it might forty years later. In the course of the Second World War, none of the partners of the Grand Alliance had shown any greater sensitivity towards the human rights and feelings of Asian peoples than the chiefs of the military government displayed in Seoul from 1945 to 1948. If Korean policemen sometimes tortured or killed civilians, if their leaders accepted bribes, if their politicians
behaved like mafiosi – was not this the way ‘these people’ had always done things? Was it not merely a higher form of Western arrogance to seek to impose Western ideas of humanity upon a society in which dog was a culinary delicacy – customarily strangled and depilated with a pine taper in the course of preparation – and where fried crickets and boiled silkworms featured prominently in local good food guides? The American record in Korea between 1945 and 1950 must be judged against the indisputable reality of Soviet expansionism, of Stalin’s bottomless malevolence. No charge against the Rhee regime can blunt the force of one simple truth: that, while the United States deliberately declined to provide South Korea with the means to conduct armed aggression, the Soviet Union supplied North Korea with a large arsenal of tanks, artillery and military aircraft. The events that unfolded in the summer of 1950 demonstrated that American fears for the peninsula were entirely well founded, whatever the shortcomings of Washington’s political response to these.

2 » INVASION

In the course of 1949, relations between North and South Korea, the tempo of mutual propaganda hysteria, rose sharply. In the South, constant military pressure eroded the strength of the communist guerrillas in the mountains. In April 1949, Pyongyang invited South Korea’s anti-Rhee leaders to attend a ‘coalition conference’. Of 545 delegates present, 240 were from the South. Rhee denounced them, not unreasonably, as ‘communist stooges’. In August, a new communist ‘Supreme People’s Assembly’ met in Haiju, just north of the 38th Parallel. At this, a ‘People’s Democratic Republic’ embracing both North and South Korea was announced. A South Korean was its nominated foreign minister. But on the 38th Parallel, responsibility for border incidents was by no means a monopoly of Pyongyang. In May 1949, in one of the most serious incidents, South Korean forces penetrated up to two and a half miles into North Korean territory, and attacked local villages. In a climate of intense mutual mistrust, in December the British Foreign Office asked the War Office for a military assessment of the situation in Korea. It received a sceptical response:

In the past [wrote Major J. R. Ferguson Innes] it has always been our view that irrespective of strengths the North Korean forces would have little difficulty in dealing effectively with the forces of South Korea should full-scale hostilities break out. This somewhat naturally (since they raised, equipped and trained South Korean forces) was not the American view. Recently, however, they have been coming round to our way of thinking regarding the capabilities of the respective forces. . . . On the question of aggression by the North, there can be no doubt whatever that their ultimate objective is to overrun the South; and I think in the long term there is no doubt that they will do so, in which case, as you so aptly remark, the Americans will have made a rather handsome contribution of equipment to the military strength of Asiatic Communism. As to their method of achieving their object, short of World War III beginning, I think they will adopt the well-tried tactics of preparing the country from within rather than resort to open aggression, although ‘frontier incidents’ will doubtless continue.

. . . Regarding American policy, if in fact one exists, towards South Korea, I can only say we know little, and of their future intentions even less . . . Whilst being in no doubt about future North Korean (or Soviet) plans regarding South Korea, we think an invasion is unlikely in the immediate view; however, if it did take place, I think it improbable that the Americans would become involved. The possession of South Korea is not essential for Allied strategic plans, and though it would obviously be desirable to deny it to the enemy, it would not be of sufficient importance to make it the cause of World War III. Meanwhile, we must accept an uneasy status quo and hope for the best.
¹

Brigadier-General W. L. Roberts, commanding officer of the American Military Assistance Group in Korea, not surprisingly took a more sanguine view of the South Korean army than the British officer quoted above. In a letter to General Charles Bolté, Director of Plans at the Pentagon, in March 1950, he urged that Americans should play a prominent role in stiffening ROK formations:

If South Korea is called upon to defend itself against aggression from the North, its ground army is capable of doing an excellent job. If American advisers are present (even on Regimental and Division level) it will do an even better job, for we have found the Americans are leaned on more heavily the rougher it gets. In other words, the advisers will almost command except in name.

Here, of course, was the root of many delusions that were to plague the US Army in Asia for the next generation. The belief that American officers could, in effect, officer Asian troops to the same effect that the British had achieved with their Indian army for two hundred years persisted into Indochina. Worse, there was the notion that they could temper control with politeness, by accompanying units merely as ‘advisers’. Later, as the ROK army expanded in the course of war, this principle of giving Koreans American support would be extended, so that Korean sub-units were subordinated to American ones. The Koreans’ knowledge of the absolute lack of confidence with which they were regarded by their allies and mentors contributed materially to justifying this. But in March 1950, despite his optimistic view of ROK capabilities, Roberts acknowledged that the strategic perspective did not favour Seoul’s forces:

All G-2 sources tell that the North Koreans have up to 100 Russian planes and a training program for pilots. You know and I know what 100 planes can do to troops, to towns and to transport on roads.

So, if South Korea were attacked today by the inferior [
sic
] ground forces of North Korea plus their Air Corps, I feel that South Korea would take a bloody nose. Again then, knowing these people somewhat, I feel they would follow the apparent winner and South Korea would be gobbled up to be added to the rest of Red Asia.

This is a fat nation now with all its ECA goods, with warehouses bulging with plenty of rice from a good crop even if their finances are shaky with great inflationary tendencies. It is getting into the position of an excellent prize of war; strategically it points right into the heart of Japan and in the hands of an enemy it weakens the Japanese bastion of Western defense.
²

Washington’s view of the importance of Korea to the anti-communist cause was changing. But the Administration’s thinking
remained confused, and so did the signals that it sent out across the world. The critical force in United States policy towards the Far East by the summer of 1950 was the deep bitterness and frustration of the American people about the ‘loss’ of China to the communists. The defeat of Chiang Kai Shek’s American-sponsored nationalist armies was a profound shock and source of sorrow not only to the legendary ‘China lobby’, but to many Americans who had grown up all their lives with a sense of missionary commitment to China. The vast Asian society had been a central force in the lives of such men as Henry Luce, who put Chiang on the cover of
Time
magazine a record seven times. In the case of great industrialists such as Alfred Kohlberg, economic interest marched hand in hand with a real personal passion for China. America’s cash investment in Chiang’s creakingly corrupt regime had been enormous: $645 million in aid and $826 in Lend–Lease during World War II, followed by another two billion dollars in the years that followed. Asia in general, and China in particular, called deeply to many Americans in a manner that Europe did not. Europe was a fully-fashioned society, often ungrateful for American influence and aid. Yet Asia seemed to lie half-made, half-civilised, wide open for all the cultural, religious and democratic improvements that the United States could offer. Throughout the Second World War, America retained delusions about the virtue and power of Chiang Kai Shek’s regime that were shared by none of her allies. When the State Department’s admirable ‘old China hands’ warned persistently of the hopeless corruption and incompetence of the Nationalists, of the irresistible power of Mao Tse Tung’s communists, their reports served only to damn them long afterwards. Davies, Vincent, and the others became, for conservative America, not the faithful prophets of disaster, but the agents who had contributed to bring this about. ‘China asked for a sword, and we gave her a dull paring knife,’ declared Senator Bridges of New Hampshire. Senator Taft damned the appeasers of the State Department, ‘guided by a left-wing group who obviously wanted to get rid of Chiang, and were willing at least to turn China over to the
communists for that purpose’. The fall of China to the communists, far from convincing Americans of the need to ensure that the regimes they supported possessed some validity within their own societies, merely persuaded much of the United States that anti-communist regimes must be sustained and supported, however unpopular with their own peoples. George Kennan sought to suggest that ‘a certain sentimentality towards the Chinese’ among Americans ‘was both patronising and dangerously naive’. Dean Acheson, Truman’s Secretary of State, was doing his utmost throughout 1949 to reconcile Americans to accepting the probable fall of Chiang’s last bastion, the island of Formosa.

The unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the government of the United States [Acheson wrote, eminently sanely, in an August 1949 White Paper]. Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result; nothing that was left undone by this country has contributed to it. It was the product of internal Chinese forces, forces which this country tried to influence, but could not. A decision was arrived at within China, if only a decision by default.

But this was now the day of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Gallup suggested that 39 per cent of Americans believed the Wisconsin Republican’s Red witch hunt, his hounding of the State Department officials who had ‘betrayed’ China to the communists was ‘a good thing’. In the words of McCarthy’s best biographer, ‘the political atmosphere in the spring of 1950 was such that evidence and logic were often avoided.’ Senators Bridges, Knowland and McCarran issued a statement denouncing Acheson’s China White Paper as ‘a 1,054-page whitewash of a wishful, do-nothing policy which has succeeded only in placing Asia in danger of Soviet conquest, with its ultimate threat to the peace of the world and our own national security’. ‘Growing numbers of Republicans were convinced that McCarthyism was their ticket to political power,
and were determined to back Joe’s Red hunt as long as the headlines continued to bombard the Administration.’ By this mid-term of Truman’s second Administration, he was already a beleaguered President, under immense domestic pressures for his alleged weakness in confronting the communist threat, at home and abroad.

Truman himself was increasingly convinced that the Soviets were risk-takers, opportunists who would press forward on every front where they detected weakness. In 1950, the memory of the thirties was not merely vivid, but a dominant force in the thinking of most Western politicians. At this historic period, when the closest advisers of the American President were men whose minds focused upon Europe as the cockpit of world affairs, the failure of the policy of appeasement of the dictators lay close to the heart of their political thought. ‘We are losing the Cold War,’ Bernard Baruch warned Truman in April 1950. John Foster Dulles accepted office in the administration that month only on condition that ‘some early affirmative action’ would be taken against ‘the communist menace’. The joint State-Defense Study Group headed by Paul Nitze which produced the critical study of American foreign policy objectives, NSC-68, in the first months of 1950, urged much greater defence expenditure. It defined the Soviet purpose as ‘the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the non-Soviet world, and their replacement by an apparatus and structure subservient to and controlled by the Kremlin’. George Kennan and ‘Chip’ Bohlen, two of America’s most prominent experts on the Soviets, opposed the National Security Council’s paper. They argued that Moscow was, in reality, far more cautious than the document suggested. But Acheson accepted NSC-68. Its principal conclusion – that the Soviets should be challenged wherever in the world they next embarked upon an assault on freedom – became part of the policy of the Truman Administration.

Yet whatever the validity of Washington’s assessment of Soviet intentions, the gravest charge against the United States government
in 1950 was that it made a precipitate commitment to an end, before it had begun to will the means. In the aftermath of World War II, the nation’s armed forces had not merely been reduced – they had been allowed to crumble to the brink of collapse. Again and again between 1947 and 1950, the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned the President that he was extending America’s diplomatic commitments beyond her military means to enforce them. Among the glittering cluster of intellects around the President, by far the least impressive was the Defense Secretary, Louis Johnson. A political operator, a fund-raiser, an electoral grandstander, Johnson had made much political capital from his dramatic savings in the military budget. Yet it was a direct consequence of Johnson’s policies, approved by Truman, that by June 1950 MacArthur’s divisions in Korea lacked 62 per cent of their infantry firepower and 14 per cent of their tanks; that 80 per cent of the army’s sixty-day reserve was unusable, and the army in Japan possessed only forty-five days’ supply of ammunition. It was in recognition of the desperate shortcomings of MacArthur’s army that the Defense Department agreed that Korea could be removed from the general’s theatre responsibilities.